Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/215

Rh gently, as infants should be waked When we wake indeed with a double awakening, not only from our ordinary nocturnal slumbers, but from our diurnal, we burst through the thallus of our ordinary life, we wake with emphasis

6 To Cliffs. It affects one's philosophy after so long living in winter quarters to see the day dawn from some hill. Our effete, lowland town is fresh as New Hampshire. It is as if we had migrated and were ready to begin life again in a new country with new hopes and resolutions. See your town with the dew on it, in as wild a morning mist (though thin) as ever draped it. To stay in the house all day such reviving spring days as the past have been, bending over a stove and gnawing one's heart, seems to me as absurd as for a woodchuck to linger in his burrow. We have not heard the news then! sucking the claws of our philosophy when there is game to be had. The tapping of the woodpecker, rat-tat-tat, knocking at the door of some sluggish grub to tell him that the spring has arrived, and his fate, this is one of the season sounds, calling the roll of birds and insects, the reveillée. The Cliff woods are comparatively silent. Not yet the woodland birds (except, perhaps, the woodpecker, so far as it migrates), only the orchard and river birds