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than pins' heads. Also, the welcome lilac is the ornament of every court-yard, and you may snap off a branch without compunction, and stick it in a pitcher, if the fragrance be not too powerful for feeble nerves.

'It is now the tenth of June, and up to this date we have had neither untimely frost nor memorable days of heat; but it has been, without exception, the most balmy season within my recollection. There has not been a single drawback. Copious showers have fallen on the earth; the air is choice and healthful; even in the heart of the city you have been able to find a refreshing coolness, and every where the vegetation is so rich, the crops are so far advanced, and the prospect is so promising, that we might with justice call this a mirabilis annus.

'It is almost intoxicating to walk 'in the cool of the day' over the pleasant roads which intersect the country in all directions, and especially where they wind over the high ground in full view of the river; or to recline in an easy carriage, not your own, and to be borne along by a pair of well-groomed horses, whose coats are sleek and well-protected by the clean netting, and who are as gentle as doves in harness; and so, without a word spoken, with your head bare, and with a soul composed and tranquil, to travel through avenues and green lanes where the giant elms lift their arms above you. Nature is so suggestive, and so many pleasant influences steal upon you, that it is most perplexing to transfer your impressions of beauty, and you feel only fitted for silent enjoyment.

'If there is any pleasant feature in the country, it is a winding narrow lane carpeted with a green sod, skirted on either hand with mulberry-trees and the wild cherry, over which the brier bushes, the wild grape, and the ivy and honey-suckle are interlocked in many an impenetrable thicket; places which the cat-bird loves to frequent, and from which he pours forth his mellow and melting cavatina. Here is the spot where the young man, with the furze just blackening upon the lip of manhood, passing his arm about the waist of the pretty maid, whispers into her ear the most tender sentiments; for the very birds on the branches teach them how to woo and coo most lovingly. Almost every village has its Love-lane as well as its Gallows-hill and Buttermilk-hollow.

'In the course of your wanderings, you will observe that the tulip-tree is now covered all over with yellow flowers, and the locusts are in full bloom, emitting from their 'high old' crowns a delicious fragrance. In the fields the clover is knee-deep, and the cattle dispose themselves in easy attitudes, and, as they remain dreamy and almost motionless on the top of some shady knoll, in relief against the blue sky, afford a picture of grace to the eye of the CLAUDE-like painter. But the anniversary of the blooming roses is also at this time, and you must by all means shut up your workshops and hurry out to this feast. For the time is short. In a few days the brief and beautiful existence of the rose is terminated, and FLORA gives the field to CERES! The one is intended to administer to the sense of Beauty, and to be twined in a triumphant chaplet around the brows of Innocence; the other comes upon a sterner and a grander mission, to fill the granaries with bread and nerve the arm with vigor.

'In the winter-time a few rose-buds cut from a green-house where they have been fostered under glass, and given to you by a generous friend, stand perhaps in a wine-glass on your table, and represent the summer. You tend them from day to day, and furnish them with clean water, until the opening bud feeds no longer on the juice of the stem, and you throw them out of your window. But they may have sufficed while on their brief errand to have soothed your soul; and, oh! to a man of guilt, if he has any particle of human feeling, a rose in his lonely cell would preach to him more eloquently than words, and he could wash its crest with his tears like a shower:

'BRING flowers to the captive's lonely cell:

They have tales of the joyous woods to tell;
Of the free blue streams, and the sunny sky,
And the bright world shut from his languid eye.'

'But when, in the gradual advancement of the year, the time draws nigh which is monopolized by this choicest and most exquisite specimen of floral beauty; when the wild, untutored, modest May-rose, with its multiplicity of pink leaves, has given place to the vaunted varieties whose names are at the tongue's end of every gardener; when the uncared-for one which grows like a brier by the way-side, soon drops its scanty leaves, and on comes precipitately the glorious, universal bloom of the rich and double flowers which have received culture, and they crown the well-trimmed stalk, and burst out in a dissipation of beauty over the porch, the net-work trellis, and the garden bower, casting forth their very souls on all the currents of the summer air, and floating into your olfactories, climbling up and insinuating themselves into the windows where you converse, sweetly intruding themselves in every covert path, wherever you wander through the delicious garden; seen at the tops of the trees, as ye are, O Kentucky roses! budding and bursting out under the eaves of the mansion, where the little downy bosoms of the justhatched chirping birds heave in the nests, and the parents drop the worm into their red mouths, unfrightened by the play of romping children; and the bumble-bee, and the honey-bee, and the humming-bird drink together out of the same cup of intermingling eglantine; then I say that you must let your soul expand with a calm enjoyment, and be convinced that GOD in His benevolence fashions in every phase of existence a heaven for us, and that free moral agents fit up a hell for themselves.

