Junia

“ Yet what a day it was in which to live and love, and motor over perfect roads through that radiant summer-land which the Ligurians loved, the Romans conquered, and the modern world comes from afar to see.
Though it was early in April, with Easter but a few days behind us, the sky, the air, the flowers, belonged to June—a rare, rich June to praise in poetry or song. Billows of roses surged over old pink and yellow stucco walls, or a soaring flame of scarlet geranium ran along their tops devouring trails of ivy with a hundred fiery tongues. ”

“ With laughter plunders all her gusty plumes.
He steals behind her, gathering, as she goes
Heedless of summer's end certain and soon,—
Of winter rattling at the door of June.
When Beauty lies hand-folded, pale and still,
Forsaken of her lovers and her lords,
And winter keeps cold watch upon the hill
Then he lets fall his bale of coloured words.
At frosty midnight June shall rise in flame,
Move at his magic with her bells and birds;
The rose will redden as he speaks her name,
He shall release earth's frozen bosom there,
And with great words shall cuff the whining air! ”

“ Many Junes have come and gone since little Billy was laid to rest in the old burying-ground, close to the wheat-field where the partridge calls, calls, the long day through. June roses scatter their leaves above him, and when the sun drops low, with long golden shafts upon the green mound which covers him, from far down in the laurel thicket comes the liquid gurgle of the wood-thrush. Kate looks into faces, once frank and bright, and full of youth and hope, now grown old and seamed with care, and she tells herself that “whom the gods love, die young.” ”

“ Well, it is June to-day—an afternoon in June; a day to make one feel life in every limb—a day when but to exist is a luxury. The roses are bending their heads in the sweet sunshine, for there is not a cloud in Heaven’s blue. The butterflies are chasing each other among the flowers on the lawn, where we recline among the daisies, and the big velvety bees go droning and humming from clover blossom to clover blossom.
“Strange, is it not, my dear Ben,” I said, “that on such a day as this, and in the midst of sunshine, I should bethink me of some night-scenes at sea and on land? ”

“ Let her beware--the world full soon Like me shall tearless turn away, And woo, instead of thine, O May! The brown, bright, joyous eyes of June. O June! forgive the long delay, My heart's deceptive dream is o'er-- Where I believe I will adore, Nor worship June, yet kneel to May.
SUNNY DAYS IN WINTER. Summer is a glorious season Warm, and bright, and pleasant; But the Past is not a reason To despise the Present. So while health can climb the mountain, And the log lights up the hall, There are sunny days in Winter, after all! Spring, no doubt, hath faded from us, Maiden-like in charms ”

“ And hasn't their name stuck to it ever since? Yes, indeed! So, be as merry as you can, my chicks; but, with all your fun and frolic, be thankful, and make June weather all about you. June time—any time—is full of joy when hearts, brimming over with thankfulness, carry cheer to other hearts, making
"A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune,"—
like the little stream that bubbles by the foot of our meadow. ”

“ He had loved June passionately, but the beautiful body he'd held in his arms lay under that sundial by the riverside. Her spirit was of another world. And he'd not have been a human, hot-blooded man, if the reproachful wraith of an old love could be more to him than the brave girl who'd saved his life and won his soul back from despair. ”

“ June is the month of roses. It is then that the wild rose wreathes our hedgerows with its bloom. It is everywhere lovely, and the sweetbriar exhales one of the most delicious of fragrances. It was a custom in England for girls to gather a rose on Midsummer Eve, wear it all day, and then place the petals in a Prayer Book and note whether it lost its hue before New Year’s Day, and take omen thereby. ”

“ The meadow grass was heavy with dew, and the birds were chattering together in every tree at the edge of the field. Whoever thinks that a summer dawning is a time of peace should get up and go out into the wet, warm, sweet, talkative world for an hour—then he would know better.
Some one beside the small girl was abroad that delicious morning of the very first day in June—a woman, tall and graceful, dressed in filmy white, and carrying a rose-red parasol, against the menace of the coming sun. ”

