When wake the violets, Winter dies;
When sprout the elm-buds, Spring is near;
When lilacs blossom, Summer cries,
“Bud, little roses!  Spring is here!”]

The windows blush with fresh bouquets,
Cut with the May-dew on their lips;
The radish all its bloom displays,
Pink as Aurora’s finger-tips.

Nor less the flood of light that showers
On beauty’s changed corolla-shades,—­
The walks are gay as bridal bowers
With rows of many-petalled maids.

The scarlet shell-fish click and clash
In the blue barrow where they slide;
The horseman, proud of streak and splash,
Creeps homeward from his morning ride.

Here comes the dealer’s awkward string,
With neck in rope and tail in knot,—­
Rough colts, with careless country-swing,
In lazy walk or slouching trot.

—­Wild filly from the mountain-side,
Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
Lend me thy long, untiring stride
To seek with thee thy western hills!

I hear the whispering voice of Spring,
The thrush’s trill, the cat-bird’s cry,
Like some poor bird with prisoned wing
That sits and sings, but longs to fly.

Oh for one spot of living green,—­
One little spot where leaves can grow,—­
To love unblamed, to walk unseen,
To dream above, to sleep below!

CHAPTER IX

[Aqui esta encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcias.

If I should ever make a little book out of these papers, which I hope you are not getting tired of, I suppose I ought to save the above sentence for a motto on the title-page.  But I want it now, and must use it.  I need not say to you that the words are Spanish, nor that they are to be found in the short Introduction to “Gil Blas,” nor that they mean, “Here lies buried the soul of the licentiate Pedro Garcias.”

I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes referring to old age.  I must be equally fair with old people now.  They are earnestly requested to leave this paper to young persons from the age of twelve to that of fourscore years and ten, at which latter period of life I am sure that I shall have at least one youthful reader.  You know well enough what I mean by youth and age;—­something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it.

I am growing bolder as I write.  I think it requires not only youth, but genius, to read this paper.  I don’t mean to imply that it required any whatsoever to talk what I have here written down.  It did demand a certain amount of memory, and such command of the English tongue as is given by a common school education.  So much I do claim.  But here I have related, at length, a string of trivialities.  You must have the imagination of a poet to transfigure them.  These little colored patches are stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.