passage from Pollok just serves to remind us, Hesperus and his starry host make a distinct picture, which lasts only

66

"till the moon,

Rising in clouded majesty, at length,

Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw."

If Vesper in full glow be not compatible with the moon, according to the author of the "Course of Time," riding unclouded up the east, a fortiori it belongs not as a part to what I call his first scene, in which the world is flooded with moonlight. There is a farther confusion; for the moon gazing on earth intense, as if she saw some wonder walking there"--which, though homely, yet expresses very well the still earnestness of moonlight-cannot be said of the moon riding up the east. In truth of nature, it is only when "riding near her highest noon," that our own feelings-which we give to inanimate things, and take back again-ascribe to the moon an earnest gaze upon our world. Pollok is thus trebly wrong. He gives two pictures, where only one was intended; he puts the second first, and the first second; and he ascribes to the moon in the one, (namely, an intense gaze upon the earth) what in truth of nature belongs to the moon in the other.

While I am upon these Night Pieces, I may notice an equal confusion of a star-light scene by Byron: Indeed I may remark of Byron generally, that he not unfrequently spoils his picture by giving us adjuncts which belong to it as it may be seen at another time, but which, strictly speaking, are not parts of it as it is before us for the time being. Here is the instance to which I specially refer at present :

"It was the night-and Lara's glassy stream

The stars are studding, each with imaged beam;
So calm, the waters scarcely seem to stray,
And yet they glide like happiness away;
Reflecting far and fairy-like from high
The immortal lights that live along the sky:
Its banks are fringed with many a goodly tree,
And flowers the fairest that may feast the bee;
Such in her Chaplet infant Dian wove,

And Innocence would offer to her love.”

These pretty lines about the flowers have nothing to do with the starlight picture. How, at such a time of night, could the fair flowers on the banks of the stream be seen? Not being seen, they have, strictly speaking, no existence whatever. To describe their beauty here, mingles the divided portraiture of night with circumstances which belong only to the light of day. Ut Pictura Poesisremember that, ye Sons of the Morning!

I confess an occasional drowsiness, as I sit in my leathern chair in my Library, under the still monotony of the sunny afternoons of Autumn. Not a sound comes near me to disturb me; and there I nap, till the shadow of some bird shooting past the sunny window startles my filmy eye, like a flash of lightning, and I awake. The only drawback from my delight in the harvest season is, that there is so much pressing work to do, and everybody is so busy, that I feel almost ashamed to saunter about, doing nothing. In the time of the shearing, our Village is quite deserted. Knowing this, the pedlars come not near us then; nor wandering tinkers; nor singing sailors (if their hoarse brassy bray, softened only by the squirting out of tobacco juice, can be called singing); nor beggars of any degree: So our hamlet in harvest is a perfect picture of still life. The only waif we have had to break our autumnal quiet this year is a penny orator of the district, who goes about lecturing against the Institutions of the country. And certainly it is one of the most pitiful sights in nature to see the small demagogue riding on his donkey through the ripe rich corn-fields of our valleys, on his atrabilious way to the next village, there to pour his morbid soul into the ears of the quiet, religious cottars, when they shall have come home at evening from their day's work of manly industry, and rouse them to the miserable belief that they are the veriest serfs and slaves of the oppressed and groaning earth. The redundant horn of yellow Plenty is an abomination to his eyes; and fain would this blasted ear of humanity eat up every golden spike of autumn, like his hungry mildewed congeners in Pharaoh's Dream. The sweep of the lusty

scytheman, laying down by his porridge-fed mastery the rustling oats, full of new porridge for evermore for himself and his family-ten by the "big Ha-Bible" register-sets our little Socialist angrily a-cock; and 0! (says the sinner's soul) that every swath were priests and peers! The merry song of the sunny lasses, peeling the harvest rig with their sweethearts, jars on him like the very sharpening of the shears of Atropos; and tearing the provincial pot-house print, in which he has just been reading the fulsome praises of his own eloquence, he stops his ill-conditioned lugs with it, not to hear the lilt of the lasses; and kicking his lean cuddy into a canter, makes off from the music of happy rural life, as if chased by the Pestilence; till, attempting a ditch in his frenzy of flight, he is tumbled into a standing pool, as green in its mantling filth as his own jaundiced liver.

