[3] "He makes a May-fly to a miracle, and furnishes the whole country with angle-rods."--_Spectator_, No. 108.
"That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never can recapture The first fine careless rapture."
On this sunny bank, in the first gleam of spring sunshine, may be noticed a sprightly little bird hopping along, glad to have completed his migration to our shore--the wheatear, which Tennyson aptly terms (if we read him aright) "the sea-blue bird of March." And later on, the cuckoo is first heard down this glade, gleefully "telling her name to all the hills," till June renders her hoarse, and the clear note becomes "Cuck-cuckoo! Cuck-cuck-cuckoo!" and endless is the harsh iteration if another of her family answer the challenge. Peering carefully round a thicket, too, may be seen the waterhen, proudly tempting her black brood to cross the stream for the first time; or haply a wild duck, that has sat on her eggs till the angler's foot almost touches her, flaps suddenly her wings, and skims under the overhanging alders. If the fisherman be an observant lover of nature, these and the like country sights and sounds will bring him great contentment even though he take no fish. And so speaks Dame Juliana Berners, in her "Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle"--one of the quaintest productions of early English literature:--"Atte the best he hath his holsom walk and merry at his ease, a swete ayre of the swete savoure of the meede flowres: that makyth hym hungry. He hereth the melodyous armony of fowles. He seeth the yonge swannes, heerons, duckes, cotes, and many other foules wyth theyr brodes. And yf the angler take fysshe, surely thenne is there noo man merier than he is in his spyryte."
Down this beck an artistic eye will find many a feast of colour. The keeper's cottage stands on a high bank; and a more charming domestic subject was never painted, even by Millais, than one which may be noticed there any day in August. His little girl, bare-headed and rosy-cheeked with the merriest of light-blue eyes, stands under a forest of sun-flowers, which spread their huge yellow discs above, while sunbeams break through and leave their gold on the little maiden's hair, and play round her, earnest, we will hope, of her future, as she drops a courtesy to the passing angler. A little farther on, the briony, with its brilliant berries, will festoon the grey trunk of its cherishing oak with a glory, in autumn, that cannot but charm the eye. The wild hyacinths of April are like a fold of blue sky that has descended upon the wooded hollows. In the thatch of the labourer's cottage is one deeply-set window, with a few tiles under it, on which lichens and moss have established a footing. It has just rained, and the contrast between their vivid greens and the brilliant red tiles is delicious. It is thus that much of the monotony inseparable from a dull country may be relieved, by judiciously educating the vision to find beauties where ordinary eyes see nothing unusual. The pensiveness of an angler's "sad pleasure" will be found agreeable leisure for this purpose.