EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 109 
one. Such is the genialness of nature that 
the trees appear to have put out feelers, by 
which the senses apprehend them more ten¬ 
derly. I do not know that the woods are ever 
more beautiful or affect me more. 
I feel it to be a greater success as a lecturer 
to affect uncultivated natures than to affect the 
most refined, for all cultivation is necessarily 
superficial, and its root may not even be di¬ 
rected toward the centre of the being. 
Look up or down the open river channel now 
so smooth. Like a hibernating animal, it has 
ventured to come out to the mouth of its bur¬ 
row. One way, perhaps, it is like melted sil¬ 
ver alloyed with copper. It goes nibbling off 
the edge of the thick ice on each side. Here 
and there I see a musquash sitting in the sun 
on the edge of the ice eating a clam, and the 
shells it has left are strewn along the edge. 
Ever and anon he drops into the liquid mirror 
and soon reappears with another clam. 
This clear, placid, silvery water is evidently 
a phenomenon of spring. Winter could not 
show us this.As we sit in this wonder¬ 
ful air, many sounds — that of wood-chopping 
for one— come to our ears, agreeably blunted, 
or muffled even, like the drumming of a part¬ 
ridge, not sharp and rending as in winter and 
recently. If a partridge should drum in win- 
