One swallow doesn’t make a summer, says the proverb, and unless one fine day (the 19th) makes a spring, we haven’t for the last six weeks [February 1870] and more had a single hour of a character to be disassociated from one of the wettest and wildest winters on record. No sooner has one storm died away, less from any voluntary cessation on its part than from sheer exhaustion of its forces, than, after a slushy, sludgy interregnum of brief duration, it has been succeeded in every instance by another and another still of equal or greater violence and fury, so that of quiet or calm we have known little, and of sun or moon or stars we have seen hardly the briefest glimpse since Old New Year’s Day. When Foote, the incomparable comedian (Johnson said of him that “the dog was irresistible”), after acquiring and dissipating several fortunes, was at last lucky enough to be able to set up his carriage in a more dashing style than ever, he selected as his motto, and emblematical of his career, the words Iterum, Iterum, Iterumque! (Again, and Again, and Again!) It has struck us that if the Meteorological Society were to apply to the Herald’s College for a crest and armorial bearings to be displayed on the title-page of their volume of “Transactions” for the first quarter of the current year, we, should they do us the honour to consult us, would suggest a cloud-cumulus, rain-surcharged, proper on the shield, with Aquarius and the “watery” Hyades as supporters; Eolus ordering “a fresh hand to the bellows” as a crest, and the Iterum, Iterum, Iterumque of Foote’s chariot as a motto of singular appropriateness and meaning. How delighted, by the way, must our amphibious friend Mr. Symons be in the midst of all this rainfall! His crest again should be a man’s head on a fish’s body in an overflowed meadow, natant, and his supporters an anemometer and rain-gauge proper! It is needless to say that anything like spring work is with us not only in a very backward state, but has hardly been commenced. Before the end of February we had our own corn seed and potatoes in the ground last year. If we get them down this year any time during the next month, it will be earlier than the weather at the date of the present writing promises. Our ornithological studies extend over a greater number of years than we care at this moment very accurately to count; but never have we known our wild-birds so listless and loveless on Shrovetide Eve as they are this season. Except an occasional carol from the wren, who has a soul as big as that of his namesake Sir Christopher, who built the dome of St. Paul’s (the wren also, by the way, is a dome-builder), and an irregular strophe at rare intervals from the redbreast, our woods are songless, and of nidification there is not a sign. Meliora sperāre, nevertheless, is sound philosophy. Let us hope for better things: He is faithful that promised that while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease. Scott has few finer passages than the following, which we are fond of repeating in such a season as this. It occurs in his epistle to William Stewart Rose, introductory to the first canto of Marmion, and, though very beautiful, is seldom quoted:—
“No longer Autumn’s glowing red
Upon our Forest hills is shed;
No more, beneath the evening beam,
Fair Tweed reflects their purple gleam;
Away hath passed the heather bell
That bloomed so rich on Needpath fell;
Sallow his brow, and russet bare
Are now the sister-heights of Yair.
The sheep, before the pinching heaven,