, 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