Miss March

“ It is March in England, bleak March, and I lie here with the great sliding doors wide open in an undershirt and p'jama trousers, and melt in the closure of mosquito bars, and burn to be out in the breeze. A few torn clouds - not white, the sun has tinged them a warm pink - swim in heaven. In which blessed and fair day, I have to make faces and speak bitter words to a man - who has deceived me, it is true - but who is poor, and older than I, and a kind of a gentleman too. ”

“ March in Marbridge used to mean violets and daffodils, tender green shoots and balmy middays. March here means days of pale clean light and great sweeping wind which chased grey clouds across a steely sky, and stirred the lust for fight and freedom in men's minds and set them longing to be up and away and at battle with the world or the elements. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Welcome, O March! whose kindly days and dry Make April ready for the throstle's song, Thou first redresser of the winter's wrong! Yea, welcome, March! and though I die ere June, Yet for the hope of life I give thee praise, Striving to swell the burden of the tune That even now I hear thy brown birds raise, Unmindful of the past or coming days; Who sing, "O joy! a new year is begun! What happiness to look upon the sun!" O, what begetteth all this storm of bliss, But Death himself, who, crying solemnly, Even from the heart of sweet Forgetfulness, Bids us, "Rejoice! lest pleasureless ye die. ”

“ March arbitrarily distinguished those with the drooping faces as tipsy and ashamed to confront the public. The small Italian children raced up and down the asphalt paths, playing American games of tag and hide-and-whoop; larger boys passed ball, in training for potential championships. The Marches sat and mused, or quarrelled fitfully about where they should spend the summer, like sparrows, he once said, till the electric lights began to show distinctly among the leaves, and they looked round and found the infants and dotards gone and the benches filled with lovers. ”

“ Had taught his soldier-heart to sigh:—
SONG. March! nor heed those arms that hold thee,
Tho' so fondly close they come;
Closer still will they enfold thee
When thou bring'st fresh laurels home.
Dost thou dote on woman's brow?
Dost thou live but in her breath?
March!—one hour of victory now
Wins thee woman's smile till death.
Oh what bliss when war is over
Beauty's long-missed smile to meet. ”

“ She fills the fields with strength and passion—makes A fire of lustre on the lawn-ringed lakes; Her beauty awes the great wild sea; the height Of grey magnificence takes strange delight And softens at her presence, at the dear Sweet face whose memory beams through all the year. March Clear upland voices, full of wind and stream, Greet March, the sister of the flying beam And speedy shadow. She, with rainbow crowned, Lives in a sphere of songs of mazy sound. The hymn of waters and the gale's high tone, With anthems from the thunder's mountain throne, Are with her ever. ”

“ It was a day late on in March—one of those days not unfrequent at that season, especially in the south and west—a day that seems filled with a promise of coming summer—a day in which all nature rejoices, which stirs the pulses and sets the blood coursing joyously, and fills the air with subtle promises of life and hope. ”

“ Every word was a stab in March's heart, so weakly tender to his own; his wife's tears, after so much experience of the comparative lightness of the griefs that weep themselves out in women, always seemed wrung from his own soul; if his children suffered in the least through him, he felt like a murderer. ”

“ March saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all. She was ready to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his interest had got them the only rooms left in the house. This satisfied in her the passion for size which is at the bottom of every American heart, and which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples. We pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we are not ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours, we are magnanimously happy in them. ”

“ It was a bright and beautiful morning in March, when Clara, after taking an affectionate leave of her cousin, whom, despite her little foibles, she tenderly loved, was seated by her old friend and commenced her homeward journey.
March, in our southern clime, is not always rude and boisterous, but has many a gentle day, when Nature is dressed in as lovely a garb as she wears at any season of the year, and such a day was the one of which we speak ”

“ March's anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying conviction of their insincerity to her. At the end she asked what rooms were left on the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked through his passenger list with a shaking head. He was afraid there was nothing they would like.
“But we would take anything,” she entreated, and March smiled to think of his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of not going.
“We merely want the best,” he put in. “One flight up, no noise or dust, with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days.” ”

“ I read a deeper meaning in my garden book as the boys' human calendar runs parallel with it, and I can see month by month and day by day that it is truly the touch of Nature that makes kindred of us all—the throb of the human heart and not the touch of learning or the arts.
Everything grows restless as spring comes on—animate, and what is called inanimate, nature. March is the trying month of indecision, the tug-of-war between winter and spring, pulling us first one way and then the other, the victory often being, until the final moment, on the side of winter. ”

“ Whoever has a touch of madness to lend him sympathy with the March hare likes the bewildering days through which he scampers to vanish at the edge of April. Rebellious, whitening ponds and wind-bent trees; defiant buds and all the kindled life of marsh, hill, and woodland, set free once more from cold, but not from dread—hear at the coming of the mighty month their promise of release. But only to comrades who will run with him through muddy lanes and tangled brush does he show his treasures: forest creatures sped like the couriers, petals lifted like the banners, of life resurgent. ”

