A Year in a Lancashire Garden / Second Edition

by Henry Arthur Bright

"Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed
The air is delicate."

And who does not recall Tennyson's—

"Swallow, swallow, flying, flying south,"

and bearing on swift wing the message that—

"Dark and true and tender is the north"?

Or who, that has once read it, can forget Les Hirondelles of Béranger, and how the French captive among the Moors questions the swallows about his country, his home, his friends, which they perhaps have seen?

Lastly, what a felicitous line is this of the American poet Lowell, when he describes

"The thin-winged swallow skating on the air."

I must bring these Notes, such as they are, to a close, and yet I feel I have scarcely even yet described the pleasures of a garden. But my memory at least can do it justice. It recalls summer afternoons, when the lawn tennis went merrily on on the lawn, by the weeping ash-tree, and summer evenings, when the house was too hot, and we sat out after dinner upon the terrace with the claret and the fruit. The air was all perfume, and the light lingered long in the east over the church steeple three miles away, and no sound but of our own voices broke the silence and the peace.