April 7: Nature Guided His Pen (Vol. 41, pp. 639-651)

On this day in 1770, the English poet William Wordsworth was born. We get the famous daffodil poem, and that first stanza tells you all you need to know about his work:

"I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

He did love nature, but his poems laid it on thick in the way that all of his English contemporaries lay it on. Springtime doggerel.

April 6: Who Is Bad? (Vol. 2, pp. 243-253)

The Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius was born this day in 121, which is why we get this selection from his "Meditations" that takes up the question, "What is badness?" He doesn't come right out and answer that question. Instead, he goes round and round in the epigrams that he is famous for.

April 5: You and Your Dreams (Vol. 34, pp. 313-322)

The great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was born this day in 1588, but to mark the occasion, the editors select a really odd piece of Hobbes' masterwork, "Leviathan."

Instead of laying out his view of humans in the state of nature living lives "nasty, brutish and short," we get this snippet discussing dreams and imagination. A very un-Hobbes-like sample of his work.

April 4: The Mistakes of Night (Vol. 18, pp. 205-215)

English playwright Oliver Goldsmith was born this day in 1774, so we get a selection from his best-known work, "She Stoops To Conquer." This play is supposed to be rollicking good fun, but it still seems like the usual overwrought, overwritten drama of the era.

April 3: Romance with a Happy Ending (Vol. 15, pp. 392-404)

I never heard of George Herbert, who was born this day in 1593, but Izaak Walton thought he was grand. In another one of Walton's mini-biographies of obscure English writers, he tells the tale of Herbert's whirlwind courtship with the woman who married him.

April 2: A Spoon Dances in the Moonlight (Vol. 29, pp. 462-471)

Yet another selection from Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle," and his South Seas travelogue. This time, it's the tale of an enormous spoon dressed in human finery and place upon a grave. As the natives chant over the grave in the moonlight, the spoon appears to dance. Not much of interest here.

April 1: "Oh, to Be in England Now That April's There" (Vol. 42, pp. 1068-1074)

The poet Robert Browning wrote those words while in Italy, where all was warm and bright. For most of the Northern Hemisphere above 40 degrees latitude, particularly in Vermont, April 1 usually gray and cold and muddy. The daffodils and crocuses are tentatively poking up from the ground, the trees haven't yet budded and the migrating birds are just starting to straggle back north.

Winter may be finished, but spring has yet to fully arrive. Browning, whose poetry we're reading today, never saw a Vermont spring, which is slow to come and quick to leave.