I.—SPRING DAYS IN JANUARY.

January 17.

IT almost seems as if we were to have no winter this year, or only winter in its mildest form. And yet one cannot help having forebodings of what may still come upon us. I imagine that just as we usually have our short Indian summer, coming in the late autumn, so we have our ante-spring-our premonitory awakening. However, we had better take what we have got with thankfulness, and ward off the approach of pessimism by averaging the joys and sorrows of existence. To-day has had all the characteristics of opening spring-no clear sunlight, indeed, but a hazy tone of blue diffused over everything-seen in the sky and hanging about the moist ground. Those lines of Wordsworth, addressed to his sister in 1798, have been running in my head ever since morning : No joyless forms shall regulate

Our living calendar :

We from to-day, my Friend, will date

The opening of the year.

One moment now may give us more

Than years of toiling reason:

Our minds shall drink at every pore

The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts will make,

Which they shall long obey :

We for the year to come may take

Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,

We'll frame the measure of our souls:

They shall be tuned to love.

Would that we might preserve such a temper and frame such a measure for the whole year long! I have just come in from the garden; and, though it is near midnight, the air is as balmy as if it were May; and in the grey moonlight the whole landscape is softened down to an exquisite harmony.

For the last few days the signs of spring have been very manifest. The Christmas roses are not gone yet, though they have been with us for more than six weeks; but they are beginning to look forlorn, and are drooping on the beds. Perhaps the most joyous thing we have is a yellow-jasmine. It is trained on a brick wall, in a warm corner facing the south-west, and is in full bloom. It is leafless, and has little or no fragrance, but the bright colour is enough. And then there are already three clumps of primroses in flower. They are on a sloping bank, looking north-west, but sheltered by a thorn-hedge some eight or ten feet high, which in a little while will be full of newly-made birds' nests.

If we want to enjoy the approach of spring we must look for leaves as well as flowers. There are

already plenty of dry twigs tipped with that reddish brown which means bursting life; but the pleasantest thing to me is the foxglove foliage, the inner leaves of which are now of a bright green. It needs but little imagination to see, rising months hence from this vivid centre, the 'foxglove spire'-grandest of our English wild flowers.

II. RETURNING WINTER.

January 23.

Since I last wrote we have had continuance of the mild spring weather until yesternight, when it became cold and boisterous. About eleven o'clock the sky was a fine sight. The gibbous moon, rising late, seemed to be scudding through the deeps, now beaming out of a clear space, and anon plunging into a gulf of clouds. The wind was then in the west; during the night it must have got into the north, for this morning there were little wreaths of snow in remote corners of the garden. Still the advent of life and verdure proceeds. The scrubby elder-bushes are, as usual, most forward, their new leaves being already uncurling; and I notice that the crocus and snowdrop are pushing their spear-like points of foliage through the soil. The yellow-jasmine in the warm corner has

not lost a petal yet.

Those who love the sun and live

in places where there is not too much of his light should cultivate yellow flowers, especially such as grow in masses like the jasmine and the laburnum. They give a feeling of sunshine on cloudy days.

By the way I should mention that our garden is rich in corners and alleys. This would follow upon saying that it is large and old-fashioned. The ancient pleasure-ground and the ancient house are always full of shady retreats and embayed recesses in which men meditate, and use devotion, and commune with friends, and, indeed, take all their highest pleasures. 'For the Side Grounds,' says Lord Bacon, thinking of some such places, 'you are to fill them with Varietie of alleys. Private, to give a full Shade; Some of them, wheresoever the Sun be. You are to frame some of them likewise for Shelter, that when the Wind blows Sharpe, you may walke, as in a Gallery.' In the particular corner of which I have been speaking, where we always get out of the sharp wind, there are, besides the yellow-jasmine, a few rose-bushes; a shapely thorn with a seat under it made of a large root sawn in two; and a little Dutch-garden in which the tulips and crocuses will first be seen.

In one of Mr. Ruskin's 'Oxford Lectures' there is a noticeable passage about the dove, where he says

that the plumage of that bird when watched carefully in the sunshine is 'the most exquisite, in the modesty of its light, and in the myriad mingling of its hue, of all plumage.' I know how wonderfully beautiful these feathers are when in motion, for I often watch a flock of doves as they are feeding on the lawn; but I am not sure Mr. Ruskin would have spoken so absolutely if he had remembered the plumage of the peacock's neck. We have one of these birds, which comes and stands by an open window and eats from my hand, so that I have abundant opportunity of observing his glorious colour. To me its splendid glancing and vanishing of green and blue, yellow and purple, seem finer than that of the dove; and yet it is also 'modest,' for the homely brown feathers, over which the coloured ones are thrown like a delicate scarf, play through, and tone down, what might otherwise seem comparatively coarse and gaudy.

III.-A FALL OF SNOW.

January 30.

Winter, as I expected he would, has been reasserting himself. Our primroses have been covered up with snow, and we have turned from thoughts of spring to those of the time—