Balmy Spring--weeks later than we expected, and months later than we
longed for her--comes at last to revive the moss on the roof and walls
of our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my study window, inviting me
to throw it open and create a summer atmosphere by the intermixture of
her genial breath with the black and cheerless comfort of the stove. As
the casement ascends, forth into infinite space fly the innumerable
forms of thought or fancy that have kept me company in the retirement of
this little chamber during the sluggish lapse of wintry weather--visions
gay, grotesque and sad, pictures of real life tinted with nature's
homely gray and russet, scenes in dreamland bedizened with rainbow-hues
which faded before they were well laid on. All these may vanish now, and
leave me to mold a fresh existence out of sunshine. Brooding Meditation
may flap her dusky wings and take her owl-like flight, blinking amid the
cheerfulness of noontide. Such companions befit the season of frosted
window-panes and crackling fires, when the blast howls through the
black-ash trees of our avenue, and the drifting snowstorm chokes up the
wood paths and fills the highway from stone wall to stone wall. In the
spring and summer time all somber thoughts should follow the winter
northward with the somber and thoughtful crows. The old paradisiacal
economy of life is again in force: we live, not to think nor to labor,
but for the simple end of being happy; nothing for the present hour is
worthy of man's infinite capacity save to imbibe the warm smile of
heaven and sympathize with the reviving earth.
The present Spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps because Winter
lingered so unconscionably long that with her best diligence she can
hardly retrieve half the allotted period of her reign. It is but a
fortnight since I stood on the brink of our swollen river and beheld the
accumulated ice of four frozen months go down the stream. Except in
streaks here and there upon the hillsides, the whole visible universe
was then covered with deep snow the nethermost layer of which had been
deposited by an early December storm. It was a sight to make the
beholder torpid, in the impossibility of imagining how this vast white
napkin was to be removed from the face of the corpse-like world in less
time than had been required to spread it there. But who can estimate the
power of gentle influences, whether amid material desolation or the
moral winter of man's heart? There have been no tempestuous rains--even
no sultry days--but a constant breath of southern winds, with now a day
of kindly sunshine, and now a no less kindly mist, or a soft descent of
showers, in which a smile and a blessing seemed to have been steeped.
The snow has vanished as if by magic; whatever heaps may be hidden in
the woods and deep gorges of the hills, only two solitary specks remain
in the landscape, and those I shall almost regret to miss when to-morrow
I look for them in vain. Never before, methinks, has spring pressed so
closely on the footsteps of retreating winter. Along the roadside the
green blades of grass have sprouted on the very edge of the snowdrifts.
The pastures and mowing fields have not yet assumed a general aspect of
verdure, but neither have they the cheerless brown tint which they wear
in later autumn, when vegetation has entirely ceased; there is now a
faint shadow of life, gradually brightening into the warm reality. Some
tracts in a happy exposure--as, for instance, yonder southwestern slope
of an orchard, in front of that old red farmhouse beyond the river--such
patches of land already wear a beautiful and tender green to which no
future luxuriance can add a charm. It looks unreal--a prophecy, a hope,
a transitory effect of some peculiar light, which will vanish with the
slightest motion of the eye. But beauty is never a delusion; not these
verdant tracts but the dark and barren landscape all around them is a
shadow and a dream. Each moment wins some portion of the earth from
death to life; a sudden gleam of verdure brightens along the sunny slope
of a bank which an instant ago was brown and bare. You look again, and,
behold an apparition of green grass!
The trees in our orchard and elsewhere are as yet naked, but already
appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if by one magic
touch they might instantaneously burst into full foliage, and that the
wind which now sighs through their naked branches might make sudden
music amid innumerable leaves. The moss-grown willow tree which for
forty years past has overshadowed these western windows will be among
the first to put on its green attire. There are some objections to the
willow: it is not a dry and cleanly tree, and impresses the beholder
with an association of sliminess. No trees, I think, are perfectly
agreeable as companions unless they have glossy leaves, dry bark, and a
firm and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow is almost
the earliest to gladden us with the promise and reality of beauty in its
graceful and delicate foliage, and the last to scatter its yellow, yet
scarcely-withered, leaves upon the ground. All through the winter, too,
its yellow twigs give it a sunny aspect which is not without a cheering
influence even in the grayest and gloomiest day. Beneath a clouded sky
it faithfully remembers the sunshine. Our old house would lose a charm
were the willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over the
snow-covered roof, and its heap of summer verdure.
