Or, if a lady is my listener, let her fancy me only an honest, simple-hearted fellow, whose familiarities are so innocent that she can pardon them;--taking her hand in his, and talking on; sometimes looking in her eyes, and then looking into the sunshine for relief; sometimes prosy with narrative, and then sharpening up my matter with a few touches of honest pathos;--let her imagine this, I say, and we may become the most excellent friends in the world. _SPRING;_ OR, _DREAMS OF BOYHOOD._ _DREAMS OF BOYHOOD._ _Spring._ The old chroniclers made the year begin in the season of frosts; and they have launched us upon the current of the months from the snowy banks of January. I love better to count time from spring to spring; it seems to me far more cheerful to reckon the year by blossoms than by blight. Bernardin de St. Pierre, in his sweet story of Virginia, makes the bloom of the cocoa-tree, or the growth of the banana, a yearly and a loved monitor of the passage of her life. How cold and cheerless in the comparison would be the icy chronology of the North;--So many years have I seen the lakes locked, and the foliage die! The budding and blooming of spring seem to belong properly to the opening of the months. It is the season of the quickest expansion, of the warmest blood, of the readiest growth; it is the boy-age of the year. The birds sing in chorus in the spring--just as children prattle; the brooks run full--like the overflow of young hearts; the showers drop easily--as young tears flow; and the whole sky is as capricious as the mind of a boy. Between tears and smiles, the year, like the child, struggles into the warmth of life. The old year--say what the chronologists will--lingers upon the very lap of spring, and is only fairly gone when the blossoms of April have strown their pall of glory upon his tomb, and the bluebirds have chanted his requiem. It always seems to me as if an access of life came with the melting of the winter's snows, and as if every rootlet of grass, that lifted its first green blade from the matted _debris_ of the old year's decay, bore my spirit upon it, nearer to the largess of Heaven. I love to trace the break of spring step by step: I love even those long rain-storms, that sap the icy fortresses of the lingering winter,--that melt the snows upon the hills, and swell the mountain-brooks,--that make the pools heave up their glassy cerements of ice, and hurry down the crashing fragments into the wastes of ocean.