This exquisite poetry has its voice of delight for me, and as I shut my eyes, it brings a change over the bare boughs and the Winter land. I dream of the chill black hedges and trees, flushing first into redness, and then “a million emeralds burst from the ruby buds.” I dream of the birds coming back, one after one, until the poetry of the flowers is all set to music. And I go out into the land to behold, not only to dream of and image, these things. I watch for the delicious green, tasselling the earliest larch (there is one every year a fortnight in advance of the others) in the clump of those trees beside the road on my way home. I look, in a warm patch that I know, for the first primroses, and when I find them mildly and quietly gazing up at me from the moss, and ivy, and broken sticks, and dead leaves, a surprise, although I was expecting them, and a dim reflection of that old child-joy, bring with a rush to my heart again those “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” And in the garden I wander through the bare shrubberies, varied with bright green box, and gather in my harvest there. The little Queen Elizabeth aconites, gold-crowned in their wide-frilled green collars; these are no more scant, and just breaking with bent head through cracking frosty ground. They have carpeted the brown beds, and are even waxing old and past now. The snowdrops have but left a straggler here and there; and the miniature golden volcano of the crocus has spent its columns of fire. The hazels are draped with slender, drooping catkins; the sweetbriar is letting the soft sweet-breathed leaves here and there out of the clenched hand of the bud. The cherry-tree is preparing to dress itself almost in angels’ clothing, white and glistening, and delicious with all soft recesses of clear grey shadow, seen against the mild blue sky. The long branches of the horse-chestnut trees, laid low upon the lawn, are lighting up all over with the ravishing crumpled emerald that bursts like light out of the brown sticky bud—-as sometimes holy heavenly thoughts may come from one whose first look we disliked; or as God’s dear lessons unfold out of the dark sheath of trouble. The fairy almond-tree—of so tender a hue that you might fantastically imagine it a cherry-tree blushing—casts a light scarf over a dark corner of the shrubbery. The laburnum is preparing for the Summer, and is all hung with tiny green festoons. Against the blue sky, on a bare sycamore branch, that stretches out straight from the trunk, a glad-voiced thrush seems thanking God that the Spring days are come. Wedged tight into three branching boughs, near the stem of a box-tree, I find a warm secure nest, filled with five little blue-green eggs. It is still a delight to me to find a nest; a delight, if not now a rapture, an intoxication.
All these I see on one Spring day or another, as I walk into my garden, or out into the changing lanes. All these I see, and all these I love. But I see them, and I love them tenderly and quietly, not with the wonder and the glee of life’s early Spring days. I am sad, partly because I know that a great deal of that old wondering ecstatic thrill has gone.
“The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose,
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.”
It must be so, naturally, if only from the mere fact that things must lose their newness, and so their wonder, to the eye and the heart. Do what you will, you must become accustomed to things. And the scent of a hyacinth or of the may, will cease when familiar to be the wonderful enchanting thing that childhood held it to be. And the thirtieth time that we see, to notice, the first snowdrop bursting through the pale green sheath above the brown bed, is a different thing from the third time. We appreciate delights keenly when we are young, seek the same in later years, but never find them; and then all our life remember the search more or less regretfully. So Wordsworth, the old man, addresses the cuckoo that brought back his young days and his young thoughts by its magic voice:—
“Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.
“Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery:
“To seek thee did I often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen.
“And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.”
Ah well, I must get on to my moral. I must not wail like an Autumn wind among the young flowers, and the bright leaves, and the blithe songs of the sweet Spring days, else I shall lay myself open to the reproach of the poet describing one who—
“Words of little weight let fall,
The fancy of the lower mind—
That waxing life must needs leave all
Its best behind.”