The lilac shrubs under my study windows are likewise almost in leaf; in
two or three days more I may put forth my hand and pluck the topmost
bough in its freshest green. These lilacs are very aged, and have lost
the luxuriant foliage of their prime. The heart or the judgment or the
moral sense or the taste is dissatisfied with their present aspect. Old
age is not venerable when it embodies itself in lilacs, rose-bushes, or
any other ornamental shrubs; it seems as if such plants, as they grow
only for beauty, ought to flourish only in immortal youth--or, at least,
to die before their sad decrepitude. Trees of beauty are trees of
paradise, and therefore not subject to decay by their original nature,
though they have lost that precious birthright by being transplanted to
an earthly soil. There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the idea of a
time-stricken and grandfatherly lilac-bush. The analogy holds good in
human life. Persons who can only be graceful and ornamental--who can
give the world nothing but flowers--should die young, and never be seen
with gray hair and wrinkles, any more than the flower-shrubs with mossy
bark and blighted foliage, like the lilacs under my window. Not that
beauty is worthy of less than immortality. No; the beautiful should live
forever, and thence, perhaps, the sense of impropriety when we see it
triumphed over by time. Apple trees, on the other hand, grow old without
reproach. Let them live as long as they may, and contort themselves into
whatever perversity of shape they please, and deck their withered limbs
with a springtime gaudiness of pink-blossoms, still they are
respectable, even if they afford us only an apple or two in a season.
Those few apples--or, at all events, the remembrance of apples in
bygone years--are the atonement which utilitarianism inexorably demands
for the privilege of lengthened life. Human flower shrubs, if they will
grow old on earth, should, besides their lovely blossoms, bear some kind
of fruit that will satisfy earthly appetites, else neither man nor the
decorum of nature will deem it fit that the moss should gather on them.
One of the first things that strikes the attention when the white sheet
of winter is withdrawn is the neglect and disarray that lay hidden
beneath it. Nature is not cleanly, according to our prejudices. The
beauty of preceding years, now transformed to brown and blighted
deformity, obstructs the brightening loveliness of the present hour. Our
avenue is strewn with the whole crop of autumn's withered leaves. There
are quantities of decayed branches which one tempest after another has
flung down, black and rotten, and one or two with the ruin of a bird's
nest clinging to them. In the garden are the dried bean-vines, the brown
stalks of the asparagus-bed, and melancholy old cabbages which were
frozen into the soil before their unthrifty cultivator could find time
to gather them. How invariable throughout all the forms of life do we
find these intermingled memorials of death! On the soil of thought and
in the garden of the heart, as well as in the sensual world, lie
withered leaves--the ideas and feelings that we have done with. There is
no wind strong enough to sweep them away; infinite space will not garner
them from our sight. What mean they? Why may we not be permitted to live
and enjoy as if this were the first life and our own the primal
enjoyment, instead of treading always on these dry bones and mouldering
relics from the aged accumulation of which springs all that now appears
so young and new? Sweet must have been the spring-time of Eden, when no
earlier year had strewn its decay upon the virgin turf, and no former
experience had ripened into summer and faded into autumn in the hearts
of its inhabitants! That was a world worth living in.--Oh, thou
murmurer, it is out of the very wantonness of such a life that thou
feignest these idle lamentations. There is no decay. Each human soul is
the first created inhabitant of its own Eden.--We dwell in an old
moss-covered mansion and tread in the worn footprints of the past and
have a gray clergyman's ghost for our daily and nightly inmate, yet all
these outward circumstances are made less than visionary by the renewing
power of the spirit. Should the spirit ever lose this power--should the
withered leaves and the rotten branches and the moss-covered house and
the ghost of the gray past ever become its realities, and the verdure
and the freshness merely its faint dream--then let it pray to be
released from earth. It will need the air of heaven to revive its
pristine energies.
