Chapter 2

The violets have been especially loved by the poets. Theocritus placed them foremost in his coronals and put them into Thyrsis's song of Daphnis's fatal constancy. Chaucer had them in his garlands, and Spenser's "flock of nymphes" gather them "pallid blew" in a meadow by the river side. In Percy's _Reliques_ they are the "violets that first appear, by purple mantles known." Milton allows Zephyr to find Aurora lying "on beds of violet blue." Shakespeare places them upon Ophelia's grave and says they are "sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes." Wordsworth, Tennyson, and all our own poets have loved them.

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But we have lingered too long among our flowers and thoughts in the April woods. The filmy haze which veiled the sun has thickened into threatening clouds, and as we look across the meadow to where the silver blue haze rested on the delectable mountain in the morning we see instead the rain-fringe, veiling and obscuring the landscape. The wind has died to a dead calm and the river is still. As the shower comes nearer the whole landscape is shrouded in an ever darkening gray and presently big round drops splash upon the surface of the river. In a moment we are surrounded by the rain. How beautiful is the first spring rain! It does not run down the slope as in the winter when the ground was frozen, but the thirsty earth seems eager to drink every drop. The unfolding leaves of the shrubs are bathed in it and the tender firstlings of the flowers are revelling in it. It dims the singing of the birds, but the robins and the meadow larks carol on and the spring music of the frogs in the nearby pond has not yet ceased.

What makes the raindrops round? And why are the drops at the beginning of the shower much larger than those which follow? We do not know. Perhaps it is well. Walt Whitman says that "you must not know too much or be too scientific about these things." He holds that a little indefiniteness adds to the enjoyment, a hazy borderland of thought as it were, like that which rests in April mornings on enchanted highlands away across the river, which we have never yet--as Thoreau says--"tarnished with our feet."

And, anyway, before we can reason it out, the rain has ceased and the last rays of the descending sun come through an opening in the clouds in that beautiful phenomenon known as a "sunburst.'[TN-3] The white beams come diagonally through the moisture-laden air, as if in a good-night smile to the tender flowers and buds.

Warming with the sunshine and watering with the showers--that is Miss April making her flower garden grow.

MAY--PERFECTION OF BEAUTY

V. MAY--PERFECTION OF BEAUTY

_Among the changing months May stands confessed The sweetest and in fairest colors dressed._ --THOMSON.

Surely the poet sang truly. We would not forget Lowell's challenge "What is so rare as a day in June," but as we sit here on the top of a limestone cliff nearly a hundred feet above the bed of the creek, and watch the red sun brightening the gray of the eastern sky, while the robins and the meadow larks are singing joyous matins we steep our senses in the delicate colorings of earth and sky that signalize the awakening of another day and the real revival of another year. April was encouraging, but there were many bare boughs and many of the last year's leaves still clung to the oaks and made a conspicuous feature of the landscape. The leafy month of June will show us more foliage, but it will be of a darker and more uniform shade of green. Now, as the sun rises higher and sends his rays through both the woodlands and the brushlands we thrill with delight at the kaleidoscope of color. There are no withered leaves to mar the beauty now. Seen in mass, and at a distance, the woodlands are a soft cinerous purple. But the tops, where the ruddy rays of the sun are glancing, are a hazy cloud of tender green, pink, yellow and pale purple. Nearer trees show in their opening leaves pale tints of the same gorgeous colors which we see in the fall. The maple keys and the edges of the tender leaves glow blood-red in the morning sun. The half-developed leaves of the birch and the poplar are a yellowish-green, not unlike the yellow which they show in autumn. The neatly plaited folds of the leaves of the oak display a greenish or cinerous purple, a soft and delicate presentment of the stronger colors which come in October, just as the overture gives us faint voicings of the beauty which the opera is to bring; just as Lowell's organist gives us

