of cattle : or in a cottage-garden, with mignon- At the 

 ette and cabbage-roses and ghostly phlox, or *j"* s *£Jp 

 dew-fragrant with musk and southernwood : 

 or in an old manor-garden, with white array of 

 lilies that seem to have drunk moonlight, and 

 damask and tea-rose in odorous profusion, with 

 the honey-loving moths circling from moss-rose 

 to moss-rose, and the night-air delaying among 

 tall thickets of sweet-pea. Or, it may be, on 

 quiet sea-waters, along phantom cliffs, or under 

 mossed and brackened rocky wastes : or on 

 a river, under sweeping boughs of alder and 

 willow, the great ash, the shadowy beech. 

 But each can dream for himself. Memory and 

 the imagination will create dream -pictures 

 without end. 



Of all these midsummer -night creatures 

 alluded to here or in the preceding article 

 there may be none more allied to poetic 

 association than the nightjar, but surely there 

 is none more interesting than the owl itself, 

 that true bird of the darkness. That phantom- 

 flight, that silent passage as from the unseen 

 to the unseen, that singular cry, whether a 

 boding scream or a long melancholy hoot or a 

 prolonged too-whoo, how blent they are with 

 one's associations of the warm husht nights of 

 summer. But is not the nightjar also of the 

 same tribe? Fern-owl is a common name; 



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