sed from sinewy arms like feathers, and the Stack grows before your
eyes, fairly proportioned as a beehive, without line or measure, but
shaped by the look and the feel, true almost as the spring instinct of
the nest-building bird. And are we not heartily ashamed of ourselves,
amidst this general din of working mirthfulness, for having, but an hour
ago, abused the jovial and generous Autumn, and thanked Heaven that he
was dead? Let us retire into the barn with Shoosy, and hide our blushes.

Comparisons are odoriferous, and therefore for one paragraph let us
compare AUTUMN with SPRING. Suppose ourselves sitting beneath THE
SYCAMORE of Windermere! Poets call Spring Green-Mantle--and true it is
that the groundwork of his garb is green--even like that of the proud
peacock's changeful neck, when the creature treads in the circle of his
own splendour, and the scholar who may have forgotten his classics, has
yet a dream of Juno and of her watchful Argus with his hundred, his
thousand eyes. But the coat of Spring, like that of Joseph, is a coat of
many colours. Call it patch-work if you choose,

"And be yourself the great sublime you draw."

Some people look on nature with a milliner's or a mantua-maker's
eye--arraying her in furbelows and flounces. But use your own eyes and
ours, and from beneath THE SYCAMORE let us two, sitting together in
amity, look lovingly on the SPRING. Felt ever your heart before, with
such an emotion of harmonious beauty, the exquisitely delicate
distinctions of character among the lovely tribes of trees! That is
BELLE ISLE. Earliest to salute the vernal rainbow, with a glow of green
gentle as its own, is the lake-loving ALDER, whose home, too, is by the
flowings of all the streams. Just one degree fainter in its hue--or
shall we rather say brighter--for we feel the difference without knowing
in what it lies--stands, by the Alder's rounded softness, the spiral
LARCH, all hung over its limber sprays, were you near enough to admire
them, with cones of the Tyrian dye. That stem, white as silver, and
smooth as silk, seen so straight in the green sylvan light, and there
airily overarching the coppice with lambent tresses, such as fancy might
picture for the mermaid's hair, pleasant as is her life on that
Fortunate Isle, is yet said by us, who vainly attribute our own sadness
to unsorrowing things--to belong to a Tree that _weeps_,--though a
weight of joy it is, and of exceeding gladness, that thus depr