arch
That stands beside the door.

"There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.

. . . . . . . . .

"Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth;
It is the hour of feeling.

"One moment now may give us more
Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season."

It is the simplicity of such lines, like the naked branches of the
trees or the unclothed fields, and the spring-like depth of feeling and
suggestion they hold, that make them so appropriate to this season.

At this season I often find myself repeating these lines of his also:--

"My heart leaps up, when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it, when my life began;
So is it, now I am a man;
So be it, when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!"

Though there are so few good poems especially commemorative of the
spring, there have no doubt been spring poets,--poets with such newness
and fullness of life, and such quickening power, that the world is
re-created, as it were, beneath their touch. Of course this is in a
measure so with all real poets. But the difference I would indicate may
exist between poets of the same or nearly the same magnitude. Thus, in
this light Tennyson is an autumnal poet, mellow and dead-ripe, and was
so from the first; while Wordsworth has much more of the spring in him,
is nearer the bone of things and to primitive conditions.

Among the old poems, one which seems to me to have much of the charm
of springtime upon it is the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. The
songs, gambols, and wooings of the early birds are not more welcome
and suggestive. How graceful and airy, and yet what a tender, profound,
human significance it contains! But the great vernal poem, doubly so in
that it is the expression of the springtime of the race, the boyhood of
man as well, is the Iliad of Homer. What faith, what simple wonder,
what unconscious strength, what beautiful savagery, what magnanimous
enmity,--a very paradise of war!

Though so young a people, there is not much of the feeling of spring
in any of our books. The muse of our poets is wise rather than joyous.
There is no exces