Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/111

Rh singular, decayed-yellow look, and a spirituous or apothecary odor. As the other day I clambered over those great white pine masts which lay in all directions, one upon another, on the hillside south of Fair Haven, where the woods have been laid waste, I was struck, in favorable lights, with the jewel-like brilliancy of the sawed ends thickly bedewed with crystal drops of turpentine, thickly as a shield, as if the Dryads, Oreads, pine-wood nymphs had seasonably wept there the fall of the tree. The perfect sincerity of these terebinthine drops, each one reflecting the world, colorless as light, or like drops of dew heaven-distilled and trembling to their fall, is incredible when you remember how firm their consistency. And is this that pitch, which you cannot touch without being defiled? Looking from the cliffs, the sun being, as before, invisible, I saw far more light in the reflected sky in the neighborhood of the sun than I could see in the heavens from my position, and it occurred to me that the reason

was that there was reflected to me from the river, the view I should have got if I had stood there on the water in a more favorable position. I see that the sand in the road has crystallized