But see! here are delights that will presently be as irrevocably gone. It is evening. What a calm and basking sunshine lies on the green landscape. Look round,--all is richness, and beauty, and glory. Those tall elms which surround the churchyard, letting the grey tower get but a passing glimpse of the river, and that other magnificent arcade of similar trees which stretch up the side of the same fair stream,--how they hang in the most verdant and luxuriant masses of foliage! What a soft, hazy twilight floats about them! What a slumberous calm rests on them! Slumberous did I say? no, it is not slumberous; it has nothing of sleep in its profound repose. It is the depth of a contemplative trance; as if every tree were a living, thinking spirit, lost in the vastness of some absorbing thought. It is the hush of a dream-land; the motionless majesty of an enchanted forest, bearing the spell of an infrangible silence. And see, over those wide meadows, what an affluence of vegetation! See how that herd of cattle, in colour and form, and grouping, worthy of the pencil of Cuyp or Ruysdael, graces the plenty of that field of most lustrous gold; and all round, the grass growing for the scythe almost overtops the hedges in its abundance. As we track the narrow footpath through them, we cannot avoid a lively admiration of the rich mosaic of colours that are woven all amongst them--the yellow rattle--the crimson stems and heads of the burnet, that plant of beautiful leaves--the golden trifolium--the light quake-grass--the azure milkwort, and clover scenting all the air. Hark! the cuckoo sends her voice from the distance, clear and continuous:-- Hail to thee, shouting Cuckoo! in my youth Thou wert long time, the Ariel of my hope, The marvel of a summer! it did soothe To listen to thee on some sunny slope, Where the high oaks forbade an ampler scope, Than of the blue skies upward--and to sit, Canopied, in the gladdening horoscope Which thou, my planet, flung--a pleasant fit, Long time my hours endeared, my kindling fancy smit. And thus I love thee still--thy monotone, The selfsame transport flashes through my frame, And when thy voice, sweet sibyl, all is flown My eager ear, I cannot choose but blame. O may the world these feelings never tame! If age o’er me her silver tresses spread, I still would call thee by a lover’s name, And deem the spirit of delight unfled, Nor bear, though grey without, a heart to Nature dead! _Wiffen’s Aonian Hours._