T

In Mid-May

HE swift advances of the summer are depriving us of the tender, delicate, gra

cious qualities of the spring. Too suddenly, if not too soon, the full greens of the summer are beginning to shade our streets, and those tentative tints of the trees are overtaken and overborne by the full chlorophyll rushing from the earth and drinking in the vapours of the sky. Earth is in haste to be ready for June. The apple trees are blossoming, it is the apple year; the pears are coming out, the cherries of cultivation are going by, but the wild cherries are all in great beauty; the shadblow has shed its lightsome petals, and now the lilacs are full of fragrance and charm. And a little way out of the city, where the forest remnants exist, where the snow lingered longer and the frosts were slower in loosing hold, the red and sugar maples are now in beautiful bloom, the poplars in their several fellowships are harmonizing the woodland, and the great family of the oaks are adding richer

colours of exceeding tenderness. The oaks, with their long patience and prospect, are in no hurry about leafing, as the shorter-lived deciduans are. The scrub oak is now one of the most attractive ornaments of the plain lands, and one resents the name, for while the husbandman may find this oak a scrub, it should be called rather the shrub, or the bush oak, for such is its manner of growth. It is delightful to find a member of the majestic family of the oaks condescending to lesser stature and common fellowship with the wayside willows, the hazels, the alders and the sumachs. In truth, it is only our false notions of importance which make such distinctions; in Nature all are of equal character and rank.

The season of appearance which we call spring has been so cautious, considerate and dilatory that still there lingers on shaded slopes beneath the pines the arbutus; still the hepatica-flower of April-is in bloom in the woodland; and the skunk cabbage, though now swelling those great green leaves which give it its proper name, has not yet done with the hooded blossoms of the earliest spring. Now are the anemones in bloom, and the first of our lilies, the adder-tongue, is making splendid many a knoll in pasture and meadow. This is one of the flowers that gets civilized out of our parks, as the skunk cabbage

does, and as the arbutus does, and indeed almost every wild flower, by the constant meddling of the park improvers. There is no flower more lovely and more delightful than the erythronium -this adder-tongue lily-but it must be let alone. Now the cassandra and the andromeda are blooming in the swamps, and all around their borders the magical rosy purple rhodora is aflame, and in the edges of damp woods the gold-thread sends up from its beautiful green vine that runs underground its bright starry blossoms. The wakerobin and the painted trillium, its fellow, are now opening in the woods ;-the lovely corydalis is in bloom on the mountain, its favourite home the seams in the venerable ledges where the ages have lodged bits of soil; there is budding the strange and forbidding flowerage of the poison ivy; and the bright yellow rocket and pretty zizia, the earliest of the parsleys, are in that stage. Note, too, the strong growth of the plants that are to bear those sturdy democracies, the asters and goldenrods, every apparent flower really a community of equals, and many hundreds of such communities gregarious in the fields and by the roadsides, making confederacies of beauty in their later days, when all the delicate graces which live so briefly now are without evidence, and hundreds of others, the riper riches of the summer, have bloomed

and are gone. Then comes the season of these honest, social families.

The loveliness of spring is that which most surely appeals to all. It is release from captivity, it is rising from death, it is promise and expectancy, it is hope, immortally beauteous and precious, the star of the future dawn gleaming against the blackness of the cloudy past. So for ages since man first rhymed the poets have declared, saying for the rest of us what we cannot so well say for ourselves. But there is also something pathetic and even melancholy in spring, since after all, these charming and cheering tokens are of the moment, and the season's secret burden is

evanescence.

"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
Bridal of earth and sky,

The dews shall weep thy fall to-night,
For thou must die."

"Like to the grass that's newly sprung,
Or like a tale that's new begun,
Or like the bird that's here to-day,
Or like the pearled dew of May.
Or like an hour, or like a span,
Or like the singing of a swan,—
E'en such is man, who lives by breath,
Is here, now there, in life and death,—
The grass it withers, the tale is ended,
The bird is flown, the dew's ascended,

The hour is short, the span is long,

The swan's near death-Man's life is done."

More native to spring are these broodings the brevity of earth than even to autumn, if one considers closely. For much of this sweet promise can have no fulfilment; whereas as the fall draws on apace, and the harvests are made, the fruits brought in, we witness the accomplished results of the energy of Nature and the labour of man; it is achieved, the year's growth and service, and the sustenance of all things and creatures from least to highest won once more from the earth.

It is one mood of man to doubt most when most is promised, to question most when most is asserted, to apprehend storm when skies are fairest, and ruin when omens favour. 'Tis this mood, as often as the mood of defeat and discouragement, which rebukes the aspiring spirit and reduces it to the weary level of the common ground. So in times when out of the winter little by little the sun lifts over the line, and the drifts that cover the highways, and send travelers out into the fields over rocks and stumps and fences in order to get along at all,-begin to shrink and lay bare the true roads and expose the nature of the makeshifts, then the worry and work are the hardest, and the change is the slowest to come. Yet it always comes.