78 Walks in New England 



around its five pistils with their starry stigmas. 

 But while the hepatica has gone on to fruit, its 

 twin on wings, the hepatica butterfly, its very 

 counterfeit in blue and lavender colours, still flits 

 through the woodland ways, and seems to be 

 searching for the flower it fellows. This miracu 

 lous creature, the very psyche of the hepatica, 

 still links May to April, and keeps alive the con 

 tinuous sympathy of Nature. 



Now is the infinite delicacy of the spring 

 merging into summer, and something is lost, day 

 by day, of the subtleties of colour, which yet are 

 magical enough, as the gray birches, the tas- 

 seled poplars, the aspens, the pink or crim 

 son oaks, the bronze tints of hickories and the 

 pendulous sugar maple blooms emphasize the 

 hillsides. Now, too, the sassafras is blossom 

 ing in pale old gold, on the hillsides, and there is 

 in the swamps all the bloom of the dainty cas- 

 sandra, drooping its heathery bells over the edge 

 of the waters. To view any scene in Nature 

 now is to feel the beauty of that slow advance 

 by which in our clime one season melts into 

 another, and hard and fast lines are avoided. 

 There are no such lines in all Nature. The 

 edges of a flower and of a mountain alike indicate 

 something beyond ; the sharp outline is only true 

 of man s structures, and of these, if they get age 



