ts exceeding
I will bear with willing cheer,
All thy precepts heeding.

Lo, the lion, king of beasts,
Spares the meek and lowly;
Toward submissive creatures he
Tames his anger wholly.
Do the like, ye powers of earth,
Temporal and holy!
Bitterness is more than's right
When 'tis bitter solely.

XIV.

Having been introduced to the worshipful order of vagrants both in
their collective and in their personal capacity, we will now follow
them to the woods and fields in spring. It was here that they sought
love-adventures and took pastime after the restraints of winter.

The spring-songs are all, in the truest sense of the word,
_lieder_--lyrics for music. Their affinities of form and rhythm are
less with ecclesiastical verse than with the poetry of the Minnesinger
and the Troubadour. Sometimes we are reminded of the French
_pastourelle_, sometimes of the rustic ditty, with its monotonous
refrain.

The exhilaration of the season which they breathe has something of the
freshness of a lark's song, something at times of the richness of the
nightingale's lament. The defect of the species may be indicated in a
single phrase. It is a tedious reiteration of commonplaces in the
opening stanzas. Here, however, is a lark-song.

WELCOME TO SPRING.

No. 6.

Spring is coming! longed-for spring
Now his joy discloses;
On his fair brow in a ring
Bloom empurpled roses!
Birds are gay; how sweet their lay!
Tuneful is the measure;
The wild wood grows green again,
Songsters change our winter's pain
To a mirthful pleasure.

Now let young men gather flowers,
On their foreheads bind them,
Maidens pluck them from the bowers,
Then, when they have twined them,
Breathe perfume from bud and bloom,
Where young love reposes,
And into the meadows so
All together laughing go,
Crowned with ruddy roses.

Here again the nightingale's song, contending with the young man's
heart's lament of love, makes itself heard.

THE LOVER AND THE NIGHTINGALE.

No. 7.

These hours of spring are jolly;
Maidens, be gay!
Shake off dull melancholy,
Ye lads, to-day!
Oh! all abloom am I!
It is a maiden love that makes me sigh,
A new, new love it is wherewith I die!

The nightingale is singing
So sweet a lay!
Her g