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Title: Buds and Bird Voices
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Release Date: September 6, 2003 [eBook #9224]
[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
Produced by: David Widger and Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BUDS AND BIRD VOICES ***
Buds and Bird Voices
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Balmy Spring—weeks later than we expected and months later than we longed
for her—comes at last to revive the moss on the roof and walls of our old
mansion. She peeps brightly into my study-window, inviting me to throw it open
and create a summer atmosphere by the intermixture of her genial breath with
the black and cheerless comfort of the stove. As the casement ascends, forth
into infinite space fly the innumerable forms of thought or fancy that have
kept me company in the retirement of this little chamber during the sluggish
lapse of wintry weather; visions, gay, grotesque, and sad; pictures of real
life, tinted with nature’s homely gray and russet; scenes in dreamland,
bedizened with rainbow hues which faded before they were well laid
on,—all these may vanish now, and leave me to mould a fresh existence out
of sunshine, Brooding Meditation may flap her dusky wings and take her owl-like
Right, blinking amid the cheerfulness of noontide. Such companions befit the
season of frosted window-panes and crackling fires, when the blast howls
through the black-ash trees of our avenue and the drifting snow-storm chokes up
the wood-paths and fills the highway from stone wall to stone wall. In the
spring and summer time all sombre thoughts should follow the winter northward
with the sombre and thoughtful crows. The old paradisiacal economy of life is
again in force; we live, not to think or to labor, but for the simple end of
being happy. Nothing for the present hour is worthy of man’s infinite capacity
save to imbibe the warm smile of heaven and sympathize with the reviving earth.
The present Spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps, because Winter lingered
so unconscionably long that with her best diligence she can hardly retrieve
half the allotted period of her reign. It is but a fortnight since I stood on
the brink of our swollen river and beheld the accumulated ice of four frozen
months go down the stream. Except in streaks here and there upon the hillsides,
the whole visible universe was then covered with deep snow, the nethermost
layer of which had been deposited by an early December storm. It was a sight to
make the beholder torpid, in the impossibility of imagining how this vast white
napkin was to be removed from the face of the corpse-like world in less time
than had been required to spread it there. But who can estimate the power of
gentle influences, whether amid material desolation or the moral winter of
man’s heart? There have been no tempestuous rains, even no sultry days, but a
constant breath of southern winds, with now a day of kindly sunshine, and now a
no less kindly mist or a soft descent of showers, in which a smile and a
blessing seemed to have been steeped. The snow has vanished as if by magic;
whatever heaps may be hidden in the woods and deep gorges of the hills, only
two solitary specks remain in the landscape; and those I shall almost regret to
miss when to-morrow I look for them in vain. Never before, methinks, has spring
pressed so closely on the footsteps of retreating winter. Along the roadside
the green blades of grass have sprouted on the very edge of the snow-drifts.
The pastures and mowing-fields have not vet assumed a general aspect of
verdure; but neither have they the cheerless-brown tint which they wear in
latter autumn when vegetation has entirely ceased; there is now a faint shadow
of life, gradually brightening into the warm reality. Some tracts in a happy
exposure,—as, for instance, yonder southwestern slope of an orchard, in
front of that old red farm-house beyond the river,—such patches of land
already wear a beautiful and tender green, to which no future luxuriance can
add a charm. It looks unreal; a prophecy, a hope, a transitory effect of sonic
peculiar light, which will vanish with the slightest motion of the eye. But
beauty is never a delusion; not these verdant tracts, but the dark and barren
landscape all around them, is a shadow and a dream. Each moment wins seine
portion of the earth from death to life; a sudden gleam of verdure brightens
along the sunny slope of a bank which an instant ago was brown and bare. You
look again, and behold an apparition of green grass!
The trees in our orchard and elsewhere are as yet naked, but already appear
full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if by one magic touch they might
instantaneously burst into full foliage, and that the wind which now sighs
through their naked branches might make sudden music amid innumerable leaves.
