CHAPTER XXIX.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. VII.--APRIL, 1861.--NO. XLII.

APRIL DAYS.

"Can trouble dwell with April days?"

_In Memoriam._

In our methodical New England life, we still recognize some magic in

summer. Most persons reluctantly resign themselves to being decently

happy in June, at least. They accept June. They compliment its weather.

They complained of the earlier months as cold, and so spent them in

the city; and they will complain of the later months as hot, and so

refrigerate themselves on some barren sea-coast. God offers us yearly a

necklace of twelve pearls; most men choose the fairest, label it June,

and cast the rest away. It is time to chant a hymn of more liberal

gratitude.

There are no days in the whole round year more delicious than those

which often come to us in the latter half of April. On these days one

goes forth in the morning, and an Italian warmth broods over all the

hills, taking visible shape in a glistening mist of silvered azure, with

which mingles the smoke from many bonfires. The sun trembles in his

own soft rays, till one understands the old English tradition, that he

dances on Easter-Day. Swimming in a sea of glory, the tops of the hills

look nearer than their bases, and their glistening watercourses seem

close to the eye, as is their liberated murmur to the ear. All across

this broad interval the teams are ploughing. The grass in the meadow

seems all to have grown green since yesterday. The blackbirds jangle

in the oak, the robin is perched upon the elm, the song-sparrow on the

hazel, and the bluebird on the apple-tree. There rises a hawk and sails

slowly, the stateliest of airy things, a floating dream of long and

languid summer-hours. But as yet, though there is warmth enough for a

sense of luxury, there is coolness enough for exertion. No tropics can

offer such a burst of joy; indeed, no zone much warmer than our Northern

States can offer a genuine spring. There can be none where there is no

winter, and the monotone of the seasons is broken only by wearisome

rains. Vegetation and birds being distributed over the year, there is no

burst of verdure nor of song. But with us, as the buds are swelling, the

birds are arriving; they are building their nests almost simultaneously;

and in all the Southern year there is no such rapture of beauty and of

melody as here marks every morning from the last of April onward.

But days even earlier than these in April have a charm,--even days that

seem raw and rainy, when the sky is dull and a bequest of March-wind

lingers, chasing the squirrel from the tree and the children from the

meadows. There is a fascination in walking through these bare early

woods,--there is such a pause of preparation, winter's work is so

cleanly and thoroughly done. Everything is taken down and put away;

throughout the leafy arcades the branches show no remnant of last year,

save a few twisted leaves of oak and beech, a few empty seed-vessels of

the tardy witch-hazel, and a few gnawed nutshells dropped coquettishly

by the squirrels into the crevices of the bark. All else is bare, but

prophetic: buds everywhere, the whole splendor of the coming summer

concentrated in those hard little knobs on every bough; and clinging

here and there among them, a brown, papery chrysalis, from which shall

yet wave the superb wings of the Luna moth. An occasional shower patters

on the dry leaves, but it does not silence the robin on the outskirts of

the wood: indeed, he sings louder than ever, though the song-sparrow and

the bluebird are silent.

Then comes the sweetness of the nights in latter April. There is as yet

no evening-primrose to open suddenly, no cistus to drop its petals;

but the May-flower knows the hour, and becomes more fragrant in the

darkness, so that one can then often find it in the woods without

aid from the eye. The pleasant night-sounds are begun; the hylas are

uttering their shrill _peep_ from the meadows, mingled soon with hoarser

toads, who take to the water at this season to deposit their spawn. The

tree-toads soon join them; but one listens in vain for bullfrogs, or

katydids, or grasshoppers, or whippoorwills, or crickets: we must wait

for them until the delicious June.

The earliest familiar token of the coming season is the expansion of the

stiff catkins of the alder into soft, drooping tresses. These are so

sensitive, that, if you pluck them at almost any time during the winter,

a day's bright sunshine will make them open in a glass of water, and

thus they eagerly yield to every moment of April warmth. The blossom

of the birch is more delicate, that of the willow more showy, but the

alders come first. They cluster and dance everywhere upon the bare

boughs above the watercourses; the blackness of the buds is softened

into rich brown and yellow; and as this graceful creature thus comes

waving into the spring, it is pleasant to remember that the Norse Eddas

fabled the first woman to have been named Embla, because she was created

from an alder-bough.

The first wild-flower of the spring is like land after sea. The two

which, throughout the Northern Atlantic States, divide this interest are

the _Epigaea repens_ (May-flower, ground-laurel, or trailing-arbutus)

and the _Hepatica triloba_ (liverleaf, liverwort, or blue anemone). Of

these two, the latter is perhaps more immediately exciting on first

discovery; because it does not, like the epigaea, exhibit its buds all

winter, but opens its blue eyes almost as soon as it emerges from the

ground. Without the rich and delicious odor of its compeer, it has

an inexpressibly fresh and earthy scent, that seems to bring all the

promise of the blessed season with it; indeed, that clod of fresh turf

with the inhalation of which Lord Bacon delighted to begin the day must

undoubtedly have been full of the roots of our little hepatica. Its

healthy sweetness belongs to the opening year, like Chaucer's poetry;

and one thinks that anything more potent and voluptuous would be less

enchanting,--until one turns to the May-flower. Then comes a richer

fascination for the senses. To pick the May-flower is like following in

the footsteps of some spendthrift army which has scattered the contents

of its treasure-chest among beds of scented moss. The fingers sink in

the soft, moist verdure, and make at each instant some superb discovery

unawares; again and again, straying carelessly, they clutch some new

treasure; and, indeed, all is linked together in bright necklaces by

secret threads beneath the surface, and where you grasp at one, you hold

many. The hands go wandering over the moss as over the keys of a piano,

and bring forth fragrance for melody. The lovely creatures twine and

nestle and lay their glowing faces to the very earth beneath withered

leaves, and what seemed mere barrenness becomes fresh and fragrant

beauty. So great is the charm of the pursuit, that the epigaea is really

the one wild-flower for which our country-people have a hearty passion.