What an unlooked for flight was this from our shadowy avenue of
black-ash and balm-of-gilead trees into the infinite! Now we have our
feet again upon the turf. Nowhere does the grass spring up so
industriously as in this homely yard, along the base of the stone wall
and in the sheltered nooks of the buildings, and especially around the
southern door-step--a locality which seems particularly favorable to its
growth, for it is already tall enough to bend over and wave in the wind.
I observe that several weeds--and, most frequently, a plant that stains
the fingers with its yellow juice--have survived and retained their
freshness and sap throughout the winter. One knows not how they have
deserved such an exception from the common lot of their race. They are
now the patriarchs of the departed year, and may preach mortality to the
present generation of flowers and weeds.
Among the delights of spring, how is it possible to forget the birds?
Even the crows were welcome, as the sable harbingers of a brighter and
livelier race. They visited us before the snow was off, but seem mostly
to have betaken themselves to remote depths of the woods, which they
haunt all summer long. Many a time shall I disturb them there, and feel
as if I had intruded among a company of silent worshipers as they sit in
Sabbath stillness among the treetops. Their voices, when they speak, are
in admirable accordance with the tranquil solitude of a summer
afternoon, and, resounding so far above the head, their loud clamor
increases the religious quiet of the scene instead of breaking it. A
crow, however, has no real pretensions to religion, in spite of his
gravity of mien and black attire; he is certainly a thief, and probably
an infidel. The gulls are far more respectable, in a moral point of
view. These denizens of sea-beaten rocks and haunters of the lonely
beach come up our inland river at this season, and soar high overhead,
flapping their broad wings in the upper sunshine. They are among the
most picturesque of birds, because they so float and rest upon the air
as to become almost stationary parts of the landscape. The imagination
has time to grow acquainted with them; they have not flitted away in a
moment. You go up among the clouds and greet these lofty-flighted gulls,
and repose confidently with them upon the sustaining atmosphere. Ducks
have their haunts along the solitary places of the river, and alight in
flocks upon the broad bosom of the overflowed meadows. Their flight is
too rapid and determined for the eye to catch enjoyment from it,
although it never fails to stir up the heart with the sportsman's
ineradicable instinct. They have now gone farther northward, but will
visit us again in autumn.
The smaller birds--the little songsters of the woods, and those that
haunt man's dwellings and claim human friendship by building their nests
under the sheltering eaves or among the orchard trees--these require a
touch more delicate and a gentler heart than mine to do them justice.
Their outburst of melody is like a brook let loose from wintry chains.
We need not deem it a too high and solemn word to call it a hymn of
praise to the Creator, since Nature, who pictures the reviving year in
so many sights of beauty, has expressed the sentiment of renewed life in
no other sound save the notes of these blessed birds. Their music,
however, just now seems to be incidental, and not the result of a set
purpose. They are discussing the economy of life and love and the site
and architecture of their summer residences, and have no time to sit on
a twig and pour forth solemn hymns or overtures, operas, symphonies and
waltzes. Anxious questions are asked, grave subjects are settled in
quick and animated debate, and only by occasional accident, as from pure
ecstasy, does a rich warble roll its tiny waves of golden sound through
the atmosphere. Their little bodies are as busy as their voices; they
are in a constant flutter and restlessness. Even when two or three
retreat to a tree-top to hold council, they wag their tails and heads
all the time with the irrepressible activity of their nature, which
perhaps renders their brief span of life in reality as long as the
patriarchal age of sluggish man. The blackbirds--three species of which
consort together--are the noisiest of all our feathered citizens. Great
companies of them--more than the famous "four-and-twenty" whom Mother
Goose has immortalized--congregate in contiguous tree-tops and
vociferate with all the clamor and confusion of a turbulent political
meeting. Politics, certainly, must be the occasion of such tumultuous
debates, but still, unlike all other politicians, they instill melody
into their individual utterances and produce harmony as a general
effect. Of all bird-voices, none are more sweet and cheerful to my ear
than those of swallows in the dim, sun-streaked interior of a lofty
barn; they address the heart with even a closer sympathy than Robin
Redbreast. But, indeed, all these winged people that dwell in the
vicinity of homesteads seem to partake of human nature and possess the
germ, if not the development, of immortal souls. We hear them saying
their melodious prayers at morning's blush and eventide. A little while
ago, in the deep of night, there came the lively thrill of a bird's note
from a neighboring tree--a real song such as greets the purple dawn or
mingles with the yellow sunshine. What could the little bird mean by
pouring it forth at midnight? Probably the music gushed out of the midst
of a dream in which he fancied himself in paradise with his mate, but
suddenly awoke on a cold, leafless bough with a New England mist
penetrating through his feathers. That was a sad exchange of imagination
for reality.
