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1When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and
2branch again into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If you look closely you
3observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the
4ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun
5gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from
6the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream
7glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the
8sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass
9affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the water
10deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue.
11What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow
12to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a
13more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully,
14as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip--labium, from labor (?)--laps or
15lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still
16larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face,
17opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering
18drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it
19tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther. Thus it seemed that
20this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a
21leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon
22is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its
23character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward;
24but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming
25out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I
26know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling
27clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing
28inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast"
29within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied
30by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and
31fruit,--not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is
32merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the
33most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not
34only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. Ere long, not only on these
35banks, but on every hill and plain and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruped from
36its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more
37powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. When the ground was partially bare of
38snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the
39infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the
40winter,--life-everlasting, golden-rods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently
41than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort,
42hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and other strong stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest
43birds,--decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like
44top of the wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy,
45and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. It
46is an antique style older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible
47tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with
48the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer. At the approach of spring the red-squirrels got under my
49house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and
50chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the
51louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No you
52don't--chickaree--chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a
53strain of invective that was irresistible. The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!
54The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the blue-bird, the song-sparrow, and the
55red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies,
56traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh-hawk sailing low over
57the meadow is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells,
58and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire,--"et primitus oritur
59herba imbribus primoribus evocata,"--as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow
60but green is the color of its flame;--the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams
61from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's
62hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with
63that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass blades are their channels, and from year to
64year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our
65human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
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