The next in brilliance are the Anemonies, as gay in their colours, and more various, but not so profuse of their charms as their pretty relation Hepatica, and more jealous of each other’s beauty; as well they may, for what flower can vie with them for exquisite delicacy of hue and elegant fragility?
The primroses, polyanthuses, and daisies that venture to show themselves this month, we will not greet; not because we are not even more pleased to see them than their gayer and more gaudy rivals; but the truth is, that they have no real claim upon our attention till next month, as their pale hues and weakly forms evidently indicate.
In taking leave of the Country for this month, let me not forget to mention that sure “prophet of delight and mirth,” the Common Pilewort, or Lesser Celandine; about which (and what more can I say to interest the reader in its favour?) Mr. Wordsworth has written two whole poems. Its little yellow stars may now be seen gemming the woodsides, when all around is cold, comfortless, and dead.
I have said that I designed to prove this to be the best of all possible months. Is the reader still incredulous as to its surpassing merits? Then be it known to him that I should insist on its supremacy, if it were only in virtue of one birthday which it includes: and one that the reader would never guess, for the best of all reasons. It is not that of “the wisest of mankind,” Lord Bacon, on the third; or of “the starry Galileo,” on the nineteenth; or of the “matchless master of high sounds,” Handel, on the twenty-fourth. True February does include all these memorable days, and let it be valued accordingly. But it includes another day, which is worth them all to me, since it gave to the world, the narrow world of some half dozen loving hearts, one who is wiser in her simplicity than the first of the abovenamed, since the results of that wisdom are virtue and happiness; who is more far-darting in her mental glance than the second, inasmuch as an instinctive sentiment of the truth is more infallible than the clearest perception of it; and whose every thought and look and motion are more “softly sweet” and musical than all the “Lydian measures” of the third; and, deprived of whom, those who have once been accustomed to live within the light of her countenance would find all the wisdom of the first to be foolishness, all the stars of the second dark, and all the harmony of the third worse than discord.
Gentlest of readers (for I had need have such), pardon me this one rhapsody, and I promise to be as “sobersuited” as the editor of an Encyclopedia, for this two months to come. Nothing, not even the nightingale’s song in the last week in April, shall move me from my propriety. But I will candidly confess, that the effects of May-day morning are more than I can venture to answer for. Even the chimney-sweepers are allowed to disport themselves then; so that when that arrives, there’s no knowing what may happen.
MARCH.
If there be a Month the aspect of which is less amiable, and its manners and habits less prepossessing, than those of all the rest (which I am loath to admit), that month is March. The burning heats of midsummer (when they shall come to us at the prophetic call of the Quarterly Reviewers—which they never will) we shall find no difficulty in bearing; and the frosts and snows of December and January are as welcome, to those who know their value, as the flowers in May. Nay—the so much vituperated fogs of November I by no means set my face against; on the contrary, I have a kind of appetite for them, both corporeal and mental; as I shall prove, and endeavour to justify in its due place.
In fact, and by the by, November is a month that has not been fairly dealt by; and, for my part, I think it should by no means have been fixed upon as that which is par excellence the month best adapted to hang and drown oneself in;—seeing that, to a wise man, that should never be an affair of atmosphere. But if a month must be set apart for such a proces, (on the same principle which determines that we are bound to begin our worldly concerns on a particular day—viz. Saturday—and would therefore, by parity of reasoning, call upon us to end them with a similar view to times and seasons), let that month be henceforth March; for it has, at this present writing, no one characteristic by which to designate it,—being neither Spring, Summer, Autumn, nor Winter, but only March.