Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/118

 ? Flakes of warm sunlight fall on the congealed fields. The brooks and rills sing carols and glees for the spring. The marsh-hawk already seeks the first stirring life that awakes. The sough of melting snow is heard in all dells, and on all the hillsides, and by the sunny river-banks; and the ice dissolves in the ponds. The earth sends forth, as it were, an inward heat; not yellow like the sun, but green is the color of her flames; and the grass flames up on the warm hill sides as her spring fire. Methinks the sight of the first sod of fresh grass in the spring would make the reformer reconsider his schemes; the faithless and despairing man revive. Grass is a symbol of perpetual growth,—its blade like a long green ribbon, streaming from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its last year's spear of withered hay with the fresh life below. I have seen when early in spring the clumps of grass stood with their three inches of new green upholding their withered spears of the last autumn. It is as steady a growth as the rill which leaps out of the ground,—indeed it [70]