as
most travellers are either stinted, or stint themselves, for time, the
space between the middle or last week in May, and the middle or last
week of June, may be pointed out as affording the best combination of
long days, fine weather, and variety of impressions. Few of the native
trees are then in full leaf; but, for whatever maybe wanting in depth of
shade, more than an equivalent will be found in the diversity of
foliage, in the blossoms of the fruit-and-berry-bearing trees which
abound in the woods, and in the golden flowers of the broom and other
shrubs, with which many of the copses are interveined. In those woods,
also, and on those mountain-sides which have a northern aspect, and in
the deep dells, many of the spring-flowers still linger; while the open
and sunny places are stocked with the flowers of the approaching summer.
And, besides, is not an exquisite pleasure still untasted by him who has
not heard the choir of linnets and thrushes chaunting their love-songs
in the copses, woods, and hedge-rows of a mountainous country; safe from
the birds of prey, which build in the inaccessible crags, and are at all
hours seen or heard wheeling about in the air? The number of these
formidable creatures is probably the cause, why, in the _narrow_
vallies, there are no skylarks; as the destroyer would be enabled to
dart upon them from the near and surrounding crags, before they could
descend to their ground-nests for protection. It is not often that the
nightingale resorts to these vales; but almost all the other tribes of
our English warblers are numerous; and their notes, when listened to by
the side of broad still waters, or when heard in unison with the
murmuring of mountain-brooks, have the compass of their power enlarged
accordingly. There is also an imaginative influence in the voice of the
cuckoo, when that voice has taken possession of a deep mountain valley,
very different from any thing which can be excited by the same sound in
a flat country. Nor must a circumstance be omitted, which here renders
the close of spring especially interesting; I mean the practice of
bringing down the ewes from the mountains to yean in the vallies and
enclosed grounds. The herbage being thus cropped as it springs, _that_
first tender emerald green of the season, which would otherwise have
lasted little more than a fortnight, is prolonged in the pastures and
meadows for many weeks: while they are farther enlivened by the
multitud