E-text prepared by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen, and Project Gutenberg
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"Can trouble dwell with April days?"
In Memoriam.
In our methodical New England life, we still recognize some magic insummer. Most persons reluctantly resign themselves to being decentlyhappy in June, at least. They accept June. They compliment its weather.They complained of the earlier months as cold, and so spent them inthe city; and they will complain of the later months as hot, and sorefrigerate themselves on some barren sea-coast. God offers us yearly anecklace of twelve pearls; most men choose the fairest, label it June,and cast the rest away. It is time to chant a hymn of more liberalgratitude.
There are no days in the whole round year more delicious than thosewhich often come to us in the latter half of April. On these days onegoes forth in the morning, and an Italian warmth broods over all thehills, taking visible shape in a glistening mist of silvered azure, withwhich mingles the smoke from many bonfires. The sun trembles in hisown soft rays, till one understands the old English tradition, that hedances on Easter-Day. Swimming in a sea of glory, the tops of the hillslook nearer than their bases, and their glistening watercourses seemclose to the eye, as is their liberated murmur to the ear. All acrossthis broad interval the teams are ploughing. The grass in the meadowseems all to have grown green since yesterday. The blackbirds janglein the oak, the robin is perched upon the elm, the song-sparrow on thehazel, and the bluebird on the apple-tree. There rises a hawk and sailsslowly, the stateliest of airy things, a floating dream of long andlanguid summer-hours. But as yet, though there is warmth enough for asense of luxury, there is coolness enough for exertion. No tropics canoffer such a burst of joy; indeed, no zone much warmer than our NorthernStates can offer a genuine spring. There can be none where there is nowinter, and the monotone of the seasons is broken only by wearisomerains. Vegetation and birds being distributed over the year, there is noburst of verdure nor of song. But with us, as the buds are swelling, thebirds are arriving; they are building their nests almost simultaneously;and in all the Southern year there is no such rapture of beauty and ofmelody as here marks every morning from the last of April onward.
But days even earlier than these in April have a charm,—even days thatseem raw and rainy, when the sky is dull and a bequest of March-windlingers, chasing the squirrel from the tree and the children from themeadows. There is a fascination in walking through these bare earlywoods,—there is such a pause of preparation, winter's work is socleanly and thoroughly done. Everything is taken down and put away;throughout the leafy arcades the branches show no remnant of last year,save a few twisted leaves of oak and beech, a few empty seed-vessels ofthe tardy witch-hazel, and a few gnawed nutshells dropped coquettishlyby the squirrels into the crevices of the bark. All else is bare, butprophetic: buds everywhere, the whole splendor of the coming summerconcentrated in those hard little knobs on every bough; and clinginghere and there among them, a brown, papery chrysalis, from which shallyet wave the superb wings of the Luna moth. An occasional shower patterson the dry leaves, but it does not silence the robin on the outskirts ofthe wo