LONDON IN MAY.
We will not begin, as is usual, by a doleful discussion of the difference between the May of the poets and that to which we are accustomed in these later days. For whatever the pessimists may say – and there are no greater slanders spoken than those which are current in respect to our English climate – May is still often sweet enough to justify all the pretty things that have been said of her. There are adverse seasons, no doubt, in which a succession of leaden days, without colour or life, turn all our anticipations into foolishness; but these, at the worst, are broken by now and then a glimpse of heaven, a sudden lifting of the cloudy curtain and shining of the hidden countenance which had been ready to beam upon us all the time, had fate and the clouds permitted. But those who have seen the coast of the Riviera all blurred and dulled out of its warmer life, and beheld the deadliest chill, more heart-searching than any northern cold, which can settle upon Rome, and seen the rain pouring down into the canals of Venice, and felt the Tramontana sweep through the deep streets of Florence, have little reason to speak evil of English skies and the moods of the English season. It would be treason to nature to say anything else than that the full delights of May belong to the country, where the trees have all shaken out their freshest green, and everything grows and nourishes visibly, so that we can see the subtle process carried on before our very eyes. The woods alive with conscious life; the wealth of the primroses going off in the south, but in the north still scattering handfuls of delight under all the trees, and succeeded by the blue of the wild hyacinths; the rich sheets of green and delicate stars of the wood-anemone; with the young foliage fluttering in the soft breezes, throwing tender masses of green between us and the sky, in a harmony which art has never been able to emulate, though even the Philistine no longer is bold enough to assert, as once he did, that blue and green cannot go together; the air all musical with birds, and sweet with lilac and hawthorn, and every shrub that flowers, – what combination can equal these? What though the wind may blow a little shrewdly of nights, our hardy English blossoms fear it little: and neither pomegranate nor oleander are worthy to be named before the rosy loveliness of an apple-orchard, the sheets of delicate bloom that clothe our midland levels in the flowery promise of May.
It would be reasonable, if reason had anything to do with the matter, no doubt, to spend this blooming season in the country, and enjoy the sweetest portion of the year among the sights and sounds which make it most sweet – as it is always reasonable in the abstract that human society should collect in towns for the winter, and indemnify itself for the loss of daylight and warmth by a closer drawing together within doors, and such pleasures of the interior as may make up for the want of attraction abroad. But on the other hand there is much to be said for the artificial rules which turn nature upside-down, so far as this is concerned. For London in May
