In our New England especially, where Mayday is a mere superstition and the Maypole a poor half-hardy exotic which shivers in an east wind almost as sharp as Endicott’s axe,—where frozen children, in unseasonable muslin, celebrate the floral games with nosegays from the milliner’s, and winter reels back, like shattered Lear, bringing the dead spring in his arms, her budding breast and wan dilustered cheeks all overblown with the drifts and frosty streaks of his white beard,—where even Chanticleer, whose sap mounts earliest in that dawn of the year, stands dumb beneath the dripping eaves of his harem, with his melancholy tail at half-mast,—one has only to take down a volume of Chaucer, and forthwith he can scarce step without crushing a daisy, and the sunshine flickers on small new leaves that throb thick with song of merle and mavis. A breath of spring blows out of the opening lines of the “Canterbury Tales” that seems to lift the hair upon our brow:
When that Aprile with his showers soote
The drought of March hath pierced to the roote,
And bathed every vein in that licour
Of whose virtue engendered is the flour;
When Zephirus eke with his sweet breath
Enspired hath in every holt and heath
The tender croppes; and the younge sun
Hath in the Ram half of his course yrun;
And little fowles maken melodie,