A SPRING GOSSIP. 69 



word for it, if the secret preference, the concealed passion, of every 

 lover of fruit could be got at, without the formality of a public trial, 

 the strawberry would be found out to be the little betrayer of hearts. 

 Was not Linnaeus cured of the gout by them? And did not even 

 that hard-hearted monster, Eichard the III., beseech "My Lord 

 of Ely" to send for some of "the good strawberries" from his gar- 

 den at Holbom ? Nay, an Italian poet has written a whole poem, 

 of nine hundred lines or more, entirely upon strawberries. " Straw- 

 berries and sugar " are to him what " sack and sugar " was to Fal- 

 stafif — "the indispensable companion — ^the sovereign remedy for 

 all evil — ^the climax of good." In short, he can do no more in wish- 

 ing a couple of new married friends of his the completest earthly 

 happiness, than to say — 



" E a dive ohe ogni cosa lieta vada, 

 Su le Fragole il zuoehero le cada." 



In short, to sum up all that earth can prize, 

 May they have sugar to their strawberries ! 



There are few writers who have treated of the spring and its in- 

 fluences more fittingly than some of the English essayists ; for the 

 English have the key to the poetry of rural life. Indeed, we cannot 

 perhaps give our readers greater pleasure than by ending this article 

 with the following extract from one of the papers of that genial and 

 kindly writer, Leigh Hunt : 



" The lightest thoughts have their roots in gravity ; and the most 

 fiigitive colors of the world are set off by the mighty background 

 of eternity. One of the greatest pleasures of so light and airy a 

 thing as the vernal season, arises from the consciousness that the 

 world is young again ; that the spring has come round ; that we 

 shall not all cease, and be no world. Nature has begun again, and 

 not begun for nothing. One fancies somehow that she could not 

 have the heart to put a stop to us in April or May. She may pluck 

 away a poor little life here and there ; nay, many blossoms of youth, 

 —but not all, — not the whole garden of life. She prunes, but does 

 not destroy. If she did,— if she were in the mind to have done 

 with us,— to look upon us as a sort of experiment not worth going 



