February

“ But the owls come in February, and if they are not swallows with the spring, they, nevertheless, help winter with most seemly haste into an early grave. Yet across the faded February meadow the old apple tree stands empty and drear enough—until the shadows of the night begin to fall.
As the dusk comes down, I go to my window and watch. ”

“ March holds February very tightly by the hand, and cannot make up her mind to hurry on with her work of opening the buds and encouraging the flowers. She blows cold winds in their faces, nips them with frosty nights, occasionally wraps them up in snow, then suddenly, repenting her of the evil, she opens up a blue sky and pours a hot sun down on them. ”

“ In January we were indoors, beside the fire, and there seemed little of new and various to tempt us out. But February comes, and with it the first dream of change, the first scarce-heard whisper of the Spring. ”

“ February can bring a vicious kind of day that is unknown in any other month, a day when Main Street is deserted and battened down, when hurricane winds lash the trees and pile huge breakers upon the shore and you huddle indoors and are thankful for warmth and dryness and an occupation that does not call you out. ”

“ The light is clear but hesitant, a delicate wine, by no means the mighty vintage of April. February has no intoxication; the vague eagerness that gives the air a pulse where fields lie voiceless comes from the secret stirring of imprisoned life. ”

“ ONE gray February day, when dirty patches of snow are still lingering on the north side of rocks and walls, as you gaze across a dreary landscape, you espy a bit of bright color on the bar-post that brightens up your spirit. ”

“ And in fulfilment of the cycle, February sees the swelling buds of willow, with their restless pussies eager for the spring, half creeping from their winter cells.
The October day is a dream, bright and beautiful as the rainbow, and as brief and fugitive. The same clouds and the same sun may be with us on the morrow, but the rainbow will have gone. There is a destroyer that goes abroad by night; he fastens upon every leaf, and freezes out its last drop of life, and leaves it on the parent stem, pale, withered, and dying. ”

“ Wisely the snow places a white [8] hand over eager—life unseen, but perceived in February’s woods as a swimmer feels the changing moods of water in a lake fed by springs. Only the thick stars, closer and more companionable than in months of foliage, burn alert and serene. In February the Milky Way is revealed divinely lucent to lonely peoples—herdsmen, mountaineers, fishermen, trappers—who are abroad in the starlight hours of this grave and silent time of year. It is in the long, frozen nights that the sky has most red flowers. ”

“ February—and the sun has only half its strength, and only a grey colour for silver glory to shed over the Mediterranean, and off the Mediterranean, up on to the green hills and marble terraces of the town. The sea is not blue but white, beneath these pearl-grey clouds, that let the sun through as through a veil, but it is calm, the limpid waves of it lapping gently on to the knotted and slimy rocks of the coast. ”

“ His colour is so evident and visible; he fills the road, being brighter than all, and for the moment is more than the trees and flowers.
Coming so suddenly over the hedge into the road close to me, he startled me as if I had been awakened from a dream—I had been thinking it was August, and woke to find it February—for the sulphur butterfly is the February pleasure. Between the dark storms and wintry rains there is a warm sunny interval of a week in February. Away one goes for a walk, and presently there appears a bright yellow spot among the furze, dancing along like a flower let loose. ”

“ The murmur of the poets is indeed louder in February than in the more pleasant days of summer, for then the growth of aquatic grasses checks the flow and stills it, whilst in February every stone, or flint, or lump of chalk divides the current and causes a vibration, With this murmur of water, and mild time, the rooks caw incessantly, and the birds at large essay to utter their welcome of the sun. The wet furrows reflect the rays so that the dark earth gleams, and in the slight mist that stays farther away the light pauses and fills the vapour with radiance. ”

“ The end of February is near, and not a hint or whisper of spring does Nature give us yet. We are wont to have earlier than this a few days at least that seem to start the sap in the trees and the blood in the veins, when the first bluebird is heard, and we get one swift, delicious glimpse of the good time coming. ”

