SUMMER IX A HEATH COUNTRY 171 



growth. The bushes of broom and the clearing is filled with the strong 

 gorse beneath them are in like manner purple stain of the common heather, 

 gay and lustrous with the long shoots fringed by the scantier growth and 

 which they have put forth since the pinker bells of the cross-leaved heath, 

 fading, a few weeks ago, of their yellow and the duller stars of the ling, now 

 blossom, which brought the first hint tardily kindling into bloom. A few 

 of brightness into the withered moors, feet lower the heather breaks away 

 Everywhere is strong, new verdure, into wet, green, mossy ground, laced 

 belying the age and lethargy of waning and belted with tussocks of pale grasses, 

 summer, and against the background and tagged with the cotton-grass's 

 of brilliant green the purple of the heads of white. The grey-green bog- 

 riotous heather glows forth with a myrtle half fills these lower lands with 

 double brilliancy and power. a growth like a dwarf sallow ; the heat- 

 Heather country is found from end dance flurries above it under the July 

 to end of our islands, and no one who sun, and when the wind passes this 

 has been bred to the wide and open way, its aromatic fragrance, like laven- 

 moors can ever change his loyalty, der mixed with thyme, flows over us 

 even if he would, for the chopped sky- in a warm noonday tide, 

 lines and broken screens of woodlands Through the clean heather-tussocks 

 in most of the heath-tracts of the south, go flapping the big, handsome grayling 

 Yet it is in the alternations of the butterflies ; grasshoppers chirp and 

 stately evergreen pine woods with occa- leap upon our outstretched arm, tiny 

 sional sunny spaces where the heather azure dragon-flies vibrate like long- 

 lies in lakes of purple, as well as with winged gems against the purple heather 

 the barer sweeps of moor and bog, and green firs. There is a burnished 

 that the strange intensity of this July brilliance about all the colours of this 

 and August spring-time of the landscape summer heath-landscape, and a half- 

 reveals itself with the greatest variety tropical sense of confident response 

 and fire. From the spot where we to the sun, which produce a widely 

 have been lying, in the shade of the different impression from the tender, 

 higher pines on their shore-like knoll, delaying spring-time that brightens 

 the land slopes down into a little clear- the rest of the English country in its 

 ing between the bright-tagged, half- earlier day. And yet it is full of a 

 grown saplings. The upper part of first exhilaration and freshness now 



