Spring.
Lo! where the rosy bosom’d hours,
Fair Venus’ train appear,
Disclose the long expected flowers,
And wake the purple year!
The attic warbler pours her throat,
Responsive to the cuckoo’s note,
The untaught harmony of spring:
While whispering pleasure as they fly,
Cool zephyrs through the clear blue sky
Their gathered fragrance fling.
Where’er the oak’s thick branches stretch
A broader, browner shade;
Where’er the rude and moss-grown beech
O’er-canopies the glade,
Beside some water’s rushy brink
With me the muse shall sit, and think
(At ease reclined in rustic state)
How vain the ardour of the crowd,
How low how little are the proud,
How indigent the great!
Still is the toiling hand of care;
The panting herds repose:
Yet hark, how through the peopled air
The busy murmur glows!
The insect youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the honied spring,
And float amid the liquid noon:
Some lightly o’er the current skim,
Some slow, their gayly-gilded trim
Quick-glancing to the sun.
To Contemplation’s sober eye
Such is the race of man:
And they that creep and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.
Alike the busy and the gay
But flutter through life’s little day
In fortune’s varying colours drest.
Brushed by the hand of rough mischance;
Or chill’d by age, their airy dance
They leave in dust to rest.
Methinks I hear in accents low
The sportive kind reply;
“Poor moralist! and what art thou?
A solitary fly!
Thy joys no glittering female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,
No painted plumage to display:
On hasty wings thy youth is flown;
Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone—
We frolic while ’tis May.”
Gay.
Then, too, a bard of the preceding centuries introduces “the Shepherd’s Holiday,” the day we now memorialize, with nymphs singing his own sweet verses in “floral games.”
Nymph 1.
Thus, thus begin, the yearly rites
Are due to Pan on these bright nights,
His morn now riseth, and invites
To sports, to dances, and delights:
All envious, and profane away,
This is the shepherd’s holiday.