Every village child knows its best haunts, and watches for it eagerly

in the spring; boys wreathe their hats with it, girls twine it in their

hair, and the cottage-windows are filled with its beauty.

In collecting these early flowers, one finds or fancies singular natural

affinities. I flatter myself with being able always to find hepatica, if

there is any within reach, for I was brought up with it ("Cockatoo

he know me berry well"); but other persons, who were brought up

with May-flower, and remember searching for it with their almost

baby-fingers, can find that better. The most remarkable instance

of these natural affinities was in the case of L.T. and his double

anemones. L. had always a gift for wild-flowers, and used often to bring

to Cambridge the largest white anemones that ever were seen, from a

certain special hill in Watertown; they were not only magnificent in

size and whiteness, but had that exquisite blue on the outside of

the petals, as if the sky had bent down in ecstasy at last over its

darlings, and left visible kisses there. But even this success was

not enough, and one day he came with something yet choicer. It was a

rue-leaved anemone (_A. thalictraides_); and, if you will believe it,

each one of the three white flowers was _double,_ not merely with that

multiplicity of petals in the disk which is common with this species,

but technically and horticulturally double, like the double-flowering

almond or cherry,--the most exquisitely delicate little petals, seeming

like lace-work. He had three specimens,--gave one to the Autocrat of

Botany, who said it was almost or quite unexampled, and another to me.

As the man in the fable says of the chameleon,--"I have it yet, and can

produce it."

Now comes the marvel. The next winter L. went to New York for a year,

and wrote to me, as spring drew near, with solemn charge to visit his

favorite haunt and find another specimen. Armed with this letter of

introduction, I sought the spot, and tramped through and through its

leafy corridors. Beautiful wood-anemones I found, to be sure, trembling

on their fragile stems, deserving all their pretty names,--Wind-flower,

Easter-flower, Pasque-flower, and homeopathic Pulsatilla; rue-leaved

anemones I found also, rising taller and straighter and firmer in stem,

with the whorl of leaves a little higher up on the stalk than one

fancies it ought to be, as if there were a supposed danger that the

flowers would lose their balance, and as if the leaves must be all ready

to catch them. These I found, but the special wonder was not there for

me. Then I wrote to L. that he must evidently come himself and search;

or that, perhaps, as Sir Thomas Browne avers that "smoke doth follow the

fairest," so his little treasures had followed him towards New York.

Judge of my surprise, when, on opening his next letter, out dropped,

from those folds of metropolitan paper, a veritable double anemone. He

had just been out to Hoboken, or some such place, to spend an afternoon,

and, of course, his pets were there to meet him; and from that day to

this, I have never heard of the thing happening to any one else.

May-Day is never allowed to pass in this community without profuse

lamentations over the tardiness of our spring as compared with that

of England and the poets. Yet it is very common to exaggerate this

difference. Even so good an observer as Wilson Flagg is betrayed into

saying that the epigaea and hepatica "seldom make their appearance until

after the middle of April" in Massachusetts, and that "it is not unusual

for the whole month of April to pass away without producing more than

two or three species of wild-flowers." But I have formerly found the

hepatica in bloom at Mount Auburn, for three successive years, on the

twenty-seventh of March; and last spring it was actually found, farther

inland, where the season is later, on the seventeenth. The May-flower is

usually as early, though the more gradual expansion of the buds renders

it less easy to give dates. And there are nearly twenty species which I

have noted, for five or six years together, as found before May-Day, and

which may therefore be properly assigned to April. The list includes

bloodroot, cowslip, houstonia, saxifrage, dandelion, chickweed,

cinquefoil, strawberry, mouse-ear, bellwort, dog's-tooth violet, five

species of violet proper, and two of anemone. These are all common

flowers, and easily observed; and the catalogue might be increased by

rare ones, as the white corydalis, the smaller yellow violet, (_V.

rotundifolia_,) and the claytonia or spring-beauty.

But in England the crocus and the snowdrop--neither being probably an

indigenous flower, since neither is mentioned by Chaucer--usually open

before the first of March; indeed, the snowdrop was formerly known by

the yet more fanciful name of "Fair Maid of February." Chaucer's daisy

comes equally early; and March brings daffodils, narcissi, violets,

daisies, jonquils, hyacinths, and marsh-marigolds. This is altogether in

advance of our season, so far as the flowers give evidence,--though we

have plucked snowdrops in February. But, on the other hand, it would

appear, that, though a larger number of birds winter in England than in

Massachusetts, yet the return of those which migrate is actually earlier

among us. From journals kept during sixty years in England, and an

abstract of which is printed in Hone's "Every-Day Book," it appears that

only two birds of passage revisit England before the fifteenth of April,

and only thirteen more before the first of May; while with us the

song-sparrow and the bluebird appear about the first of March, and quite

a number more by the middle of April. This is a peculiarity of the

English spring which I have never seen explained or even mentioned.

After the epigaea and the hepatica have opened, there is a slight pause

among the wild-flowers,--these two forming a distinct prologue for their

annual drama, as the brilliant witch-hazel in October brings up its

separate epilogue. The truth is, Nature attitudinizes a little, liking

to make a neat finish with everything, and then to begin again with

_éclat_. Flowers seem spontaneous things enough, but there is evidently

a secret marshalling among them, that all may be brought out with due

effect. As the country-people say that so long as any snow is left on

the ground more snow may be expected, it must all vanish simultaneously

at last,--so every seeker of spring-flowers has observed how accurately

they seem to move in platoons, with little straggling. Each species

seems to burst upon us with a united impulse; you may search for them

day after day in vain, but the day when you find one specimen the spell

is broken and you find twenty. By the end of April all the margins

of the great poem of the woods are illuminated with these exquisite

vignettes.

