Ittature 
Ube Selbovne Society’s flHsagasine. 
No. 39. MARCH, 1893. VoL. IV. 
A POET OF EARLY SPRING. 
By the Editor. 
H I BRING has always been dear to the poets: they have 
lavished upon it their music and their imagination, and 
j the result is that ordinary prosaic mortals, who know 
by experience that April is often cold. May inclement, 
and even June wet and shivery, have come to look upon both the 
season and its singers as equally unreal. The modern versifier, 
whose refrain is “ May has set in with its usual severity,” is at 
least as near the truth as was good Dr. Watts when he spoke of 
the rose as “ the glory of April and May; ” and it must be ad- 
mitted that May songs and carols paint Nature in a far brighter 
aspect than she usually chooses to assume at that season of the 
year. 
But the early Spring has a charm of its own. The time “ when 
rosy plumelets tuft the larch ” ; when the golden flowers 
That con'e before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty 
are out in the meadows ; is one of beauty and delight to the 
seeing eye, in spite of wind and sleet. The lengthening days, 
the opening buds that will not be kept back — these and many 
more signs we have that Spring is at hand. 
The lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf 
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf ; 
and before these we have seen on the topmost boughs the 
blossoms showing red against the sky. 
This is the time — or rather it is a time even a little earlier 
than this — that has been most made his own by one of the truest 
nature-singers of this or of any other time. He is not of those 
whose verses are to be found in most magazines, and whose 
volumes, many in number, are to be found in every bookseller’s 
shop. He is silent when we would hear him sing ; and he has 
