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 strewn 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.

A TOUCH OF NATURE*

BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

WHEN first the crocus thrusts its point of gold
Up through the still snow-drifted garden mold,
And folded green things in dim woods unclose
Their crinkled spears, a sudden tremor goes
Into my veins and makes me kith and kin

*By permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

To every wild-born thing that thrills and blows.
Sitting beside this crumbling sea-coal fire,
Here in the city's ceaseless roar and din,

Far from the brambly paths I used to know,
Far from the rustling brooks that slip and shine
Where the Neponset alders take their glow,

I share the tremulous sense of bud and brier,
And inarticulate ardors of the vine.

A SPRING RELISH*

BY JOHN BURROUGHS

From Signs and Seasons

THERE is a brief period in our spring when I like more than at any other time to drive along the country roads, or even to be shot along by steam and have the landscape presented to me like a map. It is at that period, usually late in April, when we behold the first quickening of the earth. The waters have subsided, the roads have become dry, the sunshine has grown strong and its warmth has penetrated the sod; there is a stir of preparation about the farm and all through the country. One does not care to see things very closely; his interest in nature is not special, but general. The earth is coming to life again. All the genial and more fertile places in the landscape are brought out; the earth is quickened in

*By permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

spots and streaks; you can see at a glance where man and nature have dealt the most kindly with it. The warm, moist places, the places that have had the wash of some building or of the road, or been subjected to some special mellowing influence, how quickly the turf awakens there and shows the tender green! See what the landscape would be, how much earlier spring would come to it, if every square yard of it was alike moist and fertile. As the later snows lay in patches here and there, so now the earliest verdure is irregularly spread over the landscape and is especially marked on certain slopes, as if it had blown over from the other side and lodged there.

A little earlier the homesteads looked cold and naked; the old farmhouse was bleak and unattractive; now Nature seems especially to smile upon it; her genial influences crowd up around it; the turf awakens all about as if in the spirit of friendliness. See the old barn on the meadow slope; the green seems to have oozed out from it and to have flowed slowly down the hill; at a little distance it is lost in the sere stubble. One can see where every spring lies buried about the fields; its influence is felt at the surface and the turf is early quickened there. Where the cattle have loved to lie and ruminate in the warm summer twilight, there the April sunshine loves to linger too, till the sod thrills to new life.

The home, the domestic feeling in nature is brought out and enhanced at this time; what man

has done tells, especially what he has done well. Our interest centers in the farmhouses and in the influence that seems to radiate from there. The older the home, the more genial nature looks about it. The new architectural place of the rich citizen, with the barns and outbuildings concealed or disguised as much as possible — spring is in no hurry about it; the sweat of long years of honest labor has not yet fattened the soil it stands upon.

The full charm of this April landscape is not brought out till the afternoon. It seems to need the slanting rays of the evening sun to give it the right mellowness and tenderness, or the right perspective. It is, perhaps, a little too bald in the strong, white light of the earlier part of the day, but when the faint, four o'clock shadows begin to come out and we look through the green vistas, and along the farm lanes toward the west, or out across long stretches of fields above which spring seems fairly hovering, just ready to alight, and note the teams slowly plowing, the brightened moldboard gleaming in the sun now and then it is at such times we feel its fresh, delicate attraction the most. There is no foliage on the trees yet; only here and there the red bloom of the soft maple, illuminated by the declining sun, shows vividly against the tender green of a slope beyond, or a willow, like a thin veil, stands out against a leafless wood. Here and there a little meadow watercourse is golden with marsh marigolds, or some

fence border, or rocky streak of neglected pasture land, is thickly starred with the white flowers of the bloodroot. The eye can devour a succession of landscapes at such a time; there is nothing that sates or entirely fills it, but every spring token stimulates it and makes it more on the alert.

THE GLADNESS OF NATURE

BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

IS THIS a time to be cloudy and sad,
When our mother Nature laughs around;
When even the deep blue heavens look glad,

And gladness breathes from the blossoming ground?

There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren,
And the gossip of swallows through all the sky;
The ground-squirrel gaily chirps by his den,
And the wilding bee hums merrily by.

The clouds are at play in the azure space,

And their shadows at play on the bright-green vale, And here they stretch to the frolic chase, And there they roll on the easy gale.

There's a dance of leaves in that aspen bower, There's a titter of winds in that beechen tree, There's a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower, And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea.