" Woods netted in a silver mist, and cottage gardens smelling 

 everywhere*** 



MRS. BROWNING. 



APRIL 



TDUOYANTLY the sun, peeping through the eastern cur- 

 *~* tains, sheds his glory over the world. The mist lingers 

 upon the air, and by the keenness of the dawn-breeze we know 

 that King Frost has been abroad overnight. The new grass is 

 weighed down with its heavy burden of dew, which, sparkling 

 in the light of the eastern rays, makes a million miniature 

 suns. Soon the mist steals away through the musical branches, 

 hastening to its home by way of the sunbeam pathway. As 

 we walk in the dawntide at the commencement of this sweet 

 symphonious season, and pass by gardens lit with the year's 

 primal blossoms, hearing all things whisper, " This is Spring ! " 

 is to live indeed and to be thankful for life ; to feel the 

 presence of hope in our hearts as in the world's, with all the 

 promise of its ordered seasons of fruit and flowers before 

 it, and to wonder withal what the year will for us unfold. 

 When the mist has departed, the cottage roofs gleam and 

 shimmer as they nestle amid the shadowless trees, whose 

 branches are just giving out their first faint green. Busy 

 sparrows dart to and fro from beneath the eaves with their 

 household furniture a feather, a long straggling straw, and 

 the flotsam and jetsam of the country road. Presently, 

 human life is astir, and to match the music of the birds, 

 the new flowers, the warm sunlight, making one sweet har- 

 mony, is the sound of youthful voices ringing fresh and clear 

 as they troop to the meadows to gather the violets lives in 

 the morning of life and in the spring of existence. When 

 we see the little ones with their hands full of quickly-fading 



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