To these forcible alternations of heat, cold, fog, and sun, melancholy and joyaunce, we owe the tempered, the powerful personality of our West. Rain wearies us to-day; fine weather will come with the morrow. The splendours of the East, the marvels of the Tropics, taken together, are not worth the first violet of Easter, the first song of April, the blossom of the hawthorn, the glee of the young girl who resumes her robes of white.
In the morning a potent voice, of singular freshness and clearness, of keen metallic timbre, the voice of the mavis, rises aloft, and there is no heart so sick or so sour as to hear it without a smile.
One spring, on my way to Lyons, among the intertangled vines which the peasants laboured to raise up again, I heard a poor, old, miserable, and blind woman singing, with an accent of extraordinary gaiety, this ancient village lay:
"Nous quittons nos grands habits,
Pour en prendre de plus petits."
THE BIRD AS THE LABOURER OF MAN.