From this brief sketch, we can see that the English people derive their origin from five races: the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans; and we, descendants of the English, must look back for our first grandfathers and grandmothers to these various nations and tribes. It is from them we derive our blood, our language, and our customs.
It is true that the Anglo-Saxons form the basis of our ancestry: the mixture of the other races with them is not considerable. Our language may afford a pretty fair index to the proportion which the Saxon stock bears to the others. The foundation of our language is Saxon, and consisting chiefly of the short expressive words called monosyllables. To this original stock, we have added words from the Celtic Britons, the Romans, the Danes, and the Norman French. Our language may be compared to a patched garment, the main cloth of which is a Saxon texture; but the patches are furnished by the other nations that have worn it. It is, however, a pretty good language, after all.
The Month of March.
Of all the months, March is the least of a favorite. It has neither the brilliant snows of winter, with its keen and bracing breezes, nor has it the flowers and fruits of the warmer seasons. It is a capricious mixture of cold and warm, wet and dry, sometimes visiting us with storms of sleet and snow, and suddenly changing its temper, it presents us with soft southern breezes, seeming to remind us of spring.
As far south as Virginia, March seems to bring spring with it, and many of the flowers venture to peep forth during this month; but even there, the weather is uncertain. In New England, nothing can exceed its versatility. Often the sun will rise bright and clear, and the hills will seem to breathe the atmosphere of spring. But before noon the scene is entirely changed; dark and heavy clouds come heaving from the west, the cold wind rises to a gale, and the whole air is filled with a whirling storm of snow. And thus the sun that rose on the hills, where spring had apparently began its reign, as it sets, sees these hills re-conquered by winter, and wearing its white livery in token of vassalage. So sudden are these changes, that the birds, weather-wise as they generally are, are often taken by surprise. The blue-birds, sparrows, and robins are always in haste to get back to their birth-places, and accordingly, following the retreat of winter, come northward as fast as the season will permit. But spring and winter are, in March, like two armies, constantly contending—one prevailing one day, and the next day giving way before the other. In these skirmishes of the seasons the birds we mention are often involved, and it is not seldom that they are glad to escape to the south, till the conflict of the elements is over, and the triumphant reign of spring is established.
Nor are the birds alone in suffering from the capricious tricks of the month of March. It sometimes happens that a Vermont farmer, tempted by the solid snow-path, and the appearance of steady cold weather, sets out with his one-horse sleigh upon a journey of a hundred miles, to Boston. Though it is perhaps the middle of March, still the traveller’s sleigh glides along as if upon a railroad, and in two days he reaches Boston. Here he spends a day or two, and then sets out to return. But what a change has come over the scene! The wind has veered from north-west to south-west; the snow is melting and running in rills down the hill-sides, and every time the horse steps, he is up to his knees in sposh. The traveller with his sleigh plods on, but, after a severe day’s work, he advances in his journey but twenty miles. The next day the snow is entirely gone, and he is obliged to proceed on foot, as you see him in the preceding picture, his weary horse dragging the sleigh over the grating mud and stones. After five days of toil he reaches his home, and has the comfort to be met by his wife and all his neighbors, exclaiming, with a jeer, “I told you so!”
But although March has thus acquired a character that is not the best in the world, there are some pleasant things to be said about it. William Howitt, who takes a cheerful view of almost everything in nature, admits that “March is a rude and sometimes boisterous month, possessing many of the characteristics of winter;”—“yet,” he adds, “it awakens sensations, perhaps, more delicious than the two following spring months, for it gives us the first announcement and taste of spring.”
Bryant too—our own poet, and one of the sweetest that ever sung—finds something pleasant to say of March; a pretty good proof that nothing is wanting but good humor to render a person always able to find something agreeable to talk about. See how truly and yet how pleasantly Bryant describes this capricious month:—
The stormy March has come at last,