There is a sound of tinkling teams and of wagons rolling along lanes and fields the whole country over, aye, even at midnight, till at length the fragrant ricks rise in the farmyard, and the pale smooth-shaven fields are left in solitary beauty.
They who know little about it may deem the strong penchant of our poets, and of ourselves, for rural pleasures, mere romance and poetic illusion; but if poetic beauty alone were concerned, we must still admire harvest-time in the country. The whole land is then an Arcadia, full of simple, healthful, and rejoicing spirits. Overgrown towns and manufactories may have changed for the worse, the spirit and feelings of our population; in them, "evil communications may have corrupted good manners;" but in the country at large, there never was a more simple-minded, healthful-hearted, and happy race of people than our present British peasantry. They have cast off, it is true, many of their ancestors' games and merrymakings, but they have in no degree lost their soul of mirth and happiness. This is never more conspicuous than in harvest-time.
With the exception of a casual song of the lark in a fresh morning, of the blackbird and thrush at sunset, or the monotonous wail of the yellow-hammer, the silence of birds is now complete; even the lesser reed-sparrow, which may very properly be called the English mock-bird, and which kept up a perpetual clatter with the notes of the sparrow, the swallow, the white-throat, &c. in every hedge-bottom, day and night, has ceased.
Boys will now be seen in the evening twilight with match, gunpowder, &c., and green boughs for self-defence, busy in storming the paper-built castles of wasps, the larvae of which furnish anglers with store of excellent baits. Spring-flowers have given place to a very different class. Climbing plants mantle and festoon every hedge. The wild hop, the brione, the clematis or traveller's joy, the large white convolvulus, whose bold yet delicate flowers will display themselves to a very late period of the year—vetches, and white and yellow ladies-bed-straw—invest almost every bush with their varied beauty, and breathe on the passer-by their faint summer sweetness. The campanula rotundifolia, the hare-bell of poets, and the blue-bell of botanists, arrests the eye on every dry bank, rock, and wayside, with its beautiful cerulean bells. There too we behold wild scabiouses, mallows, the woody nightshade, wood-betony, and centaury; the red and white-striped convolvulus also throws its flowers under your feet; corn fields glow with whole armies of scarlet poppies, cockle, and the rich azure plumes of viper's-bugloss; even thistles, the curse of Cain, diffuse a glow of beauty over wastes and barren places. Some species, particularly the musk thistles, are really noble plants, wearing their formidable arms, their silken vest, and their gorgeous crimson tufts of fragrant flowers issuing from a coronal of interwoven down and spines, with a grace which casts far into the shade many a favourite of the garden.
But whoever would taste all the sweetness of July, let him go, in pleasant company, if possible, into heaths and woods; it is there, in her uncultured haunts, that summer now holds her court. The stern castle, the lowly convent, the deer and the forester have vanished thence many ages; yet nature still casts round the forest-lodge, the gnarled oak and lovely mere, the same charms as ever. The most hot and sandy tracts, which we might naturally imagine would now be parched up, are in full glory. The erica tetralix, or bell-heath, the most beautiful of our indigenous species, is now in bloom, and has converted the brown bosom of the waste into one wide sea of crimson; the air is charged with its honied odour. The dry, elastic turf glows, not only with its flowers, but with those of the wild thyme, the clear blue milkwort, the yellow asphodel, and that curious plant the sundew, with its drops of inexhaustible liquor sparkling in the fiercest sun like diamonds. There wave the cotton-rush, the tall fox-glove, and the taller golden mullein. There creep the various species of heath-berries, cranberries, bilberries, &c., furnishing the poor with a source of profit, and the rich of luxury. What a pleasure it is to throw ourselves down beneath the verdant screen of the beautiful fern, or the shade of a venerable oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer sounds of bees, grasshoppers, and ten thousand other insects, mingled with the more remote and solitary cries of the pewit and the curlew! Then, to think of the coach-horse, urged on his sultry stage, or the plough-boy and his teem, plunging in the depths of a burning fallow, or of our ancestors, in times of national famine, plucking up the wild fern-roots for bread, and what an enhancement of our own luxurious ease! [3]
But woods, the depths of woods, are the most delicious retreats during the fiery noons of July. The great azure campanulas, or Canterbury bells, are there in bloom, and, in chalk or limestone districts, there are also now to be found those curiosities, the bee and fly orchises. The soul of John Evelyn well might envy us a wood lounge at this period.
Time's Telescope.