Some Spring Days in Iowa | Page 6

of pretty
daughters and fine live stock,[TN-2] and Theocritus, in his day, was
moved to say that "Money is monarch and Master," and to exclaim:
Fools, what gain is a world of wealth in your houses lying? Wise men
deem that in that dwells not true pleasure of riches, But to delight one's
soul.... Only the muses grant unto mortals a guerdon of glory; Dead
men's wealth shall be spent by the quick that are heirs to their riches.
Toward the end of the month, when the gelatinous masses in the water
courses have developed the little black dots sufficiently so that we can
see they are tadpoles, when the songsters have been joined by the
catbird, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the woodthrush, the whippoorwill,
the cheerful and friendly chewink and several of the warblers and
flycatchers, the rivers and creeks will be fringed with the brilliant
yellow of the marsh marigold, and we shall think of Shakespeare,
walking the meadows of Avon, getting material for that song of the
musicians in Cymbeline:
And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes.
And meanwhile the violet, which was among the plants sacred to
Aphrodite, was also appealing to this master poet, who was born this
month, as were Wordsworth, George Herbert, John Keble, Anthony

Trollope, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, and who died this month
as did Edward Young, who wrote Night Thoughts, and Abraham
Lincoln, who freed a race and saved a nation. Who can ever forget the
month of Lincoln's death after he has once read that exquisite
description of an April day and the song of the hermit thrush, written
by Whitman to commemorate the funeral of his friend?
The violets have been especially loved by the poets. Theocritus placed
them foremost in his coronals and put them into Thyrsis's song of
Daphnis's fatal constancy. Chaucer had them in his garlands, and
Spenser's "flock of nymphes" gather them "pallid blew" in a meadow
by the river side. In Percy's Reliques they are the "violets that first
appear, by purple mantles known." Milton allows Zephyr to find
Aurora lying "on beds of violet blue." Shakespeare places them upon
Ophelia's grave and says they are "sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes."
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and all our own poets have loved them.
* * * * *
But we have lingered too long among our flowers and thoughts in the
April woods. The filmy haze which veiled the sun has thickened into
threatening clouds, and as we look across the meadow to where the
silver blue haze rested on the delectable mountain in the morning we
see instead the rain-fringe, veiling and obscuring the landscape. The
wind has died to a dead calm and the river is still. As the shower comes
nearer the whole landscape is shrouded in an ever darkening gray and
presently big round drops splash upon the surface of the river. In a
moment we are surrounded by the rain. How beautiful is the first spring
rain! It does not run down the slope as in the winter when the ground
was frozen, but the thirsty earth seems eager to drink every drop. The
unfolding leaves of the shrubs are bathed in it and the tender firstlings
of the flowers are revelling in it. It dims the singing of the birds, but the
robins and the meadow larks carol on and the spring music of the frogs
in the nearby pond has not yet ceased.
What makes the raindrops round? And why are the drops at the
beginning of the shower much larger than those which follow? We do
not know. Perhaps it is well. Walt Whitman says that "you must not

know too much or be too scientific about these things." He holds that a
little indefiniteness adds to the enjoyment, a hazy borderland of thought
as it were, like that which rests in April mornings on enchanted
highlands away across the river, which we have never yet--as Thoreau
says--"tarnished with our feet."
And, anyway, before we can reason it out, the rain has ceased and the
last rays of the descending sun come through an opening in the clouds
in that beautiful phenomenon known as a "sunburst.'[TN-3] The white
beams come diagonally through the moisture-laden air, as if in a
good-night smile to the tender flowers and buds.
Warming with the sunshine and watering with the showers--that is Miss
April making her flower garden grow.

MAY--PERFECTION OF BEAUTY

V. MAY--PERFECTION OF BEAUTY
Among the changing months May stands confessed The sweetest and in
fairest colors dressed. --THOMSON.
Surely the poet sang truly. We would not forget Lowell's challenge
"What is so rare as a day in June," but as we sit here on the top of a
limestone cliff nearly a hundred feet above