Mirror of the Months Part 2

MARCH.

If there be a Month the aspect of which is less amiable, and its manners and habits less prepossessing, than those of all the rest (which I am loath to admit), that month is March. The burning heats of midsummer (when they shall come to us at the prophetic call of the Quarterly Reviewers--which they never will) we shall find no difficulty in bearing; and the frosts and snows of December and January are as welcome, to those who know their value, as the flowers in May. Nay--the so much vituperated fogs of November I by no means set my face against; on the contrary, I have a kind of appet.i.te for them, both corporeal and mental; as I shall prove, and endeavour to justify in its due place.

In fact, and by the by, November is a month that has not been fairly dealt by; and, for my part, I think it should by no means have been fixed upon as that which is _par excellence_ the month best adapted to hang and drown oneself in;--seeing that, to a wise man, _that_ should never be an affair of atmosphere. But if a month must be set apart for such a proces, (on the same principle which determines that we are bound to _begin_ our worldly concerns on a particular day--viz. Sat.u.r.day--and would therefore, by parity of reasoning, call upon us to end them with a similar view to times and seasons), let that month be henceforth March; for it has, at this present writing, no one characteristic by which to designate it,--being neither Spring, Summer, Autumn, nor Winter, but only March.

But what I particularly object to in March is its winds. They say

"March winds and April showers Bring forth May flowers."

But I doubt the fact. They may _call_ them forth, perhaps,--whistling over the roofs of their subterraneous dwellings, to let them know that Winter is past and gone. Or, in our disposition to "turn diseases to commodities," let us regard them as the expectant damsel does the sound of the mail coach horn that whisks through the village, as she lies in bed at midnight, and tells her that _to-morrow_ she may look for a letter from her absent swain.

The only other express and specific reason why I object to March, is that she drives hares mad; which is a great fault. But be all this as it may, she is still fraught with merits; and let us proceed, without more ado, to point out a few of them. And first of the country;--to which, by the way, I have not hitherto allowed its due supremacy--for

"G.o.d made the Country, but man made the Town."

Now, then, even the winds of March, notwithstanding all that we have insinuated in their disfavour, are far from being virtueless; for they come careering over our fields, and roads, and pathways, and while they dry up the damps that the thaws had let loose, and the previous frosts had prevented from sinking into the earth, "pipe to the spirit ditties"

the words of which tell tales of the forthcoming flowers. And not only so, but occasionally they are caught bearing away upon their rough wings the mingled odours of violet and daffodil, both of which have already ventured to

"Come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty."

The general face of nature has not much changed in appearance since we left it in February; though its internal economy has made an important step in advance. The sap is alive in the seemingly sleeping trunks that every where surround us, and is beginning to mount slowly to its destination; and the embryo blooms are almost visibly struggling towards light and life, beneath their rough, unpromising outer coats--unpromising to the idle, the unthinking, and the in.o.bservant; but to the eye that "can see Oth.e.l.lo's visage in his mind," bright and beautiful, in virtue of the brightness and the beauty that they cover, but not conceal. Now, too, the dark earth becomes soft and tractable, and yields to the kindly constraint that calls upon it to teem with new life,--crumbling to the touch, that it may the better clasp in its fragrant bosom the rudiments of that gay, but ephemeral creation which are born with the spring, only "to run their race rejoicing" into the lap of summer, and there yield up their sweet breath, a willing incense at the shrine of that nature the spirit of which is endless constancy growing out of endless change. Must I tell the reader this in plainer prose?--Now, then, is the time to sow the seeds of most of the annual flowering plants; particularly of those which we all know and love--such as Sweet Pea, the most feminine of flowers, that must have a kind hand to tend its youth, and a supporting arm to cling to in its maturity, or it grovels in the dust, and straggles away into an unsightly weed; and Mignionette, with a name as sweet as its breath,--that loves "within a gentle bosom to be laid," and makes haste to die there, lest its white lodging should be changed; and Larkspur, trim, gay, and bold, the gallant of the garden; and Lupines, blue, and yellow, and rose coloured, with their winged flowers hovering above their starry leaves; and a host of others, that we must try to characterise as they come in turn before us.

