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Summer! glowing summer! This is the month of heat and sunshine, of
clear, fervid skies, dusty roads, and shrinking streams; when doors and
windows are thrown open, a cool gale is the most welcome of all
visiters, and every drop of rain "is worth its weight in gold." Such is
July commonly--such it was in 1825, and such, in a scarcely less degree,
in 1826; yet it is sometimes, on the contrary, a very showery month,
putting the hay-maker to the extremity of his patience, and the farmer
upon anxious thoughts for his ripening corn; generally speaking,
however, it is the heart of our summer. The landscape presents an air of
warmth, dryness, and maturity; the eye roams over brown pastures, corn
fields "already white to harvest," dark lines of intersecting
hedge-rows, and darker trees, lifting their heavy heads above them. The
foliage at this period is rich, full, and vigorous; there is a fine haze
cast over distant woods and bosky slopes, and every lofty and majestic
tree is filled with a soft shadowy twilight, which adds infinitely to
its beauty--a circumstance that has never been sufficiently noticed by
either poet or painter. Willows are now beautiful objects in the
landscape; they are like rich masses of arborescent silver, especially
if stirred by the breeze, their light and fluent forms contrasting
finely with the still and sombre aspect of the other trees.
Now is the general season of _haymaking_. Bands of mowers, in their
light trousers and broad straw hats, are astir long before the fiery eye
of the sun glances above the horizon, that they may toil in the
freshness of the morning, and stretch themselves at noon in luxurious
ease by trickling waters, and beneath the shade of trees. Till then,
with regular strokes and a sweeping sound, the sweet and flowery grass
falls before them, revealing at almost every step, nests of young birds,
mice in their cozy domes, and the mossy cells of the humble bee
streaming with liquid honey; anon, troops of haymakers are abroad,
tossing the green swaths wide to the sun. It is one of Nature's
festivities, endeared by a thousand pleasant memories and habits of the
olden days, and not a soul can resist it.
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._
[3] It is a fact not known to every juvenile lover of nature,
that a transverse section of a fern-root presents a miniature
picture of an _oak tree_ which no painter could rival.
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ASTRONOMICAL OCCURENCES
FOR JULY, 1827.
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(_For the Mirror._)
The sun is in apogee, or at his greatest distance from the earth on the
2nd, in 10 deg. _Cancer_; he enters _Leo_ on the 23rd, at 5h. 13m.
afternoon; he is in conjunction with the planet Saturn on the 2nd at
11h. 30m. morning, in 9 deg. _Cancer_, and with Mars on the 12th at 1h.
45m. afternoon, being advanced 10 deg. further in the eliptic.
Venus and Saturn are also in conjunction on the 26th at 3 h. afternoon,
in 13 deg. _Cancer_.
Mercury will again be visible for a short time about the middle of the
month a little after the sun has set, arriving on the 16th at his
greatest eastern elongation, or apparent distance from the centre of the
system, as seen from the earth in 20 deg. _Leo_; and in aphelio, or that
point of his orbit most distant from the sun, on the 22nd; he becomes
stationary on the 29th.
There is only one visible eclipse of Jupiter's first satellite this
month--on the 5th, at 10h. 21m. evening.
The Georgium Sidus, or Herschel, comes to an opposition with the sun on
the 19th, at 6h. 15m. evening; he is then nearest the earth, and
consequently in the most favourable position for observation; he began
retrograding on the 1st of May in 28 deg. 12m. of _Capricornus_; he
rises on the 1st, at 9h. 11m. evening, culminating at 1h. 16m., and
setting at 5h. 21m. morning, pursuing the course of the sun on the 17th
of January; he moves only 13m. of a deg. in the course of the month,
rising 2 h. earlier on the 31st.
This planet, called also Uranus, was discovered by Herschel on the 13th
of March, 1781. It is the most distant orb in our system yet known. From
certain inequalities on the motion of Jupiter and Saturn, the existence
of a planet of considerable size beyond the orbit of either had been
before suspected; its apparent magnitude, as seen from the earth, is
about 3-1/2 sec., or of the size of a star of the sixth magnitude, and
as from its distance from the sun, it shines but with a pale light, it
cannot often be distinguished with the naked eye. Its diameter is about
4-1/2 times that of the earth, and completes its revolution in something
less than 83-1/2 years. The want of light in this planet, on account of
its great distance from the sun, is supplied by six moons, which revolve
round their primary in different periods. There is a remarkable
peculiarity attached to their orbits, which are nearly perpendicular to
the plane of the ecliptic, and they revolve in them in a direction
contrary to the order of the signs.
"Moore," in an old almanack, speaking on the difference of light and
heat enjoyed by the inhabitants of _Saturn_, and the _earth_, says,--
"From hence how large, how strong the sun's bright ball,
But seen from thence, how languid and how small,
When the keen north with all its fury blows,
Congeals the floods and forms the fleecy snows:
'Tis heat intense, to what can there be known,
Warmer our poles than in its burning (!) zone;
One moment's cold like their's would pierce the bone,
Freeze the heart's blood, and turn us all to stone."
Were Saturn thus situated, what would the inhabitants of Herschel feel,
whose distance is still further?--pursuing this train of reasoning, the
heat in the planet Mercury would be seven times greater than on our
globe, and were the earth in the same position, all the water on its
surface would boil, and soon be turned into vapour, but as the degree of
sensible heat in any planet _does not_ depend altogether on its nearness
to the sun, the temperature of these planets may be as mild as that of
the most genial climate of our globe.
The theory of the sun being a body of fire having been long since
exploded, and heat being found to be generated by the union of the sun's
rays with the atmosphere of the earth, so the caloric contained in the
atmosphere on the surfaces of the planets may be distributed in
different quantities, according to the situation they occupy with regard
to the sun, and which is put into action by the influence of the solar
rays, so as to produce that degree of sensible heat requisite for each
respective planet. We have only to suppose that a small quantity of
caloric exists in Mercury, and a greater quantity in Herschel, which is
fifty times farther from the sun than the other, and there is no reason
to believe that those planets nearest the sun suffer under the action of
excessive heat, or that the more distant are exposed to the rigours of
insufferable cold, which, in either case, might render them unfit for
the abodes of intellectual beings. PASCHE.
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