Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/143

Rh unsightly objects become radiant with beauty. There seem to be two sides of this world presented to us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. For seen with the eye of a poet, as God sees them, all things are alive and beautiful, but seen with the historical eye, or the eye of memory, they are dead and offensive. If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing she is beautiful.

I am startled that God can make me so rich even with my own cheap stores. It needs but a few wisps of straw in the sun, some small word dropped, or that has long lain silent in some book. When heaven begins and the dead arise no trumpet is blown. Perhaps the south wind will blow.

March 13, 1853. 6, to Cliffs. There begins to be a greater depth of saffron in the morning sky. The morning and evening horizon fires are warmer to the eye.

March 13, 1855. To Hubbard's Close Coming through the stubble of Stow's rye-field in front of the Breed House, I meet with four mice nests in going half a dozen rods. They lie flat on the ground amid the stubble, flattened spheres, the horizontal diameter about five inches, the perpendicular considerably less, composed of grass or finer stubble. On taking