ΤΟ HIS SISTERS, WITH DEEPEST LOVE AND THANKFULNESS, THIS JOURNAL OF SUMMER TIME IS INSCRIBED, BY THE AUTHOR. JOURNAL OF SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. MAY 1st.-Gray always sketched upon the spot the general features of a landscape, and advised his friends to do the same. "You have nothing," he wrote to one, "but to transcribe your little red books, if they are not rubbed out; for I conclude you have not trusted anything to memory, which is ten times worse than a lead pencil." The wish is felt by every reader, that Gray had given us more of his own diaries; or had composed them on a different principle. His stories of home-travel, communicated to Dr. Wharton, are incomparable. But, for the most part, he hid his sweet and learned thoughts in his own bosom. Golden days in the country were lost in critical inquiries respecting insects and plants; or in talk with fishermen about uncertain fins and scales. Johnson, in his Scottish tour, uses an awful B word to express the blending and decay of objects in the mind:-"Many particular features and discriminations are confused and conglobated into one gross and general idea." The landscape of thought is not less shifting and changeable than that of nature. Both may be fixed or revived. A few scratches a word of commentary or abridgment-will often serve to raise a remembrance of the beauty they represent, and even to recal the colouring and light of the original view or description. An early Hebrew custom appears to be the journal in an allegory. After the destruction of Jerusalem, when a Jew had passed the examination of his teacher, he took a raised seat, and a writing-tablet was put before him, to signify that he ought to record his acquisitions, and not suffer them to fade away unimproved. In the same spirit, Sir Thomas Bodleigh wrote to Bacon: "Strain your wits and industry soundly, to instruct yourself in all things between heaven and earth, which may tend to virtue and wisdom, and honour; and let all these riches be treasured up, not only in your memory, where time may ripen your stock, but rather in good writings and books of account, which will keep them safe for your use hereafter." I have not |