One chief condition of my enjoyment was the weather.  Italy has nothing like it, nor America.  There never was such weather except in England, where, in requital of a vast amount of horrible east-wind between February and June, and a brown October and black November, and a wet, chill, sunless winter, there are a few weeks of incomparable summer, scattered through July and August, and the earlier portion of September, small in quantity, but exquisite enough to atone for the whole year’s atmospherical delinquencies.  After all, the prevalent sombreness may have brought out those sunny intervals in such high relief, that I see them, in my recollection, brighter than they really were:  a little light makes a glory for people who live habitually in a gray gloom.  The English, however, do not seem to know how enjoyable the momentary gleams of their summer are; they call it broiling weather, and hurry to the sea-side with red, perspiring faces, in a state of combustion and deliquescence; and I have observed that even their cattle have similar susceptibilities, seeking the deepest shade, or standing mid-leg deep in pools and streams to cool themselves, at temperatures which our own cows would deem little more than barely comfortable.  To myself, after the summer heats of my native land had somewhat effervesced out of my blood and memory, it was the weather of Paradise itself.  It might be a little too warm; but it was that modest and inestimable superabundance which constitutes a bounty of Providence, instead of just a niggardly enough.  During my first year in England, residing in perhaps the most ungenial part of the kingdom, I could never be quite comfortable without a fire on the hearth; in the second twelvemonth, beginning to get acclimatized, I became sensible of an austere friendliness, shy, but sometimes almost tender, in the veiled, shadowy, seldom smiling summer; and in the succeeding years—­whether that I had renewed my fibre with English beef and replenished my blood with English ale, or whatever were the cause—­I grew content with winter and especially in love with summer, desiring little more for happiness than merely to breathe and bask.  At the midsummer which we are now speaking of, I must needs confess the noontide sun came down more fervently than I found altogether tolerable; so that I was fain to shift my position with the shadow of the shrubbery, making myself the movable index of a sun-dial that reckoned up the hours of an almost interminable day.

For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome.  As far as your actual experience is concerned, the English summer-day has positively no beginning and no end.  When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is already shining through the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours of Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious that it is bed-time again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make the pages of your book