Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/72

58 and the belching of the ice. The sun has got a new power in his rays after all, cold as the weather is. He could not have warmed me so much a month ago, nor should I have heard such rumblings of the ice in December. I see where a maple has been wounded, the sap is flowing out. Now, then, is the time to make sugar.

If I were to paint the short days of winter I should represent two towering icebergs approaching each other like promontories, for morning and evening, with cavernous recesses, and a solitary traveler wrapping his cloak about him and bent forward against a driving storm, just entering the narrow pass. I would paint the light of a taper at midday, seen through a cottage window, half buried in snow and frost In the foreground should appear the harvest, and far in the background, through the pass, should be seen the sowers in the fields and other evidences of spring. On the right and left of the approaching icebergs the heavens should be shaded off from the light of midday to midnight with its stars, the sun being low in the sky. I look between my legs up the river across Fair Haven. Subverting the head, we refer things to the heavens, the sky becomes the ground of the picture, and where the river breaks through low hills which slope to meet