It is my best season of devotion." Some of his most
characteristic poems were composed in such scenes and seasons.)
A MEADOW LARK
_March 16_.--Fine, clear, dazzling morning, the sun an hour high, the
air just tart enough. What a stamp in advance my whole day receives
from the song of that meadow lark perch'd on a fence-stake twenty rods
distant! Two or three liquid-simple notes, repeated at intervals, full
of careless happiness and hope. With its peculiar shimmering slow
progress and rapid-noiseless action of the wings, it flies on a way,
lights on another stake, and so on to another, shimmering and singing
many minutes.
SUNDOWN LIGHTS
_May 6, 5 P. M._--This is the hour for strange effects in light and
shade-enough to make a colorist go delirious--long spokes of molten
silver sent horizontally through the trees (now in their brightest
tenderest green,) each leaf and branch of endless foliage a lit-up
miracle, then lying all prone on the youthful-ripe, interminable
grass, and giving the blades not only aggregate but individual
splendor, in ways unknown to any other hour. I have particular spots
where I get these effects in their perfection. One broad splash lies
on the water, with many a rippling twinkle, offset by the rapidly
deepening black-green murky-transparent shadows behind, and at
intervals all along the banks. These, with great shafts of horizontal
fire thrown among the trees and along the grass as the sun lowers,
give effects more and more peculiar, more and more superb, unearthly,
rich and dazzling.
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