_"The faint auroral flushes sent Along the wavering vista of his dream."_

The edge of the cliff is lined with shad-trees. Each twig is a plume of feathery dainty white The drooping racemes of white blossoms, with the ruby and early-falling bracts among them look like gala decorations to fringe the way of Flora as she travels up the valley. The shad-trees have blossomed rather late. In them and under them it is fully spring. There is a sound of bees and a sense of sweetness which make us forget all the cold days and think only of the glory of the coming summer. There comes a song sparrow and perches on one of the twigs. He throws back his little head, opens his mouth and pours forth a flood of melody. Next comes a myrtle warbler, eager to show us the yellow on his crown, on his two sides and the lower part of his back. He is one of the most abundant of the warblers and one of the most charming and fearless. He perches on a hop hornbeam tree from which the catkins have just shed their yellow pollen and goes over it somewhat after the manner of a chickadee or a nuthatch, showing us as he does so the white under his chin, the two heavy black marks below that, the two white cross bars on his wings, and his coat of slate color, striped and streaked with black. He goes over every twig of the little tree and then flies off to another, first pausing, however, to give his little call note "tschip, tschip" and then his little song, "Tschip-tweeter-tweeter." A pair of kingfishers, showing their blue wings and splendid crests, fly screaming down the creek. Their nest is in a tunnel four feet in the clay banks on the opposite side.

Purple finches, a bit late in the season, are feeding on the seeds of the big elm. The snows of late April and early May must have delayed their journey northward. When the bird-designer made this bird he set out to make a different kind of sparrow, but then had pity upon the amateur ornithologist who finds the sparrows even now almost as difficult to classify as the amateur botanists do their asters; so he dipped the bird in some raspberry juice--John Burroughs says pokeberry juice--and the finch came out of the dye with a wash of raspberry red on his head, shoulders and upper breast, brightest on the head and the lower part of his back. Otherwise he looks much like an English sparrow.

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Now the belated April flowers are seen at their best, mingled with many of the May arrivals. It is such a day as that when Bryant wrote "The Old Man's Counsel." On the sloping hillsides, around the leafing hazel "gay-circles of anemones dance on their stalks." In the more open places the little wind flower, with its pretty leaves and solitary white blossoms, blooms in cheerful companionship with its fellows, and the more sterile parts of the hillside are snowed with the white plumes of the plantain-leaved everlasting. Downy yellow violets and the common blue violets grow everywhere and down on the sand near the river the birdfoot violet, with its quaintly cut leaves and handsome blossoms grows abundantly for the children who love to gather the "sand violets." On the bottom which was flooded in March the satiny yellow flowers of the marsh buttercup shine and the beautiful green of the uplands is spotted with the pure gold of the buttercup. There is no longer need to be satisfied with a few pretty flowers. May scatters her brightest and best in abundance. On the rocky slopes the wild ginger shows its red-brown, long-eared urns, the white baneberry its short white plumes, the branchlets of the bladdernut are breaking into white clusters and columbine soon will "sprinkle on the rocks a scarlet rain" as it did in Bayard Taylor's time, although the "scarlet rain," like that of the painted cup in the lowlands, grows less and less each year. The white glory of the plum thickets at its height and the hawthornes, whose young leaves have been a picture of pink and red, will soon break into blossom and vie with the crabapple thickets in calling attention to the beauty of masses of color when arranged by the Master Painter.

