S These Summer Visitations UMMER makes hasty brief calls on spring, and not many of them, either, this year. She hurries in at the edge of a northeaster, says howdy, and is gone before we fairly recognize her. But each time something happens to the face of Nature; a new lot of flowers take advantage of the sunshine and smile at her invitation; a new flight of birds suddenly arrives, and at the same time the beetles and the worms and the caterpillars, getting about their own business, provide food for the songsters, thus getting translated into a higher order of being, which they could reach in no other way so quickly. This is one of the seasons Hosea Biglow speaks of: "For half our May's so awfully like Mayn't 'Twould rile a Shaker, or an evrige saint." And yet who would have it otherwise, for the beauty of it?-the very delays enhance its loveliness. Things of desire attained are never so sweet in fulfilment; and May is the charmer because she evades us, and leaves us while giving her promise. Were man to manage the progress, we well know how he would do it; everything all at once would be perfect, and run on time, like a railroad. So should we lose this enticing delay, and the grace of surprise would be wanting that grace which, turning the coign of a ledge, reveals the gay columbine dancing in the light airs : "With a gypsy beauty free and fine." For now the columbine is happy in the sunny woodland, and its slender roots in the mere dry clefts of the rocks sustain a burden of beauty so rich that one marvels to see such results from a footing that seems so precarious. Just a few root-threads in a rift barely enough to contain them, and here is this wonderful flower, nodding, yellow and red, on its slight, sturdy stem, with its beautiful sunlighted leaves, so perfectly wrought to sustain it. Also the anemones are out in their benign modesty, the rue and the wood anemones, and the pretty star flower their kin. The hepatica's season has passed,-it also was once called anemone, and indeed one easily recognizes its kindred in the singular changeable beauty of the rue anemone's satiny petals, besprinkled with silver, surrounding its yellow anthered stamens around its five pistils with their starry stigmas. But while the hepatica has gone on to fruit, its twin on wings, the hepatica butterfly, its very counterfeit in blue and lavender colours, still flits through the woodland ways, and seems to be searching for the flower it fellows. This miraculous creature, the very psyche of the hepatica, still links May to April, and keeps alive the continuous sympathy of Nature. Now is the infinite delicacy of the spring merging into summer, and something is lost, day by day, of the subtleties of colour, which yet are magical enough, as the gray birches, the tasseled poplars, the aspens, the pink or crimson oaks, the bronze tints of hickories and the pendulous sugar maple blooms emphasize the hillsides. Now, too, the sassafras is blossoming in pale old gold, on the hillsides, and there is in the swamps all the bloom of the dainty cassandra, drooping its heathery bells over the edge of the waters. To view any scene in Nature now is to feel the beauty of that slow advance by which in our clime one season melts into another, and hard and fast lines are avoided. There are no such lines in all Nature. The edges of a flower and of a mountain alike indicate something beyond; the sharp outline is only true of man's structures, and of these, if they get age enough, it ceases to be true. Time makes a castle or abbey in England a piece of the landscape; time more quickly adopts into its age the barns and houses of our countryside. All outlines close up and tone down and soften, till a stone wall or a rail fence becomes as much a part of the landscape as the original rocks or the trees from which the fence-rails were made. And the old houses, when they were raised in the human pride of their possessors they were intrusive, no doubt; but now they take their place with dignity as children by adoption. In this there is an analogue of the whole course of Nature; and rightly, for all things are in the scope of the infinite life which pervades all that man is or does, all that this earth or the universes are and do, which "fills and bounds, connects and equals all." MAY SONG Within her springy copses hid Wakes slowly the dear life of earth, Each blossom as it opes its lid Englories its enchanting birth,— Sweet is the bud, and rich amid The springing green the blossom's worth. The world smiles on the ardent day; That coaxes all the birds to sing. |