Most of the early flowers either come before the full unfolding of their

leaves or else have inconspicuous ones. Yet Nature always provides for

her bouquets the due proportion of green. The verdant and graceful

sprays of the wild raspberry are unfolded very early, long before its

time of flowering. Over the meadows spread the regular Chinese-pagodas

of the equisetum, (horsetail or scouring-rush,) and the rich coarse

vegetation of the veratrum, or American hellebore. In moist copses the

ferns and osmundas begin to uncurl in April, opening their soft coils

of spongy verdure, coated with woolly down, from which the humming-bird

steals the lining of her nest.

The early blossoms represent the aboriginal epoch of our history: the

blood-root and the May-flower are older than the white man, older

perchance than the red man; they alone are the true Native Americans. Of

the later wild plants, many of the most common are foreign importations.

In our sycophancy we attach grandeur to the name _exotic_: we call

aristocratic garden-flowers by that epithet; yet they are no more exotic

than the humbler companions they brought with them, which have become

naturalized. The dandelion, the buttercup, duckweed, celandine, mullein,

burdock, yarrow, whiteweed, nightshade, and most of the thistles,--these

are importations. Miles Standish never crushed these with his heavy heel

as he strode forth to give battle to the savages; they never kissed the

daintier foot of Priscilla, the Puritan maiden. It is noticeable that

these are all of rather coarser texture than our indigenous flowers; the

children instinctively recognize this, and are apt to omit them, when

gathering the more delicate native blossoms of the woods.

There is something touching in the gradual retirement before

civilization of these delicate aborigines. They do not wait for the

actual brute contact of red bricks and curbstones, but they feel the

danger miles away. The Indians called the low plantain "the white man's

footstep"; and these shy creatures gradually disappear, the moment

the red man gets beyond their hearing. Bigelow's delightful "Florula

Bostoniensis" is becoming a series of epitaphs. Too well we know it,--we

who in happy Cambridge childhood often gathered, almost within a stone's

throw of Professor Agassiz's new Museum, the arethusa and the gentian,

the cardinal-flower and the gaudy rhexia,--we who remember the last

secret hiding-place of the rhodora in West Cambridge, of the yellow

violet and the _Viola debilis_ in Watertown, of the _Convallaria

trifolia_ near Fresh Pond, of the _Hottonia_ beyond Wellington's Hill,

of the _Cornus florida_ in West Roxbury, of the _Clintonia_ and the

dwarf ginseng in Brookline,--we who have found in its one chosen nook

the sacred _Andromeda polyfolia_ of Linnaeus. Now vanished almost or

wholly from city-suburbs, these fragile creatures still linger in

more rural parts of Massachusetts; but they are doomed everywhere,

unconsciously, yet irresistibly; while others still more shy, as the

_Linnoea_, the yellow _Cypripedium_, the early pink _Azalea_, and the

delicate white _Corydalis_ or "Dutchman's breeches," are being chased

into the very recesses of the Green and the White Mountains. The relics

of the Indian tribes are supported by the legislature at Martha's

Vineyard, while these precursors of the Indian are dying unfriended

away.

And with these receding plants go also the special insects which haunt

them. Who that knew that pure enthusiast, Dr. Harris, but remembers the

accustomed lamentations of the entomologist over the departure of these

winged companions of his lifetime? Not the benevolent Mr. John Beeson

more tenderly mourns the decay of the Indians than he the exodus of

these more delicate native tribes. In a letter which I happened to

receive from him a short time previous to his death, he thus renewed

the lament:--"I mourn for the loss of many of the beautiful plants

and insects that were once found in this vicinity. _Clethra, Rhodora,

Sanguinaria, Viola debilis, Viola acuta, Dracoena borealis, Rhexia,

Cypripedium, Corallorhiza verna, Orchis spectabilis_, with others of

less note, have been rooted out by the so-called hand of improvement.

_Cicindela rugifrons, Helluo proeusta, Sphoeroderus stenostomus,

Blethisa quadricollis, (Americana mî,) Carabus, Horia_, (which for

several years occurred in profusion on the sands beyond Mount Auburn,)

with others, have entirely disappeared from their former haunts, driven

away, or exterminated perhaps, by the changes effected therein. There

may still remain in your vicinity some sequestered spots, congenial

to these and other rarities, which may reward the botanist and the

entomologist who will search them carefully. Perhaps you may find there

the pretty coccinella-shaped, silver-margined _Omophron_, or the still

rarer _Panagoeus fasciatus_, of which I once took two specimens on

Wellington's Hill, but have not seen it since." Is not this indeed

handling one's specimens "gently as if you loved them," as Isaak Walton

bids the angler do with his worm?

There is this merit, at least, among the coarser crew of imported

flowers, that they bring their own proper names with them, and we know

precisely whom we have to deal with. In speaking of our own native

flowers, we must either be careless and inaccurate, or else resort

sometimes to the Latin, in spite of the indignation of friends. There

is something yet to be said on this point. In England, where the old

household and monkish names adhere, they are sufficient for popular

and poetic purposes, and the familiar use of scientific names seems an

affectation. But here, where many native flowers have no popular names

at all, and others are called confessedly by wrong ones,--where

it really costs less trouble to use Latin names than English, the

affectation seems the other way. Think of the long list of wild-flowers

where the Latin name is spontaneously used by all who speak of

the flower: as, Arethusa, Aster, Cistus, ("after the fall of the

cistus-flower,") Clematis, Clethra, Geranium, Iris, Lobdia, Bhodora,

Spirtea, Tiarella, Trientalis, and so on. Even those formed from proper

names (the worst possible system of nomenclature) become tolerable at

last, and we forget the man in the more attractive flower. Are those

who pick the Houstonia to be supposed thereby to indorse the Texan

President? Or are the deluded damsels who chew Cassia-buds to be

regarded as swallowing the late Secretary of State? The names have long

since been made over to the flowers, and every questionable aroma has

vanished. When the godfather happens to be a botanist, there is a

peculiar fitness in the association; the Linaea, at least, would not

smell so sweet by any other name.

