New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1872-04-22

erable inHuenzas; we still bend ourselves
double over the furnace register; We need
blankets upon our beds just as we did in
January; yet it is April, for so says the
almanac, and we will not admit that
April can be surly and savage. We cannot
get what Spenser, and Shakespeare, and
Milton, and Jamie Thomson have said about
Spring out of our heads or off our tongues.
IT'S beautiful season, albeit backward; and
when we have said our pretty say about the
smiles and tears of April, we fancy that the
inconsistent month is no longer in need of
extenuation. The fact is that all our notions
run in pairs, just as 80 often we have prl-
vate and public opinion Of the same matter.
There is Spring to which we pay neat COM
pliments, and Spring which we scold about.
Still, the poets will be stunning, without
much regard for latitude or longitude, or the
barometer the thermometer, and the hydrome-
ter. We have no doubt that poetry about
Spring has been written by Down East dam
sells this very year yet in Maine, on the nth
inst, a gentleman informed the newspapers that
abe was toiling through sn0w-drifts nine feet
"deep" No ethereal mildness there, or vio-
lets, or perfumed breezes, or awakening
smiles If it were only as pretty name, the
Maine folk might just as well call it Winter
There will be budding end bursting and
blooming down there finally, but for the pres
ent the days and the nights must remain rig
orous. BY the time the old stock-quotatiOns
have been exhausted, they may have become
appropriate
But, after all, we shall set ourselves hope
less task if we try to reform our everyday no.
menclature. Nothing is precisely as we talk
about it. Women are not half so handsome
as our fancy paints them; nor patriots so
pure nor the charitable so self-sacrilicing.
There is not book yet printed quite so good
as its admirers suppose it to be, nor
picture painted, nor statue carved.
All our life swarms with the thin
productions of the imagination, coupled
with custom. Marriage and fatherhOOd
and motherhood, and all the other hoods, are
in part only what we call them. Home is
sweet or not as may be- Everybody knows
that the childhood which he names golden
was mixture of great pleasures and great
pains. In this world whether we like to do
so or not, we must submit to daily disap
pointment, and coarse and chilling disprO
portion between our hopes and their fulfill
mcnt, should they haply be fulfilled at all.
We may and we do try to get away from
this by attributing to states and seasons
and vicissitudes the character which
fond fancy looks for; and it is this
kind of desperate swim-or-sink philosophy,
this carefully -nOurished optimism, which makes
it possible for us to live at all. Until we
come carefully to estimate them, we do not
know what blessings our errors and decisions,
our foolish dreams and wild antcipatons really
are. The Spring-time Of the poets, so far as
we of the temperate zone are concerned, is
one of these exquisite falsehoods which we
can hardly afford to forego. We cherish it
as an antidOte to the predestinate rheuma-
tism, and as prophylactic of diphtheria.
We take the balm and the bliss for
granted. We accept the traditions as an ex-
cuse for discardng the wraps which have
become WEAKNESS to the body and the soul.
We throw the responsibility of the bad cold
upon Nature, and our cough is pathetic pro-
test against her incomprehensible anachro-
nisms. 1t warns us to say grata rice reris
with the cheerful Roman, and when we glib
Der something Of gentle Spring" we con-
! ceive ourselves to be masters of fine irony,
should the wind at that moment happen to be
in the disreputable n. Z. quarter, as indeed
it is pretty sure to be.
We submit these reflections with a caveat.
They have had pertinence, as we have been
writing them, but there are many chances that
they may come to the reader with charac-
teristic untimeliness which will be their best
illustration. No newspaper article must be
burdened with a confederation of pOstscripts
like the tagged tail of lads kite. Their
fine, good-natured morning-if it be sO-may
have made all the miserable meteorologies of
month back merely musty legends. We
may seem to have been writing of some pre-
Adamite Spring-time; and all we have to say
is-Ieaven grant it!