“ On such a night in June,
[84] With the beautiful soft half-moon,
And all these innocent blisses?
On such a night as this is!
Wordsworth.
When the wind's in the south
The rain's in its mouth.
No weather is ill
If the wind be still.
Old saying.
All through the sultry hours of June,
From morning blithe to golden noon,
And till the star of evening climbs
The gray-blue East, a world too soon,
There sings a thrush within the limes.
God's poet, hid in foliage green,
Sings endless songs, himself unseen;
Right seldom come his silent times.
Linger, ye summer hours serene! ”

“ When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might not one finally become a June day?... ”

“ Farther south the withering heat hints of July; farther north there may be an edge of cold to the air; but in Georgia it is always perfectly June in June, all softness, fragrance, filled with the fearless growth and bloom of every living thing—the sort of day that seems to hum to itself with the wings of a thousand bees; adolescent weather, fragrant, soft, filled with the growth and yearning of every living thing from the frailest flower that blooms to the oldest tree and the oldest man. ”

“ They manage to look down upon the many of us who prefer the daisy fields to the time “when hills take on the noble lines of death.” But whims of the worshiper steal no splendor from the god. June has nothing to place beside a moonlit November night, whose shadow dance of multiform boughs is never seen through leaves, while shadows on the snow are hard of outline, unlike the illusive phantoms running over autumn’s brown grass. June has no flowers so quaint, pathetic, and austere as the trembling weeds of November. What does the goldenrod, white with age, care for frost? ”

“ There's no getting round the fact that what I should have thought a miracle has happened. The spirit of June has claimed me from the 'other side.' And even if I were brutal enough, disloyal enough, to disown the claim, to pretend to Joyce and myself that I didn't believe, neither Joyce nor I could have a moment's happiness, married. She knows that as well as I do. As my wife her life would be spoiled. June would always stand between us, separating us one from the other. ”

“ And read sweet poems the whole day long:
Unseen as we lie in our haybuilt home.
O life is delight when June is come.
[Pg 142]
15
The pinks along my garden walks
Have all shot forth their summer stalks,
Thronging their buds ’mong tulips hot,
And blue forget-me-not.
Their dazzling snows forth-bursting soon
Will lade the idle breath of June:
And waken thro’ the fragrant night
To steal the pale moonlight.
The nightingale at end of May
Lingers each year for their display;
Till when he sees their blossoms blown,
He knows the spring is flown. ”

“ Of June is over the earth,
And the birds are singing together
In a wild, mad strain of mirth,
As the skies of June can be,
I would like to have the summons
Sent down from God to me.
I would not wait for the furrows--
For the faded eyes and hair;
But pass out swift and sudden,
Ere I grow heart-sick with care;
I would break some morn in my singing--
Or fall in my springing walk,
As a full-blown flower will sometimes
Drop, all a-bloom, from the stalk. ”

“ That Juno was especially a deity of women, and represents in a sense the female principle of life, is seen in the fact that as every man had his genius, so every woman had her Juno; and the goddess herself may have been a development of this conception. The various forms of her cult all show her in close connexion with women. As Juno Lucina she was invoked in childbirth, and on the 1st of March, the old Roman New Year’s day, the matrons met and made offerings at her temple in a grove on the Esquiline ”

“ If June is the most flowery of months, May is certainly the most musical. The days are drawing near when there will settle on the green world of woods and lanes and meadows the silence of the summer. The grey dawn is still almost as full as ever of sweet sounds. The songs of thrush and blackbird are still glorious in the evening twilight. Wren and robin still sing to us at intervals from dawn to sunset. But through the long hours of daylight we miss already the notes of many a wandering singer, for whom June is the limit of the season. Already the cuckoo's voice is breaking. ”

