258 SUMMER. 



which, after having lain as still as though it had 

 been dead for a season, is beginning to mould crea- 

 tion into so many forms, and elaborate out of 

 the same common store, and by the agency of the 

 same stimulating sun, plants and animals in all their 

 tribes, amounting, probably, in the whole, in Britain 

 and the surrounding sea, to more than twenty thou- 

 sand species, and certainly more than twenty thousand 

 millions of individuals, in the course of one season ; so, 

 in the Summer, when the catalogue seems full, and the 

 earth, the air, and the waters are literally alive, 

 when, before we have had time to give one object the 

 slightest attention, another comes in to claim the pre- 

 ference, we feel disposed to throw ourselves under the 

 shade, suspend our inquiry, and devote the whole of 

 our time to admiration. 



And the summer is so transcendently rich in being 

 and in action, that, if it were to come upon one all at 

 once, it would be almost too much for the mind. It 

 comes, as we have said, more rapidly in those regions 

 where the winter holds its dominion for the greater 

 part of the year ; and those who have noted the con- 

 duct of the people there, have seen that the breasts of 

 men are thawed and warmed as well as the fields and 

 the floods : that the peasantry of Lapland sing in 

 chorus with the birds ; and that when the Esquimaux 

 quit their habitations of ice, and their messes of seal's 

 fat, and betake themselves to the cranberry swamps 

 and pine forests, even they feel a blitheness and hold 

 a jubilee. And amid all the arts, the elegancies, the 

 information, of the most polished and happy artificial 

 life, there is a feeling of restraint when the summer 

 comes, a wish to leave those inanimate fabrications of 



