he had words of sun and wind and dew, so lightsome were they, ardent and joyous, with a swift movement--as though writ by one who remembered gathering ‘musherooms’ in a sun-sweet dawn after a night of heavy dews, in company with another who laughed often in gladness and was dearest and fairest of all dear and fair things. ‘Howbeit,’ he added, after sorrowing that ‘many doe feare these goodly musherooms as poysonis dampe weedes,’ ‘this dothe in nowise abate the exceedynge excellence of Goddes providence that out of the grasse and dewe where nothing was, and where onlie the lytell worme turned in his sporte, come as at the shakynge of bells these delicate meates.’ Then, after some old-world lore about ‘the wayes of nature with beastes and byrdes’ in this month, he goes further afield. ‘And this monthe,’ he says, ‘is the monthe of dreames, and when there is a darke (or secret) fyre in the heartes of poetes, and when the god of Love is fierce and tyrannick in imaginings and dreames, and they doe saye in deedes also, yett not after the midwaye of the monthe; butt whye I know not.’ We hear so much of the poet-loved and poet-sung month of May, and the very name of June is sweet as its roses and white lilies and lavender, that it is become a romantic convention to associate them with ‘dreames’ and the ‘tyrannick’ season of ‘the god of Love.’ But I am convinced that the old Elizabethan or Jacobean naturalist was right. May and June are months of joy, but September is the month of ‘dreames’ and ‘darke fyre.’ Ask those who love nature as the poet is supposed to love her, with something of ecstasy perhaps, certainly with underglow of passion: ask those in whom the imagination is as a quickening and waning but never absent flame: ask this man who travels from month to month seeking what he shall never find, or this woman whose memories and dreams are many, howsoever few her hopes ... and the chance will be that if asked to name the month of the heart’s love, it will be September. I do not altogether know why this should be so, if so it is. There is that in June which has a time-defying magic: May has her sweet affinities with Spring in the human heart: in April are the flutes of Pan: March is stormy with the clarions of the winds: October can be wild with all wildness or be the calm mirror of the passing of the loveliness of the green-world. There is not a month that has not its own signal beauty, so that many love best February, because through her surge of rains appear days of blue wonder, with the song of the missel-thrush tost like spray from bare boughs--or November, because in the grey silence one may hear the fall of the sere leaves, and see mist and wan blueness make a new magic among deserted woods--or January, when all the visible world lies in a white trance, strange and still and miraculous as death transfigured to a brief and terrible loveliness on the face of one suddenly quiet from the fever of youth and proud beauty.