SPRING POEMS 109 



" The brown buds thicken on the trees, 

 Unbound, the free streams sing, 

 As March leads forth across the leas 

 The wild and windy spring. 



"Where in the fields the melted snow 

 Leaves hollows warm and wet, 

 Ere many days will sweetly blow 

 The first blue violet." 



But on the whole the poets have not been emi- 

 nently successful in depicting spring. The humid 

 season, with its tender, melting blue sky, its fresh, 

 earthy smells, its new furrow, its few simple signs 

 and awakenings here and there, and its strange feel- 

 ing of unrest, — how difficult to put its charms into 

 words! None of the so-called pastoral poets have 

 succeeded in doing it. That is the best part of 

 spring which escapes a direct and matter-of-fact de- 

 scription of her. There is more of spring in a line 

 or two of Chaucer and Spenser than in the elaborate 

 portraits of her by Thomson or Pope, because the 

 former had spring in their hearts, and the latter 

 only in their inkhorns. Nearly all Shakespeare's 

 songs are spring songs, — full of the banter, the 

 frolic, and the love-making of the early season. 

 What an unloosed current, too, of joy and fresh 

 new life and appetite in Burns! 



In spring everything has such a margin! there 

 are such spaces of silence! The influences are at 

 work underground. Our delight is in a few things. 

 The drying road is enough; a single wild-flower, 

 the note of the first bird, the partridge drumming 

 in the April woods, the restless herds, the sheep 



