330 
RURAL HOURS. 
not only spring and summer, but autumn also — as we have just 
seen in the case of Spenser. Thomson, however, has made Sum- 
mer a youth, a sort of Apollo : 
“ Child of the Sun, refulgent Summer comes 
He comes attended by the sultry hours. 
And ever fanning breezes on his way.” 
And his autumn also, “ crowned with the sickle and the wheaten 
sheaf,” scarcely looks like a female. 
In climates still warmer than those of Greece and Rome, the 
ears of grain might correctly have been woven into the wreath of 
May. Ruth must have gleaned the fields of Boaz during the 
month of May, or some time between the Passover and Pentecost — 
festivals represented by our Easter and Whitsunday — for that was 
the harvest-time of Judea. 
Many of the poets of our mother-speech have, however, fol- 
lowed the examples of Spenser and Thomson, in representing 
autumn as the season of the grain-harvest in England. Among 
others, Keats, who also gives a glowing picture of the season, in 
those verses, full of poetical images, beginning — 
“ Season of mists, and mellow fruitfulness ! 
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun.” 
He then asks, “ Who has not often seen thee 
“ . . sitting careless on a granary floor. 
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind ; 
Or on a half-reaped furrow lain asleep, 
Drows’d with the fume of poppies ; while thy hook 
Spares the next swathe, and all its twined flowers !” 
But while such poets as Spenser and Thomson give a warmer 
