yes for a day or two and dot the floor of the woods
with beauty and then their little contribution to the spring is done and
they are seen no more until another year. They bring us beauty and
sweetness and then they pass from us, like the sweet and childish but
perfect lives we all have known and loved. In contrast to such as these
there is the Jack-in-the-pulpit of the April woods which has no floral
envelope of beauty, no fragrance, no inspiration, so busy is it storing
up its swollen fortunes down in the bank, leaving behind it a tuber so
rank and tainted that even the Indians couldn't eat it until they had
first roasted it, then ground it into powder, and finally made it into a
kind of bread. But sordid-lived accumulators, herbaceous and human, have
been with us since the world began. Laban was a monopolist of pretty
daughters and fine live stock,[TN-2] and Theocritus, in his day, was
moved to say that "Money is monarch and Master," and to exclaim:

_Fools, what gain is a world of wealth in your houses lying?
Wise men deem that in that dwells not true pleasure of riches,
But to delight one's soul....
Only the muses grant unto mortals a guerdon of glory;
Dead men's wealth shall be spent by the quick that are heirs to
their riches._

Toward the end of the month, when the gelatinous masses in the water
courses have developed the little black dots sufficiently so that we can
see they are tadpoles, when the songsters have been joined by the
catbird, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the woodthrush, the whippoorwill,
the cheerful and friendly chewink and several of the warblers and
flycatchers, the rivers and creeks will be fringed with the brilliant
yellow of the marsh marigold, and we shall think of Shakespeare, walking
the meadows of Avon, getting material for that song of the musicians in
Cymbeline:

_And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes._

And meanwhile the violet, which was among the plants sacred to Aphrodite,
was also appealing to this master poet, who was born this month, as were
Wordsworth, George Herbert, John Keble, Anthony Trollope, David Hume, and
Edward Gibbon, and who died this month as did Edward Young, who wrote
_Night Thoughts_, and Abraham Lincoln, who freed a race and saved a
nation. Who can ever forget the month of Lincoln's death after he has
once read that exquisite description of an April day and the song of the
hermit thrush, written by Whitman t