“ November has its special beauty when the blue mists lurk in the depth of woodland ways, when the wet bracken glows like a peat fire, and toadstools of weird and wondrous colours adorn the damp wayside. And lovely are the rare days when the moor lies sheeted with snow, and every spray is set with diamonds. Presently in February comes a moment when a purple flush, like the bloom on a ripe plum, steals over the massed woodland, though yet no green leaf shows, and we know that life begins to stir. ”

“ Like the star-dust of Saturn they belt our fourteen-acre planet, not with three rings, nor four, but with twelve, a ring for every month, a girdle of twelve shining circles running round the year—the tinkling ice of February in the goblet of October!—the apples of October red and ripe on what might have been April's empty platter! ”

“ WEATHER AND SEASON RHYMES January brings the snow,
Makes our feet and fingers glow.
February brings the rain,
Thaws the frozen lake again.
March brings breezes loud and shrill,
Stirs the dancing daffodil. ”

“ There will be nothing of us either, unless you mean that at some future time I am alive because part of me has become perhaps a murderer, and another part a politician, and another a housemaid, for all I know.
The February sun was warm; you might almost call it hot. A little wind pregnant with spring moved through the bushes; the snowdrops, those pale heralds of the triumphant march of the new year, were thick in the grass where we had planted them, Helen and I, last autumn, so that they should give us the earliest news of the returning tide of life. ”

“ February as a rule is not a month of fogs, but rather a month of tempestuous gales, of frosts and snowfalls, but the night of February 17th, 19—, was one of calm and mist. It was not the typical London fog so dreaded by the foreigner, but one of those little patchy mists which smoke through the streets, now enshrouding and making the nearest object invisible, now clearing away to the finest diaphanous filament of pale grey. ”

“ For the remaining three months of the year, December, January, and February, they delude themselves into the notion that they are having a winter, when they gather around a winter-time hearth and listen to imaginary wind-roarings in the chimney, and see through the panes fictitious and spectral snow-storms, and dream that they are housed so snug and warm. ”

“ In the months of January and February the old and the young, the grave and the gay flock hither to derive as they imagine new vigour from the profuse perspiration they experience, and the bracing influence of this wonder-working water. ”

“ But there are no travellers passing by. The snow that has fallen during the night is unbroken. The pale February sunrise makes blue shadows on it, sharp and jagged, an outline of the fir-trees on the mountain-crest quarter of, a mile away. ”

“ February went by with her showers and her celandines, her snowdrops and thrushes that sing on bare branches. That casement in her house of dreams was gilded round and the sill carved with posies and true-lovers' knots, for through it she had seen Love for the first time. March came in by night with a great noise of wind, yet even in the gusty darkness she could put out her hands to touch a velvet sleeve as black as the gloom enclosed by the open lattice. ”

“ January was a silent expanse of high tableland, snow-bound to the horizon. Winding down hill through the sodden grassland of the bare February country, where she lighted on nothing but early parsnip fronds and sleepy celandine buds in the dripping wickery hedges, she passed at last into the wood of March, a wood of pollard hazels and greening oaks and bramble-guarded dingles, where the anemones grew, and the first primroses. She slipped and slithered in and out of mossy leaf-pits, and the briars clawed her hair and pinafore, as she robbed the primrose clumps with wet, reddened fingers. ”

“ If you wish to see how much of light, life, and joy can be got into a January, go to this blessed Hollow. If you wish to see a plant-resurrection,—myriads of bright flowers crowding from the ground, like souls to a judgment,—go to Twenty Hills in February. If you are traveling for health, play truant to doctors and friends, fill your pocket with biscuits, and hide in the hills of the Hollow, lave in its waters, tan in its golds, bask in its flower-shine, and your baptisms will make you a new creature indeed. ”

