And especially hard now, in this "dawn of day." Little brooks must be dancing down the dell,
"Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love but attend as well."
But as she cannot, he will not. . . . Only, things will get lovelier every day, for the spring is back, or at any rate close at hand—the spring, when the almond-blossom blows.
"We shall have the word
In a minor third
There is none but the cuckoo knows:
Heaps of the guelder rose!
I must bear with it, I suppose."
For he would choose, if he could choose, that November should come back. Then there would be nothing for her to love but love! In such a world as spring and summer make, heart can dispense with heart; the sun is there, and the "flowers unnipped"; but in winter, freezing in the crypt, the heart cries: "Why should I freeze? Another heart, as chill as mine is now, would quiver back to life at the touch of this one":
"Heart, shall we live or die?
The rest . . . settle by-and-bye!"
Three months ago they were so happy! They lived blocked up with snow, the wind edged in and in, as far as it could get:
"Not to our ingle, though,
Where we loved each the other so!"
If it were but winter now again, instead of the terrible, lovely spring, when she will have the blue sky and the hawthorn-spray and the brooks to love—and the almond-blossom and the cuckoo, and that guelder-rose which he will have to bear with . . .