! 7 4 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 



There is no "yellow violet" here; but as the "wind-flower" is 

 never " blue," and the hepatica often is, it was of course the 

 latter flower that really "blossomed alone" amid these lingering 

 snows. 



In further justice to our poet, who evidently discovered the 

 error of his early botanical ways, let me turn to his chronicle of 

 the Twenty-seventh of March, written several years later again, as 

 opposed to his April "yellow violet": 



" When March, just ready to depart, begins 

 To soften into April, . . . within the woods 

 Tufts of ground- laurel creeping underneath 

 The leaves of the last summer, send their sweets 

 Up to the chilly air, and by the oak 

 The squirrel -cups, a graceful company, 

 Hide in their bells a soft aerial blue" 



a passage which truly holds the mirror up to nature, and disarms 

 our censorship. Such is the sunny spot in the April woods that 

 we all know so well, his " squirrel- cups " being identical with the 

 intended hepaticas of his previous passage, and whose blossoms 

 the yellow violet rarely sees in their prime. 



It is to the hepatica, then, that Flora intrusts the first greeting 

 to the returning birds, and the bards leaving the lowly "cabbage"- 

 head to entertain the frogs and lizards, bees and flies. 



Thoreau, in one of his books, pretends to give precise dates 

 for the turning of the leaves in autumn a task as idle as to fore- 

 cast the debut of the flowers ; for while the order and association 

 in a given neighborhood is probably identical from year to year, 

 the eccentric conditions of American weather are wont to con- 

 found our oracles. In the past season, for instance, the early 

 flowers were two weeks ahead all along the line the New Eng- 

 land line, at least. In ordinary seasons I have frequently picked 

 the little rock - saxifrage (Saxifraga Virg^) in early April almost 

 frozen with the cold; and long before the bloodroots and rue- 

 anemone and wind-flowers a congenial trio were out; and the 

 little silky-leaved everlasting (Antennaria plantaginifolia] has not 



