over the earth each spring, while the flowers broke forth under her
tread over the brown moors, and the birds welcomed her with song;
when, according to Olaus Magnus, the Goths and South Swedes had, on
the return of spring, a mock battle between summer and winter, and
welcomed the returning splendour of the sun with dancing and mutual
feasting, rejoicing that a better season for fishing and hunting was
approaching? To those simpler children of a simpler age, in more
direct contact with the daily and yearly facts of Nature, and more
dependent on them for their bodily food and life, winter and spring
were the two great facts of existence; the symbols, the one of death,
the other of life; and the battle between the two--the battle of the
sun with darkness, of winter with spring, of death with life, of
bereavement with love--lay at the root of all their myths and all
their creeds. Surely a change has come over our fancies. The
seasons are little to us now. We are nearly as comfortable in winter
as in summer, or in spring. Nay, we have begun, of late, to grumble
at the two latter as much as at the former, and talk (and not without
excuse at times) of 'the treacherous month of May,' and of 'summer
having set in with its usual severity.' We work for the most part in
cities and towns, and the seasons pass by us unheeded. May and June
are spent by most educated people anywhere rather than among birds
and flowers. They do not escape into the country till the elm hedges
are growing black, and the song-birds silent, and the hay cut, and
all the virgin bloom of the country has passed into a sober and
matronly ripeness--if not into the sere and yellow leaf. Our very
landscape painters, till Creswick arose and recalled to their minds
the fact that trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few but
brown autumnal scenes. As for the song of birds, of which in the
middle age no poet could say enough, our modern poets seem to be
forgetting that birds ever sing.