sauntering through the green lanes; and the respectable members of society, hearing the birds, are rather pleased as otherwise; and, after saying nothing, walk home to dinner, and take an additional tumbler, and play backgammon, and go to bed, and sleep very soundly beside the amiable and rather corpulent mother of their large and promising family. Next morning, their wife makes excellent tea, and gives them plenty of rolls and buttered toast, and then they go into the garden and eat gooseberries, and pluck a fullblown rose, and look at the bee-hives, and wonder if the apples are as sour as they were yesterday, and sit down in the arbour and become gradually somnolent, and are greatly tormented by a persevering blue-bottle that buzzes close about their ear, and occasionally settles upon the tip of their nose; till they at length become indignant, and start up, and depart, they know not whither.

This is the common mode of enjoying the country; and no doubt a very excellent one; yet does it hardly suit our taste. It is a sort of twentyguineas-a-month enjoyment, procured through the medium of a stage-coach. To us it seems clear that no one can be happy in the country, as a christian and a gentleman ought to be, who fixes his head-quarters any where within twelve miles of a place where there is an established concourse of summer visitors; a watering

place, for instance, or any such hideous abomination. A mineral well, with its sulphureous rottenness of taste, and crowd of scrofulous decrepitudes assembled in the pump-room, is a sight sufficient to throw Flora and Pomona into hysterics, and change Hygeia herself into a valetudinarian. A true lover of nature ought to have no head-quarters. He ought to ramble up and down like the birds of passage, now breathing inspiration on the mountain's peak, and now following in his skiff "the golden path of rays" that glance and flicker on the bosom of the lake: at one time, alone and far away in the blood-stained solitudes of Glencoe-at another, tracking the red-deer through the forest of Martindale down to the wooded banks of Ullswater.

Let no man go to the country expressly to fish or shoot; let him fish when he comes to a splendid stream or living loch, and shoot when the moor lies in his way, and the birds rise gloriously on the wing, as if they deserved to be shot. But never let him pretend to be a votary of nature in all her moods and aspects, and yet go forth into her presence with a mind intent only upon a pocket-book of fly-hooks, gut, and casting-lines, or an imagination filled with detonating caps, hair-triggers, percussion locks, pointers, and double barrels. No one loves angling more than we no one can carry a gun or follow a dog

do,

more unweariedly; but it will not do to maintain that there is much poetry in either pursuit, or, at least, that poetical associations and reveries can ever be indulged in during the hour of excitement, when a fish of three pounds weight seems worth a king's ransom, and a black-cock more valuable than a dozen birds of paradise, or a score of the golden kinhis of China. We cannot serve two masters. We cannot adore the mountains, and at the same time allow the line to flow easily from our reel; we cannot venerate the clouds, casting their majestic shadows over valley and town, and at the same time pop away with No. 6. to the satisfaction of our game-keeper, and the approbation of our own conscience. Having once established this rule, we may then talk of scenery in any cursory, hop-step-and-leap manner we please, and there is a chance that we may now and then say something worth listening to, for when the mood is on us, we shall feel the beauty of the subject.

In the merry months of May, and the four which follow, external nature is an unbought book, opened at its brightest and most illuminated page, which they who run may read, and which none can read without imbibing deep draughts of health and happiness. The summer of the visible world communicates, by some invisible process, its sunshine to the soul of man; and earnestly

does he begin to long for a "beaker full of the

warm south".

"Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!"

In more homely phrase, the town becomes too hot to hold us, and away we dash into the breezy fields in old family chariots, in stage-coaches, on the tops of mails, in gigs, in curricles, in stanhopes, in dennets, in waggons, and in carts. All congregations of houses are left silent and deserted, -nuts without their kernels, cages without their birds, shells without their fish. From the time the sun enters Cancer, until he leaves Scorpio, it is in vain to look for human beings in cities. You may find them on the tops of hills,you may find them in the depths of woods, you may find them up to the middle in running streams, you may find them buried among clover, you may catch them floating upon lakes, you may start them amidst the Righi solitudes, or see them passing in shoals through the Trosachs; but hope not to encounter them in their accustomed walk "on the Rialto." There is a principle in human nature which loathes the dust and the heat, the fever and the fret, of a metropolis, whilst the merry birds are abroad in the blue or dappled sky,—whilst the mountain bee is wending his devious way with an unceasing hum of

joy over the heath and heather,

whilst "the mower whets his scythe, and the milk-maid singeth blythe," and visions for ever haunt our sleep of

some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless."

In short, it is beyond all matter of dispute that at the season alluded to one must be off to the country, and business be left to shift for itself, and the affairs of the world to proceed as best they may, for who cares about the civil or political state of Europe in summer. The only remaining question is where is one to go? If you are a married man, with a large small family, and limited income, c'en est fait-there need be no hesitation. You must take a cottage of three rooms and a kitchen in some sea-bathing village, into which, upon some highpressure principle, you must squeeze your whole community, together with several cart-loads of furniture; and for six weeks or so you must duly plunge the small fry into that part of the ocean which breaks into muddy foam upon the shore, and contains a proper mixture of sand and seaweed, whilst you yourself may find some favourite pool among the rocks, covered with limpets, tangle, and young crabs, and dabble in it for half an hour every morning and evening, to the great refreshment of your corporeal frame. But if the