So Summer 



lovely enough to please a painter or inspire a poet. 

 Nature has donned the beautiful dress of early 

 summer. The light cloud-shadows play on a land- 

 scape of hedged and cultivated fields ; they darken 

 the ripple of the stream ; they deepen the whin's gold 

 into bronze ; they cast a transitory gloom on gleam- 

 ing fields of unmown grass and green young corn ; 

 they rest for a moment on men and women toiling on 

 the bare soil, and fly over thatched hamlet and red-tiled 

 steading ; they wander across the purple moorland, 

 and are lost at last beyond the glittering waves that 

 wash the edge of the land. When they have passed 

 woodland and hill, the sleeping trees, the glancing 

 river, and the distant sea combine into an exquisite 

 smile, and the soft and fitful breeze ever more sweetly 

 croons its old-world rhyme to the grass and fern. 



It is a witch or a goddess that gazes up from 

 the outstretched country. Her look of laughter, her 

 voice and fragrance declare it ; and perhaps, like Mr. 

 Andrew Lang's goddess, what he seeks in her counte- 

 nance she shows to every wooer. One discovers a 

 well-spring of joy and worships a beneficent Deity ; 

 another shudders at a monster ' red in tooth and claw ' 

 creating only to destroy ; but a third rests in her ferny 

 lap, and listening to the bees humming their way from 

 hill to plain, and watching the hawk hovering above 

 a hay-field and the butterflies fluttering their aerial 

 love-flight in the sunshine, loses thought and memory, 

 and shares, or fancies he shares, the still happiness of 



