At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house,two at a time,directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing,and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard;and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder,as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks,defying humanity to stop them.No,you don't-chickaree-chickaree.They were wholly deaf to my arguments,or failed to perceive their force,and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible.
The first sparrow of spring!The year beginning with younger hope than ever!The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird,the song sparrow,and the red-wing,as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell!What at such a time are histories,chronologies,traditions,and all written revelations?The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring.The marsh hawk,sailing low over the meadow,is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes.The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells,and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds.The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire,-“et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,”-as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun;not yellow but green is the color of its flame;-the symbol of perpetual youth,the grass-blade,like a long green ribbon,streams from the sod into the summer,checked indeed by the frost,but anon pushing on again,lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below.It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.It is almost identical with that,for in the growing days of June,when the rills are dry,the grass-blades are their channels,and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream,and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply.So our human life but dies down to its root,and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
Walden is melting apace.There is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides,and wider still at the east end.A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body.I hear a song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore,-olit,olit,olit,-chip,chip,chip,che char,-che wiss,wiss,wiss.He too is helping to crack it.How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice,answering somewhat to those of the shore,but more regular!It is unusually hard,owing to the recent severe but transient cold,and all watered or waved like a palace floor.But the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain,till it reaches the living surface beyond.It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun,the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth,as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it,and of the sands on its shore,-a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus,as it were all one active fish.Such is the contrast between winter and spring.Walden was dead and is alive again.But this spring it broke up more steadily,as I have said.
The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather,from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones,is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim.It is seemingly instantaneous at last.Suddenly an influx of light filled my house,though the evening was at hand,and the clouds of winter still overhung it,and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain.I looked out the window,and lo!where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening,reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom,though none was visible overhead,as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon.I heard a robin in the distance,the first I had heard for many a thousand years,methought,whose note I shall not forget for many a thousand more,-the same sweet and powerful song as of yore.O the evening robin,at the end of a New England summer day!If I could ever find the twig he sits upon!I mean he;I mean the twig.This at least is not the Turdus migratorius.The pitch pines and shrub oaks about my house,which had so long drooped,suddenly resumed their several characters,looked brighter,greener,and more erect and alive,as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain.I knew that it would not rain any more.You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest,ay,at your very wood-pile,whether its winter is past or not.As it grew darker,I was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods,like weary travellers getting in late from Southern lakes,and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation.Standing at my door,I could hear the rush of their wings;when,driving toward my house,they suddenly spied my light,and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond.So I came in,and shut the door,and passed my first spring night in the woods.
In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the mist,sailing in the middle of the pond,fifty rods off,so large and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement.But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander,and when they had got into rank circled about over my head,twenty-nine of them,and then steered straight to Canada,with a regular honk from the leader at intervals,trusting to break their fast in muddier pools.A “plump”of ducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins.
