note to a certain Ode to Horror, in the works of the Poet Laureate, the Pilgrim to Waterloo. The point is to keep our reasoning faculties on the alert, -our liberties of thinking and speaking; and to enable ourselves to detest sophistry and time-serving. sound philosophical discovery goes farther towards the alteration of society than millions of complaints. The danger of these is, that the very suffering will be glad to relieve itself, and run into the gayety of despair. It is our business to keep ourselves in heart, as far as a present necessity goes, and in health of mind not to be imposed upon beyond the necessity. H No. VII. SPRING. Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade ! green AIL, beautiful season! hail, return of the leaves hail, violets, daisies, and buttercups! hail, blue sky; and ye, white little silver clouds, "gay creatures of the elements," the posterity of your turbid sires of winter time! Hail, moreover, ye evidences of spring, even in cities! Hail, green in the windows, and on the ladies' caps! Hail, coats instead of great-coats! Hail, beaux and other butterflies! Hail, the leaving off of fires; provided, dear fires, among my countrymen, ye are left off! Great encroachers upon sum mer time are ye; mighty disputers of the sunshine with May and June! There is a tendency all over the temperate part of Europe to anticipate the beauties of spring,- to fancy the season more forward than it is, or to complain that it is otherwise. I find this in Italy as well as in England. Horace Walpole said that it was the fashion to say there was no winter in Italy. There is certainly a winter sharp enough to startle foreigners; and the spring in Tuscany is far from premature. I have not found the weather in either season different from what Horace says of the snows in winter, and Virgil of the stormy showers in spring. The Primavera, or spring of the Italian poets, disappoints expectation as much as the Aprils and Mays described by our own. Primavera comes in March, and is properly the first part of the vernal season, the ver primum of the Latins. The blossom issues forth on the trees, the cranes are seen travelling in the sky, the hedges are lively with violets and periwinkles; but it is not a season warranting what the poets say of it, and warming the blood. Cold winds prevail, as with us; the snows, lingering on the mountains, embitter them, and the rains are violent. April commences the true poetical spring, and May is spring confirmed, the real season of the " поvelli amori," the May of the British poets. Whether the seasons alter from time to time in different parts of the world is a point contested. Most likely they do. But, for a long time past, the May of our poets is rather June, and very often the middle and end of June rather than the beginning. For many years it has been common to have fires as late as the old King's birthday, the 4th of June. What we call spring is indeed spring, literally speaking; and a very beautiful idea the word gives us. The ver of the ancients appears to have meant the rising of the sap. Our Saxon term is more lively and visible. It is not merely the life, but the leaping of the season; the gladness of its pulse. And yet the vivacity belongs rather to nature than to us. We have not got rid enough of our colds and clothings. If the season is very fine indeed, the true time of enjoyment in England is the one that Thomson has selected for his Bower of Indolence, "A season atween June and May, Half prankt with spring, with summer half embrown'd.” When the spring came this year in Tuscany, it was a great pleasure to me to see the corn, wine, and oil, all preparing to flourish together, for the fields are nothing else. What are meadows and cornfields in England, are orchards full of olives and vines in Tuscany, with the corn growing betwixt them. The green corn running in close stripes among the olive trees, and the preparations for the budding of the vines, it being the custom here to make trellises of reed-work, really elegant in many parts of the hedges, furnish a lively spectacle. But spring, as well as winter, made me think of home. I put on my Cap, and pitched myself in those delicious fields, all over daisies and buttercups, which go sloping from Hampstead to West End and Kilburn, - fields, the representatives of thousands of others all over England, and in which I would rather take a walk "atween June and May" than in the divinest spot recorded by the divinest of southern poets. It is common with persons in love to fancy that everybody must be happy who lives in the society of the object of their attachment. In the same manner, when I am compelled to forego the privileges of my Cap, and confine myself to wishing without enjoying (which is sometimes the case), I cannot help envying the reader for his power to go into the places I write of. I say to myself, "Now somebody will take it into his head to go and look at those fields, or he will go and look at those he is more acquainted with; or he will, or he can, go into some English field or other, rich with grass and powdered with flowers. He will see the hedges; he will see the elms and oaks (there are no elms and oaks here). He will, or he may and can, or might, could, would, should walk in a wood full of them. Furthermore, he will meet with some old friends." Reader, if there is any man who has offended you, and whom you find it hard to forgive, forgive him, I entreat you; for I forgive you, and you are the most provoking person I have known a long time. I could knock the paper out of your hand. Don't you sit giggling there, you other reader, C. L., A. B., or C., or whatever title pleased thy godfather's ear. Conscious of your power to take a long walk through the sun and dust, you take advantage of my weakness to triumph over me. But, lo! my Wishing-Cap is on me in all its glory. The very mention of your name makes me present. I am with you; walk with you, talk with you. It was I who sighed just now while you were reading. — Reader, we are reconciled and together. Fortunately I am not of a temper to make the worst of any situation I happen to be cast in. And I look upon it as a reward for my love of Nature that I have never been in a situation in which I had not some glimpse of her to console me. Even in prison I had a little garden to myself, and raised my own heart's-ease. It may not be the most grateful thing in the world to think of a jail while strolling about the most classical ground in Tuscany. I confess I think of it very often. But Nature will excuse me, because my dejection is owing to my love. If I had not loved her so much at home, I should not miss, as I do, the old homestead. I do what I can. I think of Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Milton and Galileo, and Fiesole, which I see from my window, and which is a common boundary to my walks. I endeavor to keep the vines and the olive trees new to me. Besides Virgil and the Italy of books, I make the olives remind me of Athens, of Plato, and Homer, and Sophocles, and Socrates, and a still more reverend Name in another country, who went up into a mount of olives to pray. A Dominican convent is a little in my way, with its inscription in honor of the fiery saint," the destroyer of heretics;" but the friars no longer inhabit it, and I endeavor to consider even the Inquisition as a violent note struck in the ears of mankind to make them attend to the doctrine it contradicted. Philosophy has separated the doctrine from its abuse, and the Inquisition is no more. I think of the gayer |