The Rain Comes Down, And The Gay World Is Blotted Out.
The
wind shifts to the south, and in a few days the first swallows are seen
and welcomed, but,
As the old proverb says, they do not make a summer.
Nor do the long-drawn notes of the nightingale, nor even the jolly
cuckoo, nor the tree pipit, no, nor even the soft coo of the turtle-dove
and the smell of the May flower. It is too silent even now: there are the
leading notes; but the undertone - the vibration of the organ - is but just
beginning. It is the hum of insects and their ceaseless flitting that
make the summer more than the birds or the sunshine. The coming of summer
is commonly marked in the dates we note by the cuckoo and the swallow and
the oak leaves; but till the butterfly and the bee - one with its colour,
and one with its hum - fill out the fields, the picture is but an outline
sketch. The insects are the details that make the groundwork of a summer
day. Till the humble-bees are working at the clover it is too silent; so
I think we may begin our almanack with the house-fly and the moth and the
spider and the ant on the cucumber frame, and so on, till, finally, the
catalogue culminates with the great yellow wasp. He is the final sign of
summer; one swallow does not make it, one wasp does. He is a connoisseur
of the good things of the earth, and comes not till their season.
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