winter for
the losers!

The world is at her old best, and all her children are exalted and
exhilarated by the knowledge that they are at their best also. Even the
trippers are perpetually in Sabbath clothes, as a sign that they are
infected with the prevalent feeling of festivity.

Sabbath clothes without the Sabbath gloom, beauty without piety, freedom
with open shops, sunshine without duty,--these to the masses are some of
the chief joys of the summer sun in England.

In this enumeration of a few of the leading features of a sunny August
in England, however, we should not forget to mention what will appear to
some the least desirable of them all. The fact that this particular
feature is omitted by the most successful English poets of the Victorian
School, as by other sentimentalists, would not excuse us in failing to
give it at least a passing reference here; for Victorian, alas! does not
by any means signify Alexandrian in regard to the periods of English
poetry; and even if it be a sin to mention this aspect of a sunny
August, we prefer to sin rather than to resemble a Victorian poet.

The quality referred to, then, is a certain result of the eternally
pagan influence of the sun. For, say what you will, the sun is pagan. It
says "Yea" to life. In its glorious rays it is ridiculously easy to
forget the alleged beauties of another world. Under its scorching heat
the snaky sinuousness of a basking cat seems more seductive than the
image of a winged angel, and amid the gold it lavishes, nothing looks
more loathsome, more repulsive, than the pale cheek of pious ill-health.
In short it urges man and woman to a wanton enjoyment of life and their
fellows; it recalls to them their relationship to the beasts of the
field and the birds in the trees; it fills them with a careless thirst
and hunger for the chief pastimes of these animals,--feeding, drinking,
and procreation; and the more "exalted" practices of self-abnegation,
self-sacrifice, and the mortification of the flesh, are easily forgotten
in such a mood.

Nothing goes wrong, nothing can go wrong, while the sun blazes and the
flowers are beautiful. So thinks everybody who has survived Puritanism
unscathed, so thought the majority of Brineweald's visitors that year,
so thought Mrs. Delarayne and her party of eager young swains and still
more eager virgins. Wantonness was in the air,--wantonness and beauty;
and when these two imps of passion come together August is