Rise up the mistress of this house, with gold along your breast, For the summer springs so fresh, green, and gay; And if your body be asleep, we hope your soul's at rest, Drawing near to the merry month of May. God bless this house and harbor, your riches and your store, For the summer springs so fresh, green, and gay; We hope the Lord will prosper you, both now and evermore, Drawing near to the merry month of May. The frequent allusions of the earlier English poets to "doing May observance," or the "rite of May," show us how all ranks of society, in their time, were still animated by the spirit of those primitive faiths to which we owe much of our sensibility to natural impressions. Milton himself, though a Puritan, appears to approve the usages of the season, and even employs the ancient feminine impersonation of the maternal tenderness and bounty of nature, invoking the month: The flow'ry May, who from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose. Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire Mirth and youth, and warm desire; Woods and groves are of thy dressing, Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing. Thus we salute thee with our early song, And welcome thee, and wish thee long. Time, and the changes of taste, have at last proved too strong for the persistency of custom; the practices by which blooming youth expressed its sympathy with the bloom of the year have perished, taking with them much of the poetry of the season, and that inherited sentiment which was formerly the possession of the ignorant as well as of the cultivated class. IV. _THE INVENTIVENESS OF CHILDREN._ In the days of childhood new, When Time had years and ours were few, Here on grassy fields at play, Ran we this, the other way; On this very meadow-ground First violets found, Where the cattle graze to-day. _Minnesinger, 13th Century._ The student of popular traditions is accustomed to recognize the most trifling incidents of a tale, or the phrases of a song, as an adaptation of some ancient or foreign counterpart, perhaps removed by an interval of centuries. It is the same with rhymes of the sort included in this collection, in which formulas of sport, current in our own day and in the New World, will be continually found to be the legacy of other generations and languages. Should we then infer that childhood, devoid of inventive capacity, has no resource but mechanical repetition?