_Tristo._ “No. While I allow that these early gales of spring, which breathe life and vigor into all the rest of animated nature, unbrace _our_ nerves, and through those media of sensation, lower the tone, and lessen the elasticity of the feelings, yet, for the main cause would I look deeper--even in the mind. There are certain periods, as we all know, when we are _forced to reflect_. Such periods are, every serious change in the world without--the recurrence of a birth-day, or the revisiting of home; and sometimes the sight of a long-neglected volume, through whose pages I have strayed in pleasant intercourse with an absent, or a buried friend, has brought paleness to my lip, and sadness to my heart. And such an occasion, preeminently, are the early days of spring; for spring (as the Germans say) is the cradle-time of the year.” _Apple._ “The calendar, though, says otherwise. But go on.” _Tristo._ “Then are we summoned to look forward to _another_ year, with hopes less wild and free than they were at the commencement of the last; and we look backward, also, with a longer and a sadder retrospect: and you know, Apple, that the memory of a student is but a shadowy maze, where the forms, which, in _prospect_, were gilded with glory, and girded with magnificence, to his _backward_ gaze, seem airy nothings, or shapes, palpable, indeed, but unsightly--fiends, mocking at the vanity of his hopes, and the folly of his grief. And thus the bland breath of the reviving year becomes, through the mysterious principle of association, an instrument of keenest anguish to the sensitive mind. This annual birth of nature is a mile-stone, that notches our progress from the cradle to the grave: the figures are surrounded by bloom and greenness, but they are graven by the finger of Death.” _Apple._ “I think such brilliant days make us feel _too_ well.” _Tristo._ “They do. They kindle sensations too delightful for continuance--our systems are too coarse, too frail--it seems as if an electric finger were laid invisibly upon each shrinking nerve--a balm circumfuses and permeates the heart, strange, ecstatic, overpowering. The change, too, is often so abrupt as to cause an unpleasant revulsion--the process (so far as regards the action of the mind) is not unlike that by which we pass from the stern winter of our existence here, to the bright and unending summer of the future life.” _Apple._ “Well, Tristo, though I could not succeed in making you merry, you have well nigh rendered me as sad as yourself. And Quod and Pulito have stopped their wrangling to listen to your melancholy.” _Pulito._ “Yes, Tristo, you are unwontedly depressed to-night, and Dumpling has scarcely made a _pun_ since we came together. However, the coffee is ready, that will revive you both.”