Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/85

Rh of all creatures. When only the snow had begun to melt and no rill of song had broken loose, a note so dry and fettered still, so inarticulate and half thawed out that you might and would commonly mistake for the tapping of a woodpecker. As if the young nuthatch in its hole had listened only to the tapping of woodpeckers and learned that music, and now when it would sing and give vent to its spring ecstasy, it can modulate only some notes like that. That is its theme still. That is its ruling idea of song and music. Only a little clangor and liquidity added to the tapping of the woodpecker. It was the handle by which my thoughts took firmly hold on spring. This herald of spring is commonly unseen, it sits so close to the bark.

March 5, 1860. The old naturalists were so sensitive and sympathetic toward nature that they could be surprised by the ordinary events of life. It was an incessant miracle to them, and therefore gorgons and flying dragons were not incredible. The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

As we sat under Lupine promontory the other day, watching the ripples that swept over the flooded meadows, and thinking what an eligible site that would be for a cottage, C