of the other year meanly
grudged us, a poet, flown with the acceptance of a quarter-page lyric by
the real editor in the Study next door, came into the place where the
Easy Chair sat rapt in the music of the elevated trains and the vision
of the Brooklyn Bridge towers. "Era la stagione nella quale la rivestita
terra, piu che tutto l' altro anno, si mostra bella," he said, without
other salutation, throwing his soft gray hat on a heap of magazines and
newspapers in the corner, and finding what perch he could for himself on
the window-sill.

"What is that?" he of the Easy Chair gruffly demanded; he knew perfectly
well, but he liked marring the bloom on a fellow-creature's joy by a
show of savage ignorance.

"It's the divine beginning of Boccaccio's 'Fiammetta,' it is the very
soul of spring; and it is so inalienably of Boccaccio's own time and
tongue and sun and air that there is no turning it into the language of
another period or climate. What would you find to thrill you in, 'It was
the season in which the reapparelled earth, more than in all the other
year, shows herself fair'? The rhythm is lost; the flow, sweet as the
first runnings of the maple where the woodpecker has tapped it, stiffens
into sugar, the liquid form is solidified into the cake adulterated
with glucose, and sold for a cent as the pure Vermont product."

As he of the Easy Chair could not deny this, he laughed recklessly. "I
understood what your passage from Boccaccio meant, and why you came in
here praising spring in its words. You are happy because you have sold a
poem, probably for more than it is worth. But why do you praise spring?
What do you fellows do it for? You know perfectly well that it is the
most capricious, the most treacherous, the most delusive, deadly,
slatternly, down-at-heels, milkmaid-handed season of the year, without
decision of character or fixed principles, and with only the vaguest
raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and streaming eyes.
If it did not come at the end of winter, when people are glad of any
change, nobody could endure it, and it would be cast neck and crop out
of the calendar. Fancy spring coming at the end of summer! It would not
be tolerated for a moment, with the contrast of its crude, formless
beauty and the ripe loveliness of August. Every satisfied sense of
happiness, secure and established, would be insulted by its haphazard
promises made only to be broken. 'Rather,' the outraged mortal