Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/296

 The author may call her 'Angelina,' or any other name he chooses; but he has evidently, whether he acknowledges it or not, copied her direct from Eve. The characters are barefaced plagiarisms from the book of Genesis! Oh! to find an author with originality!"

One spring I went a walking tour in the country. It was a glorious spring. Not the sort of spring they give us in these miserable times, under this shameless government—a mixture of East wind, blizzard, snow, rain, slush, fog, frost, hail, sleet, and thunder-storms—but a sunny, blue-sky'd, joyous spring, such as we used to have regularly every year when I was a young man, and things were different.

It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, even for those golden days; and, as I wandered through the waking land, and saw the dawning of the coming green, and watched the blush upon the hawthorn hedge, deepening each day beneath the kisses of the sun, and looked up at the proud old mother trees, dandling their myriad baby buds upon their strong fond arms, holding them high for the soft West wind to caress as he passed laughing by, and marked the primrose yellow creep across the carpet of the woods, and saw the new flush of the fields, and saw the new light on the hills, and heard the newfound gladness of the birds, and heard from copse and farm and meadow, the timid callings of the little new-born things, wondering to find themselves alive, and smelt the freshness of the earth, and felt the promise in the air, and felt a strong hand in the wind, my spirit rose within me. Spring had come to me also, and stirred me with a strange new life, with a strange new hope. I, too, was part of Nature, and it was Spring! Tender leaves. and blossoms were unfolding from my heart. Bright