With the main day of spring, when the enlivening earth puts on its article of clothing of green, and the warm, fragrant air fans our countenances and fills our lungs and seems even to enter to our souls, we encounter an ambiguous, unclear aching for opportunity, for satisfaction, a want to run, to meander capriciously, to take in the spring. The past winter having been uncommonly serious, this spring feeling was like a type of inebriation in May, as though there were an overabundant supply of sap.
One morning on waking I saw from my window the blue sky shining in the sun over the neighboring houses. The canaries hanging in the windows were singing boisterously, as were the workers on each floor; a merry clamor ascended from the lanes, and I went out, my spirits as brilliant as the day, to go—I didn't precisely know where. Everyone I met appeared to grin; a quality of bliss seemed to invade everything in the warm light of returning spring. One may nearly have said that a breeze of affection was blowing through the city, and seeing the young ladies whom I found in the lanes in their morning toilets, in the profundities of whose eyes there prowled a concealed delicacy, and who strolled with listless beauty, filled my heart with fomentation...