THE MAYFLOWER.
Meditations of the oak.
I sometimes think that leaves are the thoughts of trees, and that if we only knew it, we should find their life’s experience recorded in them. Our oak—what a crop of meditations and remembrances must he have thrown forth, leafing out century after century! Awhile he spake and thought only of red deer and Indians; of the trillium that opened its white triangle in his shade; of the scented arbutus, fair as the pink ocean shell, weaving her fragrant mats in the moss at his feet; of feathery ferns, casting their silent shadows on the checkerberry leaves, and all those sweet, wild, nameless, half-mossy things that live in the gloom of forests, and are only desecrated when brought to scientific light, laid out, and stretched on a botanic bier. Sweet old forest days! when blue jay, and yellow-hammer, and bobolink made his leaves merry, and summer was a long opera of such music as Mozart dimly dreamed. But then came human kind bustling beneath; wondering, fussing, exploring, measuring, treading down flowers, cutting down trees, scaring bobolinks, and Andover, as men say, began to be settled.
The brook in winter.
Let us stop the old chaise and get out a minute to look at this brook,—one of our last summer’s pets. What is he doing this winter? Let us at least say “How do you do?” to him. Ah, here he is! and he and Jack Frost together have been turning the little gap in the old stone wall, through which he leaped down to the road, into a little grotto of Antiparos. Some old rough rails and boards that dropped over it are sheathed in plates of transparent silver. The trunks of the black alders are mailed with crystal; and the witch-hazel and yellow osiers fringing its sedgy borders are likewise shining through their glossy covering. Around every stem that rises from the water is a glittering ring of ice. The tags of the alder and the red berries of last summer’s wild roses glitter now like a lady’s pendant. As for the brook, he is wide-awake and joyful; and where the roof of sheet ice breaks away, you can see his yellow-brown waters rattling and gurgling among the stones as briskly as they did last July. Down he springs! over the glossy-coated stone wall, throwing new sparkles into the fairy grotto around him; and widening daily from melting snows, and such other godsends, he goes chattering off under yonder mossy stone bridge, and we lose sight of him. It might be fancy, but it seemed that our watery friend tipped us a cheery wink as he passed, saying, “Fine weather, sir and madam; nice times these; and in April you’ll find us all right; the flowers are making up their finery for the next season; there’s to be a splendid display in a month or two.”
Trees in winter.
Neither are trees, as seen in winter, destitute of their own peculiar beauty. If it be a gorgeous study in summer-time to watch the play of their abundant foliage, we still may thank winter for laying bare before us the grand and beautiful anatomy of the tree, with all its interlacing network of boughs, knotted on each twig with the buds of next year’s promise. The fleecy and rosy clouds look all the more beautiful through the dark lace veil of yonder magnificent elms; and the down-drooping drapery of yonder willow hath its own grace of outline as it sweeps the bare snows. And the comical old apple-trees, why, in summer they look like so many plump, green cushions, one as much like another as possible; but under the revealing light of winter every characteristic twist and jerk stands disclosed.
One might moralize on this,—how affliction, which strips us of all ornaments and accessories, and brings us down to the permanent and solid wood of our nature, develops such wide differences in people who before seemed not much distinct.
Winter clouds.
The cloud lights of a wintry sky have a clear purity and brilliancy that no other months can rival. The rose tints, and the shading of rose tint into gold, the flossy, filmy accumulation of illuminated vapor that drifts across the sky in a January afternoon, are beauties far exceeding those of summer.