From a Convalescent's Window

— Yellow and white are the trimmings of spring’s green livery. The early violets excepted, almost every flower that blows is either yellow, as the dandelion and the cowslip, or white, as the dogwood, the bloodroot, and the fruit-tree blossoms. Another year, another life ! Last sitting I penetrated the woods for dogwood and cowslip, and waded through dewy field-grass after apple-blossoms; to-day I make myself glad with the memory of them, and take what I can see of spring from a window.

Lovely as the spring flowers are, each and all, the homely daffodil below my window claims a first place in my affections, because of all the childish gladness it stands for to me. One must attain to middle age, or something near it, before one begins to take a really fond delight in recollections of childhood. Why it is that we find a deep pleasure in such memories I hardly know, but to be sure that we were happy once with the careless joy of a healthy and beloved child is undoubtedly a pleasant thought in after life ; there is in it something consolatory for the trouble and loss that later years have brought us.

At the back of the country house which was my childhood’s home, at the farther side of the lawn, stretched a shrubbery, masking the garden fence; and there, in the shelter of the taller bushes, grew a host of daffodils, narcissus, and snowdrops. The yellow daffodil, pushing aside the encumbrance of last year’s dead leaves, shooting up among its protecting green lances, and nodding a welcome to me, was the first thing which announced that spring had without mistake arrived. Dear little snowdrops ! perhaps the most poetic of Spring’s elder children, — I have not seen one of them since those days.

Spring is a wonderful colorist, with apparently the fewest pigments at command. While half the trees are still naked and brown, this great impressionist painter produces her original effects. I look out of my window, and see an azure sky through an open tracery of yellow-green, — hues so tender that nothing could match with them but the silvery cloudlets caught among the upper boughs. Later on in the day a busy wind has changed all this : driven the fair-weather clouds in a mass to the northward, where they darken the horizon with a dull, thundery blue. But the rest of the sky is clear and the sun still high, and the cherry-trees, huge bouquets of snowy blossom, stand out against the lurid background with a dazzling, almost startling whiteness. Toward sunset the wind drops off, the northward horizon clears, and the sun throws strong level rays upon the horse-chestnut, till the green is filtered through and through with golden light, the under sides of the leaves shining most brightly. The cherry-tree behind it is one lustrous mass of molten silver and gold ; the nearer one, more in the shadow of the house, can catch the glory only on its topmost heights, while the scarlet-budded maple beyond is a cone of flame. The light of the eastern sky. flushed with rose, mingles with the yellow - green, the white, and gold, till the eye is enchanted with the delicate harmonies of color as the ear with sweetly blended music tones.

As one needs to be well past youth to appreciate with full consciousness the joys of childhood, so perhaps those most delight in spring who have lived long enough to experience the sterner side of existence. Every one loves the spring ; old and young hail it: but the pleasure of older persons is not merely sensuous ; it is also conscious and reflective. The recurring wonder of earth new - born is something to give pause to the mind of one who feels that the spring of his human life will never be thus renewed. The first time one realizes that physically the odds are against one, simply by the account of years, the thought is at least momentarily startling. one is ill, and finds that the recuperative powers are not to-day what they once were. Yet if Spring suggests by contrast an idea not pleasant to the natural man, on the other hand she affords us comfort with the reminder that the external world is not as we are. So long as we may stay on the green earth, and however we may outlive many of its joys, this joy in the living beauty of nature will not be taken from us. Spring will spread her ever-fresh delights before us so long as we have eyes to see them.