The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 94,
August, 1865, by Various

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 94, August, 1865

Author: Various

Release Date: May 3, 2010 [EBook #32232]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XVI.--AUGUST, 1865.--NO. XCIV.

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.

AMONG THE HONEY-MAKERS.

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 g