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The carpet of the woodlands grows softer and thicker, and more varied each day. Ferns and brakes are coming thickly. The flowers grow more splendid. The large, wholesome looking leaves of the blue bell are a fitting setting for the masses of bloom which show pink in the bud, then purple, and lastly a brilliant blue. Jack-in-the-pulpits make us smile with keen pleasure as memories of happy childhood days come crowding thickly upon us. The pretty pinnate leaves of the blue-flowered polemonium are sufficient explanation for the common name Jacobs-ladder, even though that name does not properly belong to our species. The purple trilliums, like the Dutchman's breeches, felt the effects of the many April and early May frosts but now they are coming into their beauty. Great colonies of umbrella-leaved May-apple are breaking into white flowers. The broad, lily-like leaves of the true and false Solomon's seal are even more attractive than their blossoms. Ferns, bellwort, wild sarsaparilla, all help to soften our footfalls, while overhead the light daily grows more subdued as the leaf-buds break and the leaves unfold. The throb of the year's life grows stronger. All the blossoms and buds which were formed last summer now break quickly into beauty. And, already, before the year has fairly started, there are signs of preparation for the following year. The dandelion is pushing up its fairy balloons, waiting for the first breeze. The shepherd's purse already shows many mature seeds below its little white blossoms. The keys of the soft maple will soon be ready to fall and send out rootlets, and the winged seeds of the white elm already lie thickly beneath the leafing branches.

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Each flower invites admiration and study. Dig up the root of the Solomon's seal, a rootstock, the botanists call it. It is long, more or less thickened and here and there is a circular scar which marks the place from which former stems have arisen. When these leaf-bearing stems die down they leave on this rootstock down in the ground, a record of their having lived. The scar looks something like a wax seal and the man who gave the plant the name of Solomon's seal had probably read that tale in the Arabian Nights, where King Solomon's seal penned up the giant genie who had troubled the fishermen.

Then there's the May-apple. Who does not remember his childhood days when he pulled the little umbrellas? Even now as they come up in little colonies, they call up memories of the fairy tales of childhood and we almost expect to see a fairy, or a brownie, or Queen Mab herself, coming from under them, when the summer shower, which makes their tops so beautifully moist gray, has passed. And they also bring to mind that charming first edition of Dr. Gray's botany, which had in it much of the man's humor as well as his learning. Too bad that the learned scientists who succeeded him have cut it out. "Common Honesty, very rare in some places," he wrote, speaking of that plant. "Ailanthus, Tree of Heaven, flowers smell of anything but heaven," was his comment on the blossoms of our picturesque importation from China. And when he came to the May-apple he wrote that the sweetish fruit was "eaten by pigs and boys." This made William Hamilton Gibson remember his own boyish gorgings and he wrote: "Think of it boys. And think of what else he says of it: 'Ovary ovoid, stigma sessile, undulate, seeds covering the lateral placenta, each enclosed in an aril.' Now it may be safe for pigs and billy-goats to tackle such a compound as that, but we boys all like to know what we are eating, and I cannot but feel that the public health officials of every township should require this formula of Dr. Gray's to be printed on every one of these big loaded pills, if that is what they are really made of."

Another interesting plant is the _trillium erectum_, which with the _trillium recurvatum_, is now to be found in the woods hereabouts. The flowers of the _trillium erectum_ are ill scented, carrion scented, if you please. Now the botanists have found that this odor, which is so unpleasant to the human nostrils, does the plant a real service by attracting the common green flesh-flies, such as are seen in the butchershops in the summer-time. They eat the pollen, which is supposed to taste as it smells and thus as they go from flower to flower they carry pollen from one blossom to another and so secure for the plant cross-pollination.

So we may walk from one flower to another until the morning wears to a bright noon and the afternoon wanes into a songful sunset.

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In the swamp, where the red-winged blackbird is building her bulky nest between the stems of the cat tail, and the prairie marsh wren is making her second or third little globular nest in a similar place, there is a blaze of yellow from the marsh marigolds which make masses of succulent stems and leaves, crowned with pale gold, as far up the marsh as the eye can reach. In Iowa, it is in May, rather than in June, that "the cowslip startles the meadows green" and "the buttercup catches the sun in its chalice." And it is in late April or early May that "the robin is plastering his house hard by." By the way, ought not the poet to have made it "her" house? It is the mother bird who seems to do the plastering. Both birds work on the structure, but it appears to be the female who carries most of the mud and who uses her faded red apron for a trowel as she moves round in her nest pushing her breast against the round wall of the adobe dwelling to spread the mud evenly. The work on one particular nest was done in late April when there was nothing on the elm but the seed fringes to screen the builder as she worked. Then the four light greenish-blue eggs were laid. A red squirrel got one of them one day. Disregarding the squeakings and scoldings of the anxious robins, he sat on a limb holding the egg in his forepaws and bit a hole in one side of it. Then he drained the contents, dropped the shell to the ground and was about to get another egg when he was driven off. Apparently he forgot the location of the nest after that, for the other three eggs hatched out safely.

