EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
97 
singular, decayed-yellow look, and a spirituous 
or apothecary odor. As the other day I clam¬ 
bered over those great white pine masts which 
lay in all directions, one upon another, on the 
hillside south of Fair Haven, where the woods 
have been laid waste, I was struck, in favorable 
lights, with the jewel-like brilliancy of the 
sawed ends thickly bedewed with crystal drops 
of turpentine, thickly as a shield, as if the Dry¬ 
ads, Oreads, pine-wood nymphs had seasonably 
wept there the fall of the tree. The perfect 
sincerity of these terebinthine drops, each one 
reflecting the world, colorless as light, or like 
drops of dew heaven-distilled and trembling to 
their fall, is incredible when you remember how 
firm their consistency. And is this that pitch , 
which you cannot touch without being defiled ? 
Looking from the cliffs, the sun being, as 
before, invisible, I saw far more light in the 
reflected sky in the neighborhood of the sun 
than I could see in the heavens from my po¬ 
sition, and it occurred to me that the reason 
River. 
was that there was reflected to me from the 
river, the view I should have got if I had stood 
there on the water in a more favorable position. 
I see that the sand in the road has crystallized 
7 
