Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/195

March 19, 1859. The wind makes such, a din about your ears that conversation is difficult, your words are blown away and do not strike the ear they were aimed at. If you walk by the water the tumult of the waves confuses you. If ypu go by a tree or enter the woods the din is yet greater. Nevertheless this universal commotion is very interesting and exciting. The white pines in the horizon, either single trees or whole woods, a mile off in the southwest or west, are particularly interesting. You not only see the regular bilateral form of the tree, all the branches distinct like the frond of a fern or a feather (for the pine even at this distance has not merely beauty of outline and color, it is not merely an amorphous and homogeneous or continuous mass of green, but shows a regular succession of flattish leafy boughs or stages in flakes, one above another, like the veins of a leaf, or the leaflets of a frond. It is this richness and symmetry of detail which more than its outline charms us), but that fine silvery light reflected from its needles (perhaps their under sides) incessantly in motion. As a tree bends and waves like a feather in the gale, I see it alternately dark and light, as the sides of the needles which reflect the cool sheen are alternately withdrawn from and restored to the proper angle. The