Easter Day
It is wonderful that spring should come on Easter Day.
One waked—and lo, winter was over and passed. There was a moment, in waking, of not being able to believe at all in unhappiness.
The nightingale was singing, the sun was coming up out of the filmy leaves of the garden, the bells of all the churches were pouring out Easter.
The river was misty in the early morning, under the sunshine, mauve and opal and blue. The trees of the quays, in their fragile leaf, seemed to drift in the mist and sunshine. I could not tell if the trees were gold or green in the Tuileries gardens. They were quite golden against the long purple mass of the Louvre, and quite golden up the river, where there is an especially bright blur of them under the purple towers and gable of Notre Dame.
The Halles were full of country and spring.
My own poor ugly canal had colours and lines of spring about it; its dingy, dark old houses were lifted into a sky so lovely that they seemed to have become quite lovely too, and its water, under the poor bridges, was full of gold and blue and purple and deep shining.
All the birds were singing in the great courtyards of the hospital, and all the opening buds sang too, and the green, green grass in its close bindings of stone.
Cordier—his face again bandaged, for he has been worse of late—tried to tell me something. I could make out, Nouveaux, Verdun, chez vous, très grands blessés," and then there was to open the door upon the ward's new tragedies and glories.