s or extravagance or unruliness in her. There are
spring sounds and tokens in Emerson's "May-Day:"--

"April cold with dropping rain
Willows and lilacs brings again,
The whistle of returning birds,
And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
The scarlet maple-keys betray
What potent blood hath modest May,
What fiery force the earth renews,
The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;
What joy in rosy waves outpoured
Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord."

But this is not spring in the blood. Among the works of our young
and rising poets, I am not certain but that Mr. Gilder's "New Day" is
entitled to rank as a spring poem in the sense in which I am speaking.
It is full of gayety and daring, and full of the reckless abandon of
the male bird when he is winning his mate. It is full also of the
tantalizing suggestiveness, the half-lights and shades, of April and
May.

Of prose poets who have the charm of the springtime upon them, the best
recent example I know of is Bjoernson, the Norwegian romancist. What
especially makes his books spring-like is their freshness and sweet good
faith. There is also a reticence and an unwrought suggestiveness about
them that is like the promise of buds and early flowers. Of Turgenieff,
the Russian, much the same thing might be said. His stories are simple
and elementary, and have none of the elaborate hair-splitting and forced
hot-house character of the current English or American novel. They
spring from stronger, more healthful and manly conditions, and have a
force in them that is like a rising, incoming tide.

VI OUR RURAL DIVINITY

I wonder that Wilson Flagg did not include the cow among his
"Picturesque Animals," for that is where she belongs. She has not the
classic beauty of the horse, but in picture-making qualities she is far
ahead of him. Her shaggy, loose-jointed body; her irregular, sketchy
outlines, like those of the landscape,--the hollows and ridges, the
slopes and prominences; her tossing horns, her bushy tail, tier swinging
gait, her tranquil, ruminating habits,--all tend to make her an object
upon which the artist eye loves to dwell. The artists are forever
putting her into pictures, too. In rural landscape scenes she is
an important feature. Behold her grazing in the pastures and on the
hillsides, or along banks of streams, or ruminating under wide-spreading
trees, or standing belly-deep in