To a countryman like myself the presence of
natural objects, the open face of the country, sheds a cheering and soothing influence at all times; but it is only at rare intervals that he experiences the thrill of a fresh impression. I find that a kind of preoccupation, as the farmer with his work, the angler with his rod, the sportsman with his gun, the walker with his friend, the lounger with his book, affords conditions that are not to be neglected. So much will steal in at the corners of your eyes; the unpremeditated glance, when the mind is passive and receptive, often stirs the soul. Upon whom does the brook make such an impression as upon the angler? How he comes to know its character! how he studies its every phase! how he feels it through that rod and line as if they were a part of himself! I pity the person who does not get at least one or two fresh impressions of the charm and sweetness of nature in the spring. Later in the season it gets to be more of an old story; but in March, when the season is early, and in April, when the season is late, there occasionally come days which awaken a new joy in the heart. Every recurring spring one experiences this fresh delight. There is nothing very tangible yet in awakening nature, but there is something in the air, some sentiment in the sunshine and in the look of things, a prophecy of life and renewal, that sends a thrill through the frame. The first sparrow's song, the first robin's call, the first bluebird's warble, the first phœbe's note—who can hear it without emotion? Or the first flock of migrating geese or ducks—how much they bring north with
them! When the red-shouldered starlings begin to gurgle in the elms or golden willows along the marshes and watercourses, you will feel spring then; and if you look closely upon the ground beneath them, you will find that sturdy advanced guard of our floral army, the skunk cabbage, thrusting his spear-point up through the ooze, and spring will again quicken your pulse.
One seems to get nearer to nature in the early spring days: all screens are removed, the earth everywhere speaks directly to you; she is not hidden by verdure and foliage; there is a peculiar delight in walking over the brown turf of the fields that one cannot feel later on. How welcome the smell of it, warmed by the sun; the first breath of the reviving earth. How welcome the full, sparkling watercourses, too, everywhere drawing the eye; by and by they will be veiled by the verdure and shrunken by the heat. When March is kind, for how much her slightest favors count! The other evening, as I stood on the slope of a hill in the twilight, I heard a whistling of approaching wings, and presently a woodcock flying low passed near me. I could see his form and his long curved wings dimly against the horizon; his whistling slowly vanished in the gathering night, but his passage made something stir and respond within me. March was on the wing, she was abroad in the soft still twilight searching out the moist, springy places where the worms first come to the surface and where the grass first starts; and her course was up the valley from the south. A
day or two later I sat on a hillside in the woods late in the day, amid the pines and hemlocks, and heard the soft, elusive spring call of the little owl—a curious musical undertone hardly separable from the silence; a bell, muffled in feathers, tolling in the twilight of the woods and discernible only to the most alert ear. But it was the voice of spring, the voice of the same impulse that sent the woodcock winging his way through the dusk, that was just beginning to make the pussy-willows swell and the grass to freshen in the spring runs.
Occasionally, of a bright, warm, still day in March, such as we have had the present season, the little flying spider is abroad. It is the most delicate of all March tokens, but very suggestive. Its long, waving threads of gossamer, invisible except when the sunlight falls upon them at a particular angle, stream out here and there upon the air, a filament of life, reaching and reaching as if to catch and detain the most subtle of the skyey influences.
Nature is always new in the spring, and lucky are we if it finds us new also.