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 lovely mere, the same charms as ever. The most hot and sandy tracts, which we might naturally imagine would now be parched up, are in full 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 honied odour. The dry, elastic turf glows, not only with its flowers, but with those of the wild thyme, the clear blue milkwort, the yellow asphodel, and that curious plant the _sundew_, with its drops of inexhaustible liquor sparkling in the fiercest sun like diamonds. There wave the cotton-rush, the tall fox-glove, and the taller golden mullein. There creep the various species of heath-berries, cranberries, bilberries, &c., furnishing the poor with a source of profit, and the rich of luxury. What a pleasure it is to throw ourselves down beneath the verdant screen of the beautiful fern, or the shade of a venerable oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer sounds of bees, grasshoppers, and ten thousand other insects, mingled with the more remote and solitary cries of the pewit and the curlew! Then, to think of the coach-horse, urged on his sultry stage, or the plough-boy and his teem, plunging in the depths of a burning fallow, or of our ancestors, in times of national famine, plucking up the wild fern-roots for bread, and what an enhancement of our own luxurious ease![3] But woods, the depths of woods, are the most delicious retreats during the fiery noons of July. The great azure campanulas, or Canterbury bells, are there in bloom, and, in chalk or limestone districts, there are also now to be found those curiosities, the _bee_ and _fly orchises_. The soul of John Evelyn well might envy us a wood lounge at this period. _Time's Telescope._ [3] It is a fact not known to every juvenile lover of nature, that a transverse section of a fern-root presents a miniature picture of an _oak tree_ which no painter could rival. * * * * * ASTRONOMICAL OCCURENCES FOR JULY, 1827. * * * * * (_For the Mirror._) The sun is in apogee, or at his greatest distance from the earth on the 2nd, in 10 deg. _Cancer_; he enters _Leo_ on the 23rd, at 5h. 13m. afternoon; he is in conjunction with the planet Saturn on the 2nd at 11h. 30m. morning, in 9 deg. _Cancer_, and with Mars on the 12th at 1h. 45m. afternoon, being advanced 10 deg. further in the eliptic. Venus and Saturn are also in conjunction on the 26th at 3 h. afternoon, in 13 deg. _Cancer_.