APRIL 101 



Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and 

 indescribable odors the perfume of the bursting 

 sod, of the quickened roots and rootlets, of the mold 

 under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No other 

 month has odors like it. The west wind the other 

 day came fraught with a perfume that was to the 

 sense of smell what a wild and delicate strain of 

 music is to the ear. It was almost transcendental. 

 I walked across the hill with my nose in the air taking 

 it in. It lasted for two days. I imagined it came 

 from the willows of a distant swamp, whose catkins 

 were affording the bees their first pollen; or did it 

 come from much farther from beyond the horizon, 

 the accumulated breath of innumerable farms and 

 budding forests ? The main characteristic of these 

 April odors is their uncloying freshness. They are 

 not sweet, they are oftener bitter, they are penetrat- 

 ing and lyrical. I know well the odors of May 

 and June, of the world of meadows and orchards 

 bursting into bloom, but they are not so ineffable 

 and immaterial and so stimulating to the sense as the 

 incense of April. 



The April of English literature corresponds nearly 

 to our May. In Great Britain the swallow and the 

 cuckoo usually arrive by the middle of April; with 

 us their appearance is a week or two later. Our 

 April, at its best, is a bright, laughing face under a 

 hood of snow, like the English March, but presenting 



