No days such honored days as these! While yet

Fair Aphrodite reigned, men seeking wide

For some fair thing which should forever bide

On earth, her beauteous memory to set

In fitting frame that no age could forget,

Her name in lovely April’s name did hide,

And leave it there, eternally allied

To all the fairest flowers Spring did beget.

And when fair Aphrodite passed from earth,

Her shrines forgotten and her feasts of mirth,

A holier symbol still in seal and sign,

Sweet April took, of kingdom most divine,

When Christ ascended, in the time of birth

Of spring anemones, in Palestine.

—Helen Hunt Jackson.

I come, like a hope to a gloomy breast,

With comforting smiles, and tears

Of sympathy for the earth’s unrest;

And news that the summer nears,

For the feet of the young year every day

Patter and patter and patter away.

I thrill the world with a strange delight;

The birds sing out with a will,

And the herb-lorn lea is swift bedight

With cowslip and daffodil;

While the rain for an hour or two every day

Patters and patters and patters away.

—Bernard Malcolm Ramsay, in the Pall Mall Magazine.