Weather such as prevailed yesterday while these lines were being written seems to imply that spring has indeed come. The budding willows, assuming their mantle of delicate green lend corroboration, but Shanghai knows only too well that there may still be changes in the weather, and that cold days may still be encountered. Some were welcoming spring a week or so ago, when rude Boreas brought snow from the north, and for a few days the sentiments of C.P. Cranch on this time of the year seemed so forcefully to apply. Cranch was the worst of realists; he was a pessimist to boot, as the following so clearly shows:—
If there comes a little thaw, Still the air is chill and raw, Here and there a patch of snow, Dirtier than the ground below, Dribbles down a marshy flood: Ankle deep you stick in mud In the meadows while you sing, "This is Spring"
And it really was like that only a very short while ago. It might be so again, for Shanghai seems to be a law unto herself when it comes to the question of weather. But there are signs that the season has really established herself, Joyous bunches of flowers, in the hands of. unkempt vendors, shriek the glad news along the Bund, coolies hard at work at the Race Course are laying new turf over which "flannelled fools" will disport themselves where of late the ground served the antics of the "muddied oafs." Soon the "weedy-women" will do their dirty work on the superfluous vegetation which strives to Oust the grass from local lawns. Meantime young men's fancies are doing their annual turning and the "month of marriages is drawing nigh," for romance stalks abreast of Spring. It would be possible to indulge in a quantity of natural hístory in connection with this witching season, but that is done so delightfully by the writer of the Country Diary, that to go further into the matter would be a work of supererogation.
Rather might it be more engaging on such a bright morning, as it is hoped it will be when these lines are being read, to endeavour to discover when poets have decided Spring actually does commence, Cranch has had his say. He places the occurrence quite early in the year. So does Christina G. Rossetti, who "wonders if the sap is stirring yet.' Shakespeare places it somewhat later with When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver-white And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight.
Spenser too takes little cognizance of Spring until the flowers are here. He seems to be the type of poet who only accepts' the seasons on their undoubted resuits:—
So forth issewed the Seasons of the yeara: First, lusty Spring all dight in leaves of flowers That freshly budded and new bloomes did hoare, In which a thousand birds had built their bowres That sweetly sung to call forth paramours.
It seems plain from the two foregoing examples that in the eyes of Shakespeare and Spenser no flowers mean no Spring, that the unseen moving sap stirring vegetation to its duties for another year is nothing to them; astonishingly enough these romantics only judge by results, But then Tennyson seems to be even worse, for his Spring is well along to summer, The bee buzzed up in the heat, "I am faint for your honey, my sweet."
The flower said "Take it, my dear, For now is the Spring of the year.
So come, come!"
"Hum!"
And the bee buzzed down from the heat.
He apparently likes his springs warm, and the cold, damp days during which nature stirs mean nothing to him. His is the spring in which it is possible to lie down upon some hill, and watch the white clouds scudding by and see in the valleys below the pink and white promises of autumnal fruition.
Swinburne goes right back to the days of the cold in the nose. He seeks for that moment which there are small stirrings in the quiescence of winter, that period when Nature is unconsciously preparing to turn in her sleep.
O tender time that love thinks long to see Sweet foot of Spring that with her footfall sows Late snow-like flowery leavings of the snows Be not too long irresolute to be; O mother-month where have they hidden thee?
Even he seems a trifle late, for something had to be moving to poke those delightful little heads through the soil, but he is certainly earlier than the pessimistic Mr. Cranch who started the whole of these musings. There was a little boy who hearing the family speculate as to when the sap would be moving in the trees, would day after day apply his. ear to them to find if indeed it were true. He continued to do so until the verdant landscape informed him that indeed the sap had moved. And he had not heard it! It proved to him that there was a lot going on in the world of which he knew nothing. Much is going on in the world of which the great masses. know just as much, but spring serves to prove that there are immutable processes throughout the universe, natural as well as political, of which mankind knows just as little as of when winter changes to spring. It is perhaps just as well, for if mankind could take out its watch and say "Well Spring has just arrived," it would deprive the season of much of its romance.
"So/folls the changing year, and so we change; motion so swift, we know not that we move." Just such a day was yesterday, that for the moment the anxieties of the world gave place to sheer delight, to a luxurious enjoyment of the day and a certain idleness which sought inspiration from a book of quotations to banish for a moment all the perplexities which confront mankind, and incidentally fill this column for once with something more springlike than politics.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.