The mossgrown willow-tree which for forty years past has overshadowed these
western windows will be among the first to put on its green attire. There are
some objections to the willow; it is not a dry and cleanly tree, and impresses
the beholder with an association of sliminess. No trees, I think, are perfectly
agreeable as companions unless they have glossy leaves, dry bark, and a firm
and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow is almost the earliest
to gladden us with the promise and reality of beauty in its graceful and
delicate foliage, and the last to scatter its yellow yet scarcely withered
leaves upon the ground. All through the winter, too, its yellow twigs give it a
sunny aspect, which is not without a cheering influence even in the grayest and
gloomiest day. Beneath a clouded sky it faithfully remembers the sunshine. Our
old house would lose a charm were the willow to be cut down, with its golden
crown over the snow-covered roof and its heap of summer verdure.
The lilac-shrubs under my study-windows are likewise almost in leaf: in two or
three days more I may put forth my hand and pluck the topmost bough in its
freshest green. These lilacs are very aged, and have lost the luxuriant foliage
of their prime. The heart, or the judgment, or the moral sense, or the taste is
dissatisfied with their present aspect. Old age is not venerable when it
embodies itself in lilacs, rose-bushes, or any other ornamental shrub; it seems
as if such plants, as they grow only for beauty, ought to flourish always in
immortal youth, or, at least, to die before their sad decrepitude. Trees of
beauty are trees of paradise, and therefore not subject to decay by their
original nature, though they have lost that precious birthright by being
transplanted to an earthly soil. There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the
idea of a time-stricken and grandfatherly lilac-bush. The analogy holds good in
human life. Persons who can only be graceful and ornamental—who can give
the world nothing but flowers—should die young, and never be seen with
gray hair and wrinkles, any more than the flower-shrubs with mossy bark and
blighted foliage, like the lilacs under my window. Not that beauty is worthy of
less than immortality; no, the beautiful should live forever,—and thence,
perhaps, the sense of impropriety when we see it triumphed over by time.
Apple-trees, on the other hand, grow old without reproach. Let them live as
long as they may, and contort themselves into whatever perversity of shape they
please, and deck their withered limbs with a springtime gaudiness of pink
blossoms; still they are respectable, even if they afford us only an apple or
two in a season. Those few apples—or, at all events, the remembrance of
apples in bygone years—are the atonement which utilitarianism inexorably
demands for the privilege of lengthened life. Human flower-shrubs, if they will
grow old on earth, should, besides their lovely blossoms, bear some kind of
fruit that will satisfy earthly appetites, else neither man nor the decorum of
nature will deem it fit that the moss should gather on them.
One of the first things that strikes the attention when the white sheet of
winter is withdrawn is the neglect and disarray that lay hidden beneath it.
Nature is not cleanly according to our prejudices. The beauty of preceding
years, now transformed to brown and blighted deformity, obstructs the
brightening loveliness of the present hour. Our avenue is strewn with the whole
crop of autumn’s withered leaves. There are quantities of decayed branches
which one tempest after another has flung down, black and rotten, and one or
two with the ruin of a bird’s-nest clinging to them. In the garden are the
dried bean-vines, the brown stalks of the asparagus-bed, and melancholy old
cabbages which were frozen into the soil before their unthrifty cultivator
could find time to gather them. How invariably, throughout all the forms of
life, do we find these intermingled memorials of death! On the soil of thought
and in the garden of the heart, as well as in the sensual world, he withered
leaves,—the ideas and feelings that we have done with. There is no wind
strong enough to sweep them away; infinite space will not garner then from our
sight. What mean they? Why may we not be permitted to live and enjoy, as if
this were the first life and our own the primal enjoyment, instead of treading
always on these dry hones and mouldering relics, from the aged accumulation of
which springs all that now appears so young and new? Sweet must have been the
springtime of Eden, when no earlier year had strewn its decay upon the virgin
turf and no former experience had ripened into summer and faded into autumn in
the hearts of its inhabitants! That was a world worth living in. O then
murmurer, it is out of the very wantonness of such a life that then feignest
these idle lamentations. There is no decay. Each human soul is the
first-created inhabitant of its own Eden. We dwell in an old moss-covered
mansion, and tread in the worn footprints of the past, and have a gray
clergyman’s ghost for our daily and nightly inmate; yet all these outward
circumstances are made less than visionary by the renewing power of the spirit.
