NEWS OF SPRING 



amphitheatres which are as stages whereupon, by moonlight 

 or amid the peace of the mornings and afternoons, are en- 

 acted the dumb fairy-plays of the world's happiness. They 

 are all alike; and yet each of them reveals a different bliss. 

 Each of them, as though they were the faces of a bevy of 

 equally happy and equally beautiful sisters, wears its dis- 

 tinguishing smile. A cluster of cypresses, clear-cut against the 

 sky; a mimosa like a bubbling spring of sulphur; a grove of 

 orange-trees with dark and heavy tops symmetrically weighted 

 with golden fruits that suddenly proclaim the royal affluence 

 of the soil that feeds them ; a slope covered with lemon-trees, 

 where the night seems to have heaped up on a mountain-side, 

 to await a new twilight, the stars gathered by the dawn; a 

 leafy portico opening over the sea like a deep glance that 

 suddenly discloses an infinite thought; a brook half-hidden 

 like a tear of joy; a trellis ready to receive the purple of the 

 grapes; a great stone basin drinking the water that trickles 

 from the tip of a green reed: all and yet none enhance the 

 expression of the restfulness, the tranquillity, the azure silence 

 and the blissfulness that is a delight unto itself. 



4 

 But I am looking for Winter and the print of its foot- 



[134] 