'There is now a very prevalent smell of mint from the meadows, as its tender stalks are bruised by the feet of cattle, or its odors are dislodged by the somewhat rough handling of the freebooting winds. Thirsty people like to bruise it against little icebergs, in a tumbler with wine of a choice quality, and, if I remember rightly, a slight paring of lemon and a straw-berry or two, to produce a curious, composite flavor, and so imbibe it slowly through a wheaten-straw, or sometimes a glass tube. What the advantage of this mode is, does not appear clearly; but perhaps the volatile aroma of the herb following in the wake of the drops which clamber up the tube, more gradually and pleasantly insinuates itself into the brain than when it sweeps over the sense in a powerful puff. To have it poured from a silver pitcher, on whose

outer surface the atmosphere is collected in cool drops, in the heat of a sultry day, and offered in moderate quantity by the fair hands which have concocted it with skill and with a scrupulous mildness, is not unacceptable to those who make use of such fluids; and of the julep it can with truth be said that it contains some good ingredients — the fragrant mint and crystal ice-drops. That the mint has medicinal quality, is well known. With the valetudinarian cat it disputes the palm with cat-nip; and when covered with the dews, the sick chicken takes a little nip of it.

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'I have spoken of the feast of roses, but the feast of straw-berries must be remembered. How plentiful is the crop! In this happy land the poor taste of delicacies, and the horn of plenty is literally poured out with its profusion of fruits and flowers. Here the cows come home at night with their hoofs actually dripping with the red blood of this berry, and the odors of it float over the snowy foam of the milk-pail. It grows wild in all the woods and all the meadows, and many think the wilder the sweeter; for as it is smaller in size than the seedlings of the garden, it stands a better chance to become dead-ripe and lose its acid. It requires no addition, and is rendered fit to eat by the sugar of its own nature. 'Doubtless,' says an old writer, 'God might have made a better berry, but He never did.' I have, however, met with some who are disposed to deny the truth of this statement, and who say that the rasp-berry is better. No doubt it is to some palates, but the general voice would hardly give to it the palm. In flavor, the straw-berry is admitted to be the acme of perfection, and it has probably not degenerated since it was originated in Eden. But it is so keen and pungent, that in a little while it destroys the tone of the tongue, whereas the rasp-berry has an exceedingly delicate aroma, as much so as the wild-grape blossom. Its merits are more slowly perceived, but it less fatigues the taste, and is longer appreciated. The succession of fruits as the year advances, exhibits an adaptation most pleasing and wonderful. The straw-berry is first with us, and its precedence in time is a fair presumption in favor of its ripe merits. Then comes the rasp-berry. These occupy a certain space mostly to themselves, but when they are gone, a rabble of fruits jostle one another in the garden, and every one may take his pick and choice. The English ox-heart cherry charms the eye and satisfies the taste, especially when you pluck it from the branch as it hides its blushing cheek beneath the leaves. The goose-berry and tart currant arrive in the very nick of time, but the berries taper off in excellence at the close of the year. The plain and healthful black-berry is succeeded by the whortle-berry, the poorest of fruits- GOD forgive me! But, in the meantime, the larger kinds come in to adapt themselves to every variety of taste, and to every necessity of constitution-peach, plum, and grape.

