And meanwhile the violet, which was among the plants sacred to Aphrodite, was also appealing to this master poet, who was born this month, as were Wordsworth, George Herbert, John Keble, Anthony Trollope, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, and who died this month as did Edward Young, who wrote _Night Thoughts_, and Abraham Lincoln, who freed a race and saved a nation. Who can ever forget the month of Lincoln's death after he has once read that exquisite description of an April day and the song of the hermit thrush, written by Whitman to commemorate the funeral of his friend? The violets have been especially loved by the poets. Theocritus placed them foremost in his coronals and put them into Thyrsis's song of Daphnis's fatal constancy. Chaucer had them in his garlands, and Spenser's "flock of nymphes" gather them "pallid blew" in a meadow by the river side. In Percy's _Reliques_ they are the "violets that first appear, by purple mantles known." Milton allows Zephyr to find Aurora lying "on beds of violet blue." Shakespeare places them upon Ophelia's grave and says they are "sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes." Wordsworth, Tennyson, and all our own poets have loved them. * * * * * But we have lingered too long among our flowers and thoughts in the April woods. The filmy haze which veiled the sun has thickened into threatening clouds, and as we look across the meadow to where the silver blue haze rested on the delectable mountain in the morning we see instead the rain-fringe, veiling and obscuring the landscape. The wind has died to a dead calm and the river is still. As the shower comes nearer the whole landscape is shrouded in an ever darkening gray and presently big round drops splash upon the surface of the river. In a moment we are surrounded by the rain. How beautiful is the first spring rain! It does not run down the slope as in the winter when the ground was frozen, but the thirsty earth seems eager to drink every drop. The unfolding leaves of the shrubs are bathed in it and the tender firstlings of the flowers are revelling in it. It dims the singing of the birds, but the robins and the meadow larks carol on and the spring music of the frogs in the nearby pond has not yet ceased. What makes the raindrops round? And why are the drops at the beginning of the shower much larger than those which follow? We do not know. Perhaps it is well. Walt Whitman says that "you must not know too much or be too scientific about these things." He holds that a little indefiniteness adds to the enjoyment, a hazy borderland of thought as it were, like that which rests in April mornings on enchanted highlands away across the river, which we have never yet--as Thoreau says--"tarnished with our feet."