150 STUDIES IN THE FIELD AND FOREST. 



expected to derive a perfect satisfaction. The month 

 of June is emblematical of the period of life that im- 

 mediately succeeds the departure of youth, when all 

 lOur sources of enjoyment are most abundant, and our 

 ■capacity for the higher kinds of pleasures has attained 

 maturity, and when the only circumstance that damps 

 our feelings, is the absence of that lightness of heart, 

 arising from a hopeful looking forward to the future. 

 Our manhood and our summer have arrived ; but our 

 youth and our spring have gone by; and though we 

 have the enjoyment of all we anticipated, yet with the 

 fruition hope begins to languish, and in the present 

 exists the fulness of our joys. The flowery treasures, 

 foretokened by the first blue violet, are blooming around 

 us ; the melodious concert, to which the little song 

 sparrow warbled a sweet prelude in March, is now 

 swelling from a full band of songsters, and the sweet 

 summer climate that was harbored by an occasional 

 south wind has arrived. But there is sadness in fruition. 

 With all these voluptuous gales and woodland min- 

 strelsies, we cannot help wishing for a renewal of those 

 feelings with which we greeted the first early flower, 

 and listened to the song of the earliest returning bird. 



Natm-e has thus nearly equalized the enjoyments of 

 every season. When our actual joys are least abun- 

 dant, fancy is near at hand, to supply us with the vis- 

 dons of those pleasures, of which we cannot enjoy the 

 substance ; filling our souls in spring with the hope of 

 the future; comforting us in autumn with the memory 

 of the past, and amusing us in winter, with a tranquil 

 retrospection of the whole year, and the pleasant watch- 

 ing for the dawn of another spring. 



A change has taken place in the whole aspect of the 

 woods, since the middle of the last month. The fight 



