As the spring comes on, and the densening outlines of the elm give daily a new design for a Grecian urn,—­its hue, first brown with blossoms, then emerald with leaves,—­we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the bare boughs.  In our favored temperate zone, the trees denude themselves each year, like the goddesses before Paris, that we may see which unadorned loveliness is the fairest.  Only the unconquerable delicacy of the beech still keeps its soft vestments about it:  far into spring, when worn to thin rags and tatters, they cling there still; and when they fall, the new appear as by magic.  It must be owned, however, that the beech has good reasons for this prudishness, and possesses little beauty of figure; while the elms, maples, chestnuts, walnuts, and even oaks, have not exhausted all their store of charms for us, until we have seen them disrobed.  Only yonder magnificent pine-tree,—­that pitch-pine, nobler when seen in perfection than white-pine, or Norwegian, or Norfolk Islander,—­that pitch-pine, herself a grove, una nemus, holds her unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean, whose voice she shares; and only marks the flowing of her annual tide of life by the new verdure that yearly submerges all trace of last year’s ebb.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!  Sometimes, in following up a watercourse among our hills, in the early spring, one comes to a weird and desolate place, where one huge wild grapevine has wreathed its ragged arms around a whole thicket and brought it to the ground,—­swarming to the tops of hemlocks, clenching a dozen young maples at once and tugging them downward, stretching its wizard black length across the underbrush, into the earth and out again, wrenching up great stones in its blind, aimless struggle.  What a piece of chaos is this!  Yet come here again, two months hence, and you shall find all this desolation clothed with beauty and with fragrance, one vast bower of soft green leaves and graceful tendrils, while summer-birds chirp and flutter amid these sunny arches all the livelong day.  “Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness.”

To the end of April, and often later, one still finds remains of snowbanks in sheltered woods, especially those consisting of evergreen trees; and this snow, like that upon high mountains, has become hardened by the repeated thawing and freezing of the surface, till it is more impenetrable than ice.  But the snow that actually falls during April is usually only what Vermonters call “sugar-snow,”—­falling in the night and just whitening the surface for an hour or two, and taking its name, not so much from its looks as from the fact that it denotes the proper weather for “sugaring,” namely, cold nights and warm days.  Our saccharine associations, however, remain so obstinately tropical, that it seems almost impossible for the imagination to locate sugar in New England trees; though it is known that not the maple only, but the birch and the walnut even, afford it in appreciable quantities.