“ Forces astir in the deepest roots grow restless beneath the lock of frost. Bulbs try the door. February’s stillness is charged with a faint anxiety, as if the powers of light, pressing up from the earth’s center and streaming down from the stronger sun, had troubled the buried seeds, who strive to answer their liberator, so that the guarding mother must whisper over and over, “Not yet, not yet!” Better to stay behind the frozen gate than to come too early up into realms where the wolves of cold are still aprowl. ”

“ February introduces us to the interior of a house in which a portly bon-vivant is enjoying the pleasures of the table beside a glowing fire, whilst an upper compartment of the picture shews us the dreary season without. ”

“ February always reminds me of the suburbs—appalling but you've got to go through them to get to London. Were I a rich man, I would follow Spring round the World. In that way I should be able to smile through life like those people who, in snapshots from the Riviera, seem composed principally of wide grins and thin legs, and whose joie de vivre is usually published in English illustrated journals in seasons when the English weather makes you feel that Life is just a Big Damn in a mackintosh. ”

“ Have glazed the snow and clothed the trees with ice,
While the slant sun of February pours
Into the bowers a flood of light. Approach!
The incrusted surface shall upbear thy steps,
And the broad arching portals of the grove
Welcome thy entering. ”

“ And underneath the clod doth grope and grope, —
The astronomer heliotrope,
That watches heaven with a constant eye, —
The daring crocus, unafraid to try
(When Nature calls) the February snows, —
And patience’ perfect rose. ”

“ In winter, too, we must be grateful to the ivy of the bare hedgerows shining in the sun, its leaves glistening like the simple jewels of a savage.
With February, we are agreed that spring comes in, but it is a springtime that keeps something of p. 5the graveness of winter: though, when the silver sunshine begins to be decorated with the singing of birds, we must call it spring.
In February, too, the roads are no longer edged with dead white grass, but show the fresh green of wayside plants—cow-weed, nettle, dock, and cleavers. ”

“ And how much lost fruit do we not owe to February! One feels—a layman like myself feels—that it should be enough to have a strawberry-bed, a peach-tree, a fig-tree. If these are not enough, then the addition of a gardener should make the thing a certainty. Yet how often will not a gardener refer one back to February as the real culprit. The tree blossomed too early; the late frosts killed it; in the annoyance of the moment one may reproach the gardener for allowing it to blossom so prematurely, but one cannot absolve February of all blame. ”

“ Beginning earlier,—even in February,—Spring is not compelled to burst into Summer with such headlong haste; there is time to dwell upon each opening beauty, and to enjoy the budding leaf, the tender green, the sweet youth and freshness of the year; it gives us its maiden charm, before, settling into the married Summer, which, again, does not so soon sober itself into matronly Autumn. In our own country, the virgin Spring hastens to its bridal too abruptly. ”

“ The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly colored and sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. ”

“ On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. ”

“ As you are glad to come.
(Two Robin Redbreasts are seen tapping with their beaks at the lattice, which January opens. The birds flutter in, hop about the floor, and peck up the crumbs and sugar thrown to them. They have scarcely finished their meal when a knock is heard at the door. January hangs a guard in front of the fire, and opens to February, who appears with a bunch of snowdrops in her hand.)
Good-morrow, sister.
February
Brother, joy to you! ”

“ Yet so variable is our climate, that the February of 1825 broke in upon the inhabitants of the metropolis with a day or two of piercing cold, and realized a delightful description of January sparkled from the same pen. “What can be more delicately beautiful than the spectacle which sometimes salutes the eye at the breakfast-room window, occasioned by the hoar-frost dew? ”

“ The February sunshine steeps your boughs
And tints the buds and swells the leaves within; ”

“ Hugs the broad roofs, deep-burden'd with the snow,
While clouds of snow are round the low eaves whirling.
How cold it is!—Come, let us homeward go
There will we find the cheerful fire still burning,
There ruddy warmth will make our faces glow,
And there kind hearts will welcome our returning;
Come!—let us hasten through the drifty snow.
FEBRUARY.
Come walk a mile with me—'Tis February ”