'JUNE 20.- While walking to-day out of the silent woods into a sequestered glen, I encountered a very distinct and truthful echo. Every footfall was repeated, and if you called HYLAS, HYLAS was responded. There was a well-built wall of rocks in front, and happening to soliloquize aloud, it was from the hard and flinty surface of them that my own words were thrown back with an almost impudent celerity:

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'Echo is a playful sprite, sitting high up, laughing, weeping, shrieking, talking, just according to the mood of those she mocks; feeding on the sugarplums and saccharine fragments of the poets thrown out to her by the romantic Della Cruscan youth. Exißooxer' aoidas. Alas! that Echo is not every where, to let us know that our words come back upon us; but her sportive didactics are given in the amphitheatre of rocks. Oh that liars would wander near her sylvan nestling-places, and slanderers travel down the lonely dell where their utterances might be heard by their own ears alone, and return upon them to knock their teeth out! Every thing appears to be reproduced, and each transformation to be more spiritual and refined. Is there an echo of the 'voiceless thought?' There is, but more impalpable, so that spirits only may apprehend it. The burnished glass throws back the face, and the streams reflect the weeping willows, and most delicately has the Latin poet styled sweet Echo the image of the voice-Vocis imago. Oh! how perfect is the representation, when she responds to the groans of the Hamadryad mourning over the fall of her own dear tree, for whose life she has implored the wood-man in many a susurring sigh and whisper among its branches! Wood-man, spare that tree!' And in the general forest she returns answer to the Dryad's cries, when every stroke of the flashing axe is heard again, and at last with a crash the oak falls with its crown of glory, and the sacred gloom of the grove is violated, and the most majestic pillar of its cathedral is overthrown. There was a stately tree upon the hill-top at 'Tulipton,' and it was a beacon to the sails-man, as his little boat was wafted into the safe cove, but in an evil day the hand of Expediency cut it down. Great, indeed, was the fall thereof; and as it reached the earth and smothered the shrubs and wild flowers which had been sheltered by its shade, a universal wail and lamentation was heard around, and the very echoes were reëchoed from the distant hills. In fact, the curses upon those Vandals have not yet ceased. There is an echo of the bee in clover, and of the precious music of the bobolink; but when the voice of flutes in concord floats on the air of eve with melodies which touch the heart; the same 'which once in TARA's halls the soul of music shed;' the cadence and the dying fall come with swiftest repetition, as if too sweet to die away; and as the stars glimmer and the moon sheds down her softened light, I think of friends departed and

of days gone by. So have I heard the reverberations of the water-fall and the echoings of the huntsman's horn,

'As if another chase were in the sky,'

and have listened to two farmers conversing in short interrogations over the hedge, or separated from each other by the length of a field, saying, as they placed the hollow of their hands at the corners of their mouths, on a high key:

'When are you going to mow those oats?'

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Then do I wander away from this shirt-sleeved couple, whose faces are bedewed with perspiration from working in the fields and mowing the new hay, with MILTON's beautiful apostrophe echoing on my ears from the hard and rocky surface of the times in which he lived.

'SWEET Echo, sweetest nymph, that livest unseen
Within thy airy shell,"

By slow Meander's margent green,

And in the violet-embroidered vale,

Where the love-lorn nightingale

Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well;

Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair

That likest thy NARCISSUS are?

Tell me but where,

Sweet queen of parley, daughter of the sphere!

So mayest thou be translated to the skies,

And give resounding grace to all heaven's harmonies.'

F. W. S.

'JUNE 23.- In a secluded cove or indentation of the shore, where the trees were imaged downward from the bank upon the smooth water, I observed a pair of swans, accompanied by four beautiful cygnets, lifting their snow-white plumes to catch the breeze, and gliding about with a queen-like motion. While I gazed at this unsullied group, which seemed to be native to the spirit-land rather than something earthly, the thumping sound produced by the paddle-wheels of a steam-boat began to be heard; and as she rounded the point, the water became agitated and swelled upon the shore. At this apparent danger, the parent-bird received all the four cygnets upon her back, and erecting her trembling wings into a fan-like shape, sailed away toward the green-sward—a spectacle of ineffable grace and beauty. I have noticed these birds for two years, sometimes near the shore, but oftener afar-off, like specks of white, where the blue wave seemed to mingle with the horizon; but until the present season, they were unattended by the cygnets. They now form a pure and aristocratic society, intermingling their snowy necks in the most affectionate communion. At first they were placed in a small pond for safe-keeping; but when the winter broke up, catching a glimpse of the

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