264 
FRANK FORESTER’S FIELD SPORTS. 
promise of spring and the fullness of summer are both inferior 
to the serene and calm decline of the woodland year. It leads 
to death indeed; but it seems to me rather to resemble the 
tranquil and gentle close of a well-spent life, beautified by the 
consciousness of good deeds done during the heat of youth, and 
in the heyday of manhood, and enriched by the hope of glories 
to shine forth after the winter of the grave, than the termination 
of an existence to be dreaded or deplored. 
Every land has its own season of peculiar loveliness ; and if 
the sweet spring-tide of soft and dewy England, with its May 
smiles and its April tears and its rich breath of flowery fra¬ 
grance, has awakened the fond sympathies of her landscape- 
loving poets, the many-colored, purple-hazed, and silvery-skied 
autumn of America has neither been unhonored nor unsung of 
lyres worthy to hang aloft in high niches of the temple conse¬ 
crate to the noblest tongue of the modern universe. 
The true sportsman must ever be a lover of the charms of 
rural scenery, and for this among other things I love and honor 
sportsmanship. I do not believe that any genuine forester, be 
his exterior as rough as the shell of the prickly chestnut, but 
must have within his heart, though he may lack words to define 
the sentiment, something of the painter’s spirit, and the poet’s 
fire. The very nature of his pursuits must needs awaken 
contemplation and induce thought, and I have often observed 
that the spots to which he will conduct you, apparently with¬ 
out a thought, except in reference to their convenience, 
wherein to take your noonday meal, or your afternoon siesta, 
will be the very places to charm the poet’s fancy, or fix the 
painter’s eye. 
I think no lover of nature can be an unkindly, or, at the bottom, 
an evil-minded or bad man. 
And so—and so 1 Instead of pausing longer thus, or solidly 
and solemnly discussing the theory of sporting matters, we will 
at once walk into the practice. 
We will suppose the time of the year such as our poor ballad- 
monger above quoted has, perhaps, labored to depict,—the time 
