s, for whom the
modest contrasts of nature are not enough; and you may hear the black and
green of the parks praised for this same immoderate effect of colour. But
the grass has nothing to tell that tale of the London winter which the
branch tells; it is this year's; it has no past; it is innocent, and
answerable to the sun for merely its few inches of simple green. It might
be supposed to have the graces of an alien in London. But it has them not
at all; it comes up a Londoner. You cannot be really intimate with it; and
when it puts up its little flower, and your child brings it home to you
hot from a clenched hand, even then it has nothing, nothing whatever, of
the fields. You put it into water to flatter the child, but even there,
given by that little alien hand, and so isolated from its park and its
railings, it is unmistakably the grass of its own soil; it manifestly
could never have been romping with little young dandelions on the side of
a village road, or tossed by visiting winds scented with meadows.

The London spring is a good thing, but it is another thing. It is only
because of the accident by which the real spring and the London spring
appear at the same time of the year that they have come to bear the same
name, and even to be confused together by the insensitive. A handful from
the hedgerows twenty miles away--a handful, already half faded, of mingled
things at random, grass and herbs, not free from traces of white and warm
rustic dust--an authentic little heap from the real spring, would show at
once to all apprehensive eyes what the difference really is. And yet there
must be careless or worldly birds that do not know it. Otherwise we should
not hear such songs from the remotest river-sides sung within Kensington
Gardens. Let no one pretend, however, that the bees are deceived or
indifferent.

Nor let it be said that the difference is superficial. That is precisely
untrue; it is the likeness that is superficial, and the difference
essential. The London spring is a brilliant image of the real spring. It
is fresh when the real April is fresh; and when it grows dim you could
match it with specimens from the country wayside. Nay, soot and smoke
themselves cannot disguise the real spring growth and make it look like
the London. That can easily be proved. After two weeks in which you are
unconvinced of May by the green and dazzling parks, you will get the very
thrill of May from a square yard of very young n