92 SPRING. 



visit to the fields as if by magic. The horse, even 

 though worn by labour and pinched by dry and scanty 

 food, canters around and around the field, with arching 

 neck and nostrils distended, as if he would inhale the 

 whole atmosphere at a breath, snorting aloud and 

 shaking from his lungs all the impurities of his confine- 

 ment. Even the steer is a wanton ; and the cow, at 

 other seasons the dullest creature that lives, gambols 

 and gallops with all the sportiveness of the kid. Long, 

 indeed, before there is any thing that can please their 

 appetites or satisfy their hunger, there comes upon 

 them a balm in the gale, a breathing of freshness and 

 vigour, which proves that, even with the lower crea- 

 tures, life is preferable to the means of living ; and 

 that, to all the productions of nature, the first and best 

 of blessings is the air in which " they have their being," 

 tempered by those restless breezes, which make it, at 

 all places, ever new. 



And when the proper temperature does come, how- 

 ever transitory it may be, and how much some men 

 may fear that the early making of the sunny day will 

 be marred, by those dense masses of stachen-cloud 

 which, rearing their castellated volumes in the horizon, 

 with the semblance of a ridge of massy mountains, 

 portend that the young year shall yet be swathed in 

 snow, how rapidly the energies of nature come out to 

 meet it. In January, in February, or March, as it 

 may be, according to the latitude and the elevation 

 above the level of the sea, when the air begins to 

 relent, by the snow's throwing back the whole heat of 

 the sun into the lower stratum of the air, when the 

 water begins to trickle from the cottage thatch, and 