Now, too, we have some of the bulbous rooted flowers at their best, particularly the pretty Crocuses, yellow, blue, striped, and white; while others, the Narcissus, Hyacinths, and Tulips, are visibly hastening towards their perfection.

Those spring flowers, too, which ventured to show themselves last month before they had well recovered from their winter trance, have now grown bold in their renewed strength, and look the winds in the face fearlessly. Perhaps the most poetical of these, because the most pathetic in their pale and pining beauty, are the Primroses. Their bold and bright-eyed relatives the Polyanthuses (no two alike) are also now all on the look out for lovers, among the bees that the warm sunny mornings already begin to call forth.

These, with the still prevailing Hepaticas and Anemonies, the Daisies that start up singly here and there, an early Wall-flower, the pretty pink rods of the Mezereon, and (in the woods) the lovely Wind-flower, or white Wood-anemone, const.i.tute the princ.i.p.al wealth of this preparatory month.

Now, too, the tender green of spring first begins to peep forth from the straggling branches of the hedge-row Elder, the trim Lilac, and the thin threads of the stream enamoured Willow; the first to put on its spring clothing, and the last to leave it off. And if we look into the kitchen garden, there too we may chance to find those forest trees in miniature, the Gooseberries and Currants, letting their leaves and blossoms (both of a colour) look forth together, hand in hand, in search of the April sun before it arrives, as the lark mounts upward to seek for it before it has risen in the morning. It will be well if these early adventurers-forth do not encounter a cutting easterly blast; or still worse, a deceitful breeze, that tempts them to its embraces by its milder breath, only to shower diseases upon them. But if they _will_ be out on the watch for Spring before she calls them, they must be content to take their chance.

NOW, about the middle of the month, a strange commotion may be seen and heard among the winged creatures, portending momentous matters. The lark is high up in the cold air before day-light; and his chosen mistress is listening to him down among the dank gra.s.s, with the dew still upon her unshaken wing. The Robin, too, has left off, for a brief season, his low plaintive piping, which it must be confessed was poured forth for his own exclusive satisfaction, and, reckoning on his spruce looks and sparkling eyes, issues his quick peremptory love-call, in a somewhat ungallant and husband-like manner.

The Sparrows, who have lately been sulking silently about from tree to tree, with ruffled plumes and drooping wings, now spruce themselves up till they do not look half their former size; and if it were not pairing-time, one might fancy that there was more of war than of love in their noisy squabblings. But the crouching forms, quivering wings, and murmuring bills, of yonder pair that have quitted for a moment the clamorous cabal, can indicate the movements of but _one_ pa.s.sion.

But we must leave the feathered tribe for the present:

"Sacred be love from sight, whate'er it is."

We shall have many opportunities of observing their pretty ways hereafter.

Now, also, the Ants (with whom we shall have a crow to pick by and by) first begin to show themselves from their subterranean sleeping-rooms; those winged abortions, the Bats, perplex the eyes of evening wanderers by their seeming ubiquity; and the Owls hold scientific converse with each other at half a mile distance.

Lastly, now we meet with one of the prettiest, yet most pathetic sights that the animal world presents; the early Lambs, dropped, in their tottering and bleating helplessness, upon the cold skirts of winter, and hiding their frail forms from the March winds, by crouching down on the sheltered side of their dams.

Now, quitting the country till next month, we find London all alive, Lent and Lady-day notwithstanding; for the latter is but a day, after all; and he must have a very countrified conscience who cannot satisfy it as to the former, by doing penance once or twice at an Oratorio, and hearing comic songs sung in a foreign tongue; or, if this does not do, he may fast if he pleases, every Friday, by eating salt fish in addition to the rest of his fare.

Now, the citizens have pretty well left off their annual visitings, and given the great ones leave to begin; so that there is no sleep to be had in the neighbourhood of May-fair, for love or money, after one in the morning.

Now, the dress boxes of the winter houses can occasionally boast a baronet's lady; this, however, being the extent of their attainments in that way; for how can the great be expected to listen to Shakespear under the same roof with their shop-keepers? There is, in fact, no denying that the said great are marvellously at the mercy of the said little, in the matter of amus.e.m.e.nt; and there is no saying whether the latter will not, some day or other, make an inroad upon Almack's itself.

