and the gray dawn opened her pale eye on iciness and desolation; men hurried to and fro as nature were a plague, and they its victims; the sparkling, tripping, garrulous brooks, whose sweet voices had so long gone up like a spirit's on the air, now sped their way with a faint and death-like gurgle; the laurel, pine, and cedar, disdaining to be poor pensioners on the bounties of a gushing sunshine, or, with a cringing obsequiousness, to yield conformity to the golden mutations of a passing hour, expanded their foliage of living green, unchanged amidst the bleakest ruins of winter, while the stern-browed year, old, wrinkled, and hoary, drew nearer and nearer his death-time. Ere long spring came. As the grim darkness flees before the many-tinted dawn, until at last she stands blushing upon the eastern horizon in perfect beauty, so fled the stern winter before the radiant footsteps of this flower-goddess. At her approach the wooing south-winds swept downward from their sky-built thrones, and stooping to the hill-tops, laid their soft fingers on the expanding buds, stealing a fragrance, and whispering their heaven-taught melody amongst the gnarled old branches; then crept stealthily into the valleys below, and drinking in their rich gush of pleasant sounds, glided back exulting to their high communion. The merry-voiced waters, freed from their icy fetters, and sparkling like a sheet of silver sheen, went dancing and leaping on--on with a winged impetuosity to their ocean home. Anon, the yellow violets shook off their winter slumbers, and opened their smiling cups to the arrowy sunshine; then came a wealth of painted flowers, and soon the life-breathing spring had attained its zenith. A thousand glad voices rose and swelled amid the forest's leaf-wrought canopy; its breezes were awake with spicy odors, and the bird warbled as life were new, and this creation's morn. In the orchards, the peach-trees were glorious with pink blossoms, sprinkling the tall, waving grass with rosy flakes at every gush of the wooing zephyr, which, laden with sweetness, swept sighing across the meadows.