hts!

There is a burst for you! And we will let the poets of spring, with
their lambkins and their catkins and the rest, match this poem of
William Henley's if they can. The royal months are ours, and we love the
reign of the rose.

When the burnished tints of bronze shine on the brackens, and the
night-wind blows with a chilly moan from the fields of darkness, we
shall have precious days to remember, and, ah, when the nights are long,
and the churlish Winter lays his fell finger on stream and grass and
tree, we shall be haunted by jolly memories! Will the memories be wholly
pleasant? Perchance, when the curtains are drawn and the lamp burns
softly, we may read of bright and beautiful things. Out of doors the war
of the winter fills the roaring darkness. It may be that

Hoarsely across the iron ground
The icy wind goes roaring past,
The powdery wreaths go whirling round
Dancing a measure to the blast.

The hideous sky droops darkly down
In brooding swathes of misty gloom,
And seems to wrap the fated town
In shadows of remorseless doom.

Then some of us may find a magic phrase of Keats's, or Thomas Hardy's,
or Black's, or Dickens's, that recalls the lovely past from the dead.
Many times I have had that experience. Once, after spending the long and
glorious summer amid the weird subdued beauty of a wide heath, I
returned to the great city. It had been a pleasant sojourn, though I had
had no company save a collie and one or two terriers. At evening the
dogs liked their ramble, and we all loved to stay out until the pouring
light of the moon shone on billowy mists and heath-clad knolls. The
faint rustling of the heath grew to a wide murmur, the little bells
seemed to chime with notes heard only by the innermost spirit, and the
gliding dogs were like strange creatures from some shadowy underworld.
At times a pheasant would rise and whirl like a rocket from hillock to
hollow, and about midnight a rapturous concert began. On one line of
trees a colony of nightingales had established themselves near the heart
of the waste. First came the low inquiry from the leader; then two or
three low twittering answers; then the one long note that lays hold of
the nerves and makes the whole being quiver; and then--ah, the passion,
the pain, the unutterable delight of the heavenly jargoning when the
whole of the little choir begin their magnificent rivalry! The thought
of death is gone,