26 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



mountain bard, charming the shepherds with impromptu songs, to 

 Milton, singing of — 



the pleasant time, 



The cool, the silent, save where silence yields 

 To the night-warbling bird, that now, awake, 

 Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song. 



And not those only that sing deserve honourable mention, but many 

 others, whose throats have no ravishing harmonies, are yet susceptible 

 of the rose-hues and summer breath of that blind god who tips his 

 arrow with an amra bloom to make its point pierce keener. There 

 is the little wagtail — dear to the Season of Buttercups — a conse- 

 quential, striding wiseacre, for ever foraging by the unfrozen spring 

 for delicate morsels of insect life ; a thorough Briton, nevertheless, 

 who sticks to the land that gave him birth, and disdains to turn his 

 back on our northern climate, because a few fogs and frosts give edge 

 to the British winter. There are the rooks, too, a clamorous, croak- 

 ing, sable-plumed race of petty swindlers, spending half the spring 

 in stealing each other's sticks, and lighting no end of battles in the 

 thick of the branches, until that universal conqueror — the god of the 

 Season of Buttercups — has them in his grasp, and then they build 

 nests, and prattle of love, and hatch large broods of baby rooks — 

 destined, like their parents, to be alternately devils and doves — the 

 very models of parental care and social union. Besides these, there 

 are the wood-pigeons, which now gather back to their old mossy 

 haunts, cowering together in the leafiest of coverts, besides the 

 loveliest of grey old nooks, where little runnels flow unseen, and 

 little seeds burst into yellow sprays, under the matting of the last 

 year's leaves, to spring up into waving heads of greenness, and sit in 

 the shadow of the oaks, beguiled by the soft, heart-touching " coo, 

 coo," which tells of love amid the branches. April bringing up the 

 rear of spring visitants, gives us quails, turtle-doves, swifts, puffins, 

 swallows, martins, and lapwings ; and life in innumerable forms 

 assumes its noblest aspect, warmed into new vigour with the expan- 

 sion of the season, enhanced in its beauty by the development of 

 increased provision for its support, and lifted half-way into the region 

 of the unreal by that divine impulse which is the soul of living 

 Nature, and which, while it adds heroic attributes alike to man and 

 brute, conserves that succession of creatures to which all the pro- 

 visions of Nature are attached as to one continuous thread. 



