386 NOTES ON NEW ENGLAND BIEDS 



room. I looked out and saw that the pond was already 

 calm and full of hope as on a summer evening, though 

 the ice was dissolved but yesterday. There seemed to 

 be some intelligence in the pond which responded to the 

 unseen serenity in a distant horizon. I heard a robin 

 in the distance, — the first I had heard this spring, — 

 repeating the assurance. The green pitch pine sud- 

 denly looked brighter and more erect, as if now entirely 

 washed and cleansed by the rain. I knew it would not 

 rain any more. A serene summer-evening sky seemed 

 darkly reflected in the pond, though the clear sky was 

 nowhere visible overhead. It was no longer the end of 

 a season, but the beginning. The pines and shrub 

 oaks, which had before drooped and cowered the winter 

 through with myself, now recovered their several char- 

 acters and in the landscape revived the expression of an 

 immortal beauty. Trees seemed all at once to be fitly 

 grouped, to sustain new relations to men and to one 

 another. There was somewhat cosmical in the arrange- 

 ment of nature. O the evening robin, at the close of 

 a New England day ! If I could ever find the twig he 

 sits upon ! Where does the minstrel really roost ? We 

 perceive it is not the bird of the ornithologist that is 

 heard, — the Turdus migratorius. 



July 27, 1851. After taking the road by Webster's 1 

 beyond South Marshfield, I walked a long way at noon, 

 hot and thirsty, before I could find a suitable place to 

 sit and eat my dinner, — a place where the shade and 

 the sward pleased me. At length I was obliged to put 

 up with a small shade close to the ruts, where the only 

 1 [Daniel Webster's house at Marshfield, Mass.] 



