Question

What is the theme of this passage?




the sharp contrast between winter in England and winter in Canada




the sharp contrast between spring in England and spring in Canada




the effect that spring has on poets and young people in Canada




the effect of the arrival of spring on love in Canada

Answer 1

I'll never forget the time. It was a day in April.

But an April day in Canada is a very different thing from an April day in England. In England all Nature is robed in vivid green, the air is balmy; and all those beauties abound which usually set poets rhapsodizing, and young men sentimentalizing, and young girls tantalizing. Now, in Canada there is nothing of the kind. No Canadian poet, for instance, would ever affirm that in the spring a livelier iris blooms upon the burnished dove; in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. No. For that sort of thing—the thoughts of love I mean—winter is the time of day in Canada. The fact is, the Canadians haven't any spring. The months which Englishmen include under that pleasant name are here partly taken up with prolonging the winter, and partly with the formation of a new and nondescript season. In that period Nature, instead of being darkly, deeply, beautifully green, has rather the shade of a dingy, dirty, melancholy gray. Snow covers the ground—not by any means the glistening white robe of Winter—but a rugged substitute, damp, and discolored. It is snow, but snow far gone into decay and decrepitude—snow that seems ashamed of itself for lingering so long after wearing out its welcome, and presenting itself in so revolting a dress—snow, in fact, which is like a man sinking into irremediable ruin and changing its former glorious state for that condition which is expressed by the unpleasant word "slush." There is not an object, not a circumstance, in visible Nature which does not heighten the contrast.









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Answer 2

A sharp contrast between spring in England and spring in Canada