In other cases the English name is a mere modification of the Latin

one, and our ideal associations have really a scientific basis: as with

Violet, Lily, Laurel, Gentian, Vervain. Indeed, our enthusiasm for

vernacular names is like that for Indian names, one-sided: we enumerate

only the graceful ones, and ignore the rest. It would be a pity to

Latinize Touch-me-not, or Yarrow, or Gold-Thread, or Self-Heal, or

Columbine, or Blue-Eyed-Grass,--though, to be sure, this last has an

annoying way of shutting up its azure orbs the moment you gather it, and

you reach home with a bare, stiff blade, which deserves no better

name than _Sisyrinchium anceps._ But in what respect is Cucumber-Root

preferable to Medeola, or Solomon's-Seal to Convallaria, or Rock-Tripe

to Umbilicaria, or Lousewort to Pedicularis? In other cases the merit

is divided: Anemone may dispute the prize of melody with Windflower,

Campanula with Harebell, Neottia with Ladies'-Tresses, Uvularia with

Bellwort and Strawbell, Potentilla with Cinquefoil, and Sanguinaria with

Bloodroot. Hepatica may be bad, but Liverleaf is worse. The pretty name

of May-flower is not so popular, after all, as that of Trailing-Arbutus,

where the graceful and appropriate adjective redeems the substantive,

which happens to be Latin and incorrect at the same time. It does seem a

waste of time to say _Chrysanthemum leucanthemum_ instead of Whiteweed;

though, if the long scientific name were an incantation to banish the

intruder, our farmers would gladly consent to adopt it.

But the great advantage of a reasonable use of the botanical name is,

that it does not deceive us. Our primrose is not the English primrose,

any more than it was our robin who tucked up the babes in the wood;

our cowslip is not the English cowslip, it is the English

marsh-marigold,--Tennyson's "wild marsh-marigold shines like fire in

swamps and hollows gray." The pretty name of Azalea means something

definite; but its rural name of Honeysuckle confounds under that name

flowers without even an external resemblance,--Azalea, Diervilla,

Lonioera, Aquilegia,--just as every bird which sings loud in deep woods

is popularly denominated a thrush. The really rustic names of both

plants and animals are very few with us,--the different species are

many; and as we come to know them better and love them more, we

absolutely require some way to distinguish them from their half-sisters

and second-cousins. It is hopeless to try to create new popular

epithets, or even to revive those which are thoroughly obsolete. Miss

Cooper may strive in vain, with benevolent intent, to christen her

favorite spring-blossoms "May-Wings" and "Gay-Wings," and "Fringe-Cup"

and "Squirrel-Cup," and "Cool-Wort" and "Bead-Ruby"; there is no

conceivable reason why these should not be the familiar appellations,

except the irresistible fact that they are not. It is impossible to

create a popular name: one might as well attempt to invent a legend or

compose a ballad. _Nascitur, non fit_.

As the spring comes on, and the densening outlines of the elm give daily

a new design for a Grecian urn,--its hue, first brown with blossoms,

then emerald with leaves,--we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the

bare boughs. In our favored temperate zone, the trees denude themselves

each year, like the goddesses before Paris, that we may see which

unadorned loveliness is the fairest. Only the unconquerable delicacy of

the beech still keeps its soft vestments about it: far into spring, when

worn to thin rags and tatters, they cling there still; and when they

fall, the new appear as by magic. It must be owned, however, that the

beech has good reasons for this prudishness, and possesses little beauty

of figure; while the elms, maples, chestnuts, walnuts, and even oaks,

have not exhausted all their store of charms for us, until we have seen

them disrobed. Only yonder magnificent pine-tree,--that pitch-pine,

nobler when seen in perfection than white-pine, or Norwegian, or Norfolk

Islander,--that pitch-pine, herself a grove, _una nemus_, holds her

unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean,

whose voice she shares; and only marks the flowing of her annual tide of

life by the new verdure that yearly submerges all trace of last year's

ebb.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no

winter in our year! Sometimes, in following up a watercourse among our

hills, in the early spring, one comes to a weird and desolate place,

where one huge wild grapevine has wreathed its ragged arms around a

whole thicket and brought it to the ground,--swarming to the tops of

hemlocks, clenching a dozen young maples at once and tugging them

downward, stretching its wizard black length across the underbrush, into

the earth and out again, wrenching up great stones in its blind, aimless

struggle. What a piece of chaos is this! Yet come here again, two months

hence, and you shall find all this desolation clothed with beauty

and with fragrance, one vast bower of soft green leaves and graceful

tendrils, while summer-birds chirp and flutter amid these sunny arches

all the livelong day. "Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness."

To the end of April, and often later, one still finds remains of

snowbanks in sheltered woods, especially those consisting of evergreen

trees; and this snow, like that upon high mountains, has become hardened

by the repeated thawing and freezing of the surface, till it is more

impenetrable than ice. But the snow that actually falls during April is

usually only what Vermonters call "sugar-snow,"--falling in the night

and just whitening the surface for an hour or two, and taking its name,

not so much from its looks as from the fact that it denotes the

proper weather for "sugaring," namely, cold nights and warm days. Our

saccharine associations, however, remain so obstinately tropical, that

it seems almost impossible for the imagination to locate sugar in New

England trees; though it is known that not the maple only, but the birch

and the walnut even, afford it in appreciable quantities.

