Excerpt from Aonian Hours: And Other Poems

To wander at will, in the earliest hours of spring, is one of the sweetest and most refined enjoyments. The face of things and the mind's feelings have then a fresher aspect and a dearer sensation than at any other period of the year. It is only at the first starting of Nature from the repose of winter, that these emotions are forcibly excited, for after we have been accustomed but for a few weeks to the prospect of buds, and flowers, and the gladness of all things, the mind recedes into its habitual temper and tone of feeling. When these sensations are connected with other associations, - with the spot of our boyhood or our birth, or with the pleasures of maturer life, the charm becomes still stronger and sweeter, and we may truly say, as the Arabian prophet exclaimed of Damascus, "This is almost too delicious!"

From my earliest years were these expressions of Nature imprinted on my heart, from earliest memory my imagination has been teeming with those particular images with which it was first and most intimately connected, and under these sensations, and to express these interesting associations, the following Poem was begun and finished.

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