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The air is filled with bird music. It began with the larks, closely followed by the robins, and then the noise of the crows. No change in the program since the days of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida when:

_"The busy day Wak'd by the lark, hath roused the ribald crows."_

Then came the liquid notes of the cowbirds, like the pouring of mingled molasses and olive oil. Three handsome fellows in ebony and dark brown sit on the branch of a tall elm and just beneath them sit three brownish gray females, all in a row. Cowbird No. 1 comes nearer the end of the branch, ruffles out his head as if he were about to have a sick spell and then emits that famous molasses and oil kind of whistle, sufficient to identify the cowbird anywhere. The other males repeat his example and meanwhile the females look on with approving eyes, as if it was a vaudeville performance by amateurs in polite society. The cowbirds, male and female, are all free lovers. There is no mating among them. The female lays her eggs in some other bird's nest, like the English cuckoo, as if she were too busy with the duties and pleasures of society to care for her own children.

A diskcissel[TN-4] sits on a tree instead of a reed or a bush as usual and sings "See, see, Dick Cissel, Cissel." Chewinks are down scratching among the dry leaves with the white-throated sparrows, their strong-muscled legs sending the leaves flying as if a barnyard hen were doing the scratching. A beautiful hermit thrush is near but he is silent. The chewink in his harlequin suit of black, white, and chestnut varies his sharp and cheerful "Chewink" with a musical little strain, "Do-fah, fah-fah-fah-fah," and one of the white-throated sparrows now and then stops feeding and flies up to a hazel twig to give his sweet and plaintive little "pea-a-body, peabody, peabody." Very pretty, but not so beautiful as the three broad white stripes on his crown and the white choker under his chin.

Suddenly a brown thrasher breaks into a melody from the top of a wild cherry, and then it is as if a famous operatic coloratura soprano had joined the village choir. For power and continuity of song he is without a peer. With head erect and long tail pendant he pours forth such a flood of melody, so varied and so sweet that we forget the exquisite hymn-like notes of the wood-thrush and yield ourselves wholly to the spell of his rich recital. Make the most of it while it lasts. Like all the glories of the May woods it is evanescent. When the nest down in the brush is finished, and his mate "feels the eggs beneath her wings," his song will grow less full and rich and by the time the young birds come he will have grown silent, as if weighed down with the responsibilities of a family.

We get too near the thrasher for his liking and he slips down into the brush. And then, by rare good fortune, a blue-bird begins his song. He has been chided by some because he has a magnificent contralto voice and scarcely ever uses it. Have we not been taught to chide the man who hides his talent in a napkin, or his light under a bushel? But how he can sing when he does sing! This is one of the mornings. The rich contralto thrush-like melody, with its ever recurring "sol-la," "sol-la," fills the woodlands with beauty. It is as if the pearly gates had been opened for a brief interval to let the earth hear the "quiring of the young-eyed cherubims."

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In later May, the season "betwixt May and June," beauty and fragrance and melody comes in a rich flood. The flaming breast of the oriole and the wondrous mingling of colors in the multiplied warblers glint like jewels among the ever enlarging leaves. The light in the woodlands becomes more subdued and the carpet of ferns and flowers grows richer and more beautiful. The vireos, the cardinal and the tanager add to the brilliancy and the ovenbird and veery to the melody. As good old John Milton once wrote: "In these vernal seasons of the year, when the air is clear and pleasant, it were an injury and a sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake of her rejoicing with heaven and earth."

