rters. The Sun must rise, like a
labourer, at the very earliest hour, shine all day, and go to bed late,
else they treat him contumeliously, and declare that he is not worth his
meat. Should he retire occasionally behind a cloud, which it seems most
natural and reasonable for one to do who lives so much in the public
eye, why, a whole watering-place, uplifting a face of dissatisfied
expostulation to heaven, exclaims, "Where is the Sun? Are we never to
have any Sun?" They also insist that there shall be no rain of more than
an hour's duration in the daytime, but that it shall all fall by night.
Yet when the Sun does exert himself, as if at their bidding, and is
shining, as he supposes, to their heart's content, up go a hundred green
parasols in his face, enough to startle the celestial steeds in his
chariot. A _broken_ summer for us. Now and then a few continuous
days--perhaps a whole week--but, if that be denied, now and then,

"Like angels' visits, few and far between,"

one single Day--blue-spread over heaven, green-spread over earth--no
cloud above, no shade below, save that dove-coloured marble lying
motionless like the mansions of peace, and that pensive gloom that falls
from some old castle or venerable wood--the stillness of a sleeping joy,
to our heart profounder than that of death, in the air, in the sky, and
resting on our mighty mother's undisturbed breast--no lowing on the
hills, no bleating on the braes--the rivers almost silent as lochs, and
the lochs, just visible in their aerial purity, floating dream-like
between earth and sky, imbued with the beauty of both, and seeming to
belong to either, as the heart melts to human tenderness, or beyond all
mortal loves the imagination soars! Such days seem now to us--as memory
and imagination half restore and half create the past into such weather
as may have shone over the bridal morn of our first parents in
Paradise--to have been frequent--nay, to have lasted all the Summer
long--when our boyhood was bright from the hands of God. Each of those
days was in itself a life! Yet all those sunny lives melted into one
Summer--and all those Summers formed one continuous bliss. Storms and
snows vanished out of our ideal year; and then morning, noon, and night,
wherever we breathed, we _felt_, what now we but _know_, the inmost
meaning of that profound verse of Virgil the Divine--

"Devenere locos laetos, et amoena vireta
Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas