(Lo, in the marvel of Springtime, dreams are changed into truth!)

Quicken my heart, and restore the beautiful hopes of youth.

By the faith that the flowers show when they bloom unbidden,

By the calm of the river's flow to a goal that is hidden,

By the trust of the tree that clings to its deep foundation,

By the courage of wild birds' wings on the long migration,

(Wonderful secret of peace that abides in Nature's breast!)

Teach me how to confide, and live my life, and rest.

NEWS OF SPRING *

BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK

From Old Fashioned Flowers

I HAVE seen the manner in which Spring stores up sunshine, leaves and flowers and makes ready, long beforehand, to invade the North. Here, on the ever balmy shores of the Mediterranean - that motionless sea which looks as though it were under glass where, while the months are dark in the rest

*By special permission of M. Maeterlinck and Dodd, Mead & Co.

of Europe, Spring has taken shelter from the wind and the snows in a palace of peace and light and love, it is interesting to detect its preparations for traveling in the fields of undying green. I can see clearly that it is afraid, that it hesitates once more to face the great frost-traps which February and March lay for it annually beyond the mountains. It waits, it dallies, it tries its strength before resuming the harsh and cruel way which the hypocrite winter seems to yield to it. It stops, sets out again, revisits a thousand times, like a child running round the garden of its holidays, the fragrant valleys, the tender hills which the frost has never brushed with its wings. It has nothing to do here, nothing to revive, since nothing has perished and nothing suffered, since all the flowers of every season bathe here in the blue air of an eternal summer. But it seeks pretexts, it lingers, it loiters, it goes to and fro like an unoccupied gardener. It pushes aside the branches, fondles with its breath the olive-tree that quivers with a silver smile, polishes the glossy grass, rouses the corollas that were not asleep, recalls the birds that had never fled, encourages the bees that were workers without ceasing; and then, seeing, like God, that all is well in the spotless Eden, it rests for a moment on the ledge of a terrace which the orange-tree crowns with regular flowers and with fruits of light, and, before leaving, casts a last look over its labor of joy and entrusts it to the sun.

SPRING*

BY RICHARD HOVEY

I SAID in my heart, "I am sick of four walls and a ceiling.

I have need of the sky.

I have business with the grass.

I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling,

Lone and high.

And the slow clouds go by.

I will get me away to the waters that glass

The clouds as they pass,

To the waters that lie

Like the heart of a maiden aware of a doom drawing

nigh

And dumb for sorcery of impending joy.

I will get me away to the woods.

Spring, like a huntsman's boy,

Halloos along the hillsides and unhoods

The falcon in my will.

The dogwood calls me, and the sudden thrill That breaks in apple blooms down country roads Plucks me by the sleeve and nudges me away.

The sap is in the boles to-day,

And in my veins a pulse that yearns and goads."

*From "Along the Trail," copyright by Small, Maynard & Co. Used by permission of the present publishers, Duffield & Co.

When I got to the woods, I found out

What the Spring was about,

With her gypsy ways

And her heart ablaze,

Coming up from the south

With the wander-lure of witch songs in her mouth. For the sky

Stirred and grew soft and swimming as a lover's

eye

As she went by;

The air

Made love to all it touched, as if its care

Were all to spare;

The earth

Prickled with lust of birth;

The woodland streams

Babbled the incoherence of the thousand dreams

Wherewith the warm sun teems.

And out of the frieze

Of the chestnut trees

I heard

The sky and the fields and the thicket find a voice

And all things are made new!

There was never a mote that whirled

In the nebular morn,

There was never a brook that purled

When the hills were born,

There was never a leaf uncurled -
Not the first that grew

Nor a bee-flight hurled,
Nor a bird-note skirled,
Nor a cloud-wisp swirled

In the depth of the blue,

More alive and afresh and impromptu, more thoughtless and certain and free.

When the greenlet sings on the red-bud bough Where the blossoms are whispering, "I and thou," "I and thou,"

And a lass at the turn looks after her lad with a dawn

on her brow,

And the world is just made — now!

Spring in the heart!

With her pinks and pearls and yellows!

Spring, fellows,

And we too feel the little green leaves a-start
Across the bare-twigged winter of the mart.
The campus is reborn in us to-day;

The old grip stirs our hearts with new-old joy;
Again bursts bonds for madcap holiday
The eternal boy.