Spring. Here, where the tall plantation firs Slope to the river, down the hill, Strange impulses—like vernal stirs— Have made me wander at their will. I see, with half-attentive eyes, The buds and flowers that mark the Spring, And Nature’s myriad prophecies Of what the Summer suns will bring. For every sense I find delight— The new-wed cushat’s murmurous tones, Young blossoms bursting into light, And the rich odour of the cones. The larch, with tassels purple-pink, Whispers like distant falling brooks; And sun-forgotten dewdrops wink Amid the grass, in shady nooks. The breeze, that hangs round every bush, Steals sweetness from the tender shoots, With, here and there, a perfumed gush From violets among the roots. See—where behind the ivied rock Grow drifts of white anemonies, As if the Spring—in Winter’s mock— Were mimicking his snows with these. The single bloom yon furzes bear Gleams like the fiery planet Mars:— The creamy primroses appear In galaxies of vernal stars;— And, grouped in Pleiad clusters round, Lent-lilies blow—some six or seven;— With blossom-constellations crown’d, This quiet nook resembles Heaven. THOMAS HOOD. Inside Canton. The mere notion that I was in possession of a room _inside Canton_—with freedom to wander through every quarter of that hitherto mysterious city, of which former travellers had only conveyed a notion from glances taken from the White Cloud Mountain, revealing nothing but an expanse of tiles and trees, with a pagoda-top or two, and a few mandarin flag-poles—was sufficient to banish anything like sleep. And apart from this constant wondering at perpetually finding myself where I was—the sharp “_tung_” of the mosquitoes before settling down for their gory banquet, the calls of the French and English bugles answering each other from the five-storied pagoda to the joss-house barracks, the terribly breathless atmosphere, and the grim, gigantic Chinese gods, who sat in the moonlight like pantomime ogres round my chamber, were quite enough to have kept one awake, and would have done so even if a genius had descended to read a paper on Art, which they might have discussed with him afterwards. At last the quickly-rising tropical sun fired a ray like a shell into my eyes through a broken pane in the mother-of-pearl window of my joss-haunted room. This drove me out of bed, or, rather, off my matting, as quickly as though a real shrapnell had hissed its intention of immediately exploding beneath me. For this fearful sun of a Canton summer falls in red-hot death upon the European whose brain it can reach. Our soldiers were struck down before it in the White Cloud expedition as though a crane had dropped a woolsack on their heads.