O, YE HOURS! BY MRS. HEMANS. O YE hours, ye sunny hours! Are ye come with birds and flowers, Yes, we come, again we come, Through the wood-paths free; Bringing many a wanderer home, With the bird and bee. O ye hours, ye sunny hours! Doth wild music stream in showers Yes, the Nightingale is there, While the starlight reigns, Making young leaves and sweet air Tremble with her strains. O, ye hours, ye sunny hours! Ye are mighty, mighty powers! Bring ye bliss or woe? Ask not this-oh! seek not this; Yield your hearts awhile To the soft wind's balmy kiss, And the heaven's bright smile! Throw not shades of anxious thought O'er the glowing flowers! We are come, with sunshine fraught, Question not the hours! G THE SILVER ARROW: A TALE OF THE ARCHERY GROUND. BY MISS MITFORD, Author of "Our Village," "Our Rector," &c. ARCHERY meetings are the order of the day. Not to go back to those olden times, when the bow was the general weapon of the land, when the battles of Cressy and of Poictiers were won by the stout English archers, and the king's deer slain in his forests by the bold outlaws, Robin Hood and Little John, and the mad priest, Friar Tuck, when battles were won and ships taken, not by dint of rockets and cannon-balls, but by the broad arrow, or when (to come back to more domestic, and therefore more interesting illustrations,) William of Cloudesley, the English William Tell, saved his forfeited life by shooting an apple from his son's head, at six-score paces*; not to revert to those times, which were perhaps rather too much in earnest, when the dinner, or the life, or the battle, depended on the truth of the aim, and the weapon (to say nothing of the distance) would be as unmanageable to a modern arm as the bow of Ulysses; not to go back to that golden age of archery and minstrelsy, never since the age of James and Elizabeth, 120 yards. He had previously cleft a willow wand at 400 yards. Vide the fine ballad of " Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley," in Bishop Percy's "Reliques of ancient English Poetry," a collection which, in these days of Robin Hoods and Maid Marians, ought to be reprinted, if only for the sake of the archery lore. when the bow, although no longer the favourite weapon continued to be the favourite pastime of all classes*, have bows and arrows been so rife in this England of ours as at this present time. Every country mansion has its butts and its targets, every young lady her quiver; and that token of honour, the prize arrow, trumpery as, sooth to say, it generally is, is as much coveted and cherished and envied as if, instead of a toy for a pedler's basket, it were a diamond necklace, or an emerald bracelet. To confess the truth, I suspect that the whole affair is rather more of a plaything now-a-days than it was even in the later time to which we have alluded; partly, perhaps, because the ladies, with the solitary exception of Maid Marian, (who, however, in Ben Jonson's beautiful fragment, The Sad Shepherd, of which she is the heroine, is not represented as herself taking part in the sylvan exercises of her followers,) contented themselves with witnessing instead of rivalling the feats of our forefathers; partly, it may be, because, as I have before observed, the thews and sinews of our modern archers, let them call themselves Toxopholites + fifty times over, If the fact were not too well known to need confirmation, abundant proof of the love of shooting at the butts, so prevalent amongst our ancestors, might be found in the plays of Shakspeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher, and the other great dramatists of that great dramatic age. Their works abound with allusions to the subject, and images derived from the sport. Even falconry, rich as that is in technical terms, has hardly furnished them with so many illustrations. It seems to have been the holiday sport of the lower orders, and in the absence of clubs and newspapers, the almost daily recreation of the gentry, and probably continued to be so up to the time of the Commonwealth, when all amusements were suspended by the stern habits of the puritans, and the stirring interest of the civil wars. After the Restoration, the Bowling-green appears to have taken the place of the archery ground. A word from the Greek, signifying, I believe, "a bowman," "a lover of the bow." would tug with very little effect at the weapons of Clym of the Clough, or of Little John, so called because he was the biggest person of his day. Or even if a fine gentleman of the age of William the Fourth should arrive at bending a 200 pound bow, think of his cleaving a willow wand at 400 yards distant! Modern limbs cannot compass such feats. He might as well try to lift the Durham ox. Nevertheless, although rather too much of a toy for boys and girls, and wanting altogether in the variety and interest of that other great national out-door amusement called cricket, it would be difficult to find a better excuse for drawing people together in a country neighbourhood, an object always desirable, and particularly so in this little midland county of ours, where between party squabbles and election squabbles, (affairs of mere personal prejudice with which politics have often nothing to do,) half the gentry live in a state of continual nonintercourse and consequent ignorance of each other's real good qualities, and the genial, pardonable, diverting foibles, which perhaps conduce as much as more grave solid excellence, not only to the amusement of society, but to our mutual liking and regard for each other. A man perfect in thought and word and deed is a fine thing to contemplate at reverent distance, like some rare statue on its pedestal; but for the people who are destined to mix with their fellows in this work-a-day world, to walk and talk and eat and drink like their neighbours, the more harmless peculiarities and innocent follies they bring to keep our follies in countenance the better for them and for ourselves. Luckily there is no lack of these congenial elements in human nature. The only thing requisite is a scene for their display. This want seemed completely supplied by the Archery Meeting, an approved neutral ground where politics could not enter, and where the Capulets and Montagues of H-shire might contemplate each other's good qualities, and be conciliated by each other's defects, without the slightest compromise of party etiquette or party dignity. The heads of the contending houses had long ago agreed to differ, like the chiefs of rival factions in London, and met and visited, except just at an election time, with as much good humour and cordiality as Lady Grey meets and visits Lady Beresford; it was amongst the partisans, the adherents of the several candidates, that the prejudice had been found so inveterate; and every rational person, except those who were themselves infected with the prevalent moral disorder, hailed the prescription of so pleasant a remedy for the county complaint. Accordingly the proposal was no sooner made at a country dinner party than it was carried by acclamation, a committee was appointed, a secretary chosen, and the pleasant business of projecting and anticipating commenced upon the spot. For the next week nothing could be heard of but the Archery Meeting; bows and arrows were your only subject, and Lincoln Green your only wear. Then came a few gentle difficulties; difficulties that seem as necessary preludes to a party of pleasure, as the winds and rains of April are to the flowers of May. The committee, composed, as was decorous, not of the eager sons and zealous daughters and bustling mammas of the principal families, but of their cool, busy, indifferent papas, could by no chance be got together; they were hay-making, or they were justicing, or they were attending the House, or they had forgotten the day, or |