“ February brought fair days, scattered shining celandines like pieces of gold over the garden beds, set the stiff upright daffodil buds drooping and was all too soon driven out by the bleakest March that was ever known, a fierce, detestable month of withering east winds, of starved primroses, and dauntless thrushes singing to their nests in the shaken laurustinus. Jenny began to hate the country itself now, when all she could see of it was savage and forbidding as the people it bred. ”

“ March is a month when the needle of my nature dips towards the country. I am away, greeting everything as it wakes out of winter sleep, stretches arms upward and legs downward, and drinks goblet after goblet of young sunshine. ”

“ March,
you remind me of
the pyramids, our pyramids—
stript of the polished stone
that used to guard them!
March, you are like Fra Angelico
at Fiesole, painting on plaster!
March,
you are like a band of
young poets that have not learned
the blessedness of warmth
(or have forgotten it) . ”

“ Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman's aberrations from some point at which he, supposes her fixed as a star. In these unfurnished houses, without steam or elevator, March followed his wife about with patient wonder. ”

“ The sun crosses the line; the days grow a minute longer: spring will come by and by. But by what cruel irony was the month of March ever called spring?—March, which piles snow-storms and wind-storms on backs almost broken by endurance. The long agony of March and April is the breaking-point with many a delicate person who has borne pretty well the regular winter. ”

“ There was a moment’s blank pause.
‘What do you say, Nellie?’ asked Banford.
‘I don’t mind,’ said March, in her distinct tone. ‘The village doesn’t matter to me, anyhow.’
‘No,’ said the youth, quick and soft. ‘Why should it? I mean, what should they say?’
‘Oh, well,’ came March’s plangent, laconic voice, ‘they’ll easily find something to say. But it makes no difference what they say. We can look after ourselves.’
‘Of course you can,’ said the youth. ”

“ They remain nurseries, but they have the charm which no human care can alienate. The smell of their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of exemption from care. ”

“ March, with the tender fervor that every woman who lived in the time of the war must feel for those who suffered in it. “All that I meant was that I hoped you would not get mixed up with him too much. You're so apt to be carried away by your impulses.”
“They didn't carry me very far away in the direction of poor old Lindau, I'm ashamed to think,” said March. “I meant all sorts of fine things by him after I met him; and then I forgot him, and I had to be reminded of him by Fulkerson.” ”

“ There is nothing, March, that will keep a young man in the right way like his love for just 'the one girl in the world'--if only she be worthy of his love. And I think Hazel will be--even of you."
March flung his arms about her neck and kissed her heartily:
"Dear, little Mother Blossom, I 'll try, and even if I fail, just the thought of such a glorious-filorious mother that does n't laugh at a fellow--I was afraid you would, though,--will keep me straight enough. Why, Mother Blossom! ”

“ March.
“Ah, that reminds me,” said her husband, “that we had another talk with the old gentleman, this afternoon, about Fulkerson's literary, artistic, and advertising orgie, and it's postponed till October.”
“The later the better, I should think,” said Mrs. March, who did not really think about it at all, but whom the date fixed for it caused to think of the intervening time. “We have got to consider what we will do about the summer, before long, Basil.”
“Oh, not yet, not yet,” he pleaded; with that man's willingness to abide in the present, which is so trying to a woman. ”

“ 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. ”

“ March safely at home, busy with his books and the small parish which found in him a minister by nature as by grace,—a quiet, studious man, rich in the wisdom that is better than learning, the charity which calls all mankind "brother," the piety that blossoms into character, making it august and lovely. ”

“ It is not at all pleasant to consent to such innovation, but March is a tyrant, and in the end it is better to submit to its caprices. To see all your clothes on the line at the mercy of a real March wind, would be worse than to defer the washing and wait for a milder day. ”

“ Well, I tell you, March, I know them inside out; and I know they are behaving like heroes. Every man of them ought to have a statue, and on the pedestal words like those of the noblest ruffian of the Revolution: 'Que mon nom soit flétri; que la France soit libre'"
"Good God!" cried March, "shall we never get to the bottom of your mines and counter-mines?"
After a silence Fisher answered in a lower voice, looking his friend in the eyes. ”

“ He had reverted to an entirely German effect of dress and figure; his walk was slow and Teutonic; he must be a type of thousands who have returned to the fatherland without wishing to own themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with the only country left them.
“He was rather pathetic, my dear,” said March, in the discomfort he knew his wife must be feeling as well as himself. “How odd to have the lid lifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in the witch's caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home! ”

“ March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or dinner the aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether he liked their work or not; but this was not an easy matter. Those who were at all interesting seemed to have engagements and preoccupations; after two or three experiments with the bashfuller sort—those who had come up to the metropolis with manuscripts in their hands, in the good old literary tradition—he wondered whether he was otherwise like them when he was young like them. ”

“ III. March, March! have you no feeling, E'en for the fair sex who make us knock under? You cold-blooded divil, you're far more uncivil Than Summer himself, with his terrible thunder! Every day we meet ladies down Regent-street, Holding their handkerchiefs up in good order; But, do all that we can, the most merciful man Must see the blue noses peep over the border. ”