The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 94, August, 1865 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by Ticknor and Fields, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article. Table of contents has been created for the HTML version.
The luxury of all summer's sweet sensation is to be found when one lies at length in the warm, fragrant grass, soaked with sunshine, aware of regions of blossoming clover and of a high heaven filled with the hum of innumerous bees.
It is that happy hum—which seems to the closed eyes as if the silent sunbeams themselves had found a voice and were brimming the bending blue with music as they went about their busy chemistry—that gives the chief charm to the moment; for it tunes the mind to its own key, the murmuring expression of all pleasant things, the chord of sunshine and perfume and flowers.
And it is, indeed, the sound of a process scarcely less subtile than the sunbeams' own, of that alchemy by which the limpid drop of sweet insipidity at the root of any petal is transformed to the pungent flavor and viscid drip of honey. A beautiful woman, weary of her frivolities, once half in jest envied the fate of Io, dwelling all day in the sun, all night in the starshine and dew, and fed on pasturage of violets; but there is the morning beam, the evening ray, the breeze, the dew, the spirit of the violet and of the cowslip, all gathered like a distillation and sealed into the combs, and this is the tune to which it is harvested. Beyond doubt there is no such eminent sound of gladness in all the world. The cricket seems to speak of more spiritual things than those of this sphere. As to bird-song, poets differ.
O nightingale, what doth she ail, And is she sad or jolly? Sure ne'er on earth was sound of mirth So like to melancholy,
exclaims one in compromise with all the others. Every echo is full of a lonesome sadness. The musical baying of a distant dog by night accentuates the depth and darkness and stillness; the crowing of cocks from farm to farm, in their cordon of sentinelship against the invasion of the dawn, tells the hearer how all too well the world is getting on without him; the lowing of kine through the clear noon air comes robbed of roughness, in its deep, mellow sonority, like the oboe and bassoon, full of a penetrating pathos. Let Nature but interpose a sheet of water or a bit of wood, and the merriest joy-bells that ever rang are infused with that melancholy which is the overplus of rapture. But there is no distance to lend that enchantment to the buzzing of a bee: it is close about us, a universal sibilation; the air is made of it; it sings of work, that joy and privilege,—of a home, of plenty, of a world whose color and odor make one giddy with good cheer; it may have many varying elements, but its constant is content.