December is here--one of those mild cheery days, however, when you can hardly realise that the boughs are indeed bare, and the beds flowerless, and the Spring birds far away;--one of those days which tempt you out into the garden, to saunter and loiter there, and look at the patches that will be snowdrops soon, and to think longingly of leaves where you had before naturally and as of course acquiesced in the canopy of bare boughs;--a day on which you--at least _I_--do not care to go beyond the garden. To me it seems a peaceful, and far from gloomy, churchyard. Like a spire that tall, ancient, ivy-clothed spruce-fir stands out of the shrubbery; here, near it, the gay laburnum tresses lie buried; here the pink apple-blossom crumbled into dust; each round bed along the lawn is sacred to the memory of some choice rose; the violets sleep under that high wall--the lilies, tall, white, stately, but dead and gone--claim remembrance from each side of the walk; the geraniums, verbenas, heliotropes, petunias, have their cemetery in those dark beds on the smooth sward, and each flower has some spot specially or generally consecrated to it. The memory of my old friends and companions has a tender charm for me, and I look at the stripped rose-twigs, and at the brown mould where the flowers were, with a faint halo of that feeling which is keen at the heart, when we pace among the mounds that hide the dust of friends. There is promise everywhere, I know, and the naked twigs are strung with germs of future leaves, and there are next year’s flowers sleeping at the heart of the rose. But I rather cling to any relic of the past, than care just now to look forward; and I hail this lingering arrested bud with the buff-yellow petals, or this half-shattered pure white blossom, as belonging to the sweet array of the dead flowers. True, I accept this cluster of the winter-cherry, leaning forward on to the path, an orange globe in a golden network; and the unfolding buds of the Christmas rose,--as being a link between the past and the future. But my thoughts slant backwards now, as I look upon the setting sun of the year; nor am I, in this mood, regarding it from the point that it will rise again all fresh and new to-morrow. No, I am not now concerned with the lovely wealth of leaves and flowers, the new year’s dower,--so soon all spent,--so soon all spent;--I am now of a mind to muse under the “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”