EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 137 
The clergy are as diseased and as much pos¬ 
sessed with a devil as the reformers. They 
make their topic as offensive as the politician; 
for our religion is as unpublic and incommuni¬ 
cable as our poetical vein, and to be approached 
with as much love and tenderness. 
March 15, 1842.The poor have come 
out to employ themselves in the sunshine, the 
old and feeble to scent the air once more. I 
hear the bluebird, the song-sparrow, and the 
robin, and the note of the lark leaks up through 
the meadows, as if its bill had been thawed by 
the warm sun. As I am going to the woods I 
think to take some small book in my pocket, 
whose author has been there already, whose 
pages will be as good as my thoughts, and will 
eke them out or show me human life still gleam¬ 
ing in the horizon when the woods have shut 
out the town. But I can find none. None will 
sail as far forward into the bay of nature as my 
thought. They stay at home. I would go home. 
When I get to the wood their thin leaves rustle 
in my fingers. They are bare and obvious, and 
there is no halo or haze about them. Nature 
lies fair and far behind them all. 
Cold Spring. I hear nothing but a phebe, 
and the wind, and the rattling of a chaise in 
the wood. For a few years I stay here, not 
knowing, taking my own life by degrees, and 
