"Bud, little roses! Spring is here!"]
The windows blush with fresh bouquets,

Cut with the May-dew on their lips;
The radish all its bloom displays,

Pink as Aurora's finger-tips.
Nor less the flood of light that showers

On beauty's changed corolla-shades, -
The walks are gay as bridal bowers

With rows of many-petalled maids.
The scarlet shell-fish click and clash

In the blue barrow where they slide;
The horseman, proud of streak and splash,

Creeps homeward from his morning ride.
Here comes the dealer's awkward string,

With neck in rope and tail in knot, -
Rough colts, with careless country-swing,

In lazy walk or slouching trot.
- Wild filly from the mountain-side,

Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
Lend me thy long, untiring stride

To seek with thee thy western hills!
I hear the whispering voice of Spring,

The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry,
Like some poor bird with prisoned wing

That sits and sings, but longs to fly.
Oh for one spot of living green, -

One little spot where leaves can grow, -
To love unblamed, to walk unseen,

To dream above, to sleep below!
CHAPTER IX.

[AQUI ESTA ENCERRADA EL ALMA DEL LICENCIADO PEDRO GARCIAS.
If I should ever make a little book out of these papers, which I

hope you are not getting tired of, I suppose I ought to save the
above sentence for a motto on the title-page. But I want it now,

and must use it. I need not say to you that the words are Spanish,
nor that they are to be found in the short Introduction to "Gil

Blas," nor that they mean, "Here lies buried the soul of the
licentiate Pedro Garcias."

I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes
referring to old age. I must be equally fair with old people now.

They are earnestly requested to leave this paper to young persons
from the age of twelve to that of fourscore years and ten, at which

latter period of life I am sure that I shall have at least one
youthful reader. You know well enough what I mean by youth and

age; - something in the soul, which has no more to do with the
color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with

the grass a thousand feet above it.
I am growing bolder as I write. I think it requires not only

youth, but genius, to read this paper. I don't mean to imply that
it required any whatsoever to talk what I have here written down.

It did demand a certain amount of memory, and such command of the
English tongue as is given by a common school education. So much I

do claim. But here I have related, at length, a string of
trivialities. You must have the imagination of a poet to

transfigure them. These little colored patches are stains upon the
windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull

and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are
glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.

My hand trembles when I offer you this. Many times I have come
bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this

poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless. And
yet - and yet - it is something better than flowers; it is a SEED-

CAPSULE. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest
blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of

his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.
It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very

probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it
not for individual experiences which differ from those of others

only in details seeminglytrifling. All of us have been thirsty
thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best

of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one
particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which

the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a
red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a

fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and
little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low-

"studded" school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled
over young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have

known Abraham for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.
Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that

white-pine pail, and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and
just so of my special relationships with other things and with my

rice. One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere
fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having

thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than
single waves in the ocean; - but the accidents or trivial marks

which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory
our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.

Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause
at the threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself

seriously whether you are fit to read such revelations as are to
follow. For observe, you have here no splendid array of petals

such as poets offer you, - nothing but a dry shell, containing, if
you will get out what is in it, a few small seeds of poems. You

may laugh at them, if you like. I shall never tell you what I
think of you for so doing. But if you can read into the heart of

these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear
to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and

can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural
life, - which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of

your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.
May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your

own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which
it does not lay claim to without your kind assistance, - may I beg

of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the BRACKETS which
enclose certain paragraphs? I want my "asides," you see, to

whisper loud to you who read my notes, and sometimes I talk a page
or two to you without pretending that I said a word of it to our

boarders. You will find a very long "aside" to you almost as soon
as you begin to read. And so, dear young friend, fall to at once,

taking such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn
them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet,

why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of
some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend the

Professor, says, you can sit with Nature's wrist in your hand and
count her ocean-pulses.]

I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating
especially to my early life, if I thought you would like to hear

them.
[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her

face directed partly towards me. - Half-mourning now; - purple
ribbon. That breastpin she wears has GRAY hair in it; her

mother's, no doubt; - I remember our landlady's daughter telling
me, soon after the schoolmistress came to board with us, that she

had lately "buried a payrent." That's what made her look so pale,
- kept the poor dying thing alive with her own blood. Ah! long