SIMMER SLEEP.

Otago Witness, Issue 2690, 4 October 1905, Page 79

SIMMER SLEEP.

In August a- pervasive slumber falls on Nature. . . The sap becomes still,, and hardens* into pith — that much misused ■word — Ti'hit-h. is no more than a successive cenotaph, like the abandoned chambsrs of the Nautilus, of past life. Tine corn-ears are (garnered, not , grown, on their pipy stems, which bo longer carry sustenance; and seecte and fruits seem to ripen, as they would in your store-room, cut off from the principle- of growth. Birds moult, and for a short while the loss is not made good ; vi£ality fails more rapidly than it is' fed. . . What sound there is,

Or insist Imm, or any tell-tale wind, Or whisper in the grass, is itself slsunbesrous, "as trhen a 'bell no longer swings. " . . . The world seems to have reached a iigh tide — so much more still than the winter ebb — at -which movement is suspended, and the world in -every crevice "too full for sound." The ripple of the ebb will scon begin. The stooping heads of grain fall, the \i eighty burden of tha h'emlosk and hogweed crowns will flip their seeds tOiis -way and that by the active mechanism of their shrunk scales. Change •will be apparent in the bsefe of the leaf and the withering of stems; but these changes are not yet, and for a little while life Is suspended like the tide, waiting, still as a pool, for a decayed summons. Milton, always more poet than Puritan, gives the most conspicuous instance of surrender in man to the sentiment of tbe •month. He could make no verses between the summer and' the winter solstice ; and it was the summer tha# silenced ham, as it silences all the world except the insects and the crawling things. For, as if in compensation for the other stillness, insects begin to hum and boom and drone •from the. moment the birds cease. This should perhaps take away from thie bur- > den of the season, but, for our ears at anyrate, the insert hum is the very melody of sleep, consonant with .the prevailing snood as silence itself could not be. Down along the water meadows, among the musing luxuriance of grass and weed, where the 'stream is as level as a canal, tlie hum is loudest, and fZ^JZ^ to "lull to slumbers

soft" the liveliest spirit that haunts it — th/ 9 fretful midge or briskest water-beetle. Left to itself, August is the dullest of months, and the flight to the sea or tbs downs is a natural protest against its lethargy. Yet it is full c-f a wonderful and distinct beauty of its own. It is the month of long shadows and deep distances and golden plains Into thees last breaks the sudden activity of the harvester, and in the network of little closes in the English counties, in the archipelago of cornfields, the beauty can scaroely be unravelled from the joy of harvest. But the '"harvest, the new machine-made harvest, yet more than the fruit of scythe and sickle, is am imported splendour that brings a very different mood. — Outlook.