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The beauty of the world is at every man's door, if he will only pause to see. It offers every man real riches if only he will now and then quit his muckraking or pause from paying his life for a cap and bells. It sweetens honest labor, helps earthly endeavor, strengthens human affection and leads the soul naturally from the beauty of this world to the greater beauty of that which is to come.

WALKS IN JUNE WOODS AND FIELDS

VI. WALKS IN JUNE WOODS AND FIELDS.

_Whether we look or whether we listen We can hear life murmur or see it glisten._ --LOWELL.

As we walk along the bank of the creek on a warm afternoon in June we realize how true are these lines of Lowell. The frog chorus is dying down, though now and then we catch sight of a big fellow blowing out his big balloon throat and filling the air with a hoarse bass, while another across the creek has a bagpipe apparently as big but pitched in a higher key. Two months ago one could not get near enough to see this queer inflation, but now the frogs do not seem so shy. Garter snakes wiggle through the grass down the bank of the creek and the crickets are just beginning to chirp the love chorus which is soon to swell incessantly till the fall frosts come. Butterflies, dragon flies, saw flies and gall flies are busy and we see evidences of their work in the crimson galls on the willow leaves and the purple-spotted oak apples, some of which have fallen to the ground from the scarlet oak above. Nature's first great law is the perpetuation of species, and everything we see in the June woods and fields, from the giant white oak to the busy ant, is diligently obeying that law. The red-winged blackbird circles over our heads with sharp, anxious chirps, for we have disturbed the young red-wings down in the sedge who are taking their first lessons in flying. The catbird's nest, with four greenish-blue eggs, is in a wild gooseberry bush and the catbird is up among the shad-trees feasting on the ripening June berries. The gentle notes of soft pedal music come floating sweetly down. Did you ever stop long enough to listen to the full song of the catbird? First, the brilliant, ringing strains, often softening into a subdued sympathetic melody, and then, just as the music seems almost divine, the long cat-like squeal which ends it all--much like an old organist and choirmaster of boyhood days who used to break in with a horrible discord at the lower end of the keyboard when the anthem rehearsal wasn't going to his liking.

A fruit-lover is the catbird, beginning with the June berries on the banks of streams near which she often builds her nest and continuing with wild strawberries, blackberries, wild grapes and the berries of the Virginia creeper--sometimes also seen busily scooping out a big hole on the rosy side of a tempting apple in the orchard. Some observers say the catbird eats the eggs of the fly-catcher and other birds, but this must be seen to be believed.

There comes an outbreak of melody from the top of a tall black willow, much like the tones of the robin and yet suggestive of the warbling vireo, but finer than the former, clearer, louder and richer than the latter. We lift our eyes and see the pointed carmine shield of the rose-breasted grosbeak, one of the most beautiful, useful and music-full birds in the forest or the garden. Many mornings and evenings during the month of May one of these handsome fellows was busy in my garden, diligently picking the potato bugs from the young vines, stopping now and then, especially in his morning visits, to pour out a happy, ringing lyric and to show his handsome plumage. On one occasion he took a couple of potato bugs in his "gros" beak as he flew to the nearby woodland, probably a tempting morsel for his spouse's breakfast. A bird that can sing better than a warbling vireo, whose carmine breast is comparable only to the rich, red rose of June, who picks bugs from potato vines, singing chansons meanwhile and who is so good to his wife that he does a large share of the incubation, and takes largely upon himself the care of their children is surely a "rara avis" and worth having for a friend. He is a typical bird of June. His color matches the June roses, his songs are full and sweet and rich as the June days, and the eggs of his soberly dressed spouse are usually laid and hatched in June. There is a nest in a hawthorn bush where the wild grape twines her crimson-green clusters and by the time the blossoms break and fill the air with fragrance, no accidents coming meanwhile, four young grosbeaks will be the pride of as warm a paternal heart as ever beat in bird or human breast.