IT is not long since, here among all these folk in London, I should have held myself of no account whatever, but should have stood aside and made them way thinking that they, perhaps, had more right than I--for who was I? Now I see them just the same, and watch them. But of what account do I hold them? Especially the young women. I look at them as they dart and flash before the shops, like wagtails on the edge of a pool. If I pass them close, or any man, like sharp, slim wagtails they flash a little aside pretending to avoid us; yet all the time calculating. They think that we adore them--alas, would it were true! Probably they think all men adore them, howsoever they pass by. What is it, that, from their faces fresh as spring, such fair, fresh, alert, first-flower faces, like lavender crocuses, snowdrops, like Roman hyacinths, scyllas and yellow-haired hellebore, jonquils, dim anemones, even the sulphur auriculas, flowers that come first from the darkness, and feel cold to the touch, flowers scentless or pungent, ammoniacal almost; what is it, that, from the faces of the fair young women comes like a pungent scent, a vibration beneath that startles me, alarms me, stirs up a repulsion? They are the issue of acrid winter, these first- flower young women; their scent is lacerating and repellant, it smells of burning snow, of hot-ache, of earth, winter-pressed, strangled in corruption; it is the scent of the fiery-cold dregs of corruption, when destruction soaks through the mortified, decomposing earth, and the last fires of dissolution burn in the bosom of the ground. They are the flowers of ice-vivid mortification, thaw-cold, ice-corrupt blossoms, with a loveliness I loathe; for what kind of ice-rotten, hot-aching heart must they need to root in! _CRAVING FOR SPRING_ I WISH it were spring in the world. Let it be spring! Come, bubbling, surging tide of sap! Come, rush of creation! Come, life! surge through this mass of mortifica- tion! Come, sweep away these exquisite, ghastly first- flowers, which are rather last-flowers! Come, thaw down their cool portentousness, dissolve them: snowdrops, straight, death-veined exhalations of white and purple crocuses, flowers of the penumbra, issue of corruption, nourished in mortification, jets of exquisite finality; Come, spring, make havoc of them! I trample on the snowdrops, it gives me pleasure to tread down the jonquils, to destroy the chill Lent lilies; for I am sick of them, their faint-bloodedness, slow-blooded, icy-fleshed, portentous. I want the fine, kindling wine-sap of spring, gold, and of inconceivably fine, quintessential brightness, rare almost as beams, yet overwhelmingly potent, strong like the greatest force of world-balancing.