EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 55 
west. To Abner Buttrick and Tarbeli Hills. 
See a flock of large ducks in a line (may be 
black?) oyer Great Meadows, also a few shel¬ 
drakes. It was pleasant to hear the tinkling of 
very coarse brash, broken, honey-combed, dark 
ice, rattling one piece against another along 
the northeast shores to which it had drifted. 
Scarcely any ice now about river except what 
rests on the bottom of the meadow, dirty with 
sediment. The first song-sparrows are very in¬ 
conspicuous and shy on the brown earth. You 
hear some weeds rustle, or think you see a 
mouse run amid the stubble, and then the spar¬ 
row flies low away. 
March 4, 1840. I learned to-day that my 
ornithology had done me no service. The birds 
I heard, which fortunately did not come within 
the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it 
had been the first morning of creation and had 
for background to their song an untrodden wil¬ 
derness stretching through many a Carolina 
and Mexico of the soul. 
March 4, 1841. Ben Jonson says in his 
epigrams, “ He makes himself a thoroughfare of 
vice.” This is true, for by vice the substance 
of a man is not changed, but all his pores and 
cavities and avenues are profaned by being 
made the thoroughfares of vice. The searching 
devil courses through and through him. His 