Along our maritime rivers the people associate April, not with

"sugaring," but with "shadding." The pretty _Amelanchier Canadensis_ of

Gray--the _Aronia_ of Whittler's song--is called Shad-bush or Shad-blow

in Essex County, from its connection with this season; and there is a

bird known as the Shad-spirit, which I take to be identical with the

flicker or golden-winged woodpecker, whose note is still held to

indicate the first day when the fish ascend the river. Upon such slender

wings flits our New England romance!

In April the creative process described by Thales is repeated, and the

world is renewed by water. The submerged creatures first feel the touch

of spring, and many an equivocal career, beginning in the ponds and

brooks, learns later to ignore this obscure beginning, and hops or

flutters in the dusty daylight. Early in March, before the first male

canker-moth appears on the elm-tree, the whirlwig beetles have begun to

play round the broken edges of the ice, and the caddis-worms to

crawl beneath it; and soon come the water-skater _(Gerris)_ and the

water-boatman _(Notonecta)_. Turtles and newts are in busy motion when

the spring-birds are only just arriving. Those gelatinous masses in

yonder wayside-pond are the spawn of water-newts or tritons: in the

clear transparent jelly are imbedded, at regular intervals, little

blackish dots; these elongate rapidly, and show symptoms of head and

tail curled up in a spherical cell; the jelly is gradually absorbed for

their nourishment, until on some fine morning each elongated dot gives

one vigorous wriggle, and claims thenceforward all the privileges

attendant on this dissolution of the union. The final privilege is often

that of being suddenly snapped up by a turtle or a snake: for Nature

brings forth her creatures liberally, especially the aquatic ones,

sacrifices nine-tenths of them as food for their larger cousins, and

reserves only a handful to propagate their race, on the same profuse

scale, next season.

It is surprising, in the midst of our Museums and Scientific Schools,

how little we yet know of the common things before our eyes. Our

_savans_ still confess their inability to discriminate with certainty

the egg or tadpole of a frog from that of a toad; and it is strange that

these hopping creatures, which seem so unlike, should coincide so nearly

in their juvenile career, while the tritons and salamanders, which

border so closely on each other in their maturer state as sometimes to

be hardly distinguishable, yet choose different methods and different

elements for laying their eggs. The eggs of our salamanders or

land-lizards are deposited beneath the moss on some damp rock, without

any gelatinous envelope; they are but few in number, and the anxious

mamma may sometimes be found coiled in a circle around them, like the

symbolic serpent of eternity.

The small number of birds yet present in early April gives a better

opportunity for careful study,--more especially if one goes armed with

that best of fowling-pieces, a small spy-glass: the best,--since how

valueless for purposes of observation is the bleeding, gasping, dying

body, compared with the fresh and living creature, as it tilts,

trembles, and warbles on the bough before you! Observe that robin in the

oak-tree's top: as he sits and sings, every one of the dozen different

notes which he flings down to you is accompanied by a separate flirt and

flutter of his whole body, and, as Thoreau says of the squirrel, "each

movement seems to imply a spectator," and to imply, further, that the

spectator is looking through a spy-glass. Study that song-sparrow: why

is it that he always goes so ragged in spring, and the bluebird so

neat? is it that the song-sparrow is a wild artist, absorbed in the

composition of his lay, and oblivious of ordinary proprieties, while the

smooth bluebird and his ash-colored mate cultivate their delicate warble

only as a domestic accomplishment, and are always nicely dressed before

sitting down to the piano? Then how exciting is the gradual arrival of

the birds in their summer-plumage! to watch it is as good as sitting at

the window on Easter Sunday to observe the new bonnets. Yonder, in that

clump of alders by the brook, is the delicious jargoning of the first

flock of yellow-birds; there are the little gentlemen in black and

yellow, and the little ladies in olive-brown; "sweet, sweet, sweet" is

the only word they say, and often they will so lower their ceaseless

warble, that, though almost within reach, the little minstrels seem far

away. There is the very earliest cat-bird, mimicking the bobolink before

the bobolink has come: what is the history of his song, then? is it a

reminiscence of last year? or has the little coquette been practising it

all winter, in some gay Southern society, where cat-birds and bobolinks

grow intimate, just as Southern fashionables from different States

may meet and sing duets at Saratoga? There sounds the sweet, low,

long-continued trill of the little hair-bird, or chipping-sparrow, a

suggestion of insect sounds in sultry summer, and produced, like them,

by a slight fluttering of the wings against the sides: by-and-by we

shall sometimes hear that same delicate rhythm burst the silence of the

June midnights, and then, ceasing, make stillness more still. Now watch

that woodpecker, roving in ceaseless search, travelling over fifty trees

in an hour, running from top to bottom of some small sycamore, pecking

at every crevice, pausing to dot a dozen inexplicable holes in a row

upon an apple-tree, but never once intermitting the low, querulous

murmur of housekeeping anxiety: now she stops to hammer with all her

little life at some tough piece of bark, strikes harder and harder

blows, throws herself back at last, flapping her wings furiously as she

brings down her whole strength again upon it; finally it yields, and

grub after grub goes down her throat, till she whets her beak after the

meal as a wild beast licks its claws, and off on her pressing business

once more.

It is no wonder that there is so little substantial enjoyment of Nature

in the community, when we feed children on grammars and dictionaries

only, and take no pains to train them to see that which is before

their eyes. The mass of the community have "summered and wintered" the

universe pretty regularly, one would think, for a good many years; and

yet nine persons out of ten in the town or city, and two out of three

even in the country, seriously suppose, for instance, that the buds upon

trees are formed in the spring; they have had them before their eyes

all winter, and never seen them. As large a proportion suppose, in good

faith, that a plant grows at the base of the stem, instead of at the

top: that is, if they see a young sapling in which there is a crotch

at five feet from the ground, they expect to see it ten feet from the

ground by-and-by,--confounding the growth of a tree with that of a man

or animal. But perhaps the best of us could hardly bear the severe test

unconsciously laid down by a small child of my acquaintance. The boy's

father, a college-bred man, had early chosen the better part, and

employed his fine faculties in rearing laurels in his own beautiful

nursery-gardens, instead of in the more arid soil of court-rooms or

state-houses. Of course the young human scion knew the flowers by name

before he knew his letters, and used their symbols more readily; and

after he got the command of both, he was one day asked by his younger

brother what the word _idiot_ meant,--for somebody in the parlor had

been saying that somebody else was an idiot. "Don't you know?" quoth

Ben, in his sweet voice: "an idiot is a person who doesn't know an

arbor-vitae from a pine,--he doesn't know anything." When Ben grows up

to maturity, bearing such terrible tests in his unshrinking hands, who

of us will be safe?