Now, however, in spite of the said inroads, the best boxes at the Opera do begin to be worth exploring, since a beautiful Englishwoman of high fas.h.i.+on is "a sight to set before a king."

Now, the actors (all but the singing ones) in their secret hearts put up periodical prayers for the annual agitation of the Catholic Question; for without some stimulus of this kind, to correct the laxity of our religious morals, there is no knowing how soon they may cease to give thanks for three Sundays in the week during Lent.

Now, (during the said pious period) occasionally an inadvertent apprentice gets leave to go to "the play" on a Wednesday or Friday; and, having taken his seat in the one s.h.i.+lling gallery, wonders during six long hours what can have come to the players, that they do nothing but sit in a row with their hands before them, in front of a pyramid of fiddlers, and break silence now and then by singing a psalm; for a psalm he is sure it must be, though he never heard it at church.

Now, every other day, the four sides of the newspapers offer to the wearied eye one unbroken ocean of _long-primer_; to the infinite abridgement of the labour of Chapter Coffee House quidnuncs, who find that they have only one sheet to get through instead of ten; and to the entire discomfiture of the conscientious reader, who makes it a point of duty to spell through all that he pays for, avowed advertis.e.m.e.nts included; for in these latter there is some variety--of which no one can accuse the parliamentary speeches. By the by, it would be but consistent in the Times to bestow their ingenuous prefix of [_advertis.e.m.e.nt_] on a few of the last named effusions. And if they were placed under the head of "Want Places," n.o.body but the advertiser would see cause to complain of the mistake.

Now, Fas.h.i.+on is on the point of awaking from her periodical sleep, attended by Mesdames Bean, Bell, and Pierrepoint on one side of her couch, and Messieurs Myers, Stultz, and Davison on the other; each individual of each party watching with apparent anxiety to catch the first glance of her opening eye, in order to direct their several movements accordingly; but each having previously determined on those movements as definitively as if their legitimate monarch and directress had nothing to do with matter; for, to say truth, notwithstanding her boasted legitimacy, Fas.h.i.+on has but a very limited control, even in her own court; the real government being an Oligarchy, the members of which are each lords paramount in their own particular departments. Who, in fact, shall dispute an epaulet of Miss Pierrepoint's? and when Mr. Myers has achieved a collar, who shall call it in question?

Now, Hyde Park is worth walking in at four o'clock of a fine week day, though the trees are still bare; for there, as sure as the suns.h.i.+ne comes, shall be seen sauntering beneath it three distinct cla.s.ses of fas.h.i.+onables; namely, first, the fair immaculates from the mansions about May Fair, who loll listlessly in their elegant equipages, and occasionally eye, with an air of infinite disdain, the second cla.s.s, who are peregrinating on the other side the bar,--the fair frailties from the neighbourhood of the New Road; which latter, more magnanimous than their betters, and less envious, are content, for their parts, to appropriate the greater portion of the attentions of the third cla.s.s--the ineffables and exquisites from Long's, and Stevens's. Among these last-named cla.s.s something particular indeed must have happened if you do not recognise that _arbiter elegantiarum_ of actresses, the marquis of W----; that delighter in dennets and decaying beauties, the honourable L---- S----; and that prince-pretty-man of rake-h.e.l.ls and roues little George W----.

APRIL.

April is come! "proud--pied April!" and "hath put a spirit of youth in every thing." Shall our portrait of her, then, alone lack that spirit?

Not if words can speak the feelings from which they spring. "Spring!"

See how the name comes uncalled-for; as if to hint that it should have stood in the place of "April." But April _is_ spring--the only spring month that we possess in this egregious climate of ours. Let us, then, make the most of it.

April is at once the most juvenile of the Months, and the most feminine--never knowing her own mind for a day together. Fickle as a fond maiden with her first lover;--coying it with the young Sun till he withdraws his beams from her, and then weeping till she gets them back again. High-fantastical as the seething wit of a poet, that sees a world of beauty growing beneath his hand, and fancies that he has created it, whereas it is it that has created him a poet; for it is Nature that makes April, not April Nature.

