JULY is the manhood of the year. It stands strong, full-grown, glowing and beautiful, between the seasons of growth and decline. It is now perfect summer. The trees are in full foliage, and their tender leaves have darkened into a rich sobriety. Flowers of the most brilliant kind are scattered over mead and mountain, over heath and glen. All is bright and hot; thunder occasionally announces the season of sultriness; insects hum around, and the heart of man reposes on the genial scene, neither looking backward nor forward. Avaunt, Winter! let us not dream that thou canst ever return; hide thee, beloved Spring! awake no tender remembrances! Let us go forth into field and forest-God, and Nature, and Poetry, and our fellow men call us. The songs of birds grow faint; the nightingale is hushed; the cuckoo has departed; the blackbird and the thrush now rarely bid us a musical and heartsome welcome to their haunts; the rose fades on the wayside bough; the corn already grows pale for harvest; but then, what thousands of happy and beautiful things surround us! Is not the crimson foxglove again gay by the woodside, and glorious in the forest? Are not the elder-flower, and the corn poppy, and the viper's-bugloss of richest azure delightful in the hedge, and on the sandy heath? Are not men and women, and troops of glad children roaming full of delight on the margin of delicious seas, through the glens of beautiful hills, over the fairest spots of foreign lands? Is it not the holiday of nature, enjoyed by myriads of holiday hearts, which have torn themselves for a season from the couch of that worst slavery-life without a task, and without an aim; from shops and factories, and the twelvemonth hardness of counting house stools? Ah! what a luxury is a bank, what a cushion is a bed of moss or heather on a moor

No. 27.-VOL. II.

land, what a delicium is a plunge into sea or river after the dryness of the stool and the desk through a long monotonous year! Enjoy it, good souls, enjoy it. Lay in sunshine for a long future amid dusky alleys; lay in flowers for remembrance, where not even a weed will grow amid stony pavements and stony hearts; lay in breezes and waves that may fan your parched souls in the sandy desert of merchantdom. Lie on banks, and think no more of bankers; lean on hedges, and not on ledgers; open daisies instead of day-books; have no care about stocks, but such as you can stick in your button-hole; or of prices current, but such as you can learn of the fruit-woman. Leave scrip, and take only a railway trip; leave steam factories, and get upon steam-boats. Nature is now above par, but the exchange is only all the more in your favour; be for one heaven of a month men, and not merchants; be grand capitalists in the wealth of a whole universe.

Don't you scent the hay? Don't you hear the scythes ringing? Don't you hear laughter? Don't you see shapes in sunny fields fit for painters, fit for poets, fit for any man, with a pair of eyes and a heart, to delight in? They are the Arcadians of England-hay-makers, who, with such a sky over their heads, and not a workhouse roof-with such beauty and warmth around them, forget that they are poor, and some weeks ago were miserable, and are once more happy English peasants, earning their twelve and fifteen shillings a-week! God bless them! and he does bless them. What a heaven expands over them; what a paradise lies around them; what a goodness there is in once more meeting in the ancient fields with their friends in comfort, and with work and wages!

Ye thousands, and ye tens of thousands, that still are

JULY 3, 1847.