12 
NATURE NOTES. 
The linnet’s bosom blushes at her gaze, 
While round her brows a woodland culver flits, 
Watching her large light eyes and gracious looks, 
And in her open palm a halcyon sits 
Patient — the secret splendour of the brooks. 
Come, Spring ! She comes on waste and wood, 
On farm and field : but enter also here, 
Diffuse thyself at will thro’ all my blood, 
And, tho’ thy violet sicken into sere, 
Lodge with me all the year ! ” 
Robert Browning as a Nature Painter. — At this moment when 
“ Dumb is he who waked the world to speak 
And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier,” 
one instinctively turns to the works of the great master that has gone from us, 
to find what he too says on this same topic of spring. See what he puts in the 
mouth of “An Italian Person of Quality,” surely crediting that person with a 
power of word-painting quite beyond such a being : — 
“ Is it better in May, I ask you ? you’ve summer all at once ; 
In a day he leaps complete with a few strong April suns ! 
’Mid the sharp short emerald wheat, scarce risen three fingers well, 
The wild tulip, at end of its tube, blows out its great red bell 
Like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell.” 
And here is an English spring, so different from the Italian, just at those best 
days of the year, when showery April meets with sunny May, 
“ And after April, when May follows, 
And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows, 
Hark ! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge 
Leans to the field and scatters to the clover 
Blossoms and dewdrops — at the bent spray’s edge — 
That’s the wise thrush ; he sings each song twice over, 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture ! ” 
“ Having in mind Shakespeare and Shelley, I nevertheless think the last 
three lines the finest ever written touching the song of a bird.” So says 
Edmund Clarence Stedman in his Victorian Poets. Some of us will be ready 
to admit that the praise, high as it is, is none too high. 
Robert Browning, as well as Alfred Tennyson, was one of the earliest patrons 
of the Selborne Society. 
A Daisy in December. — The poetry of Nature once more : the following 
beautiful lines by Mr. Paget Toynbee are (by permission) extracted from the 
Academy of 23rd December, 1889. 
“ Sad, solitary daisy, did some dream 
Of unknown life and long-desired delight 
Flash on thy wintry slumbers like the gleam 
Of silent lightning in the summer night? 
“ What sudden promptings pierced thy tender core, 
And thrilled the quivering fibres of thy root? 
What secret longing never felt before 
Impelled thy leaves thus ere their day to shoot? 
“ Did’st seem to hear the lark’s light love song run 
Adown the sky, and fall extinct to earth ? 
Did’st feel the glow of summer’s golden sun 
P'lush thy pale petals at its rosy birth ? 
“ Wast wooed with whispers by the warm west wind 
To dash the .trembling dewdrop from thine eye? 
Did’st taste the kiss of one of thine own kind, 
And, faint with new life, feel content to die ? 