Should the spirit ever lose this power,—should the withered leaves, and
the rotten branches, and the moss-covered house, and the ghost of the gray past
ever become its realities, and the verdure and the freshness merely its faint
dream,—then let it pray to be released from earth. It will need the air
of heaven to revive its pristine energies.
What an unlooked-for flight was this from our shadowy avenue of black-ash and
balm of Gilead trees into the infinite! Now we have our feet again upon the
turf. Nowhere does the grass spring up so industriously as in this homely yard,
along the base of the stone wall, and in the sheltered nooks of the buildings,
and especially around the southern doorstep,—a locality which seems
particularly favorable to its growth, for it is already tall enough to bend
over and wave in the wind. I observe that several weeds—and most
frequently a plant that stains the fingers with its yellow juice—have
survived and retained their freshness and sap throughout the winter. One knows
not how they have deserved such an exception from the common lot of their race.
They are now the patriarchs of the departed year, and may preach mortality to
the present generation of flowers and weeds.
Among the delights of spring, how is it possible to forget the birds? Even the
crows were welcome as the sable harbingers of a brighter and livelier race.
They visited us before the snow was off, but seem mostly to have betaken
themselves to remote depths of the woods, which they haunt all summer long.
Many a time shall I disturb them there, and feel as if I had intruded among a
company of silent worshippers, as they sit in Sabbath stillness among the
tree-tops. Their voices, when they speak, are in admirable accordance with the
tranquil solitude of a summer afternoon; and resounding so far above the head,
their loud clamor increases the religious quiet of the scene instead of
breaking it. A crow, however, has no real pretensions to religion, in spite of
his gravity of mien and black attire; he is certainly a thief, and probably an
infidel. The gulls are far more respectable, in a moral point of view. These
denizens of seabeaten rocks and haunters of the lonely beach come up our inland
river at this season, and soar high overhead, flapping their broad wings in the
upper sunshine. They are among the most picturesque of birds, because they so
float and rest upon the air as to become almost stationary parts of the
landscape. The imagination has time to grow acquainted with them; they have not
flitted away in a moment. You go up among the clouds and greet these
lofty-flighted gulls, and repose confidently with them upon the sustaining
atmosphere. Duck’s have their haunts along the solitary places of the river,
and alight in flocks upon the broad bosom of the overflowed meadows. Their
flight is too rapid and determined for the eye to catch enjoyment from it,
although it never fails to stir up the heart with the sportsman’s ineradicable
instinct. They have now gone farther northward, but will visit us again in
autumn.
The smaller birds,—the little songsters of the woods, and those that
haunt man’s dwellings and claim human friendship by building their nests under
the sheltering eaves or among the orchard trees,—these require a touch
more delicate and a gentler heart than mine to do them justice. Their outburst
of melody is like a brook let loose from wintry chains. We need not deem it a
too high and solemn word to call it a hymn of praise to the Creator; since
Nature, who pictures the reviving year in so many sights of beauty, has
expressed the sentiment of renewed life in no other sound save the notes of
these blessed birds. Their music, however, just now, seems to be incidental,
and not the result of a set purpose. They are discussing the economy of life
and love and the site and architecture of their summer residences, and have no
time to sit on a twig and pour forth solemn hymns, or overtures, operas,
symphonies, and waltzes. Anxious questions are asked; grave subjects are
settled in quick and animated debate; and only by occasional accident, as from
pure ecstasy, does a rich warble roll its tiny waves of golden sound through
the atmosphere. Their little bodies are as busy as their voices; they are all a
constant flutter and restlessness. Even when two or three retreat to a tree-top
to hold council, they wag their tails and heads all the time with the
irrepressible activity of their nature, which perhaps renders their brief span
of life in reality as long as the patriarchal age of sluggish man. The
blackbirds, three species of which consort together, are the noisiest of all
our feathered citizens. Great companies of them—more than the famous
“four-and-twenty” whom Mother Goose has immortalized—congregate in
contiguous treetops and vociferate with all the clamor and confusion of a
turbulent political meeting. Politics, certainly, must be the occasion of such
tumultuous debates; but still, unlike all other politicians, they instil melody
into their individual utterances and produce harmony as a general effect. Of
all bird voices, none are more sweet and cheerful to my ear than those of
swallows, in the dim, sunstreaked interior of a lofty barn; they address the
heart with even a closer sympathy than robin-redbreast. But, indeed, all these
winged people, that dwell in the vicinity of homesteads, seem to partake of
human nature, and possess the germ, if not the development, of immortal souls.
