The winter had now broken up his encampment, and was already in full retreat. With the approach of spring the mystical conversations of our friends entered on the period of the Middle Ages. The lengthening mornings found Atherton early at his desk, sipping a solitary and preliminary cup of coffee, and reading or writing. Willoughby felt his invention quickened by the season, and a new elasticity pervade him. His romance advanced with fewer hindrances from that cross-grained dissatisfaction which used so frequently to disfigure his manuscript with the thorny scratches and interlineations of an insatiable correction.
Gower, too, could enter once more on the enjoyment of his favourite walk before breakfast. In wandering through the dewy meadows, in ‘the slanting sunlight of the dawn,’ he felt, as we all must, that there is truth in what the chorus of mystics have ever said or sung about the inadequacy of words to express the surmise and aspiration of the soul. In a morning solitude there seems to lie about our fields of thought an aerial wealth too plenteous to be completely gathered into the granary of language.
O who would mar the season with dull speech,
That must tie up our visionary meanings
And subtle individual apprehensions
Into the common tongue of every man?
And of the swift and scarce detected visitants
Of our illusive thoughts seek to make prisoners,
And only grasp their garments.
It is one of the pleasant pastimes of the spring to watch day by day the various ways in which the trees express, by a physiognomy and gesture of their own, their expectation of the summer. Look at those young and delicate ones, alive with impatience to the tip of every one of the thousand sprays that tremble distinct against the sky, swaying uneasily to and fro in the sharp morning breeze. They seem longing to slip their rooted hold upon the earth, and float away to embrace their bridegroom sun in the air. And see those veterans—what a gnarled, imperturbable gravity in those elder citizens of park or wood: they are used to it; let the day bring new weatherstains or new buds, they can bide their time. And are they not already wrapped, many of them, in hood and habit of dark glossy ivy—woodland senatorial fur—they can afford to wait. Here, look, close beside us, the eyes of the buds are even now peeping through the black lattice of the boughs, and those amber-coloured clouds overhead are looking them promises of kindly showers as they sail by. What is that sparkling on yonder hill? Only the windows of a house with eastern aspect: the sun lights his beacon-fire regularly there, to signal to his children down in the hollow that he is coming, though they cannot see him yet, and will roll away the cloud from the valley mouth, and make the place of their night-sepulchre glorious with his shining raiment.