Page:The Romance of Nature; or, The Flower-Seasons Illustrated.djvu/226

128 do not mean a broad carriage-road lane, but one of those lovely little narrow winding dingles, arched over with Wild-briar and Woodbine, where the air is full of perfume and the banks bright with flowers. How refreshing it is to step into such an one, from the sunny and shadeless fields, to sit beneath the hedge of Hawthorn and Hazel-bushes,

Spenser paints a scene like this in language like the colouring of Claude:

Then gan the shepheard gather into one

His straggling goates, and drave them to a foord,

Whose cerule streame, rombling in pible stone,

Crept under mosse as greene as any goord.

Now had the sun halfe heaven overgone,

When he his heard back from that water foord

Drave, from the force of Phœbus' boyling ray,

Into thick shadowes, there themselves to lay.