The best thing, perhaps, that can be said of our summer up to this date [July 1872], is that it has, upon the whole, been amiable and summer-like; has, after the manner of a love-lorn maiden, wept much and often smiled, although, until within the last day or two, it has never actually laughed. You loved it, and couldn't help yourself, but your love wanted warmth and fervour, just because of its want of jocundity and joyousness. Even in our climate, summer is not summer by the mere reading of the thermometer, however sensitive and delicate its mercurial indications; one wants brilliant sunshine, with cloudless, or almost cloudless skies, to make up a summer as a summer proper ought to be. The poets of the East and South always speak of summer and summer scenes as "laughing," while in more northern and less favoured lands your poet is content to describe otherwise exactly similar scenes and situations as simply "smiling," "gentle," "sweet," "quiet," and so forth, so that an acute critic, by attending to this alone, could tell, were other proofs entirely wanting, whether a poet was born under northern skies, or lived and loved, soared and sang, in sunnier and more southern climes. Horace has-- --"mihi angulus ridet." His "corner," observe, does not merely smile; it "laughs" under the bright blue Italian sky. Lucretius has-- --"tibi rident æquora ponti;" which Creech and Dryden, bards of a colder clime, have rendered "smiles," but which literally and truly is honest, open, joyous "laughter" in the southern bard. Metaetasio has-- "A te fioriscono Gli erbosi 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 larkë, messager of daye, Salueth in hire song the morwe gray; And fyry Phebus ryseth up so brighte, That al the orient laugheth of the light."-- Very finely modernised by Dryden thus:-- "The morning lark, messenger of day, Saluted in her song the morning grey; And soon the sun arose with beams so bright That all the horizon laughed to see the joyous sight."