Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/168

154 newly-created island of the spring, just sprung up from the bottom in the midst of the blue waters. The fawn-colored oak leaves, with a few pines intermixed, thickly covering the bill, look not like a withered vegetation, but an ethereal kind just expanded and peculiarly adapted to the season and the sky.

Look toward the sun, the water is yellow, as water in which the earth had just washed itself clean of its winter impurities; look from the sun and it is a beautiful dark-blue, but in each direction the crests of the waves are white, and you cannot sail or row over this watery wilderness without sharing the excitement of this element. Our sail draws so strongly that we cut through the great waves without feeling them We meet one great gull beating up the course of the river against the wind at Flint's Bridge. It is a very leisurely sort of limping flight, the bird tacking its way along like a sailing vessel. Yet the slow security with which it advances suggests a leisurely contemplativeness, as if it were working out some problem quite at its leisure. As often as its very narrow, long, and curved wings are lifted up against the light, I see a very narrow, distinct light edging to the wing where it is thin. Its black tipt wings. Afterwards from Ball's Hill I see two more circling about looking for food over the ice and water.