a natural impulse the ancient Israelites had turned their faces to the East, and worshipped. It was magnificent! and the more so, that our awakenings are ordinarily metropolitan, and even sunrise there has become sophisticated, and robes not openly, but behind a cloud. Here lay the Isle of Wight, a misty outline, faint and dubious as the mirage landscape born of the sailor's longing for the shore; and before me, with its belt of wood, the green expanse of Southampton-waters, sparkling at high tide, and stretching inland from it-corn-fields and meadow-land, in all the green luxuriance of June.

It was the dawn of a holiday. A few hours hence, and flags were flying from ships' masts and church towers; banners waved above the bar, and floated from the topmost pinnacle of the shattered castle-walls; bells rang out their hollow pæans, and noon echoed with the thunder-plauds of cannon at Portsmouth, in honour of her whose name sounds like a triumph, and is best heard amidst a flourish of trumpets, or to the cadence of a conqueror's march - VICTORIA ! It was the anniversary of her coronation; and, never had the sun, in his ten past revolutions, shone on one more exteriorly glorious. In the town the shops were all closed, so that no drawback existed in the shape of business, to withhold the inhabitants from the enjoyments teeming in the environs, and at the water-side, if the patchwork programmes of amusement, which made the dead walls eloquent, and the dullest alleys iris-coloured, were to be believed. Carriages were driving in all directions; excursion parties were setting off from the pier; processions with bands and banners filled the streets ; the gayest dresses, the brightest colours, the prettiest faces were abroad. Steam-boats, tea-gardens, taverns, cricket-grounds, archery meetings, balloons, balls, and the female Ethiopian serenaders in the perspective. And, amidst all this present and promised enjoyment, it was as if Nature had compacted with local usage, to make the day propitious to the event. Nothing could be more delicious, except the change in our intention of passing it, and choosing a stroll in the New Forest, in preference to making part of a crowded steam-boat company, in an excursion round the Isle of Wight. The very circumstance of going by railway into the Norman's chace, has in it something to stir the imagination, and elevate the heart with a surrounding and present sense of the superiority of our own privileged age, to those days of tyranny and serfdom. In such a position our progress as a

people becomes apparent; there is no questioning relative disadvantages-the spirit of the feudal ages wanes in the distance of seven centuries, a grotesque and fearful phantasy; and the onward-rushing train, peopling the broad wastes and lonely places, becomes a pageant more glorious far than a flying stag, and royal cortége, with a kingly hunter at his heels. I confess myself to have been affected by more than ordinary sensations on the occasion. The time of year, the lovely country, the associations, the delightful day, the charm of congenial companionship-all these helps to delight surrounded me, and I gave myself wholly up to their witchery. For some distance we kept Southampton-waters at our side; and through the ridges of shingle on the shore, which looked rough and barren enough to have repelled vegetation, the flaunting poppy, and the tall blue blossoms of the viper's bugloss had risen, and here and there a bush of eglantine threw out its trailing branches, sheeted with blossoms, that breathed after us, through the open windows of the carriage, a delicious flavour of farewell; presently we exchanged the shingle for grass-fields, so luxuriant as to almost choke the hawthorn-trees and wild roses that fringed the hedges; wych-elms with their plume-like branches in full foliage, and limes with silken leaves and scented blossoms hung over the road, and then a bit of park-like scenery was passed over, and anon, an old-fashioned farm-house with grey walled gardens at the back, and orchards and home-meads on either side, came into sight; its clustering barns and outhouses looking a picture of plenty, and the contemplative cows, some standing mid-deep in the pond, and others lying under the shelter of a group of ash trees-even a pair of foals with their heads amicably laid together, gave to the pleasant landscape a character of quiet and content. Now the rich scent of beans in blossom came, wafted from invisible fields, and the green spears of the waving corn rustled within a few feet of the iron road. There were groups of sun-burnt men and women wending their way to the hay-fields; there the grass was already cut, the wain on the field, and the mowers laid to rest amongst the wind-rows; further on, masses of wood and spaces of brown heath-the outskirts of the forest-became visible; and, except the low-pitched roof of a woodman's hut, so overgrown with moss and lichen, as to be barely distinguishable from the surrounding vegetation, we soon lost sight of any immediate dwellings. Distant hamlets appeared here and there,

and the thin blue smoke from a gipsy's fire went stealing up through the green boughs in more than one hollow. By and by an amphitheatre of wood appeared extending around us, as far as the eye could reach, and weird oaks and groups of forest trees multiplied. A morass lay on one side; a wide bare heath with hoards of semi-wild horses on the other; while a few minutes more brought us into the green wood, with exquisite bits of scenery almost edging the line, and herds of red deer trooping from the distant thickets.