The softer aspects of Nature, especially, require time and culture

before man can enjoy them. To rude races her processes bring only

terror, which is very slowly outgrown. Humboldt has best exhibited the

scantiness of finer natural perceptions in Greek and Roman literature,

in spite of the grand oceanic anthology of Homer, and the delicate

water-coloring of the Greek Anthology and of Horace. The Oriental and

the Norse sacred books are full of fresh and beautiful allusions; but

the Greek saw in Nature only a framework for Art, and the Roman only

a camping-ground for men. Even Virgil describes the grotto of Aeneas

merely as a "black grove" with "horrid shade,"--"_Horrenti atrum

nemus imminet umbrâ_." Wordsworth points out, that, even in English

literature, the "Windsor Forest" of Anne, Countess of Winchelsea, was

the first poem which represented Nature as a thing to be consciously

enjoyed; and as she was almost the first English poetess, we might be

tempted to think that we owe this appreciation, like some other good

things, to the participation of woman in literature. But, on the other

hand, it must be remembered that the voluminous Duchess of Newcastle, in

her "Ode on Melancholy," describes among the symbols of hopeless gloom

"the still moonshine night" and "a mill where rushing waters run

about,"--the sweetest natural images. So woman has not so much to claim,

after all. In our own country, the early explorers seemed to find only

horror in its woods and waterfalls. Josselyn, in 1672, could only

describe the summer splendor of the White Mountain region as "dauntingly

terrible, being full of rocky hills, as thick as mole-hills in a meadow,

and full of infinite thick woods." Father Hennepin spoke of Niagara,

in the narrative still quoted in the guide-books, as a "frightful

cataract"; though perhaps his original French phrase was softer. And

even John Adams could find no better name than "horrid chasm" for the

gulf at Egg Rock, where he first saw the sea-anemone.

But we are lingering too long, perhaps, with this sweet April of smiles

and tears. It needs only to add that all her traditions are beautiful.

Ovid says well, that she was not named from _aperire_, to open, as some

have thought, but from _Aphrodite_, goddess of beauty. April holds

Easter-time, St. George's Day, and the Eve of St. Mark's. She has not,

like her sister May in Germany, been transformed to a verb and made a

synonyme for joy,--"_Deine Seele maiet den trüben Herbst_"--but April

was believed in early ages to have been the birth-time of the world.

According to Venerable Bede, the point was first accurately determined

at a council held at Jerusalem about A.D. 200, when, after much profound

discussion, it was finally decided that the world's birthday occurred on

Sunday, April eighth,--that is, at the vernal equinox and the full moon.

But April is certainly the birth-time of the year, at least, if not of

the planet. Its festivals are older than Christianity, older than the

memory of man. No sad associations cling to it, as to the month of June,

in which month, says William of Malmesbury, kings are wont to go to

war,--"_Quando solent reges ad arma procedere_,"--but it holds the Holy

Week, and it is the Holy Month. And in April Shakspeare was born, and in

April he died.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE WHITE ASH.

When Helen returned to Elsie's bedside, it was with a new and still

deeper feeling of sympathy, such as the story told by Old Sophy might

well awaken. She understood, as never before, the singular fascination

and as singular repulsion which she had long felt in Elsie's presence.

It had not been without a great effort that she had forced herself to

become the almost constant attendant of the sick girl; and now she was

learning, but not for the first time, the blessed truth which so many

good women have found out for themselves, that the hardest duty bravely

performed soon becomes a habit, and tends in due time to transform

itself into a pleasure.

The old Doctor was beginning to look graver, in spite of himself. The

fever, if such it was, went gently forward, wasting the young girl's

powers of resistance from day to day; yet she showed no disposition

to take nourishment, and seemed literally to be living on air. It was

remarkable that with all this her look was almost natural, and her

features were hardly sharpened so as to suggest that her life was

burning away. He did not like this, nor various other unobtrusive signs

of danger which his practised eye detected. A very small matter might

turn the balance which held life and death poised against each other.

He surrounded her with precautions, that Nature might have every

opportunity of cunningly shifting the weights from the scale of death

to the scale of life, as she will often do, if not rudely disturbed or

interfered with.

Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance were constantly coming

to her from the girls in the school and the good people in the village.

Some of the mansion-house people obtained rare flowers which they sent

her, and her table was covered with fruits--which tempted her in vain.

Several of the school-girls wished to make her a basket of their own

handiwork, and, filling it with autumnal flowers, to send it as a joint

offering. Mr. Bernard found out their project accidentally, and, wishing

to have his share in it, brought home from one of his long walks some

boughs full of variously tinted leaves, such as were still clinging

to the stricken trees. With these he brought also some of the already

fallen leaflets of the white ash, remarkable for their rich olive-purple

color, forming a beautiful contrast with some of the lighter-hued

leaves. It so happened that this particular tree, the white ash, did not

grow upon The Mountain, and the leaflets were more welcome for their

comparative rarity. So the girls made their basket, and the floor of it

they covered with the rich olive-purple leaflets. Such late flowers as

they could lay their hands upon served to fill it, and with many kindly

messages they sent it to Miss Elsie Venner at the Dudley mansion-house.

Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came, languid, but tranquil, and

Helen was by her, as usual, holding her hand, which was strangely cold,

Helen thought, for one who--was said to have some kind of fever. The

school-girls' basket was brought in with its messages of love and hopes

for speedy recovery. Old Sophy was delighted to see that it pleased

Elsie, and laid it on the bed before her. Elsie began looking at the

flowers and taking them from the basket, that she might see the leaves.

All at once she appeared to be agitated; she looked at the basket,--then

around, as if there were some fearful presence about her which she was

searching for with her eager glances. She took out the flowers, one

by one, her breathing growing hurried, her eyes staring, her hands

trembling,--till, as she came near the bottom of the basket, she flung

out all the rest with a hasty movement, looked upon the olive-purple

leaflets as if paralyzed for a moment, shrunk up, as it were, into

herself in a curdling terror, dashed the basket from her, and fell back

senseless, with a faint cry which chilled the blood of the startled

listeners at her bedside.

"Take it away!--take it away!--quick!" said Old Sophy, as she hastened

to her mistress's pillow. "It's the leaves of the tree that was always

death to her,--take it away! She can't live wi' it in the room!"

The poor old woman began chafing Elsie's hands, and Helen to try to

rouse her with hartshorn, while a third frightened attendant gathered up

the flowers and the basket and carried them out of the apartment. She

came to herself after a time, but exhausted and then wandering. In her

delirium, she talked constantly as if she were in a cave, with such

exactness of circumstance that Helen could not doubt at all that she had

some such retreat among the rocks of The Mountain, probably fitted up in

her own fantastic way, where she sometimes hid herself from all human

eyes, and of the entrance to which she alone possessed the secret.

All this passed away, and left her, of course, weaker than before. But

this was not the only influence the unexplained paroxysm had left behind

it. From this time forward there was a change in her whole expression

and her manner. The shadows ceased flitting over her features, and the

old woman, who watched her from day to day and from hour to hour as a

mother watches her child, saw the likeness she bore to her mother coming

forth more and more, as the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes,

and the scowl disappeared from the dark brows and low forehead.

With all the kindness and indulgence her father had bestowed upon her,

Elsie had never felt that he loved her. The reader knows well enough

what fatal recollections and associations had frozen up the springs of

natural affection in his breast. There was nothing in the world he would

not do for Elsie. He had sacrificed his whole life to her. His very

seeming carelessness about restraining her was all calculated; he knew

that restraint would produce nothing but utter alienation. Just so

far as she allowed him, he shared her studies, her few pleasures, her

thoughts; but she was essentially solitary and uncommunicative. No

person, as was said long ago, could judge him,--because his task was not

merely difficult, but simply impracticable to human powers. A nature

like Elsie's had necessarily to be studied by itself, and to be followed

in its laws where it could not be led.

Every day, at different hours, during the whole of his daughter's

illness, Dudley Venner had sat by her, doing all he could to soothe and

please her: always the same thin film of some emotional non-conductor

between them; always that kind of habitual regard and family-interest,

mingled with the deepest pity on one side and a sort of respect on the

other, which never warmed into outward evidences of affection.

It was after this occasion, when she had been so profoundly agitated

by a seemingly insignificant cause, that her father and Old Sophy were

sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the other. She had fallen

into a light slumber. As they were looking at her, the same thought came

into both their minds at the same moment. Old Sophy spoke for both, as

she said, in a low voice,--

"It's her mother's look,--it's her mother's own face right over

again,--she never look' so before,--the Lord's hand is on her! His will

be done!"

When Elsie woke and lifted her languid eyes upon her father's face, she

saw in it a tenderness, a depth of affection, such as she remembered

at rare moments of her childhood, when she had won him to her by some

unusual gleam of sunshine in her fitful temper.

"Elsie, dear," he said, "we were thinking how much your expression was

sometimes like that of your sweet mother. If you could but have seen

her, so as to remember her!"

The tender look and tone, the yearning of the daughter's heart for the

mother she had never seen, save only with the unfixed, undistinguishing

eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the under-thought that she might soon

rejoin her in another state of being,--all came upon her with a sudden

overflow of feeling which broke through all the barriers between her

heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept. It seemed to her father as if the

malign influence,--evil spirit it might almost be called,--which had

pervaded her being, had at last been driven forth or exorcised, and that

these tears were at once the sign and the pledge of her redeemed nature.

But now she was to be soothed, and not excited. After her tears she

slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never before.

Old Sophy met the Doctor at the door and told him all the circumstances

connected with the extraordinary attack from which Elsie had suffered.

It was the purple leaves, she said. She remembered that Dick once

brought home a branch of a tree with some of the same leaves on it, and

Elsie screamed and almost fainted then. She, Sophy, had asked her, after

she had got quiet, what it was in the leaves that made her feel so bad.

Elsie couldn't tell her,--didn't like to speak about it,--shuddered

whenever Sophy mentioned it.

This did not sound so strangely to the old Doctor as it does to some

who listen to this narrative. He had known some curious examples of

antipathies, and remembered reading of others still more singular.

He had known those who could not bear the presence of a cat, and

recollected the story, often told, of a person's hiding one in a chest

when one of these sensitive individuals came into the room, so as not to

disturb him; but he presently began to sweat and turn pale, and cried

out that there must be a cat hid somewhere. He knew people who were

poisoned by strawberries, by honey, by different meats,--many who could

not endure cheese,--some who could not bear the smell of roses. If he

had known all the stories in the old books, he would have found that

some have swooned and become as dead men at the smell of a rose,--that

a stout soldier has been known to turn and run at the sight or smell of

rue,--that cassia and even olive-oil have produced deadly faintings in

certain individuals,--in short, that almost everything has seemed to be

a poison to somebody.

