honor for the poor Pebble! Look at him, and think what splendors issue from his loins: "Fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, To ransom great kings from captivity." MARLOWE. "Sparkling diamonds" are not properly in our list of pebbles; for diamond, the most brilliant mystery of all, is a charcoal! What now remains for stone, thus filling the coffers of wealth, glorifying the crowns of sultans, and adding beams to beauty itself? One thing greater than all. The oldest and stoniest of stone is granite, and granite (as far as we know) is the chief material of the earth itself, the bones of the world, the substance of our star. Honored, therefore, be thou, thou small pebble lying in the lane; and, whenever any one looks at thee, may he think of the beautiful and noble world he lives in, and all of which it is capable! SPRING. HIS morning, as we sat at breakfast, thinking of our present subject, with our eyes fixed on a set of the British Poets, which stand us in stead of a prospect, there came by the window, from a child's voice, a cry of "Wallflowers!" There had just been a shower; sunshine had followed it; and the rain, the sun, the boy's voice, and the flowers came all so prettily together upon the subject we were thinking of, that, in taking one of his roots, we could not help fancying we had received a present from Nature herself, with a penny for the bearer. There were thirty lumps of buds on this penny root: their beauty - the was yet to come; but the promise was there, new life, the spring; and the raindrops were on them, as if the sweet goddess had dipped her hand in some fountain, and sprinkled them for us by way of message; as who should say, "April and I are coming." What a beautiful word is Spring! At least, one fancies so, knowing the meaning of it, and being used to identify it with so many pleasant things. An Italian might find it harsh, and object to the Sp and the terminating consonant: but if he were a proper Italian, a man of fancy, the worthy countryman of Petrarch and Ariosto, we would convince him that the word - was an excellent good word, crammed as full of beauty as a bud; and that S had the whistling of the brooks in it, p and ⁄ the force and roughness of whatsoever is animated and picturesque, ing the singing of the birds, and the whole word the suddenness and salience of all that is lively, sprouting, and new, — spring, springtime, a spring-green, a spring of water; to spring; springal, a word for a young man, in old (that is, ever new) English poetry, which with many other words has gone out, because the youthfulness of our hearts has gone out,—to come back with better times, and the nine-hundredth number of the work before us. If our Italian, being very unlike an Italian, ill-natured, and not open to pleasant conviction, should still object to our word, we would grow uncourteous in turn, and swear it was a better word than his Primavera, — which is what he calls Spring,- Prima-vera ; that is to say, the first Vera, or Ver of the Latins, the Veer (Bnp Ionice) or Ear of the Greeks; and what that means, nobody very well knows. But why Primavera? and what is Seconda, or second Vera? The word is too long and lazy, as well as obscure, compared with our brisk, little, potent, obvious, and leaping Spring, full of all fountains, buds, birds, sweetbriers, and sunbeams. "Leaping, like wanton kids in pleasant spring," says the poet, speaking of the "wood-born people that flocked about fair Serena. How much better the word spring suits here with the word leaping, than if it had been prima-vera! How much more sudden and starting, like the boundings of the kids! Prima vera is a beautiful word; let us not gainsay it: but it is more suitable to the maturity than to the very springing of spring, as its first syllable would pretend. So long and comparatively languid a word ought to belong to that side of the season which is next to summer. Ver, the Latin word, is better, or rather Greek word; for, as we have shown before, it comes from the Greek, like almost every good thing in Latin. It is a pity one does not know what it means: for the Greeks had "good meanings" (as Sir Hugh Evans would say); and their Ver, Feer, or Ear, we may be sure, meant something pleasant, - possibly the rising of the sap, or something connected with the new air, or with love; for etymologists, with their happy facilities, might bring it from the roots of such words. Ben Jonson has made a beautiful name of its adjective (Earinos, vernal) for the heroine of his "Sad Shepherd: " "Earine, Who had her very being and her name With the first knots or buddings of the Spring; Or earliest roses blown; when Cupid smiled, And Venus led the Graces out to dance; And all the flowers and sweets in Nature's lap The lightest thoughts have their roots in gravity, and the most fugitive colors of the world are set off by the mighty background of eternity. One of the greatest pleasures of so light and airy a thing as the vernal season arises from the consciousness, that the world is young again; that the spring has come round; that we shall not all cease, and be no world. Nature has begun again, and not begun for nothing. One fancies somehow that she could not have the heart to put a stop to us in April or May. She may pluck away a poor little life here and there; nay, many blossoms of youth: but not all, not the whole garden of life. She prunes, but does not destroy. If she did; if she were in the mind to have done with us, - to look upon us as an experiment not worth going on with; as a set of ungenial and obstinate compounds which refused to co-operate in her sweet designs, and could not be made to answer in the working ; depend upon it, she would take pity on our incapability and bad humors, and conveniently quash us in some dismal, sullen winter's day, just at the natural dying of the year, most likely in November; for Christmas is a sort of spring itself, a winter-flowering. We care nothing for arguments about storms, earthquakes, or other apparently unseasonable interruptions of our pleasures we imitate, in that respect, the magnanimous indifference, or what appears such, of the Great Mother herself, knowing that she means us the best in the gross; and also that we may all get our remedies for these evils in time, if we co-operate as before said. People in South America, for instance, may learn from experience, and build so as to make a, comparative nothing of those rockings of the ground. It is of the gross itself that we speak; and sure we are, that, with an eye to that, Nature does not feel as Pope ventures say she does, or see "with equal eye" to "Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, And now a bubble burst, and now a world." |