A sweet grey tint, that had begun to overspread the bare parts of the copse, is deepening into such a sapphire sheet, that our ungrateful hearts half forget or retract the regret they felt, when the fair young hazels and the tall thin ash-wands bowed in the Winter before the cruel bill. Only lately, it seems, on the way across the fields to the station, a delicate fairy mass, the light lilac of the “faint sweet cuckoo-flower,” had spread its kindly screen over the hacked and maimed stumps of the fallen wood. But the hyacinths take their place now; and, after these, we expect the bright rose of the ragged-robin; and, after these, quite a garden of tall spires of the foxglove, alternating from pale to darker red, with, rarely and preciously, a clustered sceptre of milky white. But why go on to the ragged-robin and the foxglove, later flowers of the year? Truly, there are flowers enough at this season to satisfy the most avaricious. Look but at the yellow meadows of the daffodils. “I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er dales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils, Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. “Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” So the poet; and how could he but be of a May-day heart, amid such a May wealth of flowers? It was a light, a gleam, a possession that he thenceforth held; a sweet, living landscape of the heart, a landscape alive, indeed, not only with colour and light and shade, but with ceaseless gleeful motion. “I gazed, and gazed, but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought.” No; for often, when May-days were far away, and perhaps shallow snow, streaked with patches of brown land, slanted away under a pale grey sky, even at such times that wealth and glory, and abundance of the flowers, suddenly would “Flash upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude.” And then, even in a lonely hour, a time of dulness and depression, a time when this sad life seemed saddest; in such a time even, that glad gleeful yellow landscape would come back, with something of the light and joy of a kind deed done, or a strong word said; and, amid the pale snow, and the ever-increasing depression, well can the possessor say that--then, “Then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.”