Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/202

188 progress which his life makes be the apology for abruptness. Is not my life riveted together? has not it sequence? Do not my breathings follow each other naturally?

March 20, 1853. I notice the downy, swaddled plants now and in the fall, the fragrant life-everlasting and the ribwort, innocents born in a cloud. Those algas I saw the other day in John Hosrner's ditch were more like seaweed than anything else I have seen in the country. They made me look at the whole earth as a seashore, reminded me of Nereids, sea-nymphs, Tritons, Proteus, etc., etc., made the ditches fabulate in an older than the arrow-headed character. Better learn this strange character which nature uses to-day than the Sanskrit, "books in the brooks."

It is evident that the English do not enjoy that contrast between winter and summer that we do, that there is too. much greenness and spring in the winter, there is no such wonderful resurrection of the year. Birds kindred with our first spring ones remain with them all winter, and flowers answering to our earliest spring ones put forth there in January. They have no winter in our sense, only a winter like our spring. The peculiarity of to-day is that now first you perceive that dry, warm, summer-presaging scent from dry oaks and other leaves,