4 SUMMER 



sense of spring into the new season. Summer comes 

 progressively, 



' Annihilating all that 's made 

 To a green thought in a green shade. 



In some countries the symmetry, the changelessness of 

 summer, becomes an oppression. Colour has the effect of 

 glare. You escape from a dusty town into country that is 

 a kiln such sometimes is the impression. We feel this in 

 England, too, a little. The world has a desire for something 

 that is not town and is not, in the ordinary sense, country. 

 People fly to the sea for the sake of its movement and its 

 variableness and its coolness ; and to escape the dry and 

 torrid monotony, as it seems to some, that has taken 

 possession of the land, while the succulent stems of wild 

 grass and tame corn are drying their juices, and the leaves of 

 the trees are impalpably losing freshness and ' surface.' 



Great changes there are, of course, in these months ; but 

 to the eye many of the changes are rather artificial than 

 natural. The grasses are cut at the time when they have 

 hardly reached that full tide at which the trees abide the 

 summer long, and growth begins again after the cutting. 

 As for harvest proper, it is felt to be an event of autumn, 

 though it intrudes into summer ; and in a highly cultivated 

 country makes the greatest change of all. 



The sounds of summer suffer a more thorough change 

 than the sights. Almost before we know it all the birds, or 

 almost all the birds, have gradually sunk into silence. Even 

 expert naturalists are surprised year after year by the com- 

 pleteness of this silence and its early date. Burroughs, king 

 of American naturalists, came over to England largely to 

 hear the nightingales sing ; but he went back home with his 

 desire unfulfilled. He had simply stayed in towns too late ; 

 and when they journeyed into the country he and his advisers 