Brockenhurst!--the very name savours of Saxon times—it hath an antique sound! Brockenhurst, with its homely hostel, and scattering of red-tiled cottages, is now a railway station, and in right thereof hath its Lymington and other omnibuses in waiting, and a building of new brick, with the aspect of a beer-house, bearing, in huge characters, the assumed style of " Railway Inn." It is so broad a caricature, that we did not attempt it; but, turning to the less pretending establishment, through the bright windows of which we had obtained a tacit warranty of the cheer, in the appearance of a plump landlady, with just a possible shade of beeswing port in her clear cheek, and eyes as brightly brown as her own home-brewed, ordered dinner against our return, and sauntered off, without other guide than fancy, or other limit than our own free wills, to explore a portion of the Norman huntingground. The newness of the scene, the expanse, the odour,-for the turf, a mosaic of wild thyme and heath, at every pressure gave forth perfume,-made me for a while forgetful of all other sensations, but the abstract enjoyment of them; a sense of joy in mere volition, active, unmixed as that which childhood feels; an exquisite perception of the minutest beauties around me, lent me a happiness as serene as it was rare. Nor was I alone in this re-birth of pure delight. Now, it was the amber blossoms of the furze, recalling, with its peach-like odour, the sunlit hills where we had scented it in childhood; now a little painted blue butterfly, resting on the cup of a dwarf convolvulus, like a bit out of the foreground of one of Valentine Bartholemew's flower pictures, beguiled us, and we looked into each other's eyes our sense of Nature's loveliness. Sometimes we paused by the wide pools filled with broad-leaved water-lilies, each with its yellow chalice lifted up between its green arms, as if a troop of unseen Naiads had projected, with uplifted hands, a libation to the sun. At others, we watched those Pythagorean epicures, the bees, flying in

and out amongst the rustling heath-flowers, and tapping their viol-shaped flasks of honey-dew at will. Even the pensile harebell, on its thread-like stalk, held us bent over it in admiration, and chimed, into the delicate auricles of the soul, unwritten harmonies. None of these things were new to us: furze-bloom and butterfly, nymphias, bees, and hare-bell, we had looked upon them from season to season all our life. It was the circumstances under which we saw them that enhanced their charms, and led us on from one to the other, gaily, as if we had managed to cast off our score of years, and had reserved only the odd ones for the day's enjoyment. Presently-for we had taken no note of the way but by its flowers-we found ourselves shut out from the heath, and standing in a cool green glade of the forest; such a spot as Shakspeare must have pictured to group his Melancholy Jaques and Dying Stag.

The antique oaks, "beset with green, and forced grey coats to wear," the hanging branches of the ash, the massive foliage of the elm, bent overhead, clothing the place with shade, yet not so much so but that through the side-long apertures broad streaks of sunshine, and lawny slopes, and wooded uplands, could be seen, stretching away till where irregular clumps and ridges of stormwrecked trees, showed another and older phase of the forest. Immediately at our feet, fringed with forget-me-nots, and the saintly flowers of the veronica, and with a border of bear-bine flowing on beside it, and marking its progress every little while with one of its great white blossoms, stole on a little stream, now rippling over the pebbly stones with a purling noise, now gliding silently under the broad pond lily-leaves, and anon dancing off in swift eddies, to join, a little lower down, a tranquil pool, beside which a solitary tree hung, like a leafy narcissus, over its umbrageous shadow; and floating islands of water daisies, moored by their roots, spread out their frail and scented flowers in the sun. Green and blue dragon-flies, with glossy wings, skimmed and darted unceasingly over its clear surface, beneath which the minnows were as actively in motion-now diving to the sanded bottom, now passing in a shoal from side to side, and anon snatching so eagerly at their unwary prey, as to shoot themselves half out of their limpid element. The turf teemed with insect life; the shrill-voiced cicades kept up a constant chirping; and beneath the great arms of a grey-grown oak, clouds of midges circled, with a sound like the seething of a distant cauldron.

Everywhere on the velvet sod, trailing under the trees, and intermingling with the brushwood and other vert, in the close thickets that adjoined this sylvan spot, flowers appeared," thrown graceful round by Nature's careless hand ;" and overhead an atmosphere so blue and cloudless, so refulgent with unshadowed sunshine, as to put the quarrellers with our English climate literally out of countenance, had any been there to have gazed upon it. Here, seated upon a felled trunk, "under a fresh tree's shade," the rained empire of an Hamadryad, with Tyrrel's Oak (or what tradition calls so) in the foreground, and the leafy wilderness, with its impervious shades and dim aisles leading yet deeper into the far-extending boscage around us, a hundred dream-like phantasies possessed us-enough of desolation remained amidst the beauty of the landscape to make the contrast pleasurable; so, taking for our illustration a page from the author of the "Saxon Chronicle," we peopled the surrounding district with images of the past, raising here the low square tower of a Saxon church, and there the grey wood-fire smoke of a distant village. Wherever rank crops of reeds and bulrushes were ripening, we saw the white corn wave; and from the rich moist places where the cry of the autumn lapwing and solitary bittern sounds, there came up the voices of the reapers singing the song of harvest, with foreheads bound with flowers, and an offering of new corn in their hands; teeming pastures spread over wastes where the hares run free, and in the secret spots where the fox kindles her young -green dells bowered with wild rose and "lush honey-suckle" children played, children with bright hair and angel faces, such as beguiled into Christian pity and a holy pun, the good St. Gregory. Should we turn the page, and behold the working out of the ruthless mandate, when the starke king, who "loved the high deer as if he had been their father," had made it even as Heshbon and Elialeh, and caused the shouting for the summer fruits, and for the harvest to fail? Should we look upon the extirpated people— the pillaged barns the ruined homesteads the crops destroyed -the cattle slain—the burning churches? No; we chose rather to imagine how Nature, never stationary, carried on by night as well as by day her work of reparation, and hid within her mantle of beauty the havock man had made; how she covered the scars of the wounded earth with herbs and flowers, and drew close a woody screen over its tenderest places, breathing into the solitude the spell of stillness and repose, till the beasts of chase made