The First Crocus
-aFAGER correspondents do not rush to record the appearance of the first crocus as they do that of the first cuckoo. Yet the cuckoo but assures us that spring will presently give way to summer ; the crocus bears witness that the season of fat churchyards is at an end.
It is necessary to be rare in order to be recorded ; but not in order to be appreciated. There is no first crocus. Yesterday grass and garden bed were alike bare. To-day in all manner of sunny spots, under the windows of modest villas and " star-scattered on the grass " of wide-lawned mansions, flickers of gold, sun-splashed from the flying chariot wheels of Phoebus Apollo, catch the eye.
Long hidden from sight the sturdy corms have garnered last year's sunshine in their hearts. To-day they bring forth their store and scatter it abroad. Phoebus may sulk, or Jack Frost belatedly snap his chilly fingers in our face. The crocuses are shining—a whole " inverted bowl we call the sky" of them—bidding us make ready for the tumult of spring.
And who worthier to be the symbol of the world reborn ? The yellow crocus is not a native of these islands. Of unknown origin, itself incapable of setting seed, it is a floral cosmopolitan, the flower without a country. A less science-ridden age than ours would surely ascribe to it a miraculous origin.
Miracle-born or not, it is a sturdy character, this crocus, its hard-tipped, membrane-wrapped faseiculus thrusting upward through the hardest London clay, making light of sticks, stones or the rolled surface of gravelled walks.
A symbol, too, of evanescence, though not, we must admit, of its own volition ! Either because he no longer draws the Goddess of Love to her philanderings or " fore- tells true things by animadversion," or, more materially, because he is no longer regarded as a proper ingredient of pie, the sparrow is not only always with us but is with us everywhere.
And sparrows and crocuses, like crabbed age and youth, cannot live together. One man's meat is another man's poison. What the crocodile shuns Philip the Scavenger incontinently devours. But not before the ringing chal- lenge has gone forth :- "Awake! Awake ! Tho vernal days are here.
Awake ! Awake ! The Lord of Life is nigh !"
And what use, after all, would life be if it were not evanescent, if it were measured by the clock and not by the record of things seen and accustomed joys renewed ? Before the crocuses have gone, the chiff-chaff, that tiny pioneer of all the bird adventurers, will be banging his little tin anvil, and on his heels April unrolling, like some Levan- tine trader, her rich carpets of white and blue and gold.
Let the old purchase while they may, and for the young are there not flying carpets of adventure and bright birds of desire to lure their feet down ways untrodden and
Previous page
