Young men kindle heart’s desire;
    You may liken them to fire: 
    Old men frighten love away
    With cold frost and dry decay.

A roundelay, which might be styled the Praise of May or the exhortation to be liberal in love by The Example of the Rose, shall follow.

THE EXAMPLE OF THE ROSE.

No. 9.

Winter’s untruth yields at last,
Spring renews old mother earth;
Angry storms are overpast,
Sunbeams fill the air with mirth;
Pregnant, ripening unto birth,
All the world reposes.

Our delightful month of May,
Not by birth, but by degree,
Took the first place, poets say;
Since the whole year’s cycle he,
Youngest, loveliest, leads with glee,
And the cycle closes.

From the honours of the rose
They decline, the rose abuse,
Who, when roses red unclose,
Seek not their own sweets to use;
’Tis with largess, liberal dues,
That the rose discloses.

Taught to wanton, taught to play,
By the young year’s wanton flower,
We will take no heed to-day,
Have no thought for thrift this hour;
Thrift, whose uncongenial power
Laws on youth imposes.

Another song, blending the praises of spring with a little pagan vow to Cupid, has in the original Latin a distinction and purity of outline which might be almost called Horatian.

THE VOW TO CUPID.

No. 10.

    Winter, now thy spite is spent,
    Frost and ice and branches bent! 
    Fogs and furious storms are o’er,
    Sloth and torpor, sorrow frore,
    Pallid wrath, lean discontent.

    Comes the graceful band of May! 
    Cloudless shines the limpid day,
    Shine by night the Pleiades;
    While a grateful summer breeze
    Makes the season soft and gay.

    Golden Love I shine forth to view! 
    Souls of stubborn men subdue! 
    See me bend! what is thy mind? 
    Make the girl thou givest kind,
    And a leaping ram’s thy due!

    O the jocund face of earth,
    Breathing with young grassy birth! 
    Every tree with foliage clad,
    Singing birds in greenwood glad,
    Flowering fields for lovers’ mirth!

Nor is the next far below it in the same qualities of neatness and artistic brevity.

A-MAYING.

No. 11.

    Now the fields are laughing; now the maids
    Take their pastime; laugh the leafy glades: 
        Now the summer days are blooming,
        And the flowers their chaliced lamps for love illuming. 
    Fruit-trees blossom; woods grow green again;
    Winter’s rage is past:  O ye young men,
        With the May-bloom shake off sadness! 
        Love is luring you to join the maidens’ gladness.