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There is no time like Spring,
When life's alive in everything,

Before new nestlings sing,

Before cleft swallows speed their journey back

Along the trackless track

God guides their wing;

He spreads their table that they nothing lack,-
Before the daisy grows a common flower,

Before the sun has power

To scorch the world up in his noontide hour.

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There is no time like Spring-
Like Spring that passes by;

There is no life like Spring-life born to die,

Piercing the sod,

Clothing the uncouth clod,

Hatched in the nest,

Fledged on the windy bough,

Strong on the wing:

There is no time like Spring that passes by,

Now newly born, and now

Hastening to die.

Christina Rossetti.

SPRING IN AMERICA.

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INTER is past; the heart of Nature warms
Beneath the wrecks of unresisted storms;
Doubtful at first, suspected more than seen,
The southern slopes are fringed with tender green;
On sheltered banks, beneath the dripping eaves,
Spring's earliest nurslings spread their glowing leaves,
Bright with the hues from wider pictures won,
White, azure, golden,-drift, or sky, or sun;-
The snowdrop, bearing on her patient breast
The frozen trophy torn from winter's crest;

The violet, gazing on the arch of blue
Till her own iris wears its deepened hue;

The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
Naked and shivering with his cup of gold.

Swelled with new life, the darkening elm on high
Prints her thick buds against the spotted sky;
On all her boughs the stately chestnut cleaves
The gummy shroud that wraps her embryo leaves;
The house-fly, stealing from his narrow grave,
Drugged with the opiate that November gave,
Beats with faint wing against the sunny pane,
Or crawls, tenacious, o'er its lucid plain;
From shaded chinks of lichen-crusted walls,
In languid curves, the gliding serpent crawls;
The bog's green harper, thawing from his sleep,
Twangs a hoarse note and tries a shortened leap;
On floating rails that face the softening noons
The still shy turtles range their dark platoons,
Or toiling, aimless, o'er the mellowing fields,
Trail through the grass their tesselated shields.

O. Wendell Holmes.

THE WOODLAND.

THEY came to where the brushwood ceased, and day
Peer'd 'twixt the stems; and the ground broke away
In a sloped sward down to a brawling brook,
And up as high as where they stood to look
On the brook's further side was clear; but there
The underwood and trees began again.

This open glen was studded thick with thorns
Then white with blossom; and you saw the horns,
Through the green fern, of the shy fallow-deer,
Which come at noon down to the water here.
You saw the bright-eyed squirrels dart along
Under the thorns on the green sward; and strong
The blackbird whistled from the dingles near,
And the light chipping of the woodpecker
Rang lonelily and sharp; the sky was fair,
And a fresh breath of spring stirred everywhere.
Merlin and Vivian stopp'd on the slope's brow
To gaze on the green sea of leaf and bough
Which glittering lay all round them, lone and mild,
As if to itself the quiet forest smiled.

Upon the brow-top grew a thorn; and here

The grass was dry and moss'd, and you saw clear
Across the hollow: white anemones

Starr'd the cool turf, and clumps of primroses
Ran out from the dark underwood behind.

No fairer resting-place a man could find.

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