that our forefathers, in the days of Chaucer, felt the holiday-making
instinct of the spring, and that instinct has not been affected by
the lapse of the centuries. It stirs us even in London, when the
impetuous lilacs are bursting into bud, and the sooty sparrows
chirrup love-songs, and "a livelier iris changes on the burnished
dove"--or, to be more accurate, pigeon--which swells and straddles
as if Piccadilly were all his own. The very wallflowers and daffodils
which crown the costers' barrows help to weave the spell; and,
though pleasure-jaunts are out of the question, we welcome a call
of duty which takes us, even for twenty-four hours, into "the country
places, which God made and not man."

For my own part, I am no victim of the "pathetic fallacy" by which
people in all ages have persuaded themselves that Nature sympathized
with their joys and sorrows. Even if that dream had not been dispelled,
in prose by Walter Scott, and in verse by Matthew Arnold, one's
own experience, would have proved it false.

"Alas! what are we, that the laws of Nature should correspond in
their march with our ephemeral deeds or sufferings?" _The Heart
of Midlothian_.

"Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends."[*]

[Footnote *: _In Harmony with Nature_.]

A funeral under the sapphire sky and blazing sun of June loses
nothing of its sadness--perhaps is made more sad--by the unsympathetic
aspect of the visible world. December does not suspend its habitual