174 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 Aprzd “ 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 début 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 (Saxzfraga 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 (dutennaria plantaginifolia) has not 
