There are times in England, when the merry month of May is not, as it would now appear, merely a poet’s fiction; when the air is indeed mild and balmy, and the more conspicuously so, that it succeeds the furious gusts and driving hail-storms of the boisterous March, the fickle sunshine and capricious rains of April. One of these singular epochs in the history of weather it was, in which events occurred which remained unforgotten for many a day in the green wilds of Charnwood Forest. It was upon a soft, sweet morning, toward the latter end of the month, and surely nothing more delicious could have been conceived by the fancy of the poet. The low west wind was fanning itself among the tender leaves of the new-budded trees, and stealing over the deep meadows, all redolent with dewy wild flowers, waving them with a gentle motion, and borrowing a thousand perfumes from their bosoms; the hedgerows were as white with the dense blossoms of the hawthorn, as though they had been powdered over by an untimely snow-storm, while everywhere along the wooded banks, the saffron primrose and its sweet sister of the spring, the violet, were sunning their unnumbered blossoms in the calm warmth of the vernal sunshine. The heavens, of a pure transparent blue, were laughing with a genial lustre, not flooded by the dazzling glare of midsummer, but pouring over all beneath their influence a lovely, gentle light, in perfect keeping with the style of the young scenery, and all the air was literally vocal with the notes of innumerable birds, from the proud lark, “rejoicing at heaven’s gate,” to the thrush and blackbird, trilling their full, rich chants from every dingle, and the poor linnet, piping on the spray. Nothing—no, nothing—can be imagined that so delights the fancy with sweet visions, that so enthrals the senses, shedding its influences even upon the secret heart, as a soft old-fashioned May morning. Apart from the mere beauties of the scenery, from the mere enjoyment of the bright skies, the dewy perfumes that float on every breeze, the mild, unscorching warmth—apart from all these, there is something of a deeper and a higher nature in the thoughts called forth by the spirit of the time—a looking forward of the soul to fairer things to come, an excitement of a quiet hope within, not very definite perhaps, nor easily explained, but one which almost every man has felt, and contrasted with the languid and pallid satiety produced by the full heat of summer, and yet more with the sober and reflective sadness that steals upon the mind as we survey the russet hues and the sere leaves of autumn. It is as if the newness, the fresh youth of the season, gave birth to a corresponding youth of the soul. Such are the sentiments which many men feel now-a-days, besides the painter and the poet and the soul-rapt enthusiast of nature; but those were iron days of which we write, and men spared little time to thought from action or from strife, nor often paused to note their own