Buds and Bird Voices

Balmy Spring--weeks later than we expected and months later than we
longed for her--comes at last to revive the moss on the roof and
walls of our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my study-window,
inviting me to throw it open and create a summer atmosphere by the
intermixture of her genial breath with the black and cheerless
comfort of the stove. As the casement ascends, forth into infinite
space fly the innumerable forms of thought or fancy that have kept me
company in the retirement of this little chamber during the sluggish
lapse of wintry weather; visions, gay, grotesque, and sad; pictures
of real life, tinted with nature's homely gray and russet; scenes in
dreamland, bedizened with rainbow hues which faded before they were
well laid on,--all these may vanish now, and leave me to mould a
fresh existence out of sunshine, Brooding Meditation may flap her
dusky wings and take her owl-like Right, blinking amid the
cheerfulness of noontide. Such companions befit the season of
frosted window-panes and crackling fires, when the blast howls
through the black-ash trees of our avenue and the drifting snow-
storm chokes up the wood-paths and fills the highway from stone wall
to stone wall. In the spring and summer time all sombre thoughts
should follow the winter northward with the sombre and thoughtful
crows. The old paradisiacal economy of life is again in force; we
live, not to think or to labor, but for the simple end of being
happy. Nothing for the present hour is worthy of man's infinite
capacity save to imbibe the warm smile of heaven and sympathize with
the reviving earth.

The present Spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps, because
Winter lingered so unconscionably long that with her best diligence
she can hardly retrieve half the allotted period of her reign. It
is but a fortnight since I stood on the brink of our swollen river
and beheld the accumulated ice of four frozen months go down the
stream. Except in streaks here and there upon the hillsides, the
whole visible universe was then covered with deep snow, the
nethermost layer of which had been deposited by an early December
storm. It was a sight to make the beholder torpid, in the
impossibility of imagining how this vast white napkin was to be
removed from the face of the corpse-like world in less time than had
been required to spread it there. But who can estimate the power of
gentle influences, whether amid material desolation or the moral
winter of man's heart? There have been no tempestuous rains, even
no sultry days, but a constant breath of southern winds, with now a
day of kindly sunshine, and now a no less kindly mist or a soft
descent of showers, in which a smile and a blessing seemed to have
been steeped. The snow has