a delight to me to find a nest; a delight, if not now a rapture, an intoxication. All these I see on one Spring day or another, as I walk into my garden, or out into the changing lanes. All these I see, and all these I love. But I see them, and I love them tenderly and quietly, not with the wonder and the glee of life’s early Spring days. I am sad, partly because I know that a great deal of that old wondering ecstatic thrill has gone. “The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose, The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where’er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” It must be so, naturally, if only from the mere fact that things must lose their newness, and so their wonder, to the eye and the heart. Do what you will, you must become accustomed to things. And the scent of a hyacinth or of the may, will cease when familiar to be the wonderful enchanting thing that childhood held it to be. And the _thirtieth_ time that we see, to notice, the first snowdrop bursting through the pale green sheath above the brown bed, is a different thing from the _third_ time. We appreciate delights keenly when we are young, seek the same in later years, but never find them; and then all our life remember the search more or less regretfully. So Wordsworth, the old man, addresses the cuckoo that brought back his young days and his young thoughts by its magic voice:-- “Thou bringest unto me a tale Of visionary hours. “Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! _Even yet_ thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery: “To seek thee did I often rove Through woods and on the green; And thou wert still a hope, a love; Still longed for, never seen. “And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget _That golden time again_.” Ah well, I must get on to my moral. I must not wail like an Autumn wind among the young flowers, and the bright leaves, and the blithe songs of the sweet Spring days, else I shall lay myself open to the reproach of the poet describing one who-- “Words of little weight let fall, The fancy of the lower mind-- That waxing life must needs leave all Its best behind.” It is not true really, that we are leaving behind our best, when we have passed into the Summer, or even into the Autumn days. But there is a degree, a portion of truth in it. There is a sense, no doubt, in which even the Summer does lose a beauty which is the peculiar possession of life’s Spring days.