Among the adventures of Ulysses on his return to his native country after the siege of Troy, by adverse 
Avinds and unmanageable currents, he arrived at an island inhabited by a people called Lotophagi, where he 
landed to take in water and refresh his crew, after they were refreshed, he sent three men into the country 
to learn some particulars concerning the natives, and they found them a friendly people, who offered them 
to taste of the Lotus of which he who had once tasted, Homer says, had no desire to return, but rather 
wished to live with them, and renounce all thoughts of home. It would seem, however, that they returned 
to Ulysses, most probably drunk, for they were refractory, and he was obliged to use force to get them on 
board, and then he confined them, bound underneath the benches on which the rowers sat, and fearing lest 
any more of his men should be induced to try the fascinating effects of the Lotus, he immediately departed. 
Pope has thus translated this account. 
Three men were sent deputed from the crew, 
(An Herald, one,) the dubious coast to view, 
And learn what habitants possess’d the place, 
They went, and found an hospitable race : 
Not prone to ill, nor strange to foreign guest, 
They eat, they drink, and nature gives the feast ; 
The trees around them all their food produce, 
Lotus the name, divine nectareous juice ! 
Odyssey Book ix. 
(Thence call’d Lotophagi ) which whoso tastes, 
Insatiate riots in the sweet repasts, 
Nor other home, nor other care intends, 
But quits his house, his country, aqd his friends : 
The three we sent from off th’enchanting ground 
We dragg’d reluctant, and by force we bound : 
The rest in haste forsook the pleasing shore, 
Or, the charm tasted, had returned no more. 
Of July, Dr. Aikin says ; the animal creation seem oppressed with languor during this hot season, and 
either seek the recesses of woods, or resort to pools and streams to cool their bodies, and quench their thirst. 
On the grassy bank 
Some ruminating lie ; while others stand 
Half in the flood, and often bending sip 
The circling surface. In the middle droops 
The strong laborious ox, of honest front, 
Which incompos’d he shakes; and from his sides 
The troublous insects lashes with his tail, 
Returning still. 
Thomson. 
William Howitt thus describes some of the characteristics of this month. 
Spring-flowers have given place to a very different class. Climbing plants mantle and festoon every 
hedge. The wild hop — the bryony — the clematis, or traveller’s joy — the large white convolvulus, whose 
bold yet delicate flowers will display themselves to a very late period of the year — vetches, and white and 
yellow ladies’ bed-straw, invest every bush with their varied beauty, and breathe on the passers by their 
faint summer sweetness. The Campanula rotundifolia, the hare-bell of poets and the blue-bell of botanists, 
arrests the eye on every dry bank, rock, and way side, with its hairy stems and beautiful cerulean bells. 
There too we behold wild scabiouses, mallows, the woody-nightshade, wood-betony, and centaury : the red 
and white striped convolvulus also throws its flowers under your feet ; corn-fields glow with whole armies 
of scarlet poppies, cockle, and the rich azure plumes of the viper’s bugloss ; even thistles, the curse of Adam, 
diffuse a glow of beauty over waste and barren places. Some species, particularly the musk-thistle, are 
really noble plants, wearing their formidable arms, their silken vests, and their gorgeous crimson tufts of 
fragrant flowers issuing from a coronal of interwoven down and spines, with ,a grace which casts far into the 
shade many a favourite of the garden. 
But whoever would taste all the sweetness of July, let him go, in pleasant company, if possible, into 
heaths and woods : it is there, in her uncultured haunts, that Summer now holds her court. The stern 
castle, the lowly convent, the deer, and the forester, have vanished thence many ages ; yet nature still casts 
round the forest-lodge, the gnarled oak, and lonely mere, the same charms as ever. The most hot and 
sandy tracks, which we might naturally imagine, would now be parched up, are in fall glory. The Erica 
Tetralix, or bell-heath, the most beautiful of our indigenous species, is now in bloom, and has converted 
the brown bosom of the waste into one wide sea of crimson; the air is charged with its honeyed odour: 
the dry elastic turf glows, not only with its flowers, but with those of the wild thyme, the clear blue milk- 
wort, the yellow asphodel, and that curious plant the sun-dew, with its drops of inexhaustible liquor 
parkling in the fiercest sun like diamonds. 
