AUGUST.

Silence again. The glorious symphony
Hath need of pause and interval of peace.
Some subtle signal bids all sweet sounds cease,
Save hum of insects' aimless industry.
Pathetic, summer seeks by blazonry

Of colour to conceal her swift decrease.
Weak subterfuge! Each mocking day doth fleece
A blossom and lay bare her poverty.
Poor middle-agèd summer! Vain this show!
Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset
One meadow with a single violet;

And well the singing thrush and lily know,
Spite of all artifice which her regret.
Can deck in splendid guise, their time to go.

AUGUST.

Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.

JOHN iv. 35.

THE grand feature of this month is CORN HARVEST. It is a time for universal gladness of heart. Nature has completed her most important operations. She has ripened her best fruits, and a thousand hands are ready to reap them with joy. It is a gladdening sight to stand upon some eminence and behold the yellow hues of harvest amid the dark relief of hedges and trees, to see the shocks standing thickly in a land of peace; the partly-reaped fields and the clear, cloudless sky, shedding over all its lustre. There is a solemn splendour, a mellowness and maturity of beauty, thrown over the landscape. The wheat-crops shine on the hills and slopes, as Wordsworth expresses it, "like golden shields cast down from the sun." For the lovers of solitary rambles, for all who desire to feel the pleasures of a thankful heart, and to participate in the happiness of the simple

and the lowly, now is the time to stroll abroad. They will find beauty and enjoyment spread abundantly before them. They will find the mowers sweeping down the crops of pale barley, every spiked ear of which, so lately looking up bravely at the sun, is now bent downward in a modest and graceful curve, as if abashed at his ardent and incessant gaze. They will find them cutting down the rustling oats, each followed by an attendant rustic who gathers the swath into sheaves from the tender green of the young clover, which, commonly sown with oats to constitute the future crop, is now showing itself luxuriantly. But it is in the wheat-field that all the jollity, and gladness, and picturesqueness of harvest are concentrated. Wheat is more

particularly the food of man. Barley affords him a wholesome but much abused potation;— the oat is welcome to the homely board of the hardy mountaineers, but wheat is especially and everywhere the "staff of life." To reap and gather it in, every creature of the hamlet is assembled. The farmer is in the field, like a rural king amid his people— the labourer, old or young, is there to collect what he has sown with toil, and watched in its growth with pride; the dame has left her wheel and her shady cottage, and, with sleeve-defended arms, scorns to do less than the best of them:—the blooming damsel is there, adding her sunny beauty to