inspirations to clean and sweet lives, calling to mind the lines of Wordsworth:

In rocky fields and hillsides and dry open woods, the dwarf everlasting (Antennaria plantaginifolia) with its silvery-white little florets set in delicate cups, is one of the first species of the great composite family to bloom. We take it from between the rocks and think of those lines of Tennyson, which John Fiske declared to be among the deepest thoughts ever uttered by poet:

Even more innocent, fresh and fair, is the bloodroot, with its snowy petals, golden center and ensanguined root-stock which crimsons the fingers that touch it. This is the herb, so the legend says, which the Israelites in Egypt dipped in sacrificial blood to mark their doorposts. As long ago as last November we dug up one of the papery sheaths and found the flower, then about a half inch long, snugly wrapped in its single leaf; and now the pale green leaf has pushed up and unfolded, showing the fragile flower in all its beauty.

Strange contrasts we see in some of these April flowers. Some of them open their star-like eyes for a day or two and dot the floor of the woods with beauty and then their little contribution to the spring is done and they are seen no more until another year. They bring us beauty and sweetness and then they pass from us, like the sweet and childish but perfect lives we all have known and loved. In contrast to such as these there is the Jack-in-the-pulpit of the April woods which has no floral envelope of beauty, no fragrance, no inspiration, so busy is it storing up its swollen fortunes down in the bank, leaving behind it a tuber so rank and tainted that even the Indians couldn’t eat it until they had first roasted it, then ground it into powder, and finally made it into a kind of bread. But sordid-lived accumulators, herbaceous and human, have been with us since the world began. Laban was a monopolist of pretty daughters and fine live stock, and Theocritus, in his day, was moved to say that “Money is monarch and Master,” and to exclaim:

Toward the end of the month, when the gelatinous masses in the water courses have developed the little black dots sufficiently so that we can see they are tadpoles, when the songsters have been joined by the catbird, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the woodthrush, the whippoorwill, the cheerful and friendly chewink and several of the warblers and flycatchers, the rivers and creeks will be fringed with the brilliant yellow of the marsh marigold, and we shall think of Shakespeare, walking the meadows of Avon, getting material for that song of the musicians in Cymbeline:

And meanwhile the violet, which was among the plants sacred to Aphrodite, was also appealing to this master poet, who was born this month, as were Wordsworth, George Herbert, John Keble, Anthony Trollope, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, and who died this month as did Edward Young, who wrote Night Thoughts, and Abraham Lincoln, who freed a race and saved a nation. Who can ever forget the month of Lincoln’s death after he has once read that exquisite description of an April day and the song of the hermit thrush, written by Whitman to commemorate the funeral of his friend?

The violets have been especially loved by the poets. Theocritus placed them foremost in his coronals and put them into Thyrsis’s song of Daphnis’s fatal constancy. Chaucer had them in his garlands, and Spenser’s “flock of nymphes” gather them “pallid blew” in a meadow by the river side. In Percy’s Reliques they are the “violets that first appear, by purple mantles known.” Milton allows Zephyr to find Aurora lying “on beds of violet blue.” Shakespeare places them upon Ophelia’s grave and says they are “sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes.” Wordsworth, Tennyson, and all our own poets have loved them.

But we have lingered too long among our flowers and thoughts in the April woods. The filmy haze which veiled the sun has thickened into threatening clouds, and as we look across the meadow to where the silver blue haze rested on the delectable mountain in the morning we see instead the rain-fringe, veiling and obscuring the landscape. The wind has died to a dead calm and the river is still. As the shower comes nearer the whole landscape is shrouded in an ever darkening gray and presently big round drops splash upon the surface of the river. In a moment we are surrounded by the rain. How beautiful is the first spring rain! It does not run down the slope as in the winter when the ground was frozen, but the thirsty earth seems eager to drink every drop. The unfolding leaves of the shrubs are bathed in it and the tender firstlings of the flowers are revelling in it. It dims the singing of the birds, but the robins and the meadow larks carol on and the spring music of the frogs in the nearby pond has not yet ceased.

What makes the raindrops round? And why are the drops at the beginning of the shower much larger than those which follow? We do not know. Perhaps it is well. Walt Whitman says that “you must not know too much or be too scientific about these things.” He holds that a little indefiniteness adds to the enjoyment, a hazy borderland of thought as it were, like that which rests in April mornings on enchanted highlands away across the river, which we have never yet—as Thoreau says—“tarnished with our feet.”

And, anyway, before we can reason it out, the rain has ceased and the last rays of the descending sun come through an opening in the clouds in that beautiful phenomenon known as a “sunburst.’ The white beams come diagonally through the moisture-laden air, as if in a good-night smile to