Up, then, children! we will go, Where the blooming roses grow; In a joyful company, We the bursting flowers will see; Up, your festal dress prepare! Where gay hearts are meeting, there May hath pleasures most inviting, Heart, and sight, and ear, delighting; Listen to the bird’s sweet song, Hark! how soft it floats along. Courtly dames! our pleasures share; Never saw I May so fair: Therefore, dancing will we go, Youths rejoice! the flow’rets blow! Sing ye! join the chorus gay! Hail this merry, merry May! Book of the Months. We give some further extracts, which poets, at different periods, have sung in praise of the merry month of May: [Illustration: a group of women and children watch birds flying against a backdrop of a rainbow] Happy the age, and harmless were the dayes (For then true love and amity was found) When every village did a May-pole raise, And Whitsun-ales and May-games did abound: And all the lusty younkers in a rout, With merry lasses daunced the rod about; Then friendship to their banquet bid the guests, And poore men fared the better for their feasts. Pasquil’s Palinodia, 1634. From the moist meadow to the withered hill, Led by the breeze, the vivid verdure runs, And swells, and deepens, to the cherished eye. The hawthorn whitens; and the juicy groves Put forth their buds, unfolding by degrees, Till the whole leafy forest stands displayed In full luxuriance. Thomson. Each hedge is covered thick with green, And where the hedger late hath been, Young tender shoots begin to grow, From out the mossy stumps below. But woodmen still on Spring intrude, And thin the shadow’s solitude, With sharpened axes felling down, The oak-trees budding into brown; Which, as they crash upon the ground, A crowd of laborers gather round, These mixing ’mong the shadows dark, Rip off the crackling, staining bark; Depriving yearly, when they come, The green woodpecker of his home; Who early in the Spring began, Far from the sight of troubling man, To bore his round holes in each tree, In fancy’s sweet security; Now startled by the woodman’s noise, He wakes from all his dreamy joys. Clark.