112 BIRDS AND POETS 
But the difference I would indicate may exist be. 
tween poets of the same or nearly the same magni- 
tude. Thus, in this light Tennyson is an autumnal 
poet, mellow and dead-ripe, and was so from the 
first; while Wordsworth has much more of the 
spring in him, is nearer the bone of things and to 
primitive conditions. 
Among the old poems, one which seems to me to 
have much of the charm of springtime upon it is 
the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. The 
songs, gambols, and wooings of the early birds are 
not more welcome and suggestive. How graceful 
and airy, and yet what a tender, profound, human 
significance it contains! But the great vernal poem, 
doubly so in that it is the expression of the spring- 
time of the race, the boyhood of man as well, is the 
Tliad of Homer. What faith, what simple wonder, 
what unconscious strength, what beautiful savagery, 
what magnanimous enmity, —a very paradise of 
war! 
Though so young a people, there is not much 
of the feeling of spring in any of our books, The 
muse of our poets is wise rather than joyous. There 
is no excess or extravagance or unruliness in her. 
There are spring sounds and tokens in Emerson’s 
* May-Day: ” — 
“ April cold with dropping rain 
Willows and lilacs brings again, 
The whistle of returning birds, 
And trumpet-lowing of the herds. 
The scarlet maple-keys betray 
What potent blood hath modest May, 
