The young grass along the foot of this slope was thick and green;
imagination missed from the picture rural sheep, their fleeces wet with
April rain. Along the summit of the slope trees of oak and ash and maple
and chestnut and poplar lifted against the sky their united forest
strength. Between the trees above and the grass below, the embankment
spread before the eye the enchantment of a spring landscape, with late
bare boughs and early green boughs and other boughs in blossom.
The earliest blossoms on our part of the earth's surface are nearly
always white. They have forced their way to the sun along a frozen path
and look akin to the perils of their road: the snow-threatened lily of
the valley, the chill snowdrop, the frosty snowball, the bleak hawtree,
the wintry wild cherry, the wintry dogwood. As the eye swept the park
expanse this morning, here and there some of these were as the last
tokens of winter's mantle instead of the first tokens of summer's.
There were flushes of color also, as where in deep soil, on a projection
of rock, a pink hawthorn stood studded to the tips of its branches with
leaf and flower. But such flushes of color were as false notes of the
earth, as harmonies of summer thrust into the wrong places and become
discords.
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