‘Hark, hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings, And Phœbus ’gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With everything that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise!’
Then the wild-flowers: what a feast of plant life! What various colour, shape, bloom—of every shade and tint, from the dingle, ‘where the rath violets grow,’ to the daffodil bank, by the sun-kissed lake. ‘Isn’t that delicious?’ said Hermione; ‘who but our Shakespeare could have pictured so delightfully the lovely summer of old England, with the hedgerows and the pastures all glistening with dew! That dear lark is coming down again—a living song, floating through the blue ocean of sky—singing as he falls. Then at last dropping like a stone into the field—I saw him close to that patch of red clover.’
‘But _we_ have skylarks in Australia,’ said Vanda, who objected to unqualified praise of England for being England; ‘our bird doesn’t fly so high, certainly, and stops more quickly, but he sings a sweet little tuneful lay. He has not had a thousand years in which to practise.’
This colloquy took place one morning before breakfast, at which unusual time, about 5 A.M., these young people elected to get up, for once in a way, that they might be enabled to say they had seen an English sunrise, and heard an English skylark. They were staying at an old—ever so old English hall, where everything was in keeping with tradition and history. The century-old oaks were there; the forest was the same, mercifully spared, and lovingly tended; the aged oaks were the immediate descendants of those under which Gurth and Wamba lay and chaunted their roundelay when Bois-Guilbert, the Templar of the period, inquired the way to Rotherwood, and was directed all wrong by the eccentric Wamba.
Yes! there were the oaks, huge of girth, mighty of spread and shade, and clothed to the very tips of their enormous branches with delicate leaflets, bursting buds, and every variety of leafage which goes to furbish up the glorious green garb of an English spring.
Now that the spring had arrived, the real English spring—written about, talked about, sung about by everybody that had ever been in England, or read about the great and glorious Motherland—they were all mad with hope and expectation, also with ardent desire to go in and possess the land of faerie. Fortunately, for once, the climate did not betray them. The weather continued fine and open. Frosts were few and far between. The grass in the meadows, thick and verdant, spread a velvet garment over all the land. Over the fields around stood ancient farm-houses, near villages with names as old as the Norman Conquest. Around were ruined abbeys and crumbling spires, besides bridges over brooks, where swam the fat carp which had tempted the monks to sink their foundations first, and to follow up with the stately piles, which sheltered so many a lordly abbot and his train of cowled brethren, lay and spiritual, with servitors, tenants, and retainers, military and otherwise.