"To my Godchild" opens in the same manner. The early months, drenched with icy rain, had meant misery and dumbness. Breaking of silence came with the breaking of the frost, and the poetry which returned with the warm weather is full of acknowledgments. It is something more than the small-talk of his verse; it is, like the dedications of the eighteenth century, a formal obeisance to a patron--"Sun-god and song-god."
The Spring found him happiest. The May of his poems is the May known to the Londoner. After deploring, in the proem of _Sister Songs_, the lateness of the season, it is suddenly upon him. He discovered it for certain round a street corner not far from his lodgings in Elgin Avenue--
Mark yonder how the long laburnum drips Its jocund spilth of fire, its honey of wild flame.
That is the signal best known to the Londoner. Most of the details of his description in _Sister Songs_, from the stars to Covent Garden clock, are metropolitan. From his high room, down steep stairs, a faded oilcloth at his feet, the coiling patterns of a varnished wall-paper at his restricted elbow; through the muffled light and air of the hall, and past the broken stucco of the front steps, he would emerge on a morning of good fortune, to see, not a dismal street of other lodgings exactly like his own, but
A garden of enchanting In visionary May, Swayless for the spirit's haunting, Thrice threefold walled with emerald from our mortal mornings grey.
We may imagine that St. Francis cared not overmuch for the look of the Assisi streets; it is doubtful whether Francis of Kilburn cared at all about the aspect of Kilburn. The gayest thoroughfare caught his eye no more than the most dismal--and Brondesbury is not gay. To "And your new lodging, Francis, what of it?" he would give a good account of the rights and lefts that led there, but he would make no picture of it for you, having none himself. I do not suppose he found the soot and stucco architecture of Elgin Avenue any more or less entertaining than the red brick of Palace Court, and, while he might describe Oxford Street as "stony-hearted," I doubt if he could have described to the satisfaction of a builder the nature of its exterior stone. Manchester could hardly do less than blind the civic eye. Certainly Francis was no observer, and had retained the ignorance, rather than the innocence, of his Vision.