For about six weeks from the middle of February we had bitter northerly winds.  The frost was not very severe, but the wind penetrated the thickest clothing and searched the house through and through.  The shrubs, even the hardiest, were blackened by its virulence.  There was scarcely any sunshine, and every now and then a gloomy haze, like the smoke in London suburbs, invaded us.  The rise and fall of the barometer meant nothing more than a variation in the strength of the polar current.  Growth was nearly arrested, although one morning I found three primroses in a sheltered hollow.  Never had the weather seemed more hopeless than towards the close of March.  On the last evening of the month the sky was curiously perplexed and agitated notwithstanding there was little movement in the air above or below.  Next morning the change had come.  The wind had backed to the south, and a storm from the Channel was raging with torrents of warm rain.  O the day that followed!  Massive April clouds hung in the air.  How much the want of visible support adds to their charm!  One enormous cloud, with its base nearly on the horizon, rose up forty-five degrees or so towards the zenith.  Its weight looked tremendous, but it floated lightly in the blue which encompassed it.  Towards the centre it was swollen and dark, but its edges were dazzling white.  While I was watching it, it went away to the east and partly broke up.  A new cloud, like and not like, succeeded it . . . I followed the lane, stopped for a few minutes at a corner where the grassy road-margin widens out near the tumble-down barn, looked over the gate westward across the valley to the hills beyond, and then went down to the brook that winds along the bottom.  It runs in a course which it has cut for itself, and is flanked on either side by delicately-carved miniature cliffs of yellow sandstone overhung with broom and furze.  It was full of pure glittering moor-water, which seemed to add light to the stones in its bed, so brilliant was their colour.  It fell with incessant, rippling murmur over its little ledges, gathering itself up into pools between each, and so it went on to the mill-pond a mile away.  Close to me a blackbird was building her nest.  She moved when I peeped at her, but presently returned.  Her back was struck by the warm sun and was glossy in its rays.  A scramble of half a mile up a rough track brought me to the common, and there, thirty miles distant, lay the chalk downs, unsubstantial, a light-blue mist.

Youth with its heat in the blood may be more capable of exultation at this season, but to the old man it brings the sounder hope and deeper joy.