Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/75

Rh March 4, 1854. To Walden. In the meadow I see some still fresh and perfect pitcher plant leaves, and everywhere the green and reddish radical leaves of the golden senecio, whose fragrance when bruised carries me back or forward to an incredible season. Who would believe that under the snow and ice lie still, or in mid-winter, some green leaves which bruised yield the same odor that they do when their yellow blossoms spot the meadows in June. Nothing so realizes the summer to me now. In the dry pastures under the Cliff Hill, the radical leaves of the Johnswort are now revealed everywhere in pretty radiating wreaths flat on the ground. These leaves are recurved, reddish above, green beneath, and covered with dewy drops. I see now-a-days, the ground being laid bare, great cracks in the earth revealed, a third of an inch wide, running with a crinkling line for twenty rods or more through the pastures and under the walls, frost cracks of the past winter. Sometimes they are revealed through ice four or five inches thick over them. I observed to-day where a crack had divided a piece of bark lying over it with the same irregular and finely meandering lines, sometimes forking.

March 4, 1855. Though there is a cold and strong wind, it is very warm in the