into the earth in a rigid line by man: the
fence, in short, is dogma: icy prejudice lingers near it.
The snow has disappeared; but the landscape is a ghastly sight,
--bleached, dead. The trees are stakes; the grass is of no color; and
the bare soil is not brown with a healthful brown; life has gone out
of it. Take up a piece of turf: it is a clod, without warmth,
inanimate. Pull it in pieces: there is no hope in it: it is a part
of the past; it is the refuse of last year. This is the condition to
which winter has reduced the landscape. When the snow, which was a
pall, is removed, you see how ghastly it is. The face of the country
is sodden. It needs now only the south wind to sweep over it, full
of the damp breath of death; and that begins to blow. No prospect
would be more dreary.

And yet the south wind fills credulous man with joy. He opens the
window. He goes out, and catches cold. He is stirred by the
mysterious coming of something. If there is sign of change nowhere
else, we detect it in the newspaper. In sheltered corners of that
truculent instrument for the diffusion of the prejudices of the few
among the many begin to grow the violets of tender sentiment, the
early greens of yearning. The poet feels the sap of the new year
before the marsh-willow. He blossoms in advance of the catkins. Man
is greater than Nature. The poet is greater than man: he is nature
on two legs,--ambulatory.

At first there is no appearance of conflict. The winter garrison
seems to have withdrawn. The invading hosts of the South are
entering without opposition. The hard ground softens; the sun lies
warm upon the southern bank, and water oozes from its base. If you
examine the buds of the lilac and the flowering shrubs, you cannot
say that they are swelling; but the varnish with which they were
coated in the fall to keep out the frost seems to be cracking. If
the sugar-maple is hacked, it will bleed,--the pure white blood of
Nature.

At the close of a sunny day the western sky has a softened aspect:
its color, we say, has warmth in it On such a day you may meet a
caterpillar on the footpath, and turn out for him. The house-fly thaws
out; a company of cheerful wasps take possession of a chamber-window.
It is oppressive indoors at night, and the window is raised. A flock of
millers, born out of time, flutter in. It is most unusual weather for
the season: it is so every year. The delusion is complete, when, on a
mild evening, the tree-t