SUMMER PICTURES. 
297 
you,—Thomas Hood and the Midsummer Fairies, min¬ 
gling with the weird tone of the “ Bridge of Sighs ;” 
Spenser and his Catalogue of Trees, wherein he indivi¬ 
dualizes each by a happy choice of epithets :— 
“ And forth they pass, with pleasure forward led, 
Joying to hear the birds’ sweet harmony, 
Which, therein shrouded from the tempest’s dread, 
Seemed in their song to scorn the cruel sky; 
Much can they praise the trees so straight and high,— 
The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall.” 
And.as you get into a day-dream, and gaze upon the blue 
snatches of sky through artless breaks in the foliage, and 
upon the “ half-excluded light which sleeps in patches 
upon the shadowy verdure below,” your thoughts turn 
to Robin Hood and John Keats; to Scott and his 
“forest fair;” to Coleridge and the “leafy month ot 
June;” to Robert Bloomfield and quaint old Herrick. 
And from the solemn quietude and beauty of these pic¬ 
tures, the fancy draws innumerable beautiful figures, 
such as the poets have ever delighted to revel in; and 
they come up successively upon “ that inward eye which 
is the bliss of solitude,” like stars peeping through the 
cool twilight, or young hopes, hallowed in their birth by 
those boyish tears, not unfrequently shed over fancied 
disappointments. And then bitter memorials of old sins, 
and feelings of remorse for broken ties and rash follies, 
overwhelm the soul like a November fog; and we feel, 
that if we had the power, we could gladly blot out all the 
history of our past. But there are those who love us 
now, and the world is not all desolate; and if the heart 
is in unison with the external world of beauty, we shall 
