SPRING. 
331 
and plain and in every hollow, the frost comes out of 
the ground like a dormant quadruped from its burrow, 
and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other climes 
in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more 
powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, 
the other but breaks in pieces. 
When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a 
few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was 
pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant 
year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the 
withered vegetation which had withstood the winter, — 
life-everlasting, golden-rods, pinweeds, and graceful 
wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently 
than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe 
till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, mulleins, Johns- 
wort, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and other strong 
stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which en¬ 
tertain the earliest birds, — decent weeds, at least, which 
widowed Nature wears. I am particularly attracted by 
the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass; it 
brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is 
among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in 
the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types 
already in the mind of man that astronomy has. It is 
an antique style older than Greek or Egyptian. Many 
of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inex¬ 
pressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are ac¬ 
customed to hear this king described as a rude and bois¬ 
terous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he 
adorns the tresses of Summer. 
At the approach of spring the red-squirrels got under 
my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat 
reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling 
