A Devotee by Mary Cholmondeley

'L'amour est une source naive, partie de son lit de cresson, de fleurs, de gravier, qui, riviere, qui, fleuve, change de nature et d'aspect a chaque flot. ' -- DE BALZAC.

In England Spring is a poem. In the Highlands of Scotland she has the intensity of a passion. The crags and steeps are possessed by her; they stand transfigured like a stern man in the eyes of his bride. And here in these solemn depths and lonely heights, as nowhere else, shy Spring abandons herself, secure in the fastnesses where her every freak is loved. She sets the broom ablaze among the gray rocks, yellow along the river's edge, yet hardly yellower than the leaves on the young oak just above. The larches hear her voice, and hundred by hundred peep over each other's heads upon the hillside, all a-tremble with fairy green. The shoots of the dwarf cherry, scattered wide upon the uplands, are pink among the grass. The primroses are everywhere, though it is Whitsuntide -- behind the stones, among the broom, beside the little tumbling streams, in every crevice, and on every foothold. The mountain-ash holds its white blossoms aloft in its careful spreading fingers. Even the silver birch forgets its sadness while spring reigns in Scotland.