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Sussex Valley, along which we passed for thirty miles, is green, wooded, and smilingly fertile, being watered by a clear rapid river. The numerous hay-meadows, and the neat appearance of the arable land, reminded me of England. It is surprising, considering the advantages possessed by New Brunswick, that it has not been a more favourite resort of emigrants.
Ah, if I could only paint it so truly that you could hear the drowsy hum of the bees among the thyme, and smell the scented hay-meadows in the distance, and feel that it is midsummer in England! That would indeed be truth, and that would be art.
The hawthorns too were white upon the fell-side, beside the ageing gold of the gorse, while below, the lake lay like roughened silver in its mountain cup, and on the sides of Nab Scar, below the screes, the bronze of the oaks ran in and out among the feathery green of the larch plantations, or the flowering grass of the hay-meadows dropping to the lake.
Another disproof may be found in the 'fern web, 'bracken clock' of Scotland; the tiny cockchafer, with brown wing-cases and dark-green thorax, which abounds in some years in the hay-meadows, on the fern, or on the heads of umbelliferous flowers.
Emma took off her sun-bonnet when riding through the woods, and told Mary how happy it made her to hear the birds sing, and to breathe the sweet fragrance which came from the hay-meadows; but Mary felt diffident, and did not reply warmly, as she felt.
I left the road at a point where a low bank started across the marsh like a long protecting arm reaching out around the hay-meadows, dragging them away from the grasping river, and gathering them out of the vast undrained tract of coarse sedges, to hold them to the upland.
I do hope you won't have me up to bench. 'Tain't a month now as I'm out o' prizzum along o' they fir-toppings, and I should, you see with a look up and down and round at the gay hay-meadows, and the fleet water, and the soft gleaming clouds, which to Lancelot seemed most pathetic, 'I should like to ha' a spell o' fresh air, like, afore I goes in again.
There the private fields, carefully protected during the spring, from the tread or bite of cattle, and mown yearly in the summer, have all the wealth of flowers peculiar to our hay-meadows. Outside, in the forest itself, these flowers hardly exist, except by some pool-side, or on the meadow-like border of a bog.
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