the "sweet security" of his
native fields. He may then feel with Wordsworth how

Dear is the forest frowning o'er his head.
And dear _the velvet greensward_ to his tread.

Or he may exclaim in the words of poor Keats--now slumbering under a
foreign turf--

Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than her own.

It is a pleasing proof of the fine moral influence of natural scenery
that the most ceremonious strangers can hardly be long seated together
in the open air on the "velvet greensward" without casting off for a
while the cold formalities of artificial life, and becoming as frank and
social as ingenuous school-boys. Nature breathes peace and geniality
into almost every human heart.

"John Thelwall," says Coleridge, "had something very good about him. We
were sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks when I said to him
'Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!' 'Nay, Citizen
Samuel,' replied he, 'it is rather a place to make us forget that there
is any necessity for treason!'"

Leigh Hunt, who always looks on nature with the eye of a true painter
and the imagination of a true poet, has represented with delightful
force and vividness some of those accidents of light and shade that
diversify an English meadow.

RAIN AND SUNSHINE IN MAY.

"Can any thing be more lovely, than the meadows between the rains of
May, when the sun smites them on the sudden like a painter, and they
laugh up at him, as if he had lighted a loving cheek!

I speak of a season when the returning threats of cold and the resisting
warmth of summer time, make robust mirth in the air; when the winds
imitate on a sudden the vehemence of winter; and silver-white clouds are
abrupt in their coming down and shadows on the grass chase one another,
panting, over the fields, like a pursuit of spirits. With undulating
necks they pant forward, like hounds or the leopard.

See! the cloud is after the light, gliding over the country like the
shadow of a god; and now the meadows are lit up here and there with
sunshine, as if the soul of Titian were standing in heaven, and playing
his fancies on them. Green are the trees in shadow; but the trees in the
sun how twenty-fold green _they_ are--rich and variegated with gold!"

One of the many exquisite out-of-doors enjoyments for the observers of
nature, is the sight of an English harvest. How cheering it is to behold
the sickles flashing in the sun, as