e, and fell
into a strain of invective that was irresistible.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than
ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and
moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-wing, as
if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time
are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations?
The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing
low over the meadow, is already seeking the first slimy life that
awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the
ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides
like a spring fire--"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus
evocata"--as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the
returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame;--the
symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon,
streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but
anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the
fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the
ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of
June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and
from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and
the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life
but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to
eternity.

Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the
northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. A great
field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrow
singing from the bushes on the shore--olit, olit, olit--chip, chip,
chip, che char--che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it.
How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering
somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It is unusually hard,
owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or
waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque
surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. It is
glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare
face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the
fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore--a silvery sheen as from
the scales of a leuc