We hear them saying their melodious prayers at morning’s blush and eventide. A
little while ago, in the deep of night, there came the lively thrill of a
bird’s note from a neighboring tree,—a real song, such as greets the
purple dawn or mingles with the yellow sunshine. What could the little bird
mean by pouring it forth at midnight? Probably the music gushed out of the
midst of a dream in which he fancied himself in paradise with his mate, but
suddenly awoke on a cold leafless bough, with a New England mist penetrating
through his feathers. That was a sad exchange of imagination for reality.
Insects are among the earliest births of sprung. Multitudes of I know not what
species appeared long ago on the surface of the snow. Clouds of them, almost
too minute for sight, hover in a beam of sunshine, and vanish, as if
annihilated, when they pass into the shade. A mosquito has already been heard
to sound the small horror of his bugle-horn. Wasps infest the sunny windows of
the house. A bee entered one of the chambers with a prophecy of flowers. Rare
butterflies came before the snow was off, flaunting in the chill breeze, and
looking forlorn and all astray, in spite of the magnificence of their dark
velvet cloaks, with golden borders.
The fields and wood-paths have as yet few charms to entice the wanderer. In a
walk, the other day, I found no violets, nor anemones, nor anything in the
likeness of a flower. It was worth while, however, to ascend our opposite hill
for the sake of gaining a general idea of the advance of spring, which I had
hitherto been studying in its minute developments. The river lay around me in a
semicircle, overflowing all the meadows which give it its Indian name, and
offering a noble breadth to sparkle in the sunbeams. Along the hither shore a
row of trees stood up to their knees in water; and afar off, on the surface of
the stream, tufts of bushes thrust up their heads, as it were, to breathe. The
most striking objects were great solitary trees here and there, with a
mile-wide waste of water all around them. The curtailment of the trunk, by its
immersion in the river, quite destroys the fair proportions of the tree, and
thus makes us sensible of a regularity and propriety in the usual forms of
nature. The flood of the present season—though it never amounts to a
freshet on our quiet stream—has encroached farther upon the land than any
previous one for at least a score of years. It has overflowed stone fences, and
even rendered a portion of the highway navigable for boats.
The waters, however, are now gradually subsiding; islands become annexed to the
mainland; and other islands emerge, like new creations, from the watery waste.
The scene supplies an admirable image of the receding of the Nile, except that
there is no deposit of black slime; or of Noah’s flood, only that there is a
freshness and novelty in these recovered portions of the continent which give
the impression of a world just made rather than of one so polluted that a
deluge had been requisite to purify it. These upspringing islands are the
greenest spots in the landscape; the first gleam of sunlight suffices to cover
them with verdure.
Thank Providence for spring! The earth—and man himself, by sympathy with
his birthplace would be far other than we find them if life toiled wearily
onward without this periodical infusion of the primal spirit. Will the world
ever be so decayed that spring may not renew its greenness? Can man be so
dismally age stricken that no faintest sunshine of his youth may revisit him
once a year? It is impossible. The moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into
beauty; the good old pastor who once dwelt here renewed his prime, regained his
boyhood, in the genial breezes of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and
heavy soul if, whether in youth or age, it have outlived its privilege of
springtime sprightliness! From such a soul the world must hope no reformation
of its evil, no sympathy with the lofty faith and gallant struggles of those
who contend in its behalf. Summer works in the present, and thinks not of the
future; autumn is a rich conservative; winter has utterly lost its faith, and
clings tremulously to the remembrance of what has been; but spring, with its
outgushing life, is the true type of the movement.
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