To nestle young spring’s offering,
That dying Earth shall live anew.
How different this from Thomson’s pessimistic,
Dread winter spreads his latest glooms
And reigns tremendous o’er the conquered year.
This poem seemed to present unusual difficulties to Patience. The words came slowly and haltingly, and the indications of composition were more marked than in any other of her poems. The third line was first dictated “Like weary workmen overdone,” and then changed to “weary toilers,” and the eighteenth line was given: “On the shore-wavelet’s breast,” and afterwards altered to read “the shorewave’s crest.”
Possibly it was because the poet has not the same zest in painting pictures of winter that she has in depicting scenes of kindlier seasons, in which she is in accord with nearly all poets, and, for that matter, with nearly all people. Her pen, if one may use the word, is speediest and surest when she presents the beautiful, whether it be the material or the spiritual. She expresses this feeling herself with beauty of phrase and rhythm in this verse, which may be entitled “The Voice of Spring.”
The streamlet under fernbanked brink
Doth laugh to feel the tickle of the waving mass;
And silver-rippled echo soundeth