Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/216

202 have arrived. Probably the improvements of men thus advance the seasons. This is the Bahamas and the tropics or turning point to the red poll. Is not the woodpecker (downy?) our first woodland bird, come to see what effects the frost and snow and rain have produced on the decaying trees, what trunks will drum?

The oak plain is still red. There are no expanding leaves to greet and reflect the sun as it first falls over the hill.

I go along the river side to see the now novel reflections. The invading waters have left a thousand little isles where willows and sweet gale and the meadow itself appears. I hear the phebe note of the chickadee, one taking it up behind another, as in a catch, phe-bee phe-bee.

That is an interesting morning when one first uses the warmth of the sun instead of fire, bathes in the sun as anon in the river, eschewing fire, draws up to the garret window and warms his thoughts at nature's great central fire, as does the buzzing fly by his side. Like it, too, our muse, wiping the dust off her long unused wings, goes blundering through the cob-webs of criticism, more dusty still, and carries away the half of them. What miserable cob-web is that which has hitherto escaped the broom, whose spider is invisible, but the "North American Review."