I love the gentle thaws that you can trace, day by day, by the stained
snow-banks, shrinking from the grass; and by the gentle drip of the
cottage-eaves. I love to search out the sunny slopes by a southern wall,
where the reflected sun does double duty to the earth and where the
frail anemone, or the faint blush of the arbutus, in the midst of the
bleak March atmosphere, will touch your heart, like a hope of Heaven in
a field of graves! Later come those soft, smoky days, when the patches
of winter grain show green under the shelter of leafless woods, and the
last snow-drifts, reduced to shrunken skeletons of ice, lie upon the
slope of northern hills, leaking away their life.
Then the grass at your door grows into the color of the sprouting grain,
and the buds upon the lilacs swell and burst. The peaches bloom upon the
wall, and the plums wear bodices of white. The sparkling oriole picks
string for his hammock on the sycamore, and the sparrows twitter in
pairs. The old elms throw down their dingy flowers, and color their
spray with green; and the brooks, where you throw your worm or the
minnow, float down whole fleets of the crimson blossoms of the maple.
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