Colin he bow’d and blush’d, then said,
Will you, sweet maid, this first of May
Begin the dance by Colin led,
To make this quite his holiday?
Sylvia replied, I ne’er from home
Yet ventur’d, till this first of May;
It is not fit for maids to roam,
And make a shepherd’s holiday.
It is most fit, replied the youth,
That Sylvia should this first of May
By me be taught that love and truth
Can make of life a holiday.
Lady Craven.
“We call,” says Mr. Leigh Hunt—“we call upon the admirers of the good and beautiful to help us in ‘rescuing nature from obloquy.’ All you that are lovers of nature in books,—lovers of music, painting, and poetry,—lovers of sweet sounds, and odours, and colours, and all the eloquent and happy face of the rural world with its eyes of sunshine,—you, that are lovers of your species, of youth, and health, and old age,—of manly strength in the manly, of nymph-like graces in the female,—of air, of exercise, of happy currents in your veins,—of the light in great Nature’s picture,—of all the gentle spiriting, the loveliness, the luxury, that now stands under the smile of heaven, silent and solitary as your fellow-creatures have left it,—go forth on May-day, or on the earliest fine May morning, if that be not fine, and pluck your flowers and your green boughs to adorn your rooms with, and to show that you do not live in vain. These April rains (for May has not yet come, according to the old style, which is the proper one of our climate), these April rains are fetching forth the full luxury of the trees and hedges;—by the next sunshine, all ‘the green weather,’ as a little gladsome child called it, will have come again; the hedges will be so many thick verdant walls, the fields mossy carpets, the trees clothed to their finger-tips with foliage, the birds saturating the woods with song. Come forth, come forth.”[120]
This was the great rural festival of our forefathers. Their hearts responded merrily to the cheerfulness of the season. At the dawn of May morning the lads and lasses left their towns and villages, and repairing to the woodlands by sound of music, they gathered the May, or blossomed branches of the trees, and bound them with wreaths of flowers; then returning to their homes by sunrise, they decorated the lattices and doors with the sweet-smelling spoil of their joyous journey, and spent the remaining hours in sports and pastimes. Spenser’s “Shepherd’s Calendar” poetically records these customs in a beautiful eclogue:—
Youths folke now flocken in every where
To gather May-buskets, and smelling breere;
And home they hasten, the postes to dight,
And all the kirke pillers, ere daylight,
With hawthorne buds, and sweet eglantine,
And girlonds of roses, and soppes in wine.
* * * * *
Siker this morrow, no longer ago,
I saw a shole of shepheards outgo
With singing and showting, and jolly cheere;
Before them yode a lustie tabrere,
That to the meynie a hornepipe plaid,
Whereto they dauncen eche one with his maide.
To see these folkes make such jovisaunce,
Made my hart after the pipe to daunce.
Tho’ to the greene-wood they speeden them all,
To fetchen home May with their musicall:
And home they bringen, in a royall throne,
Crowned as king; and his queen attone
Was Ladie Flora, on whom did attend
A faire flock of faeries, and a fresh bend
Of lovely nymphs. O, that I were there
To helpen the ladies their May-bush beare.