green, and flaunted proudly in gorgeous robes of gold and crimson. The
blushing rose once more sought the thorny stem that had slept so long
desolate; and the changeful-hued touch-me-not looked up smilingly from
the pallid grass, where nestled thousands of purple violets peeping
out timidly from their shady nooks; and the waning year smiled--smiled
as smiles the dying man, when the life-blood quickens in his veins,
for almost the last time to linger on the cheek and lip, brighten in
the eye, and give a joyous swell to the heart that lies in ruins. The
gorgeous pageant went by, and the trees put on their robes of
mourning--anon, tossed their huge branches to the sky, leafless and
desolate, save where the ivy, creeping gracefully up the twisted
trunk, or the sacred mistletoe, luxuriant on the dying bough, wore a
fadeless green amidst the desolations that surrounded them. The clear,
unsullied sky assumed a deeper, peculiar blue; the night reigned with
a clearer, intenser brilliancy, and the thronging stars beamed with an
almost unnatural brightness; the cold, hurrying winds awoke from their
sluggishness, and took their way over hill and meadow with a dismal
tone, like the midnight howl that comes to the ear of the dying with
hideous tales of the noisome grave; and the fleecy mass of trooping
clouds, driving wildly before every ice-winged impulse of the wintry
storm, seemed like sheets of floating snow dotting the vast cerulean.
Still another change--the earth was clad in a robe of spotless ermine,
and the gray dawn opened her pale eye on iciness and desolation; men
hurried to and fro as nature were a plague, and they its victims; the
sparkling, tripping, garrulous brooks, whose sweet voices had so long
gone up like a spirit's on the air, now sped their way with a faint
and death-like gurgle; the laurel, pine, and cedar, disdaining to be
poor pensioners on the bounties of a gushing sunshine, or, with a
cringing obsequiousness, to yield conformity to the golden mutations
of a passing hour, expanded their foliage of living green, unchanged
amidst the bleakest ruins of winter, while the stern-browed year, old,
wrinkled, and hoary, drew nearer and nearer his death-time. Ere long
spring came. As the grim darkness flees before the many-tinted dawn,
until at last she stands blushing upon the eastern horizon in perfect
beauty, so fled the stern winter before the radiant footsteps of this
flower-goddess. At her approach the wooing s