WHEN COWSLIPS BLOOM 139 
“For oft, when on my couch I lie 
Tn vacant or in pensive mood, 
They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude; 
And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
And dances with the daffodills.” 
His daffodils: my cowslips. We both are em- 
perors: let that suffice. 
One cowslip makes me sing; and here for the 
first time of my watching them through my 
springtimes, they came on me in torrents. They 
ran like a rushing river. They broadened out 
into lagoons and widened still wider into lakes 
and then came running and ran a footrace with 
the train. Like the stars for multitudes they 
were and everyone is a-smiling. Not a churl 
among them all. “The day of cowslips”—hold 
that in thy calendar, my heart. April twenty- 
seven, in the year of God, nineteen hundred 
fifteen, when the Minnesota lakes were playing 
hide-and-seek with us travelers, running to peek 
at us in their game of peek-a-boo and then running 
away from us, reticent and then brazen, while 
all among their marges flowered out the golden 
cowslips, and when a little stream wandered 
moodily where rushes soon would build banks 
for them—there the cowslips come trooping 
with swift delight like a happy song from a 
heart in love. 
There are days and days and days for all 
things. Said a hoary voice of a long-ago, “Thou 
