How Spring Came in New England | Page 5

tree is a
living thing, and its growth repels it. The fence is dead, driven into the
earth in a rigid line by man: the fence, in short, is dogma: icy prejudice
lingers near it. The snow has disappeared; but the landscape is a ghastly
sight,-- bleached, dead. The trees are stakes; the grass is of no color;
and the bare soil is not brown with a healthful brown; life has gone out
of it. Take up a piece of turf: it is a clod, without warmth, inanimate.
Pull it in pieces: there is no hope in it: it is a part of the past; it is the
refuse of last year. This is the condition to which winter has reduced
the landscape. When the snow, which was a pall, is removed, you see
how ghastly it is. The face of the country is sodden. It needs now only

the south wind to sweep over it, full of the damp breath of death; and
that begins to blow. No prospect would be more dreary.
And yet the south wind fills credulous man with joy. He opens the
window. He goes out, and catches cold. He is stirred by the mysterious
coming of something. If there is sign of change nowhere else, we detect
it in the newspaper. In sheltered corners of that truculent instrument for
the diffusion of the prejudices of the few among the many begin to
grow the violets of tender sentiment, the early greens of yearning. The
poet feels the sap of the new year before the marsh-willow. He
blossoms in advance of the catkins. Man is greater than Nature. The
poet is greater than man: he is nature on two legs,--ambulatory.
At first there is no appearance of conflict. The winter garrison seems to
have withdrawn. The invading hosts of the South are entering without
opposition. The hard ground softens; the sun lies warm upon the
southern bank, and water oozes from its base. If you examine the buds
of the lilac and the flowering shrubs, you cannot say that they are
swelling; but the varnish with which they were coated in the fall to
keep out the frost seems to be cracking. If the sugar-maple is hacked, it
will bleed,--the pure white blood of Nature.
At the close of a sunny day the western sky has a softened aspect: its
color, we say, has warmth in it On such a day you may meet a
caterpillar on the footpath, and turn out for him. The house-fly thaws
out; a company of cheerful wasps take possession of a chamber-
window. It is oppressive indoors at night, and the window is raised. A
flock of millers, born out of time, flutter in. It is most unusual weather
for the season: it is so every year. The delusion is complete, when, on a
mild evening, the tree-toads open their brittle- brattle chorus on the
edge of the pond. The citizen asks his neighbor, "Did you hear the frogs
last night?" That seems to open the new world. One thinks of his
childhood and its innocence, and of his first loves. It fills one with
sentiment and a tender longing, this voice of the tree-toad. Man is a
strange being. Deaf to the prayers of friends, to the sermons and
warnings of the church, to the calls of duty, to the pleadings of his
better nature, he is touched by the tree-toad. The signs of the spring
multiply. The passer in the street in the evening sees the maid-servant
leaning on the area- gate in sweet converse with some one leaning on
the other side; or in the park, which is still too damp for anything but

true affection, he sees her seated by the side of one who is able to
protect her from the policeman, and hears her sigh, "How sweet it is to
be with those we love to be with!"
All this is very well; but next morning the newspaper nips these early
buds of sentiment. The telegraph announces, "Twenty feet of snow at
Ogden, on the Pacific Road; winds blowing a gale at Omaha, and snow
still falling; mercury frozen at Duluth; storm-signals at Port Huron."
Where now are your tree-toads, your young love, your early season?
Before noon it rains, by three o'clock it hails; before night the bleak
storm-cloud of the northwest envelops the sky; a gale is raging,
whirling about a tempest of snow. By morning the snow is drifted in
banks, and two feet deep on a level. Early in the seventeenth century,
Drebbel of Holland invented the weather-glass. Before that, men had
suffered without knowing the degree of their suffering. A century later,
Romer hit upon the idea of using mercury in a thermometer; and
Fahrenheit constructed the instrument which adds