"Bring me that basket, Sophy," said the old Doctor, "if you can find

it."

Sophy brought it to him,--for he had not yet entered Elsie's apartment.

"These purple leaves are from the white ash," he said. "You don't know

the notion that people commonly have about that tree, Sophy?"

"I know they say the Ugly Things never go where the white ash grows,"

Sophy answered. "Oh, Doctor dear, what I'm thinkin' of a'n't true, is

it?"

The Doctor smiled sadly, but did not answer. He went directly to Elsie's

room. Nobody would have known by his manner that he saw any special

change in his patient. He spoke with her as usual, made some slight

alteration in his prescriptions, and left the room with a kind, cheerful

look. He met her father on the stairs.

"Is it as I thought?" said Dudley Venner.

"There is everything to fear," the Doctor said, "and not much, I am

afraid, to hope. Does not her face recall to you one that you remember,

as never before?"

"Yes," her father answered,--"oh, yes! What is the meaning of this

change which has come over her features, and her voice, her temper, her

whole being? Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it? Can it be that the curse

is passing away, and my daughter is to be restored to me,--such as her

mother would have had her,--such as her mother was?"

"Walk out with me into the garden," the Doctor said, "and I will tell

you all I know and all I think about this great mystery of Elsie's

life."

They walked out together, and the Doctor began:--

"She has lived a twofold being, as it were,--the consequence of the

blight which fell upon her in the dim period before consciousness. You

can see what she might have been but for this. You know that for these

eighteen years her whole existence has taken its character from that

influence which we need not name. But you will remember that few of the

lower forms of life last as human beings do; and thus it might have been

hoped and trusted with some show of reason, as I have always suspected

you hoped and trusted, perhaps more confidently than myself, that the

lower nature which had become ingrafted on the higher would die out and

leave the real woman's life she inherited to outlive this accidental

principle which had so poisoned her childhood and youth. I believe it

is so dying out; but I am afraid,--yes, I must say it, I fear it has

involved the centres of life in its own decay. There is hardly any pulse

at Elsie's wrist; no stimulants seem to rouse her; and it looks as if

life were slowly retreating inwards, so that by-and-by she will sleep as

those who lie down in the cold and never wake."

Strange as it may seem, her father heard all this not without deep

sorrow, and such marks of it as his thoughtful and tranquil nature, long

schooled by suffering, claimed or permitted, but with a resignation

itself the measure of his past trials. Dear as his daughter might become

to him, all he dared to ask of Heaven was that she might be restored to

that truer self which lay beneath her false and adventitious being. If

he could once see that the icy lustre in her eyes had become a soft,

calm light,--that her soul was at peace with all about her and with Him

above,--this crumb from the children's table was enough for him, as it

was for the Syro-Phoenician woman who asked that the dark spirit might

go out from her daughter.

There was little change the next day, until all at once she said in a

clear voice that she should like to see her master at the school,

Mr. Langdon. He came accordingly, and took the place of Helen at her

bedside. It seemed as if Elsie had forgotten the last scene with him.

Might it be that pride had come in, and she had sent for him only to

show how superior she had grown to the weakness which had betrayed her

into that extraordinary request, so contrary to the instincts and usages

of her sex? Or was it that the singular change which had come over her

had involved her passionate fancy for him and swept it away with her

other habits of thought and feeling? Or perhaps, rather, that she felt

that all earthly interests were becoming of little account to her, and

wished to place herself right with one to whom she had displayed a

wayward movement of her unbalanced imagination? She welcomed Mr.

Bernard as quietly as she had received Helen Darley. He colored at the

recollection of that last scene, when he came into her presence; but

she smiled with perfect tranquillity. She did not speak to him of any

apprehension; but he saw that she looked upon herself as doomed. So

friendly, yet so calm did she seem through all their interview, that Mr.

Bernard could only look back upon her manifestation of feeling towards

him on their walk from the school as a vagary of a mind laboring

under some unnatural excitement, and wholly at variance with the true

character of Elsie Venner, as he saw her before him in her subdued,

yet singular beauty. He looked with almost scientific closeness of

observation into the diamond eyes; but that peculiar light which he knew

so well was not there. She was the same in one sense as on that first

day when he had seen her coiling and uncoiling her golden chain, yet how

different in every aspect which revealed her state of mind and emotion!

Something of tenderness there was, perhaps, in her tone towards him;

she would not have sent for him, had she not felt more than an ordinary

interest in him. But through the whole of his visit she never lost her

gracious self-possession. The Dudley race might well be proud of the

last of its daughters, as she lay dying, but unconquered by the feeling

of the present or the fear of the future.

As for Mr. Bernard, he found it very hard to look upon her and listen to

her unmoved. There was nothing that reminded him of the stormy-browed,

almost savage girl he remembered in her fierce loveliness,--nothing of

all her singularities of air and of costume. Nothing? Yes, one thing.

Weak and suffering as she was, she had never parted with one particular

ornament, such as a sick person would naturally, as it might be

supposed, get rid of at once. The golden cord which she wore round her

neck at the great party was still there. A bracelet was lying by her

pillow; she had unclasped it from her wrist.

Before Mr. Bernard left her, she said,--"I shall never see you again.

Some time or other, perhaps, you will mention my name to one whom you

love. Give her this from your scholar and friend Elsie."

He took the bracelet, raised her hand to his lips, then turned his face

away; in that moment he was the weaker of the two.

"Good-bye," she said; "thank you for coming."

His voice died away in his throat, as he tried to answer her. She

followed him with her eyes as he passed from her sight through the door,

and when it closed after him sobbed tremulously once or twice,--but

stilled herself, and met Helen, as she entered, with a composed

countenance.

"I have had a very pleasant visit from Mr. Langdon," Elsie said. "Sit

by me, Helen, awhile without speaking; I should like to sleep, if I

can,--and to dream."