THE EARLY JULY FLOWERS. A pleasing land of drowsyhead it was, The Castle of Indolence lies in fairy Summer Land. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, sees it set amid. sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns and flowery beds, and his keen ear listens to the prattle of the purling rills, to the lowing of the herds along the vale and to the flocks loud-bleating from the distant hills: and there rises to our minds as fair a picture of the poet's dream as words can paint. Such pictures belong to summer only. Winter is too serious for such trifling. The stern realities of life are then too apparent, are not to be concealed. 196 There seems to be something in the nature of summer which incites the mind to linger over such pictures. The bright warm sunlight is in sympathy with the dolce far niente spirit in man. Everything about him is growing for him, and why should he not rest and A stern necessity admonishes enjoy the fair vision? him that the hard fates have ordained otherwise. Propt on beds of amaranth and moly in the land of the Lotos, he wearies of the sea, wearies of the oar, merely dreams of fatherland, of wife and child, ceases to think of returning home, until some sage Ulysses leads him back weeping to the hollow ships, and bids to make speed away from the enchanted shore. But if all the long summer days cannot be given to rest, a part of them can be and ought to be, so that we may see and appreciate the beauty that lies at our feet or before our doors. I have seen from Bethlehem, New Hampshire, the sun sink behind the distant hills, painting the western sky in gorgeous colors and flooding the valley of the Ammonoosuc with purple light; and have seen from Worcester the sun sink behind Tetaessit Hill in a sky of ineffable beauty, while all the hillside and the valley between were wrapped in richest purple. I have looked down from Mount Washington upon half of New Hampshire spread below, and from Mount Wachusett upon half of Worcester County; the former surpasses in rugged grandeur, but the latter in |