Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/123

Rh one. Such is the genialness of nature that the trees appear to have put out feelers, by which the senses apprehend them more tenderly. I do not know that the woods are ever more beautiful or affect me more.

I feel it to be a greater success as a lecturer to affect uncultivated natures than to affect the most refined, for all cultivation is necessarily superficial, and its root may not even be directed toward the centre of the being

Look up or down the open Tiver channel now so smooth. Like a hibernating animal, it has ventured to come out to the mouth of its burrow. One way, perhaps, it is like melted silver alloyed with copper. It goes nibbling off the edge of the thick ice on each side. Here and there I see a musquash sitting in the sun on the edge of the ice eating a clam, and the shells it has left are strewn along the edge. Ever and anon he drops into the liquid mirror and soon reappears with another clam.

This clear, placid, silvery water is evidently a phenomenon of spring. Winter could not show us this As we sit in this wonderful air, many sounds—that of wood-chopping for one—come to our ears, agreeably blunted, or muffled even, like the drumming of a partridge, not sharp and rending as in winter and recently. If a partridge should drum in