And somehow, now that, comfortably replete with luncheon, I approach my epilogue, now it is in my mind to make verses rather than to discourse in sober and reasonable prose. But I lack any matter, too, that plainly prompts to versifying. So I somewhat vacantly consider the trees which stand about my library window. At this season they have put off their nakedness, but the green of their leaves has not yet come to its full volume. The leaves are sallow and infrequent. They dapple a luminous gray sky with much the effect of germs seen under a microscope. The grass in the long field beyond is pale and sodden: for I regard all this in a gray shining pause between the heavy spring rains. The world, in preparing to be very beautiful, is for the while disheveled looking: and it suggests to me, without any stepping stones of exact analogy, a handsome woman defamatorily clad in a shabby green dressing-gown, poised before her mirror, with her hair already partially loosened in order that she may prepare for a festival. It is a fine festival for which the world makes ready. It is a pageant and a banqueting that will feed all the senses, and will last for months, until the white winds of November come, like gaunt janitors, to remove the furniture and decorations. Life everywhere will burgeon and exult, and bear fruit, and wane peacefully. I mean not only grasses and bushes and trees. There will be a great barking of dogs, and cats also will make the warm night vocal. And birds too will cry out in the night, as if amazed and wistful, and that crying will be very piercingly sweet and, for no reason at all, pathetic. There will be lambs, and foals, and calves, with amateurishly constructed legs. And of course the young people--But I wonder about those young people! There is upon them a bland hard innocence, like the gloss of white china. It is slippery, and it ever so lightly chills. Yet it does seem, essentially, innocence. I recall, with a wealth of ancient instances, that my own generation, where it went unchaperoned, was remarkably unhampered by innocence: and I wonder if my own generation was like this in the presence of our elders? I do not remember; I feel that nobody could hope to remember a thing so far away: and it is in my mind to make verses.