A RHAPSODY BY JEREMY SHORT, ESQ.
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It is April, and the rain is pattering against our window as we write, with a low monotonous tinkle like the far-off music of an evening bell. How every thing has changed since yesterday! The sunlight no longer floods the hill-side—the birds sing not their jocund lays—the brooklet by our window no more goes frolicking onward in its glittering sheen. The sky is dun, spongy, and covered with flitting clouds. The fields are drenched by last night’s rain, and the cattle cower under the sheds in the barn-yard. Yet the south wind has a warmth and freshness in its touch delicious to the fevered brow of a student, and as it breathes through the casement the blood dances more merrily along our veins and we feel a new life within us.
It is April, fickle fooling April, but already one begins to dream of May. And soon it will be here. Oh! how we long for its bright sunshine, its budding flowers, its delicious perfumes, its breezy mornings and its starry nights, reminding us of that better country where the streams sing on forever, where the spring-time never fades, and where all the sainted ones we have loved on earth, purified and made more glorious than ever, await us with their seraphic smiles. May!—bright, beautiful May!—what is like to thy loveliness? The Summer may be full of maturer beauty, the Autumn more like a matron in her queenliness, but thou art as a young and innocent bride, all blushing and trembling in thy tearful gladness. And of all days in May give us the first—the vesperus of her sky—the proudest gem in her coronal.
Is there any thing so exquisite in the older poets as their habit of constantly alluding to the merry sports with which our English ancestors were accustomed to celebrate the first of May? Is there any thing more captivating to the lover of green and sunshiny fields and antique customs, than the dance around the flower-decked pole of the village, with the rosy-cheeked maidens for partners, and the hobby-horse, the morrice-crew, and the combatants of the ring around? Alas! the day for these spectacles has gone forever. Even in merry England the first of May has lost its popularity, and it is only in some quiet dell, secluded among the hills, far away from the metropolis, that the Maypole is wreathed with garlands on the eventful morning, and the blushing beauty is crowned with flowers as queen of May. How many kindly feelings, how many happy hours, how many holy associations have been lost to us by the neglect of this simple rural custom! Far away from home and friends, in lands remote even from his native continent, the sight of a pole decked out with flowers for some pagan festival, has recalled to the wanderer’s mind the happy days of his youth, when he sported with his gay companions on the village lawn, or slily kissed some blushing little beauty who had been his partner on the first of May.
We wish this good old custom could be revived among us, not with its grotesque maskers, but as a day for greenwood sports. We sing “Io Pæn” at the few celebrations which are vouchsafed to us in these degenerate days. Your crabbed utilitarians may talk of its uselessness, and sneer at it as a childish pastime, but who that has a soul for the beautiful in nature can fail to love this merry-making on the greensward? Give us the pure canopy of heaven for our ball-room ceiling—let us dance where the birds may carol around us and the balmy breath of flowers kiss our cheeks. Let us welcome in the blushing month with the young, and beautiful, and gay, feeling as we partake in their sports, as if old Spenser had dreamed of the fair ones around us, when he drew that immortal picture of May:
“Then came faire May, the fayrest mayd on ground,
Deckt all with dainties of her season’s pryde,
And throwing flow’res out of her lap around:
Upon two bretheren’s shoulders she did ride,