“ There was a slight note of protest in June’s solemn tone.
“If you fall in love with beauty, all the world is yours. There’s no escape from beauty so long as the sky is above us. No matter where we walk we are face to face with beauty.”
June was afraid that a girl who looked so smart in a lilac silk dress and a picture hat that she had the air of a fashion plate must have caught William’s injudicious observation. ”

“ Then let us welcome pleasant spring,
And still the flowery tribute bring,
And still to thee our carol sing,
O lovely May!
Mrs. Hemans.
JUNE.
Come, June! and with beauty fill the earth.
Long have we waited for thy clear blue sky;
Though May is sweet she lacks thy constancy,
And chilly winds oft break the glad world's mirth. ”

“ But there was no sign, neither angry motion in the air nor hint of January mist. June—fields of June, sky of June, songs of June. Grass of June beneath him, grass of June over the tragedy he had deemed immortal. A bird called out of the dell: “Rickie!”
A bird flew into the dell.
“Did you take me for the Dryad?” she asked. She was sitting down with his head on her lap. He had laid it there for a moment before he went out to die, and she had not let him take it away.
“I prayed you might not be a woman,” he whispered.
“Darling, I am very much a woman. ”

“ He prolonged her youth by many seasons, gave her springs with the summers of Saint‐Martin, and gilded her twilight years with the most splendid rays. We are so classical, in France, that we have not perceived, after two thousand years, that roses, in our climate, do not bloom in April as in the descriptions of poets of antiquity, but in June, and that our women begin to be beautiful at the age at which those of Greece, who are more precocious, cease to be. ”

“ Pretty, but weak. June—June, for heaven’s sake, girl, don’t write poetry on June. It’s the sickliest subject in the world. It’s been written to death.”
“No, June is immortal,” cried Emily suddenly, a mutinous sparkle replacing the strained look in her eyes. She was not going to let Mr. Carpenter have it all his own way.
But Mr. Carpenter had tossed June aside without reading a line of it.
“‘I weary of the hungry world’—what do you know of the hungry world?—you in your New Moon seclusion of old trees and old maids—but it is hungry. ”

“ And now home again and The Home Stretch mine!
June, and writing this to you as I sit in the old sweet place under the old sweet trees, under the hickories we loved so, and afar off is the flush of old gold above the violet of the western hills.
And the same June sounds come over to me: the call of an ewe to an errant lamb; the neigh of a mare and the answering whinny of her colt; the distant staccato clatter of binders amid the wheat.
And a wood-thrush deep in our laurel thicket rinsing clear the air around with her liquid notes.... ”

“ Laughing with the weather;
Blending both our souls, love,
In the selfsame tune,
Drinking all life holds, love,
In the heart of June.
In the heart of June, love,
With its golden weather,
Underneath the moon, love,
You and I together.
Ah! how sweet to seem, love,
Drugged and half aswoon
With this luscious dream, love,
In the heart of June.
{121}
THE OLD BAND
It's mighty good to git back to the old town, shore,
Considerin' I've be'n away twenty year and more.
Sence I moved then to Kansas, of course I see a change,
A-comin' back, and notice things that's new to me and strange ”

“ Blossoms Time's flower, the steadfast amethyst.
"Here's pansies, they're for thoughts"—weak thoughts though fair;
June sees their opening, June their swift decay.
But those stone bourgeons stand for thoughts more rare,
Whose patient crystals colored day by day.
Might I so cut my flowers within the rock,
And prison there their sweet escaping breath;
Their petals then the winter's frost should mock,
And only Time's slow chisel work their death. ”

“ And then the month is May, and the straw-bonneted and white-aproned girls, ladies and peasants alike, were all out at their porches and balconies, lover-like couples were sauntering down the park-lanes, one servant passed us with a tri-cornered blue billet-doux between his thumb and finger, the nightingales were singing their very hearts away to the new-blown roses, and a sense of summer and seventeen, days of sunshine and sonnet-making, came over me irresistibly. I should like to see June out in Geneva. ”