Spring Gossip 295 



from the consciousness that the world is young again; that 

 the spring has come round; that we shall not all cease, and 

 be no world. Nature has begun again, and not begun for 

 nothing. One fancies somehow that she could not have 

 the heart to put a stop to us in April or May. She may 

 pluck away a poor little life here and there; nay, many 

 blossoms of youth, - - but not all, - not the whole garden 

 of life. She prunes, but does not destroy. If she did, 

 if she were in the mind to have done with us, - - to look 

 upon us as a sort of experiment not worth going on with, 

 as a set of ungenial and obstinate compounds, which re- 

 fused to co-operate in her sweet designs, and could not be 

 made to answer in the working, - - depend upon it, she 

 would take pity on our incapability and bad humors, and 

 conveniently quash us in some dismal, sullen winter's day, 

 just at the natural dying of the year, most likely in Novem- 

 ber; for Christmas is a sort of spring itself -- a winter 

 flowering. We care nothing for arguments about storms, 

 earthquakes, or other apparently unseasonable interrup- 

 tions of our pleasures. We imitate, in that respect, the 

 magnanimous indifference, or what appears to be such, of 

 the great mother herself, knowing that she means us the 

 best in the gross; and also that we may all get our remedies 

 for these evils in time, if we will only co-operate. People 

 in South America, for instance, may learn from experience, 

 and build so as to make a comparative nothing of those 

 rockings of the ground. It is of the gross itself that we 

 speak; and sure we are, that with an eye to that, Nature 

 does not feel as Pope ventures to say she does, or sees 'with 

 equal eye' 



'Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd, 

 And now a bubble burst, and now a world.' 



"He may have flattered himself that he should think it a 

 fine thing for his little poetship to sit upon a star, and look 

 grand in his own eyes, from an eye so very dispassionate; but 

 Nature, who is the author of passion, and joy, and sornm. 

 does not look upon animate and inanimate, depend upon it, 