Insects are among the earliest births of spring. Multitudes, of I know
not what species, appeared long ago on the surface of the snow. Clouds
of them almost too minute for sight hover in a beam of sunshine, and
vanish as if annihilated when they pass into the shade. A mosquito has
already been heard to sound the small horror of his bugle-horn. Wasps
infest the sunny windows of the house. A bee entered one of the chambers
with a prophecy of flowers. Rare butterflies came before the snow was
off, flaunting in the chill breeze, and looking forlorn and all astray
in spite of the magnificence of their dark velvet cloaks with golden
borders.
The fields and wood-paths have as yet few charms to entice the wanderer.
In a walk the other day I found no violets nor anemones, nor anything in
the likeness of a flower. It was worth while, however, to ascend our
opposite hill for the sake of gaining a general idea of the advance of
spring, which I had hitherto been studying in its minute developments.
The river lay round me in a semi-circle, overflowing all the meadows
which give it its Indian name, and offering a noble breadth to sparkle
in the sunbeams. Along the hither shore a row of trees stood up to their
knees in water, and afar off, on the surface of the stream, tufts of
bushes thrust up their heads, as it were, to breathe. The most striking
objects were great solitary trees here and there with a mile-wide waste
of water all around them. The curtailment of the trunk by its immersion
in the river quite destroys the fair proportions of the tree, and thus
makes us sensible of a regularity and propriety in the usual forms of
nature. The flood of the present season, though it never amounts to a
freshet on our quiet stream, has encroached farther upon the land than
any previous one for at least a score of years. It has overflowed stone
fences, and even rendered a portion of the highway navigable for boats.
The waters, however, are now gradually subsiding; islands become annexed
to the mainland, and other islands emerge like new creations from the
watery waste. The scene supplies an admirable image of the receding of
the Nile--except that there is no deposit of black slime--or of Noah's
flood, only that there is a freshness and novelty in these recovered
portions of the continent which give the impression of a world just made
rather than of one so polluted that a deluge had been requisite to
purify it. These upspringing islands are the greenest spots in the
landscape; the first gleam of sunlight suffices to cover them with
verdure.
Thank Providence for spring! The earth--and man himself, by sympathy
with his birthplace--would be far other than we find them if life toiled
wearily onward without this periodical infusion of the primal spirit.
Will the world ever be so decayed that spring may not renew its
greenness? Can man be so dismally age-stricken that no faintest
sunshine of his youth may revisit him once a year? It is impossible. The
moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into beauty, the good old pastor
who once dwelt here renewed his prime, regained his boyhood, in the
genial breezes of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy soul
if, whether in youth or age, it have outlived its privilege of
springtime sprightliness! From such a soul the world must hope no
reformation of its evil--no sympathy with the lofty faith and gallant
struggles of those who contend in its behalf. Summer works in the
present and thinks not of the future; autumn is a rich conservative;
winter has utterly lost its faith, and clings tremulously to the
remembrance of what has been; but spring, with its outgushing life, is
the true type of the movement.