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.