ance is more considered than this poet's, and that
no one is more immediately responsible than he. We must attribute to the
most subtile and profound consciousness the power that can trace with
such tenderness and beauty the alliance he has shown between earth and
humanity in the exultation of spring, and which can make matter of
intellectual perception the mute sympathies that seemed to perish with
childhood:--

"The pebble loosened from the frost
Asks of the urchin to be tost.
In flint and marble beats a heart,
The kind Earth takes her children's part,
The green lane is the school-boy's friend,
Low leaves his quarrel apprehend,
The fresh ground loves his top and ball,
The air ring's jocund to his call,
The brimming brook invites a leap,
He dives the hollow, climbs the steep."

Throughout the poem these recognitions of our kindred with external
nature occur, and a voice is given to the blindly rejoicing sense within
us when the poet says,

"The feet that slid so long on sleet
Are glad to feel the ground"

and thus celebrates with one potent and satisfying touch the instinctive
rapture of the escape from winter. Indeed, we find our greatest pleasure
in some of these studies of pure feeling, while we are aware of the
value of the didactic passages of the poem, and enjoy perfectly the high
beauty of the pictorial parts of it. We do not know where we should
match that strain beginning,

"Why chidest thou the tardy spring?"

Or that,

"Where shall we keep the holiday,
And duly greet the entering May?"

Or this most delicate and exquisite bit of description, which seems
painted _a tempera_,--in colors mixed with the transparent blood of
snowdrops and Alpine harebells:--

"See, every patriot oak-leaf throws
His elfin length upon the snows,
Not idle, since the leaf all day
Draws to the spot the solar ray,
Ere sunset quarrying inches down,
And half-way to the mosses brown:
While the grass beneath the rime
Has hints of the propitious time,
And upward pries and perforates
Through the cold slab a hundred gates,
Till green lances, piercing through,
Bend happy in the welkin blue."

There is not great range of sentiment in "May-Day," and through all the
incoherence of the poem there is a constant recurrence to the
master-theme. This recurrence has at times something of a perfunctory
air, and the close of