78 THE ELM. 



noons, when the daffodils open their golden cups,, 

 and the almond and the mezereon cover their bare 

 branches with sweet pink bloom, reminding us of 

 those happy little children of genius who before they 

 have been to school, and become leafy with book- 

 knowledge, play forth verses, and song, and Art ; 

 producing, like the birds in spring, not from instruc- 

 tion, but because they cannot help; presently, 

 while these livelier sweet sights invite our hearts, 

 the dark elm-knots also expand, and then we have 

 dense round clusters of little vases, tinted brown, 

 and purple, and green, in delicate intermixture, 

 while in the midst are lifted up stamens and a ruddy 

 pistil that seems clipped out of fairy velvet. So 

 abundant are these pretty flowers, and so deep and 

 vinous is the hue, that when the sunbeams fall on 

 the tree, it seems almost to purple the surrounding 

 air. Up to this time, not a leaf, not an opening leaf- 

 bud, is to be seen, so that between our eyes and the 

 pale sky there is nothing but twig and bloom. Talk 

 not of flowers as born only of the summer. In the 

 dreariest and coldest seasons that precede there are 

 always plenty. It is not that flowers are wanting, 

 but that we have not yet quite learned that seeing, 

 like conversation, is one of the Fine Arts, the prin- 

 ciples of which come by nature, but which requires 

 culture quite as much as our capacity for writing or 

 working out a sum in arithmetic. 



By the time the leaves are completing their green 