April is doubtless the sweetest month of all the year; partly because it ushers in the May, and partly for its own sake, so far as any thing can be valuable without reference to any thing else. It is, to May and June, what "sweet fifteen," in the age of woman, is to pa.s.sion-stricken eighteen, and perfect two-and-twenty. It is, to the confirmed Summer, what the previous hope of joy is to the full fruition; what the boyish dream of love is to love itself. It is indeed the month of promises; and what are twenty performances compared with one promise? When a promise of delight is fulfilled, it is over and done with; but while it remains a promise, it remains a hope: and what is all good, but the hope of good? What is every _to-day_ of our life, but the hope (or the fear) of to-morrow? April, then, is worth two Mays, because it tells tales of May in every sigh that it breathes, and every tear that it lets fall. It is the harbinger, the herald, the promise, the prophecy, the foretaste of all the beauties that are to follow it--of all, and more--of all the delights of Summer, and all the "pride, pomp, and circ.u.mstance of glorious" Autumn. It is fraught with beauties itself that no other month can bring before us, and

"It bears a gla.s.s which shews us many more."

As for April herself, her life is one sweet alternation of smiles and sighs and tears, and tears and sighs and smiles, till it is consummated at last in the open laughter of May. It is like--in short, it is like nothing in the world but "an April day." And her charms--but really I must cease to look upon the face of this fair month generally, lest, like a painter in the presence of his mistress, I grow too enamoured to give a correct resemblance. I must gaze upon her sweet beauties one by one, or I shall never be able to think and treat of her in any other light than that of _the Spring_; which is a mere abstraction,--delightful to think of, but, like all other abstractions, not to be depicted or described.

Before I proceed to do this, however, let me inform the reader that what I have hitherto said of April, and have yet to say, is intended to apply, not to this or that April in particular--not to April eighteen hundred and twenty-four, or fourteen, or thirty-four--but to APRIL _par excellence_; that is to say, what April ("not to speak it profanely") _ought to be_. In short, I have no intention of being _personal_ in my remarks; and if the April which I am describing should happen to differ, in any essential particulars, from the one in whose presence I am describing it, neither the month nor the reader must regard this as a covert libel or satire. The truth is that, for what reason I know not--whether to put to shame the predictions of the Quarterly Reviewers, or to punish us Islanders for our manifold follies and iniquities, or from any quarrel, as of old, between Oberon and t.i.tania--but certain it is that

"The seasons alter: h.o.a.ry headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose; And on old Hyems' thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set: the Spring, the Summer, The chilling Autumn, angry Winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the amazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which."

It is of April, then, as she is when Nature is in her happiest mood, that I am now to speak; and we will take her in the prime of her life, and our first place of rendezvous shall be the open fields.

What a sweet flush of new green has started up to the face of this meadow! And the new-born Daisies that stud it here and there, give it the look of an emerald sky powdered with snowy stars. In making our way to yonder hedgerow, which divides the meadow from the little copse that lines one side of it, let us not take the shortest way, but keep religiously to the little footpath; for the young gra.s.s is as yet too tender to bear being trod upon; and the young lambs themselves, while they go cropping its crisp points, let the sweet daisies alone, as if they loved to look upon a sight as pretty and as innocent as themselves.

I have been hitherto very chary of appealing to the poets in these pleasant papers; because they are people that, if you give them an inch, even in a span-long essay of this kind, always endeavour to lay hands on the whole of it. They are like the young cuckoos, that if once they get hatched within a nest, always contrive to oust the natural inhabitants.

But when the Daisy, "la douce Marguerite," is in question, how can I refrain from p.r.o.nouncing a blessing on the bard who has, by his sweet praise of this "una.s.suming commonplace of nature," revived that general love for it, which, until lately, was confined to the hearts of "the old poets," and of those young poets of all times, the little children? But I need not do this, for he has his reward already, in the fulfilment of that prophecy with which he closes his address to his darling flower:

"Thy long-lost praise thou shalt regain; Dear shalt thou be to future men, As in old time."

Does the reader, now that I have brought before him, in company with each other, "this child of the year," and the gentlest and most eloquent of all her lovers, desire to hear a few more of the compliments that he has paid to her, without the trouble of leaving the fields, and opening a book? I can afford but a few; for beneath yonder hedgerow, and within the twilight of the copse behind it, there are flocks of other sweet flowers, waiting for their praise.