Its type is the first spear of grass. The senses--sight,
hearing, smell--are as hungry for its delicate and almost spiritual
tokens as the cattle are for the first bite of its fields. How it
touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the
arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping
across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first
honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear
piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the campfire
in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the
tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny knolls and
slopes, the full translucent streams, the waxing and warming sun,--
how these things and others like them are noted by the eager eye
and ear! April is my natal month, and I am born again into new
delight and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an
indescribable charm to me. Its two syllables are like the calls of
the first birds,--like that of the phoebe-bird, or of the
meadowlark. Its very snows are fertilizing, and are called the poor
man's manure.
Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and indescribable
odors,--the perfume of the bursting sod, of the quickened roots and
rootlets, of the mould under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No
other month has odors like it. The west wind the other day came
fraught with a perfume that was to the sense of smell what a wild
and delicate strain of music is to the ear.
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