Gala-Days | Page 5

your trunk and pitch into
Vesuvius, if you like. I won't stand in your way."

His acquiescence was ungraciously, and I believe I may say
ambiguously, expressed; but it mattered little, for I gathered up my
goods and chattels, strapped them into my trunk, and waited for the
summer to send us on our way rejoicing,--the gentle and gracious
young summer, that had come by the calendar, but had lost her way on
the thermometer. O these delaying Springs, that mock the
merry-making of ancestral England! Is the world grown so old and
stricken in years, that, like King David, it gets no heat? Why loiters,
where lingers, the beautiful, calm-breathing June? Rosebuds are bound
in her trailing hair, and the sweet of her garments always used to waft a
scented gale over the happy hills.
"Here she was wont to go! and here! and here! Just where the daisies,
pinks, and violets grow; Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk! But like the soft
west-wind she shot along; And where she went the flowers took
thickest root, As she had sowed them with her odorous foot."
So sang a rough-handed, silver-voiced, sturdy old fellow, harping
unconsciously the notes of my lament, and the tones of his sorrow wail
through the green boughs today, though he has been lying now these
two hundred years in England's Sleeping Palace, among silent kings
and queens. Fair and fresh and always young is my lost maiden, and
"beautiful exceedingly." Her habit was to wreathe her garland with the
May, and everywhere she found most hearty welcome; but May has
come and gone, and June is still missing. I look longingly afar, but
there is no flutter of her gossamer robes over the distant hills. No white
cloud floats down the blue heavens, a chariot of state, bringing her
royally from the court of the King. The earth is mourning her absence.
A blight has fallen upon the roses, and the leaves are gone gray and
mottled. The buds started up to meet and greet their queen, but her
golden sceptre was not held forth, and they are faint and stunned with
terror. The censer which they would have swung on the breezes, to
gladden her heart, is hidden away out of sight, and their own hearts are
smothered with the incense. The beans and the peas and the tasselled
corn are struck with surprise, as if an eclipse had staggered them, and
are waiting to see what will turn up, determined it shall not be

themselves, unless something happens pretty soon. The tomatoes are
thinking, with homesick regret, of the smiling Italian gardens, where
the sun ripened them to mellow beauty, with many a bold caress, and
they hug their ruddy fruit to their own bosoms, and Frost, the
cormorant, will grab it all, since June disdains the proffered gift, and
will not touch them with her tender lips. The money-plants are growing
pale, and biting off their finger-tips with impatience. The marigold
whispers his suspicion over to the balsam-buds, and neither ventures to
make a move, quite sure there is something wrong. The scarlet
tassel-flower utterly refuses to unfold his brave plumes. The Zinnias
look up a moment, shuddering with cold chills, conclude there is no
good in hurrying, and then just pull their brown blankets around them,
turn over in their beds, and go to sleep again. The morning-glories rub
their eyes, and are but half awake, for all their royal name. The
Canterbury-bells may be chiming velvet peals down in their dark
cathedrals, but no clash nor clangor nor faintest echo ripples up into my
Garden World. Not a bee drones his drowsy song among the flowers,
for there are no flowers there. One venturesome little phlox dared the
cold winds, and popped up his audacious head, but his pale, puny face
shows how near he is to being frozen to death. The poor birds are
shivering in their nests. They sing a little, just to keep up their spirits,
and hop about to preserve their circulation, and capture a bewildered
bug or two, but I don't believe there is an egg anywhere round. Not
only the owl, but the red-breast, and the oriole, and the blue-jay, for all
his feathers, is a-cold. Nothing flourishes but witch-grass and
canker-worms. Where is June?--the bright and beautiful, the warm and
clear and balm-breathing June, with her matchless, deep, intense sky,
and her sunshine, that cleaves into your heart, and breaks up all the
winter there? What are these sleety fogs about? Go back into the
January thaw, where you belong! What have the chill rains, and the raw
winds, and the dismal, leaden clouds, and all these flannels and furs to
do with June,