SPRING.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2643, 28 August 1906, Page 5

SPRING.

We have glided into Spring, that season beloved of the poets and by the young. In some countries winter weather is so seven that the earth becomes literally icebound, dead and lifeless. In such lands the dawn of Spring is a beautiful vision, a sudden awakening of life which can hardly be comprehended by dwellers in a mild climate like that which we enjoy in New BssJsad Here we get no hard winter, and for this reason we do not exclain with the post of the season— H Come, gentle Spring! Ethereal mildness, come!" We get "ethereal" mildness even in mid-winter, and that special delight in a transformation scene witnessed in colder climes is denied to us. Shakespeare himself was the most notable bard to write of the English Spring, a Spring such as he knew of in Warwickshire. It was he who sang—"When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, Do paint the meadows with delight" In another fine passage he writes— M When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything."

One needs to be in Warwickshire when "Spring comes slowly up this way" to quite understand how the English" Spring makes poets and poetry. Our New Zealand Spring is comparatively tame, and is perhaps, on the whole, a little rheumatic. The cumate here is moist, and the earthdoes not get properly "aired" till the dawn of summer. Shakespeare, it is true, admits even in England " The uncertain glory of an April day." Here we have not only " the uncertain glory," but also a dampness which is less observable in the If other Country. Then, too, we listen in vain here for " the nightingale's song in the grove," and that sweet cuckoo note which heralds in Spring in the Old Land. The bards of humour, as well as the poets of love, have written "Odes to Spring" Did not one go so far as to say "Bother the flowers that bloom in the Spring." If the flowers, so indicated, were the flowery politicians of New Zealand, no exception can be taken to his point of view. Did not the same author, too, twit a small bird with suffering from a pain—a worm in its inside. In New Zealand we have our own Spring signals all around us. Is not the grass growing on the farms, and, when the sun shines, are there not lambs frisking on the lea all unaware of their fate a few weeks hence when they will be served up with mint sauce ? Are not the sonwters of the grove warbling love ditties, oblivious of the murderous eye which fruit-growers •re casting in their direction ? Are not the wattles a mass of golden bloom, and is not every tiny willow pendant studded with pale green leaflets? Do not " fair daffodils" bloom in the flower border, and is not the early plum tree revealing its numberless white buds ? Even the dauntless rhubarb is forcing its way through the ground and giving promise of early pie, while, here and there, a stray strawberry plant is breaking into flower. Spring is with us and gloomy winter is away. New hopes and new aspirations cause the blood to circle more freely in the veins of all living things. Is spring the birth of new life or only the re-incarnation of old life ? Does not every winter prelude a spring of some kind and does not even the winter season of a man's existence give place to a Spring elsewhere ? There is nothing new under the sun and oven in the human heart, when strength fails and eyes grow dim, there are spring tides which beat on another whore. That other shore has been called by many " the Summer Land," but even there seasons may follow one another according to the natural iaws which rule not only the lives we understand, but also the lives which are hidden, as it were, from us. The morning of life, whether it be a new life or an old life made new, is ever beautiful and ever lovely. If it appears not in the face and in the form of those who have grown old and grey in the battle of life, it ought still to be in their immortal spirits, which, unlike their bodies, need never to grow old. No one ever grows so old that he ceases to look for the coming of a day when his life will be fuller and brighter. Man, like the great world which he inhabits, "spins for ever down the ringing grooves of change."—' Wairarapa Daily Times.'