EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 231 
March 25, 1859. A score of my townsmen 
have been shooting and trapping musquash and 
mink of late. They are gone all day; early 
and late they scan the rising tide ; stealthily 
they set their traps in remote swamps, avoid¬ 
ing one another. Am not I a trapper, too ? 
early and late scanning the rising flood, rang¬ 
ing by distant woodsides, setting my traps in 
solitude, and baiting them as well as I know 
how, that I may catch life and light, that my 
intellectual part may taste some venison and be 
invigorated, that my nakedness may be clad in 
some wild June warmth? 
As to the color of spring, I should say that 
hitherto in dry weather it was fawn-colored ; in 
wet, more yellowish or tawny. When wet, the 
green of the fawn is supplied by the lichens and 
the mosses. 
March 26, 1842. I thank God that the 
cheapness which appears in time and the world, 
the trivialness of the whole scheme of things, 
is in my own cheap and trivial moment. I am 
time and the world. In me are summer and 
winter, village life, and commercial routine, pes¬ 
tilence and famine, and refreshing breezes, joy 
and sadness, life and death. 
I must confess I have felt mean enough when 
asked how I was to act on society, what errand 
I had to mankind. Undoubtedly I did not feel 
