lingers near it.  The snow has disappeared; but the landscape is a ghastly sight, —­bleached, dead.  The trees are stakes; the grass is of no color; and the bare soil is not brown with a healthful brown; life has gone out of it.  Take up a piece of turf:  it is a clod, without warmth, inanimate.  Pull it in pieces:  there is no hope in it:  it is a part of the past; it is the refuse of last year.  This is the condition to which winter has reduced the landscape.  When the snow, which was a pall, is removed, you see how ghastly it is.  The face of the country is sodden.  It needs now only the south wind to sweep over it, full of the damp breath of death; and that begins to blow.  No prospect would be more dreary.

And yet the south wind fills credulous man with joy.  He opens the window.  He goes out, and catches cold.  He is stirred by the mysterious coming of something.  If there is sign of change nowhere else, we detect it in the newspaper.  In sheltered corners of that truculent instrument for the diffusion of the prejudices of the few among the many begin to grow the violets of tender sentiment, the early greens of yearning.  The poet feels the sap of the new year before the marsh-willow.  He blossoms in advance of the catkins.  Man is greater than Nature.  The poet is greater than man:  he is nature on two legs,—­ambulatory.

At first there is no appearance of conflict.  The winter garrison seems to have withdrawn.  The invading hosts of the South are entering without opposition.  The hard ground softens; the sun lies warm upon the southern bank, and water oozes from its base.  If you examine the buds of the lilac and the flowering shrubs, you cannot say that they are swelling; but the varnish with which they were coated in the fall to keep out the frost seems to be cracking.  If the sugar-maple is hacked, it will bleed,—­the pure white blood of Nature.

At the close of a sunny day the western sky has a softened aspect:  its color, we say, has warmth in it On such a day you may meet a caterpillar on the footpath, and turn out for him.  The house-fly thaws out; a company of cheerful wasps take possession of a chamber-window.  It is oppressive indoors at night, and the window is raised.  A flock of millers, born out of time, flutter in.  It is most unusual weather for the season:  it is so every year.  The delusion is complete, when, on a mild evening, the tree-toads open their brittle-brattle chorus on the edge of the pond.  The citizen asks his neighbor, “Did you hear the frogs last night?” That seems to open the new world.  One thinks of his childhood and its innocence, and of his first loves.  It fills one with sentiment and a tender longing, this voice of the tree-toad.  Man is a strange being.  Deaf to the prayers of friends, to the sermons and warnings of the church, to the calls of duty, to the pleadings of his better nature, he is touched by the tree-toad.  The signs of the spring multiply.  The passer in the street in the evening sees the maid-servant leaning on the area-gate in sweet converse with some one leaning on the other side; or in the park, which is still too damp for anything but true affection, he sees her seated by the side of one who is able to protect her from the policeman, and hears her sigh, “How sweet it is to be with those we love to be with!”