19th April, 1881

The Primrose shines; unnoticed on the lawn
      The Peacocks strut, they feel that it is spring,
    They shake their fans, they drop their painted wing,
But Hughenden’s white curtains all are drawn;
Who played the game of nations, King and Pawn,
    Has played and lost the game where Death is King.
    He nevermore shall see the cedars fling
Their fragrant shadows from the English dawn.

Ambitionless for self to be or have,
    Ambitious for the land to be and do,
        The Patriot-soul has vanished from our strife;
    But, though his heart to dust and ashes go,
True Love shall bend above the threefold grave
        That holds the friend, the statesman, and his wife.

(Valete: Tennyson and other Memorial Poems, p. 61)

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Came April, and beneath her feet the cloud
    Broke into song upon the silent hills;
    The primrose woke, and thirsty daffodils
Tossed up their golden cups, a merry crowd:
Then visibly beneath his cold grey shroud
    Helvellyn moved to hear the cuckoo-thrills
    Make echo down the valley; danced the rills,
The Greta sounded glad, Lodore was loud.

The white lambs gambolled thro’ the sunlit grass,
    With jewels of the sloe the hedge was pearled,
        And golden shone the coltsfoot in the lane;
No foot, no heart, but did the lightlier pass,
    For April tears had wrought another world
        Wherein was life and laugher after pain.

(Poems at Home and Abroad, p. 42)

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How blue the snow is; you might have supposed the fields out ‘Wythop’ way had been washed with ultramarine; but one’s eyes are caught back by the beauty of the snowdrifts by the roadside.  These snowdrifts are for all the world as if great waves of milk had curled over to breaking, and at the moment had been fixed or changed into crystalline marble.  And now the sun is gathering its glory back into self, and hangs a globe of flame above ‘Whinlatter’ Pass.  Suddenly the light goes out from all the valley meadows.  The day star has sunk behind the hills.  But still old Skiddaw flashes back the flame, and shepherds, out Newlands way, can see the bastions of Blencathra glow like molten gold. (p. 113)

For us, as we gaze out south, the range of Helvellyn is the miracle of beauty that holds our eyes.  Far off and ghostly for the haze, it lies upon a background of rosy flushing afterglow, and seems to faint into a kind of impalpable phantom of its former strength—becomes no longer solid mountain, but spectral cloud.  A light wind blows, and the oak leaves in the hedge tinkle like iron; the farmer calls the horse to get his hay, the wren chirrups or scolds from the wayside bank, and a partridge cries from the near field.  Then all is silent and hushed for the coming of the queen.  Over the dark pines upon Skiddaw, and above the silver shoulder of the hill, clear-faced and full, the February moon swims up to rule the night.  And such a reign of splendour was then begun as I have no words to chronicle.  For the heaven above Helvellyn was rosy pink, melting into blue, and the sky above Skiddaw was, or seemed to be, steel azure, and the west beyond Wythop range was gleaming amber.  There, in the midst of that golden sea, shone Venus like a point of silver fire.  Sirius rose and scintillated above Helvellyn’s ridge, Jupiter looked clear from near the zenith, and Orion girt his starry sword about him in mid-heaven; but it was the Moon who was the queen of all our hearts.  It was she who laid her mystery upon the lakes, the hills, the valleys, white with snow; she who made one feel that if sunrise and sunsetting had been fair to-day, the moon-rising in a land of Arctic splendour had been fairer still. (pp. 114-115)

(Lake Country Sketches, pp. 109-115)

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The silence of the vales is, however, broken by one visitor’s cry, who is par excellence the bird of April.  I know not why, unless it be that the cuckoo loves an echo and delights to hear his own voice, but I have noted how persistently he chooses the tops of the dales, their inmost recesses, for his habitat.  One cannot towards the end of April pass up from the high end of a valley to the fells without hearing the cuckoo.  Long before he will be welcomed by the children in the plain, there, in the resonant valley-end, will shepherds hear him.  So persistently does he haunt the far end of Borrodale and shout himself hoarse at Seathwaite that the word ‘Borrodalgouk’ has become a proverb, and stories are told of a determination on the part of the dalesmen to build up a wall to keep the cuckoo a possession of the vale. (pp. 43-44)

Wordsworth was fortunate to dwell where the cuckoo found an echo, and many a time has one noted how, between Loughrigg fell and Nab Scar, the cuckoo loves still, as of old, to stammer out his call. (p. 44)

At the end of April, in the far recesses of the hill in some deep ghyll where as yet no leaf has come to ash or rowan, another voice may break the silence and cheer the solitude, this is the mountain ouzel; a shy singer but a sweet one is he, and one may feel rewarded for a long April wandering by sound of his clear flute. (p. 44)

A long April wandering!  The April twilight is the loveliest gift the month brings to our lakeland hills.  Not truly to be compared to the never-darkened skies of May, but very wondrous are these golden evenings of an April day.  All through the day alternate sun and shower has possessed the vale.  Curtains of hail or heavy rain have hidden or revealed the purple blues and golden greens of the mountain distance.  Then all the storms of the day drift from sight.  Like black dragons, dark clouds that had coiled up in the west writhe out of ken, and golden galleons float over the hills into serene spaces of silver sky.  The hills are deathly grey, and the woods dead brown, save for the islands of larch green and budding birch, but the song of the birds is ceaseless.  You feel as you listen that they are in a world—the world of love and praise—where no night comes.  Suddenly Helvellyn kindles into rosy pink, and Skiddaw goes a golden bronze, and when the light fails, such golden sky burns between Wythop and the Dodd, or gleams in the west beyond the Wrynose pass, that the men in Westmoreland and Cumberland feel as a shepherd once put it to me, “that dayleet’s ower lang for a hard darrock,” and we feel the April skies are almost merciless to the weary horse and husbandman.  But it is this same lengthened evening that invites the wanderer to our dales, and they who love colour-changes and would feel the gladness of bird-song and the first quickening of the valley meadows and hedgerows should come—though nights are chill and at times a snow-fall whitens all the tops—to the English Lakes in daffodil days, before the woodlands have shut the sunshine from their mellow carpets, or the sycamore has shaken his rosy glumes upon the rooftree of the fellside farm. (pp. 44-45)

(Months at the Lakes, pp. 37-47)

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