66 March Charms of Spring. 



precociously early, and nobler ones lagging behind, the 

 season resembles nothing so much as that uncomfort- 

 able hour in the daily life of a household when some 

 of its members, the early-risers, are already walking 

 about as if they did not quite know what to do with 

 themselves, and others have not yet come down to 

 breakfast. No, summer and not spring is the landscape- 

 painter's time of harmony, late summer, when the 

 peasants go to the harvest-fields, and come home with 

 songs in the warm-toned, mellow moonlight, and all the 

 trees have had time to assume the fulness of their 

 foliage. 



Yet spring has its own charms, especially for young 

 people, who have it within their breasts. I think per- 

 haps, as we get older, and are saddened by the gloomier 

 experiences of life, that the recurrence of the earliest 

 leaves and flowers does not always increase our cheerful- 

 ness very much. We know too well the limits of a year, 

 how short a space it is, how little that will be satis- 

 factory afterwards can be done in it whilst it lasts. We 

 think of the other springs that now lie far behind us, 

 and how we lost them in vain pleasures, or profitless 

 labor that seems to us still more vain. Will this year 

 be better used ? Already it is slipping away from 

 under us, and pray what have we done ? Made plans, 

 perhaps, to be afterwards modified, and, it may be, 

 finally abandoned, to join all those other ghostly 

 schemes and projects so various in conception, so mo- 

 notonous in the negative result. It is only, I imagine, 

 the simply and intensely practical who are never 



