Dream Life | Page 9

worse for
the reading, I advise to lay it down. It will be very harmless on the shelf,
however it may be in the hand.
I shall lay no claim to the title of moralist, teacher, or romancist: my
thoughts start pleasant pictures to my mind; and in a garrulous humor I
put my finger in the button-hole of my indulgent friend, and tell him
some of them,--giving him leave to quit me whenever he chooses.
Or, if a lady is my listener, let her fancy me only an honest,
simple-hearted fellow, whose familiarities are so innocent that she can
pardon them;--taking her hand in his, and talking on; sometimes
looking in her eyes, and then looking into the sunshine for relief;
sometimes prosy with narrative, and then sharpening up my matter with
a few touches of honest pathos;--let her imagine this, I say, and we may
become the most excellent friends in the world.

SPRING;
OR,
DREAMS OF BOYHOOD.

DREAMS OF BOYHOOD.

Spring.
The old chroniclers made the year begin in the season of frosts; and
they have launched us upon the current of the months from the snowy
banks of January. I love better to count time from spring to spring; it
seems to me far more cheerful to reckon the year by blossoms than by
blight.
Bernardin de St. Pierre, in his sweet story of Virginia, makes the bloom
of the cocoa-tree, or the growth of the banana, a yearly and a loved
monitor of the passage of her life. How cold and cheerless in the
comparison would be the icy chronology of the North;--So many years
have I seen the lakes locked, and the foliage die!
The budding and blooming of spring seem to belong properly to the
opening of the months. It is the season of the quickest expansion, of the
warmest blood, of the readiest growth; it is the boy-age of the year. The
birds sing in chorus in the spring--just as children prattle; the brooks
run full--like the overflow of young hearts; the showers drop easily--as
young tears flow; and the whole sky is as capricious as the mind of a
boy.
Between tears and smiles, the year, like the child, struggles into the
warmth of life. The old year--say what the chronologists will--lingers
upon the very lap of spring, and is only fairly gone when the blossoms
of April have strown their pall of glory upon his tomb, and the
bluebirds have chanted his requiem.
It always seems to me as if an access of life came with the melting of
the winter's snows, and as if every rootlet of grass, that lifted its first
green blade from the matted débris of the old year's decay, bore my
spirit upon it, nearer to the largess of Heaven.
I love to trace the break of spring step by step: I love even those long
rain-storms, that sap the icy fortresses of the lingering winter,--that
melt the snows upon the hills, and swell the mountain-brooks,--that
make the pools heave up their glassy cerements of ice, and hurry down
the crashing fragments into the wastes of ocean.

I love the gentle thaws that you can trace, day by day, by the stained
snow-banks, shrinking from the grass; and by the gentle drip of the
cottage-eaves. I love to search out the sunny slopes by a southern wall,
where the reflected sun does double duty to the earth and where the
frail anemone, or the faint blush of the arbutus, in the midst of the bleak
March atmosphere, will touch your heart, like a hope of Heaven in a
field of graves! Later come those soft, smoky days, when the patches of
winter grain show green under the shelter of leafless woods, and the
last snow-drifts, reduced to shrunken skeletons of ice, lie upon the
slope of northern hills, leaking away their life.
Then the grass at your door grows into the color of the sprouting grain,
and the buds upon the lilacs swell and burst. The peaches bloom upon
the wall, and the plums wear bodices of white. The sparkling oriole
picks string for his hammock on the sycamore, and the sparrows twitter
in pairs. The old elms throw down their dingy flowers, and color their
spray with green; and the brooks, where you throw your worm or the
minnow, float down whole fleets of the crimson blossoms of the maple.
Finally the oaks step into the opening quadrille of spring, with grayish
tufts of a modest verdure, which by-and-by will be long and glossy
leaves. The dogwood pitches his broad, white tent in the edge of the
forest; the dandelions lie along the hillocks, like stars in a sky of green;
and the wild cherry, growing in all the hedge-rows, without other
culture than