se by
the fences. From about the trunks of the trees it has long departed:
the tree is a living thing, and its growth repels it. The fence is dead,
driven into the earth in a rigid line by man: the fence, in short, is
dogma: icy prejudice lingers near it. The snow has disappeared; but the
landscape is a ghastly sight,--bleached, dead. The trees are stakes; the
grass is of no color; and the bare soil is not brown with a healthful
brown; life has gone out of it. Take up a piece of turf: it is a clod,
without warmth, inanimate. Pull it in pieces: there is no hope in it:
it is a part of the past; it is the refuse of last year. This is the
condition to which winter has reduced the landscape. When the snow,
which was a pall, is removed, you see how ghastly it is. The face of the
country is sodden. It needs now only the south wind to sweep over it,
full of the damp breath of death; and that begins to blow. No prospect
would be more dreary.

And yet the south wind fills credulous man with joy. He opens the
window. He goes out, and catches cold. He is stirred by the mysterious
coming of something. If there is sign of change nowhere else, we detect
it in the newspaper. In sheltered corners of that truculent instrument
for the diffusion of the prejudices of the few among the many begin to
grow the violets of tender sentiment, the early greens of yearning. The
poet feels the sap of the new year before the marsh-willow. He blossoms
in advance of the catkins. Man is greater than Nature. The poet is
greater than man: he is nature on two legs,--ambulatory.

At first there is no appearance of conflict. The winter garrison seems
to have withdrawn. The invading hosts of the South are entering without
opposition. The hard ground softens; the sun lies warm upon the southern
bank, and water oozes from its base. If you examine the buds of the
lilac and the flowering shrubs, you cannot say that they are swelling;
but the varnish with which they were coated in the fall to keep out
the frost seems to be cracking. If the sugar-maple is hacked, it will
bleed,--the pure white blood of Nature.

At the close of a sunny day the western sky has a softened aspect: its
color, we say, has warmth in it On such a day you may meet a caterpillar
on the footpath, and turn out for him. The house-fly thaws out; a
company of cheerful wasps take possession of a chamber-window. It
is oppressive indoors at night, and the window is raised. A flock of
millers, born