Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/233

The landscape is very agreeably diversified with hill and dale, meadow and cliff. As we look southwest how attractive the shores of russet capes and peninsulas laved by the flood. Indeed that large tract east of the bridge is now an island. How firm that low, undulating, russet-land! At this season and under these circumstances the sun just come out and the flood high around it, russet, so reflecting the light of the sun, appears to me the most agreeable of colors, and I begin to dream of a russet fairy land and elysium. How dark and terrene must be green, but this smooth russet reflects almost all the light. That broacl and low, but firm, island, with but few trees to conceal the contour of the ground and its outline, with its fine russet sward, firm and soft as velvet, reflecting so much light; all the undulations of the earth, its nerves and muscles revealed by the light and shade, and the sharper ridgy edge of steep banks where the plow has heaped up the earth from year to year, this is a sort of fairy land and elysium to my eye. The tawny, couchant island! Dry land for the Indian's wigwam in the spring, and still strewn with his arrow-points. The sight of such land reminds me of the pleasant spring days in which I have walked over such tracts looking for these relics. How well, too, the smooth, firm, light-reflecting,