We have had lately a severely cold week -Blackthorn winter indeed. How the poor garden shrivels and shrinks, and seems to lose all its colour!

Many years ago, in a volume of Tennyson given me by Owen Meredith, he wrote on the fly-leaf the following little poem, full of sympathy for the gardener:

In Nature can aught be unnatural ?

If so, it is surely the frost, That cometh by night and spreadeth death's pall On the promise of summer which spring hath lost. In a clear spring night Such a frost pass'd light Over the budding earth, like a ghost.

But the flowers that perish'd

Were those alone Which, in haste to be cherish'd And loved and known,

Had too soon to the sun all their beauty shown. Lightly vested, Amorous-breasted Blossom of almond, blossom of peachImpatient children, with hearts unsteady, So young, and yet more precocious each

Than the leaves of the summer, and blushing already! These perished because too soon they lived; But the oak-flower, self-restrained, survived;

'If the sun would win me,' she thought, 'he must

Wait for me, wooing me warmly the while; For a flower's a fool, if a flower would trust Her whole sweet being to one first smile.'