SPRING POEMS 109 
“The brown buds thicken on the trees, 
Unbound, the free streams sing, 
As March leads forth across the leas 
The wild and windy spring. 
** Where in the fields the melted snow 
Leaves hollows warm and wet, 
Ere many days will sweetly blow 
The first blue violet.’’ 
But on the whole the poets have not been emi- 
nently successful in depicting spring. The humid 
season, with its tender, melting blue sky, its fresh, 
earthy smells, its new furrow, its few simple signs 
and awakenings here and there, and its strange feel- 
ing of unrest, — how difficult to put its charms into 
words! None of the so-called pastoral poets have 
succeeded in doing it. That is the best part of 
spring which escapes a direct and matter-of-fact de- 
scription of her. There is more of spring in a line 
or two of Chaucer and Spenser than in the elaborate 
portraits of her by Thomson or Pope, because the 
former had spring in their hearts, and the latter 
only in their inkhorns. Nearly all Shakespeare’s 
songs are spring songs,—full of the banter, the 
frolic, and the love-making of the early season. 
What an unloosed current, too, of joy and fresh 
new life and appetite in Burns! 
In spring everything has such a margin! there 
are such spaces of silence! The influences are at 
work underground. Our delight is in a few things. 
The drying road is enough; a single wild-flower, 
the note of the first bird, the partridge drumming 
in the April woods, the restless herds, the sheep 
