HAT time is left far behind us (as much as tried to believe that the days were really . shadowed out the undefined chairs, bath, table;-how uninviting it made the plunge into the day appear, if you lay for a minute to think about it! And when-the struggling half-light gaining ground sufficiently to bar the drawn blind, and give it a blue look in the yellow candle-light-you thought yourself in duty bound to extinguish that flame, itself beginning to look ill at ease, sickly, and out of place, and you then drew up the blind, and tried to imagine that daylight had returned, H what a chill, crude, unripened daylight this was and how difficult to part your hair by it! At eight, just as you were leaving the room, the real thing would sometimes come; and out of some rosy broken bits on the horizon, the sun, made of two halves, bigger below and smaller above, and unnaturally elongated, would emerge, and flood the room with a mellow orange glory. It was then, however, but How-d'ye-do, and Goodbye-you had to go downstairs, and he to ascend, into that great bank of cloud canopying the whole heaven, out of that narrow strip of clear sky in which for a quarter of an hour only he should reign gloriously. You could not help staying a few minutes to greet him; but you had just opened the window, and there were some twelve degrees of frost, and your fingers did ache to a degree that awoke a passion for that great goodhumoured fire which you knew awaited you in the dining-room. So, until that was reached, animal enjoyment of the morning could not be said to have begun. How different now; now that a quarter of the year has gone, and that sweet April is with us again! How the generous sunbeams are flooding the room when the hour comes for rising! How the first noisy awakening twitter of the birds, the tuning of the concert, has subsided in a measure, and some clear solo voice is giving praise for the thickening hedges and the fledging trees. And every morning makes a difference in the limes and elms which you see from your window; and every day there is some progress to be noted after breakfast in the garden: the curved slender emerald loops of the second crop of peas are breaking the brown loose mould here and there; the dusky green of the ash-leaf kidneys is to be irregularly detected over the beds; long parellel bars of mustard and cress please your eye; the radishes (how those birds get at them!) are appearing under the net; a narrow examination reveals a dull limp fringe commencing along the onion lines. Pleasant, all this is; but, when you have indulged the children by going with them "just to look at our gardens," you must go in to work. April days, sweet April days! in truth, it is difficult to settle to steady work when the first one or two real Spring days are here. "Make haste, your morning task resign, -thus the opening warmth and brightness and song seem to invite you. But some graver matters demand your attention, and the study chair must not wait for you in vain, nor be vacated till these are dismissed. However, I have sometimes drawn my chair into the bowwindow, and now and then, between the intervals of reading, looked up for a restful space of dreamy enjoyment. This is not a plan to be recommended, if steady reading be your object; but if there be time to "Feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness," a sweet healthful recreation lurks in thus, for some few quarters of an hour, giving up our minds to "Drink at every pore The spirit of the season." |