CHARMS OF SPRING. 215 



and liberty, has shot from underground to meet the sun, 

 without waiting to put on her green-leaf mantle. Every 

 garden has its scattering of snow-drops, crocuses and hepatica ; 

 and now there is not a wall so mouldering, not a bank so dry, 

 not a spot so barren, but can boast its peculiar ornament in 

 the lively white blossoms of the whitloe-grass."* 



Tufting, also, the roof of many an humble cottage, this little 

 hardy flower of poverty and promise, seems created as if at 

 once to impart and to betoken hopeful feelings : such feelings 

 as are, in the present season, the natural spring growth of every 

 healthy mind, in every station, however permitted for awhile, 

 and for ends of Infinite Wisdom, to be crushed or stinted, 

 most frequently, alas ! among the poor, through human agency. 

 But how, amidst spring flowers, have we stumbled on oppres- 

 sion, that foul weed of the social garden ? Perhaps, because like 

 the whitloe-grass, it clings not unfrequently to cottage roofs ; 

 and perhaps, also, because with the return of even a spring- 

 quarter, " distresses" are too closely intertwined in the shape 

 of notices, distrainings, or ejectments consummations dire to 

 a dark winter of struggle, starvation, sickness, and old age; 

 one, perhaps, or all of them. 



But no more of these moral bind- weeds, choking the spring 

 products of the mind, except to read in the page of Nature's 

 book, now open, an emblematic prophecy of their extermina- 

 tion ! In the glow of that genial and rising spirit of ameliora- 



* Draba verna. 



