The bobolink has come, and, like the soul

Of the sweet season vocal in a bird,

Gurgles in ecstasy we know not what

20 Save June! Dear June! Now God be praised for June.

May is a pious fraud of the almanac,

A ghastly parody of real Spring

Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind;

Or if, o'er-confident, she trust the date,

25 And, with her handful of anemones,
Herself as shivery, steal into the sun,

The season need but turn his hour-glass round,
And Winter suddenly, like crazy Lear,

Reels back, and brings the dead May in his arms, 30 Her budding breasts and wan dislustred front With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard All overblown. Then, warmly walled with books, While my wood-fire supplies the sun's defect, Whispering old forest-sagas in its dreams, 35 I take my May down from the happy shelf

Where perch the world's rare song-birds in a row,

17. Bryant has a charming poem, Robert of Lincoln, in which the light-hearted song of the bird gets a homelier but no less delightful interpretation. See, also, Lowell's lines in Suthin' in the Pastoral Line, No. VI. of the second series of The Biglow Papers:

"'Nuff sed, June's bridesman, poet o' the year,
Gladness on wings, the bobolink is here;
Half-hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings,

Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings,

Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair,

Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air."

28. In the fifth act of Shakspere's King Lear, Lear enters with Cordelia dead in his arms.

Waiting my choice to open with full breast, And beg an alms of spring-time, ne'er denied In-doors by vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods 40 Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year.

July breathes hot, sallows the crispy fields, Curls up the wan leaves of the lilac-hedge, And every eve cheats us with show of clouds That braze the horizon's western rim, or hang 45 Motionless, with heaped canvas drooping idly, Like a dim fleet by starving men besieged, Conjectured half, and half descried afar, Helpless of wind, and seeming to slip back Adown the smooth curve of the oily sea.

50 But June is full of invitations sweet,

Forth from the chimney's yawn and thrice-read

tomes

To leisurely delights and sauntering thoughts.
That brook no ceiling narrower than the blue.
The cherry, drest for bridal, at my pane

55 Brushes, then listens, Will he come?
All dusty as a miller, takes his toll

The bee,

Of powdery gold, and grumbles. What a day To sun me and do nothing! Nay, I think Merely to bask and ripen is sometimes 60 The student's wiser business; the brain That forages all climes to line its cells, Ranging both worlds on lightest wings of wish, Will not distil the juices it has sucked To the sweet substance of pellucid thought, 65 Except for him who hath the secret learned To mix his blood with sunshine, and to take

44. 1. e., that give a brazen hue and hardness to the western sky at sunset.