ll animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave
our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them
into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like
the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it,
but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the
potter.

Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in
every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruped
from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other
climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than
Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces.

When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had
dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender
signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately
beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the
winter--life-everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild
grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even,
as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails,
mulleins, johnswort, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and other strong-stemmed
plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest
birds--decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am
particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the
wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is
among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable
kingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that
astronomy has. It is an antique style, older than Greek or Egyptian.
Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible
tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king
described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a
lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at
a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up
the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling
sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the
louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying
humanity to stop them. No, you don't--chickaree--chickaree. They were
wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their forc