Excerpt from Memorials of the English Martyrs

MILD spring morning had succeeded to the cold deep gloom of night. Broken clouds were scattered here and there over the clear sky, but the rising sun spread the radiance and the glow of its beams over the whole broad expanse, steeping the nearer clouds in a flood of golden light, flushing the more distant with rosy lustre, and pouring down its brilliant rays over a truly English land scape. Pastures were there, clothing the sloping hills with lawns of richest verdure, some sprinkled over with cowslips, others yellow with buttercups hedge-rows of vivid green, whence the milk - white flowers of the hawthorn filled the air with perfume: a little stream winding its silvery way through the meadows of the valley - the tender haze of morning still hovering over its glassy surface. A soft and genial shower was just over, and the glitter ing rain-drops trembled upon the leaves and springing grass, while the freshened earth gave forth that balmy smell which rises after gentle rain. All was green, and fresh, and sparkling with the warm golden sunshine.

The last traces of a long winter, seemed on that morning to have passed quite away. There was no touch of the cold cutting east, or the sharp north, in the soft playful breeze: no marks of wintry barrenness upon the ground: the humbler plants on every bank were pushing forth their bright green shoots, or unfolding their leaf-buds, or opening their tinted blossoms to the sun. Even the grey branches of the backward ash were hung with foliage. The bees were groping and murmuring in the bells of the cowslips butterflies were in constant motion upon the buttercups of the meadows, and in the branches of the ash tree a goldfinch was fluttering its bright wings, and warbling forth its sweet and merry song. Every sight that met the eye, and every sound that fell upon the ear seemed to speak one language night is gone, and winter is passed. It was a scene, and a season, and a morning such as Chaucer, nature's true poet, would have painted with words breathing of the sweetness and freshness of the morning air. It brought to mind his lovely Fable of the Flower and the Leaf, and his description of the morning hour.

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