EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 201 
gently, as infants should be waked.When 
we wake indeed with a double awakening, not 
only from our ordinary nocturnal slumbers, but 
from our diurnal, we burst through the thal- 
lus of our ordinary life, we wake with empha¬ 
sis. 
6 A. M. To Cliffs. It affects one’s philoso¬ 
phy after so long liying in winter quarters to 
see the day dawn from some hill. Our effete, 
lowland t6wn is fresh as New Hampshire. It 
is as if we had migrated and were ready to be¬ 
gin life again in a new country with new hopes 
and resolutions. See your town with the dew 
on it, in as wild a morning mist (though thin) 
as ever draped it. To stay in the house all day 
such reviving spring days as the past have been, 
bending over a stove and gnawing one’s heart, 
seems to me as absurd as for a woodchuck to 
linger in his burrow. We have not heard the 
news then! sucking the claws of our philoso¬ 
phy when there is game to be had. The tap¬ 
ping of the woodpecker, rat-tat-tat , knocking at 
the door of some sluggish grub to tell him that 
the spring has arrived, and his fate, this is one 
of the season sounds, calling the roll of birds 
and insects, the reveillee . The Cliff woods are 
comparatively silent. Not yet the woodland 
birds (except, perhaps, the woodpecker, so far 
as it migrates), only the orchard and river birds 
