t broke through the dark soil, the
fruit trees were covered with buds, the husbandman was abroad in the
fields, the milk-maid tripped home with well-filled pails, the swallows and
martins struck the sunny pools with their long, pointed wings, the new
dropped lambs reposed on the young grass, the tender growth of leaves--

Lifts its sweet head into the air, and feeds
A silent space with ever sprouting green.[3]

Man himself seemed to regenerate, and feel the frost of winter yield to
an elastic and warm renewal of life--reason told us that care and sorrow
would grow with the opening year--but how to believe the ominous voice
breathed up with pestiferous vapours from fear's dim cavern, while nature,
laughing and scattering from her green lap flowers, and fruits, and
sparkling waters, invited us to join the gay masque of young life she
led upon the scene?

Where was the plague? "Here--every where!" one voice of horror and dismay
exclaimed, when in the pleasant days of a sunny May the Destroyer of man
brooded again over the earth, forcing the spirit to leave its organic
chrysalis, and to enter upon an untried life. With one mighty sweep of its
potent weapon, all caution, all care, all prudence were levelled low: death
sat at the tables of the great, stretched itself on the cottager's pallet,
seized the dastard who fled, quelled the brave man who resisted:
despondency entered every heart, sorrow dimmed every eye.

Sights of woe now became familiar to me, and were I to tell all of anguish
and pain that I witnessed, of the despairing moans of age, and the more
terrible smiles of infancy in the bosom of horror, my reader, his limbs
quivering and his hair on end, would wonder how I did not, seized with
sudden frenzy, dash myself from some precipice, and so close my eyes for
ever on the sad end of the world. But the powers of love, poetry, and
creative fancy will dwell even beside the sick of the plague, with the
squalid, and with the dying. A feeling of devotion, of duty, of a high and
steady purpose, elevated me; a strange joy filled my heart. In the midst of
saddest grief I seemed to tread air, while the spirit of good shed round me
an ambrosial atmosphere, which blunted the sting of sympathy, and purified
the air of sighs. If my wearied soul flagged in its career, I thought of my
loved home, of the casket that contained my treasures, of the kiss of love
and the filial caress, while my eyes were moistened by purest dew, a