to me to have much of the charm of springtime upon it is the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. The songs, gambols, and wooings of the early birds are not more welcome and suggestive. How graceful and airy, and yet what a tender, profound, human significance it contains! But the great vernal poem, doubly so in that it is the expression of the spring-time of the race, the boyhood of man as well, is the Iliad of Homer. What faith, what simple wonder, what unconscious strength, what beautiful savagery, what magnanimous enmity-a very paradise of war!

Though so young a people, there is not much of the feeling of spring in any of our books. The muse of our poets is wise rather than joyous. There is no excess or extravagance or unruliness in her. There are spring sounds and tokens in Emerson's 'May Day:

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'April cold with dropping rain
Willows and lilacs brings again,
The whistle of returning birds,
And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
The scarlet maple-keys betray
What potent blood hath modest May;
What fiery force the earth renews,
The wealth of forms the flush of hues;

Joy shed in rosy waves abroad

Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord." But this is not spring in the blood. Among the works of our young and rising poets, I am not certain but Mr. Gilder's "New Day" is entitled to rank as a spring poem in the sense in which I am speaking. It is full of gaiety and daring, and full of the reckless abandon of the male bird when he is winning his mate. It is full also of the tantalising suggestiveness-the half lights and shades of April and May.

Of prose-poets who have the charm of the spring-time upon them, the best recent example I know of is Björnson, the Norwegian romancist. What especially makes his books spring-like is their freshness and sweet good faith. There is also a reticence and an unwrought suggestiveness about them that is like the promise of buds and early flowers. Of Turgeneiff, the Russian, much the same thing might be said. His stories are simple and elementary, and have none of the elaborate hair-splitting and forced hot-house character of the current English or American novel. They spring from stronger, more healthful and manly conditions, and have a force in them that is like a rising, incoming

I

OUR RURAL DIVINITY.

WONDER that Wilson Flagg did not

include the cow among his Picturesque Animals, for that is where she belongs. She has not the classic beauty of the horse, but in picture-making qualities she is far ahead of him. Her shaggy, loose-jointed body, her irregular, sketchy outlines, like those of the landscape-the hollows and ridges, the slopes and prominences-her tossing horns, her bushy tail, her swinging gait, her tranquil, ruminating habits-all tend to make her an object upon which the artist eye loves to dwell. The artists are

for ever putting her into pictures, too. In rural landscape scenes she is an important feature. Behold her grazing in the pastures and on the hill-sides, or along banks of streams, or ruminating under wide-spreading trees, or standing belly deep in the creek or pond, or lying upon the smooth places in the quiet summer afternoon, the day's grazing done, and waiting to be summoned home to

be milked; and again in the twilight lying upon the level summit of the hill, or where the sward is thickest and softest; or in winter a herd of them filing along toward the spring to drink, or being "foddered " from the stack in the field upon the new snow surely the cow is a picturesque animal, and all her goings and comings are pleasant to behold.

I looked into Hamerton's clever book on the domestic animals, also expecting to find my divinity duly celebrated, but he passes her by and contemplates the bovine qualities only as they appear in the ox and the bull.

Neither have the poets made much of the cow, but have rather dwelt upon the steer, or the ox yoked to the plough. I recall this touch from Emerson :

"The heifer that lows in the upland farm,

Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm."

But the ear is charmed, nevertheless, especially if it be not too near, and the air be still and dense, or hollow, as the farmer says. And again, if it be spring-time, and she task that powerful bellows of hers to its utmost capacity, how round the sound is, and how far it goes over the hills.

The cow has at least four tones or lows.