THE ENGLISH YEAR.*
MESSRS. BEACH THOMAS and Collett have added Summer to their previous volumes Autumn and Winter and Spring, and have completed a very charming trilogy. It is not every field naturalist who combines in a marked degree the patience to make and chronicle accurate observations with the power to describe what he has seen in easy and lucid English. These writers do more, and their English Year. contains many passages of deep insight and much rhythmic beauty. It would be a difficult task to separate the work of one collaborator from that of the other. Here we seem to see
an accentuated liking for accumulated fact and detail, and here there is an imagination roving further afield beyond
the lives of beasts and flowers, but the thousand pages of the three books as a whole touch a level which is even and high; both authors are widely read, and each can supplement the other. In Summer they may have found a more exacting task than in their earlier volumes. Winter is a season of promise "if winter comes, can spring be far behind P" Spring, written of in winter, fills many books ; but when spring is here there is no time to write of summer, and when summer has come the year is full. The very fulness of the year makes for a certain clesiderium in the thought of all that has gone before. But summer, too, is a time of store, and the store of the writers' experience
adds the zest of variety ; they take us by June hedgerows, in the wind that splashes the whitebeams on the chalk downs, among the half-hidden flowers of the July cornfields, along the banks of trout streams in Wales and the Hebrides, through the heat of firwooda and heather, out along the shore below high-water mark. Here is a picture which we may guess has a setting of Berkshire oaks :—
"Birds soar and glide in high air, regardless for the time being of any perch or stay; and for power and grandeur the flight of a great hawk excels that of any insect, as is only due to its size. But the peculiar beauty of the purple emperor's flight is the way in which it is linked to the large contours of the trees' upper boughs, and in particular to a few favourite perches. From these It leaps high aloft, sweeps and circles round a friend or rival with the ceremonious grace of the tournament, rides on outstretched wings as the Vanessae ride round the autumn dahlia-heads, and again stoops flashing to its perch. All is still for a few moments, and we only hear the solemn drone of the innumerable insects of the sunshine. Then the purple emperor is off and up again, quickly followed by another from a hitherto unnoticed perch ; as they flick their wings against the sky over the oak-crown, the purple iridescence and pure white spots and bands start momentarily into sharp relief. Another beautiful movement is when they mount across the high folds of the boughs, sweeping In and out of the knolls and depressions of the foliage as a swallow shines over the undulating mustard blossom in the downs. So the proud game of flying goes on through all the hot hours in the July woods ; and the peculiar relation of the butterfly's flight to the lines of its favourite tree seems gradually to shape the tree before our eyes, like a fine piece of sculpture, and adds beauty to the oak as to its owner."
It is only a pity that something of the grace of such flight should not have touched the pen of the illustrator of the text. Sir Alfred East's and Mr. Mostyn's paintings carry us out into the full air and sun of summer, but Mr. A. W. Seaby's sketches on the printed page seem to lack the same sense of life and light. Some of the birds—e.g., the sedgewaxbler (p. 27) and the robin (p. 34)—are oddly foreshortened, and the butter- flies are heavy and flat. The insect on p. 35 is decidedly not a "little blue." There are traces of haste in some of these sketches; perhaps Mr. Seaby has drawn too much.
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