pecker comes screaming into the empty house, and throws open doors and windows wide, calling out each of them to let the neighbors know of its return. But heard farther off it is very suggestive of ineffable associations, which cannot be distinctly recalled, of long-drawn summer hours, and thus it also has the effect of music. I was not aware that the capacity to hear the woodpecker had slumbered within me so long. When the blackbird gets to a conqueree he seems to be dreaming of the sprays that are to be and on which he will perch. The robin does not come singing, but utters a somewhat anxious or inquisitive peep at first. The songsparrow is immediately most at home of those I have named.

Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening, reminiscences of our sanest hours. The voice of nature is always encouraging.

When I get two thirds up the hill, I look round, and am for the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue-scalloped rim.

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is a spring landscape, and as impossible a fortnight ago as the song of birds. It is a deeper and warmer blue than in winter, methinks. The snow is off the mountains, which seem even to have come again like the birds. The undulating river is a bright blue channel between sharp-edged shores of ice retained by the willows. The wind blows strong but warm from west by north (so that I have to hold my paper tight while I write this), making the copses creak and roar, but the sharp tinkle of a song-sparrow is heard through it all. But, ah! the needles of the pine, how they shine, as I look down over the Holden wood and westward! Every third tree is lit with the most subdued, but clear, ethereal light, as if it were the most delicate frost-work in a winter morning, reflecting no heat, but only light. And as they rock and wave in the strong wind, even a mile off, the light courses up and down them as over a field of grain, i. e., they are alternately light and dark, like looms above the forest, when the shuttle is thrown between the light woof and the dark web. At sight of this my spirit is like a lit tree. It runs or flashes over

their parallel boughs as when you play with the teeth of a comb. Not only osiers, but pine needles, shine brighter, I think, in the spring, and arrowheads and railroad rails, etc., etc.

Anacreon noticed this spring shining. Is it not from the higher sun and cleansed air and greater animation of nature? There is a warmer red on the leaves of the shrub oak and on the tail of the hawk circling over them.

I sit on the cliff and look toward Sudbury. I see its meeting-houses and its common, and its fields lie but little beyond my ordinary walk. How distant in all important senses may be the town which yet is within sight. With a glass I might, perchance, read the time on its clock. How circumscribed are our walks after all! With the utmost industry we cannot expect to know well an area more than six miles square; and yet we pretend to be travelers, to be acquainted with Siberia and Africa!

March 18, 1860. I examine the skunk cabbage now generally and abundantly in bloom all along under Clam-shell. It is a flower, as it were, without a leaf. All that you see is a stout beaked hood just rising above the dead brown grass in the springy ground where it has felt the heat under some south bank. The single enveloping leaf or spathe is all the flower that you see commonly, and these are as variously colored as tulips, and of singular color, from a very dark, almost black mahogany to a bright yellow, streaked or freckled with ma

hogany. It is a leaf simply folded around the

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flower, with its top like a bird's beak bent over it for its further protection, evidently to keep off wind and frost, and having a sharp angle down its back. These various colors are seen close together, and the beaks are bent in various directions. All along under that bank I heard the hum of honey-bees in the air, attracted by this flower. Especially the hum of one within a spathe sounds deep and loud. They circle about the bud, at first hesitatingly, then alight and enter at the open door and crawl over the spadix, and reappear laden with the yellow pollen. What a remarkable instinct it is that leads them to this flower. This bee is said to have been introduced by the white man, but how much it has learned. This is almost the only indigenous flower in bloom in this town at present, and probably I and my companion are the only men who have detected it this year. Yet this foreign fly has left its home, probably a mile off, and winged its way to this warm bank to find it. Six weeks hence children will set forth a-Maying, and have indifferent luck. But the first sunny and warmer day in March the honey-bee comes forth, stretches its wings, and goes forth in search of the earliest flower.

March 18, 1861. When I pass by a twig of willow, though of the slenderest kind, rising

above the sedge in some dry hollow, early in December or midwinter, above the snow, my spirits rise, as if it were an oasis in the desert. The very name, sallow (salix, from the Celtic sal-lis, near water), suggests that there is some natural sap or blood flowing there. It is a divining rod that has not failed, but stands with its root in the fountain. The fertile willow catkins are those green caterpillar-like ones, commonly an inch or more in length, which develop themselves rapidly after the sterile yellow ones, which we had so admired, are fallen or effete. Arranged around the bare twigs, they often form green wands from eight to eighteen inches long. A single catkin consists of from twenty-five to one hundred pods, more or less ovate and beaked, each of which is closely packed with cotton, in which are numerous seeds, so small that they are scarcely discernible by ordinary eyes.

"The willow worn by forlorn paramour." As if it were the emblem of despairing love! It is rather the emblem of triumphant love and sympathy with all nature. It may droop, it is so lithe and supple, but it never weeps. The willow of Babylon blooms not the less hopefully with us though its other half is not in the New England world at all, and never has been. It droops not to represent David's tears,