Armed with my microscope, many an autumnal hour do I spend in the woods and moorland places, pursuing my entomological recreations. So multitudinous are the points of study and amusement in this world of tiny myriads, that I need not attempt even to touch on them. Just one word on spiders. All the world knows how pugnacious they are: Under no circumstances whatever can they meet each other without fighting. Whoever wishes to see their battles may easily manage it thus:-Let him, any fine August or September morning, when the hedges and bushes are swarming with their webs, lift one, web and all, with a twig, and let it down softly by its thread on the centre of another web, where sits a fellow its likely match in point of size; and to it they go immediately. If a fly or any other proper bait be dropped into the web, and four or five other spiders be brought to the prey, the battle rages like Waterloo. The lean red spider with long legs beats all the rest hollow. In their rage their bodies shiver, like the feathers of the amorous or threatening turkeycock.

Having no dislike to the coming-on of winter, October is to me the most delightful month of the year. To say nothing of the beauty of the woods at that season, my

favourite month is very often a dry one, sufficiently warm,
and yet with a fine bracing air that makes exercise de-
lightful. And then what noble exercise for you
in your
sporting jacket! To saunter through the rustling wood-
lands; to stalk across the stubble field, yellow with the
last glare of day; to skirt the loin of the hill, and, over-
leaping the dike, tumble away among the ferns, and reach
your door just as the great red round moon comes up in
the east, how invigorating! I say nothing of the clear
fire within, and the new Magazine just laid on your table.
Moreover, October is associated with the glad consumma-
tion of harvest-home, and all the fat blessings of the year
-not forgetting the brewing of brown-stout. Altogether,
October is a manly jolly fellow; and that Spencer knew
=right well, as thus appears :-

"Then came October, full of merry glee;
For yet his noule was totty of the must,
Which he was treading in the wine fat's sea;
And of the joyous oil whose gentle gust
Made him so frolic."

What fine quaint picturesque old words these are! But Oh! the dismal look of a wet October, and a late harvest! The central figure of the dreary picture is the farmer, on the first dry breezy evening that comes after a fortnight's incessant rain in the end of the month, bending and looking through his black bean field, sticking sodden to the ground in every stook, slimy with slugs, all going to slaver, and losing the sprouted pulse from every open pod. The miry hunters riding homeward sink to the fetlocks, as they cross the deep clayey country. The husbandman turns cheerlessly to the higher lands. The small birds, starting from his feet, shriek adown the wind in the watery evening light. The green and yellow (both in one) glint of the oats, tussled by the wind on the edge of the waste, with the chaff of every top pickle (thrashed out by the windy blasts that have contrived to blow in every interval of the rain) shimmering thin and white to his level eye, fluctuates away before him. They won't be ripe and ready yet for a fortnight to come.

In quantity and quality there is always, of course, a

natural correspondence between the wild and home fruit of the season. So the wild, like the home, is very abundant this year upon the whole. Haws, however, are rather scanty. Indeed, the hawthorn is a capricious and delicate plant in this respect, and seldom yields a very full crop. Even in seasons when the flower (chivalrously called "Lady's Meat") covers the long line of hedges as with a snowy sheet, and delights every nose of sensibility in the parish, we are by no means sure of a harvest of haws entirely correspondent; as the blossom, with the first set of the fruit, is exceedingly tender. Well do the boys know the fat ones. Hips (called in some parts of Scotland jupes) are a fair yield this harvest, whether smooth or hairy, hard or buttery. That all-devouring gourmand, the school-boy, who crams every crudity into his maw, from the sour mouth-screwing crab up (though down in literal position) to the Swedish turnip, sweetened by the frost, riots in the luxury of the hip, caring not how much the downy seeds may canker and chap the wicks of his mouth, and render his nails an annoyance in scratching his neck. See the little urchin slily watching the exit of the "lang" cart from the stackyard; then jumping in from behind, he takes his seat on the cross-bench, or ventures to stand erect by the help of the pitch-fork, his black, dirt-barkened little feet overcrept by earwigs, beetles, and long-legged spinners, the living and hither-and-thitherrunning residuum of the last cart-load of peas; till, when the half-cleared field is reached, Flibbertigibbet, who ought all the while to be " gathering," bolts through a slap in the hedge, and is down upon the buttery hips in the Whitelea braes. Our hedge-rows, sandy banks, and wild stony places, are quite black with brambles this autumn. Clean them from the worms of the thousand-and-one flies that feed on them, and they are capital for jelly and jam; and for painting children's faces, as we see every day in the bylanes around our Village. The bramble is called in Roxburghshire (honi soit qui mal y pense) "Lady's Garters." There, however, the land being mostly a stiff clay, it thrives poorly. It loves a sharp sandy soil, and especially those