This is the most fairy-scented time of the whole year. “The wood-bine spices are wafted abroad,” indeed. The willows perfume the lanes with their intoxicating sweetness; and there is a cool pure dawn-like fragrance everywhere, from the countless millions of opening leaves, steeped every night with dew.
Last week we saw the first swallows. There they skimmed and flew, as if they had never gone to other skies at all. Their flight is so effortless, they seem to pour and stream down unseen cataracts of air. To-day chimney-swallows came, and we watched their endless rippling and circling. They sailed and wheeled, in little companies or singly, now twittering and now silent, and from now on all summer the sky will never be empty of their beautiful activities.
May 26.
At last the woods are like a garden of delicate flowers, clothing the hills as far as eye can see with colors of sunrise. The red-oaks are gold color, with strong brown stems; ash and lindens are golden green; maples soft copper and bronze, or deep flesh-color.
The flower-like delicacy of leafing out is wonderfully prolonged. The willows come first, then elms, in brown flower, then quaking-asps and birches, and then maples. Later, lindens and ash-trees catch the light, and the ash leaves (which grow far apart, and in bunches, with the flower-buds) are indeed like just-alighted butterflies. The small leaves are so bright that even in the rain they shine as if a shaft of sunlight from some unseen break in the clouds were lighting the woods.
Now long shining leaf buds show among the elm flowers and on the beeches. The later poplars are cream-white and as downy as velvet. A wood of maples and poplars is almost a pink-and-white wood; shell-pink, and palest, most silvery-and-creamy gray.
The tall gold-colored red-oaks make masses of strong color; and later, when we think the shimmering of the fairy rainbow is fading, the white oaks come out in a mist of pale carnation—pink and gray and cream.
In June, after all the hardwoods have merged into uniform light green, firs and spruces become jeweled at every point with tips of light, the new growth for the year. Red pines and white pines are set all over with candelabra of lighter green, until high on the tops of the seeding white pines little clusters of finger-slender pale green cones begin to show.
By this time the forest-flowers have faded through the woods. The brighter colors of the field-flowers are gay along the roadsides and over meadows and pastures, and with them Summer has come.