Page:Autumn. From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/429

red-polls, feeding on the seeds of the birch, as if a flower were created to be now in bloom, a peach to be now first fully ripe on its stem. I am struck by the perfect confidence and success of Nature. There is no question about the existence of these delicate creatures, their adaptedness to their circumstances. There is added superfluous painting and adornment, a crystalline, jewel-like health and soundness, like the colors reflected from ice-crystals. When some rare northern bird, like the pine grossbeak, is seen thus far south, in the winter, he does not suggest poverty, but dazzles us with his beauty. There is in them a warmth that is akin to the warmth that melts the icicle. Here is no imperfection suggested. The winter with its snow and ice is not an evil to be corrected. It is as it was designed and made to be, for the artist has had leisure to add beauty to use. I had a vision thus prospectively, as I stood in the swamp, of these birds, my acquaintances, angels from the north. I saw this familiar, too familiar fact, at a different angle, and I was charmed and haunted by it. I had seen into paradisaic regions with their air and sky, and I was no longer wholly or merely a denizen of this vulgar earth. Yet I had hardly a foothold there. It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's