64 March — Nash. 



Nash greets the spring in another tone and measure : — 



1 Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king ; 

 Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring. 

 Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing 

 Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo ! ' 



These extracts are as dissimilar as can be, and yet 

 in both of them we may observe a characteristic they 

 have in common. It is much more the sounds and 

 sensations of the pleasant time than any thing that is to 

 be seen which awaken the enthusiasm of the poet. The 

 1 ethereal mildness ' of Thomson, with the shower of 

 shadowing roses and the awakening music, strike his 

 imagination before any landscape distinctly rises before 

 it. Nash says that ' cold doth not sting,' and he imitates 

 the songs of the birds, which serve him for a refrain. 

 On the other hand, I well remember a large picture of 

 Spring by Daubigny, which was very disappointing both 

 to myself and others ; and the disappointment was most 

 probably due to the inevitable absence of those very 

 delights of sound and sense which refresh us so much in 

 Nature, and of which the poets are so careful to remind 

 us. What would spring be without the spring feeling 

 — that quite peculiar exhilaration that comes to us, we 

 know not how, like far-off reminiscences of youth ? 



The only landscape-painter who ever dedicated his 

 powers to this season of the year with a devotion all but 

 exclusive of every other was Constable. He liked the 

 freshness of the season as a pleasure for the eye, and his 

 own eye longed for it and loved it, because he was in a 

 state of intense antagonism to the brown doctrine in 



