_Night Thoughts_, and Abraham Lincoln, who freed a race and saved a
nation. Who can ever forget the month of Lincoln's death after he has
once read that exquisite description of an April day and the song of the
hermit thrush, written by Whitman to commemorate the funeral of his
friend?

The violets have been especially loved by the poets. Theocritus placed
them foremost in his coronals and put them into Thyrsis's song of
Daphnis's fatal constancy. Chaucer had them in his garlands, and
Spenser's "flock of nymphes" gather them "pallid blew" in a meadow by the
river side. In Percy's _Reliques_ they are the "violets that first
appear, by purple mantles known." Milton allows Zephyr to find Aurora
lying "on beds of violet blue." Shakespeare places them upon Ophelia's
grave and says they are "sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes."
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and all our own poets have loved them.

* * * * *

But we have lingered too long among our flowers and thoughts in the April
woods. The filmy haze which veiled the sun has thickened into threatening
clouds, and as we look across the meadow to where the silver blue haze
rested on the delectable mountain in the morning we see instead the
rain-fringe, veiling and obscuring the landscape. The wind has died to a
dead calm and the river is still. As the shower comes nearer the whole
landscape is shrouded in an ever darkening gray and presently big round
drops splash upon the surface of the river. In a moment we are surrounded
by the rain. How beautiful is the first spring rain! It does not run down
the slope as in the winter when the ground was frozen, but the thirsty
earth seems eager to drink every drop. The unfolding leaves of the shrubs
are bathed in it and the tender firstlings of the flowers are revelling