Sitting on Lightning Hillside

April 24.

Sitting on Lightning Hillside and looking over Heywood's meadow, I am struck by the vivid greenness of the tips of the sedge just pushing up out of its dry tussocks in the water. All the lower part of the tussock is brown, sere, prostrate blades of last year, while from the amid the withered blades spring up ranks of green life like a fire.

The fallen dead and decaying last year's grass is dead past all resurrection, perfectly brown and lifeless, while this vivid green that has shot up from its midst -- close upon the heels of winter, even through snow -- is the renewal of life. The contrast of life with death, spring with winter, is nowhere more striking. I observed it here on the 22d.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 24, 1859

The contrast . . . is nowhere more striking. See March 20, 1853 ("It is the contrast between life and death. There is the difference between winter and spring. The bared face of the pond sparkles with joy.”)