April is come! “proud—pied April!” and “hath put a spirit of youth in every thing.” Shall our portrait of her, then, alone lack that spirit? Not if words can speak the feelings from which they spring. “Spring!” See how the name comes uncalled-for; as if to hint that it should have stood in the place of “April.” But April is spring—the only spring month that we possess in this egregious climate of ours. Let us, then, make the most of it.
April is at once the most juvenile of the Months, and the most feminine—never knowing her own mind for a day together. Fickle as a fond maiden with her first lover;—coying it with the young Sun till he withdraws his beams from her, and then weeping till she gets them back again. High-fantastical as the seething wit of a poet, that sees a world of beauty growing beneath his hand, and fancies that he has created it, whereas it is it that has created him a poet; for it is Nature that makes April, not April Nature.
April is doubtless the sweetest month of all the year; partly because it ushers in the May, and partly for its own sake, so far as any thing can be valuable without reference to any thing else. It is, to May and June, what “sweet fifteen,” in the age of woman, is to passion-stricken eighteen, and perfect two-and-twenty. It is, to the confirmed Summer, what the previous hope of joy is to the full fruition; what the boyish dream of love is to love itself. It is indeed the month of promises; and what are twenty performances compared with one promise? When a promise of delight is fulfilled, it is over and done with; but while it remains a promise, it remains a hope: and what is all good, but the hope of good? What is every to-day of our life, but the hope (or the fear) of to-morrow? April, then, is worth two Mays, because it tells tales of May in every sigh that it breathes, and every tear that it lets fall. It is the harbinger, the herald, the promise, the prophecy, the foretaste of all the beauties that are to follow it—of all, and more—of all the delights of Summer, and all the “pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious” Autumn. It is fraught with beauties itself that no other month can bring before us, and
“It bears a glass which shews us many more.”
As for April herself, her life is one sweet alternation of smiles and sighs and tears, and tears and sighs and smiles, till it is consummated at last in the open laughter of May. It is like—in short, it is like nothing in the world but “an April day.” And her charms—but really I must cease to look upon the face of this fair month generally, lest, like a painter in the presence of his mistress, I grow too enamoured to give a correct resemblance. I must gaze upon her sweet beauties one by one, or I shall never be able to think and treat of her in any other light than that of the Spring; which is a mere abstraction,—delightful to think of, but, like all other abstractions, not to be depicted or described.
Before I proceed to do this, however, let me inform the reader that what I have hitherto said of April, and have yet to say, is intended to apply, not to this or that April in particular—not to April eighteen hundred and twenty-four, or fourteen, or thirty-four—but to April par excellence; that is to say, what April (“not to speak it profanely”) ought to be. In short, I have no intention of being personal in my remarks; and if the April which I am describing should happen to differ, in any essential particulars, from the one in whose presence I am describing it, neither the month nor the reader must regard this as a covert libel or satire. The truth is that, for what reason I know not—whether to put to shame the predictions of the Quarterly Reviewers, or to punish us Islanders for our manifold follies and iniquities, or from any quarrel, as of old, between Oberon and Titania—but certain it is that
“The seasons alter: hoary headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
And on old Hyems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the Spring, the Summer,
The chilling Autumn, angry Winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the amazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.”
It is of April, then, as she is when Nature is in her happiest mood, that I am now to speak; and we will take her in the prime of her life, and our first place of rendezvous shall be the open fields.
What a sweet flush of new green has started up to the face of this meadow! And the new-born Daisies that stud it here and there, give it the look of an emerald sky powdered with snowy stars. In making our way to yonder hedgerow, which divides the meadow from the little copse that lines one side of it, let us not take the shortest way, but keep religiously to the little footpath; for the young grass is as yet too tender to bear being trod upon; and the young lambs themselves, while they go cropping its crisp points, let the sweet daisies alone, as if they loved to look upon a sight as pretty and as innocent as themselves.
I have been hitherto very chary of appealing to the poets in these pleasant papers; because they are people that, if you give them an inch, even in a span-long essay of this kind, always endeavour to lay hands on the whole of it. They are like the young cuckoos, that if once they get hatched within a nest, always contrive to oust the natural inhabitants. But when the Daisy, “la douce Marguerite,” is in question, how can I refrain from pronouncing a blessing on the bard who has, by his sweet praise of this “unassuming commonplace of nature,” revived that general love for it, which, until lately, was confined to the hearts of “the old poets,” and of those young poets of all times, the little children? But I need not do this, for he has his reward already, in the fulfilment of that prophecy with which he closes his address to his darling flower: