200 NETHER LOCHABER. 



which Creech and Dryden, hards of a colder clime, have rendered 



" smiles," hut which literally and truly is honest, open, joyous 



" laughter " in the southern hard. Metaetasio has — 



" A te fiorisoono 

 Gli erboai prati ; 

 E i flutti ridono 

 Nel mar placati." 



" Ridono," observe — laughter again — like his earlier countrymen, 

 Horace and Lucretius. Our British poets rarely venture to make 

 spring or summer do more than smile ; they are afraid of the 

 laughter of the south, as being quoad hoc an over-bold hyperbole. 

 We can only quote at this moment two instances in which the 

 laughter of more favoured lands is boldly introduced. John 

 Langhorne, a poet and miscellaneous writer of the last century, 

 author of the Fables of Flora, very beautifully says — 



" Where Tweed's soft banks in liberal beauty lie, 

 And Flora laughs beneath an azure sky." 



And Chaucer, the father of English poetry, has the following : — 



*' The busy larke, messager of daye, 

 Salueth in hire song the morwe gray ; 

 And fyry Phebus ryseth up so brighte, 

 That al the orient laugJieth of the light." — 



Yery finely modernised by Dryden thus : — 



" The morning lark, messenger of day, 

 Saluted in her song tlie morning grey ; 

 And soon the sun arose with beams so bright 

 That all the horizon lavghed to see the joyous sight." 



Our summer, then, thus far, has not been a "laughing," but, at 

 the best, a merely smiling summer. There has been but little 

 iictual sunshine, rarely such a thing as a blue, unclouded sky ; but, 

 if we do not err, if the wish be not altogether father to the 

 thought, a splendid autumn, glad and goldeii — summer and autumn 



