“Over the hills of April, With soft winds hand in hand, Impassionate and dreamy-eyed Spring leads her saraband. Her garments float and gather And swirl along the plain, Her headgear is the golden sun, Her cloak the silver rain.” But why do not the poets see and express the hyperphysical charm of the spring evenings? When the light of the vernal day has faded the stars come forth, and in the quality of their shining reduplicate and heighten the impressions left by the quickening landscapes. More than half is lost if this be missed. But perhaps this side of nature is too transcendent even for poetry. One can behold but not tell it. Emerson has come nearest to its expression, and he puts it in prose: “The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of the flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. _Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade._ Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn.” [Illustration: CHART I--THE VERNAL EVENING SKY] There was not only poetic but logical fitness in the old English custom, abandoned since 1751, of dating the opening of the year from the last week of March. How can the real birth of the year be imagined to occur when all nature is still deep in slumber under the January snows? The seasons are manifestly the children of the sun, waxing and waning with his strength, and surely that one should be reckoned the eldest which is the first birth of his vivific springtime rays. It seems remarkable that the beginning of the year in ancient times, when men felt more keenly than we do now the symbolism of natural phenomena, was not more frequently fixed at, or near, the Vernal Equinox, and I suspect some defect in our information on this subject. In Attica, George Cornewell Lewis tells us, the year began at the Summer Solstice. But this was to make the second of the sun’s seasonal offspring the senior, thus ignoring the just claim of the true heir, the season of buds. In Sparta and Macedonia, according to the same authority, the year began with the Autumnal Equinox, which was still worse, for in summer the year is at the zenith of its life, while in autumn it is already stumbling toward the tomb. In Bœotia, at Delphi, and in Bithynia they contradicted nature more decidedly, as we do to-day, by making the year begin at the Winter Solstice, when the chilled world is yet asleep. The Romans adopted this plan eventually, but it is interesting to observe that they had an older custom of beginning the year in March, which many cherished in their domestic life as well as for some legal purposes, after the lawful opening of the year had been fixed on the 1st of January.