cure the face of day,
To yonder bench leaf-shelter'd let us stray,
Till blended objects fail the swimming sight,
And all the fading landscape sinks in night;
To hear the drowsy dor come brushing by
With buzzing wing, or the shrill cricket cry;
To see the feeding bat glance through the wood;
To catch the distant falling of the flood;
While o'er the cliff th' awaken'd churn-owl hung
Through the still gloom protracts his chattering song;
While high in air, and poised upon his wings,
Unseen, the soft-enamour'd woodlark sings:
These, NATURE'S works, the curious mind employ,
Inspire a soothing melancholy joy:
As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain
Steals o'er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein!

Each rural sight, each sound, each smell, combine;
The tinkling sheep-bell or the breath of kine;
The new-mown hay that scents the swelling breeze,
Or cottage-chimney smoking through the trees.

The chilling night-dews fall--away, retire!
For see, the glow-worm lights her amorous fire!
Thus, ere night's veil had half obscured the sky,
Th' impatient damsel hung her lamp on high:
True to the signal, by love's meteor led,
Leander hasten'd to his Hero's bed.

I am, etc.

LETTER XXV.

SELBORNE, _Aug. 30th_, 1769.

Dear Sir,--It gives me satisfaction to find that my account of the _ousel
migration_ pleases you. You put a very shrewd question when you ask me
how I know that their autumnal migration is southward? Was not candour
and openness the very life of natural history, I should pass over this
query just as a sly commentator does over a crabbed passage in a classic;
but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree
of shame, that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all
other autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake of our
milder winters, and return to the northward again when the rigorous cold
abates, so I concluded that the ring-ousels did the same, as well as
their congeners the fieldfares; and especially as ring-ousels are known
to haunt cold mountainous countries: but I have good reason to suspect,
since, that they may come to us from the westward, because I hear from
very good authority, that they breed on Dartmoor, and that they forsake
that wild district about the time that our visitors appear, and do not
return till late in the spring.