The phenomena of spring, as regards the vegetable world, must not be viewed as _beginning_ with the season in question. Spring, while the harbinger and preparation of the ensuing seasons, is itself the consummation of a long series of wonderful processes, wrought in the silence and darkness of winter, and largely beneath the surface of the earth. We never see the actual beginning of anything. Covered up though they be, by the cold snow, the artizans of leaf and flower are diligently at work even from the close of the preceding summer, and only wait the vernal sunbeam to unfold the delicate product of their labours. This is strikingly exemplified in "bulbous roots," such as those of the tulip and crocus, in which the future flower may easily be made out by careful dissection with a penknife. The hazel puts forth its infant catkins as early as September, while the rich brown clusters of the same season are but ripening, and the autumn yellow of the leaves is in the distance. Soon after this it is quite easy to find the incipient female alder-bloom of the season to come, and the rudimentary golden catkins of the next year's sallow. Thus is the history of the flower beautifully in keeping with that of its winged image--the butterfly, which, like the flower in the bud, has been forming all along, in the grub and chrysalis, the bud-state of the perfect insect.
The river approaches the Ashley meadows by an exceedingly pleasant route, generally known as the lower Bollin valley. The whole course of the stream, from beyond Macclesfield downwards, is interesting, and at Norcliffe it begins to meander through the prettiest rural scenery near Manchester. The gentle rise and fall of the ground on either side, the plentiful and comely trees, the innumerable windings and turnings that bring with every successive field a new and pretty prospect, the sound of the rushing water, the birds saturating every grove and little wood with their cheerful poor man's music, the flowers no longer ambitious, for every bank and meadow is brimful and overflowing,--really it almost makes one fancy, when down in this beautiful valley, that we have got into those happy regions old Homer tells of, where the nepenthe grows, and the lotus,--that wonderful fruit which, when people had once tasted, they forgot their cares and troubles, and desired to remain there always, and ceased to remember even home. The difference is here, that after going thither, we love home all the better for our visit, since the heart, though it may be unconsciously, always grows into a resemblance of what it contemplates with interest and affection. No senseless fiction is it after all, about the lotus-fruit. Every man has his lotus-country somewhere; the poet has only turned into ingenious fable the experience of universal human nature.