A Spring day.

April 2.

The sun is up. The water on the meadows is perfectly smooth and placid, reflecting the hills and clouds and trees. The air is full of the notes of birds, - song sparrows, red-wings, robins (singing a strain), bluebirds, - and I hear also a lark, - as if all the earth had burst forth into song. The influence of this April morning has reached them, for they live out-of-doors all the night, and there is no danger that they will oversleep themselves such a morning.

For a long distance, as we paddle up the river, we hear the two-stanza'd lay of the pewee on the shore, - pee-wet, pee-wee, etc. Those are the two obvious facts to eye and ear, the river and the pewee.

We hardly set out to return, when the water looked sober and rainy. There was more appearance of rain in the water than in the sky, - April weather look. And soon we saw the dimples of drops on the surface . The clouds, the showers, and the breaking away now in the west, all belong to the summer side of the year and remind me of long-past days.

We land in a steady rain and walk inland by R. Rice's barn, regardless of the storm, toward White Pond. At last the drops fall wider apart, and we pause in a sandy field near the Great Road of the Corner, where it was agreeably retired and sandy, drinking up the rain. The rain was soothing, so still and sober, gently beating against and amusing our thoughts, swelling the brooks. 

The robin now peeps with scared note in the heavy overcast air, among the apple trees. The hour is favorable to thought.

The rain now turns to snow with large flakes, so soft many cohere in the air as they fall. They make us white as millers and wet us through. I hear a solitary hyla for the first time. At Hubbard's Bridge, count eight ducks going over. Looking up, the flakes are black against the sky. And now the ground begins to whiten.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 2, 1852

The air is full of the notes of birds, - song sparrows, red-wings, robins (singing a strain) See  April 2, 1854("I heard something which reminded me of the song of the robin in rainy days in past springs. ") April 2, 1856 ("Robins are peeping and flitting about. Am surprised to hear one sing regularly their morning strain,”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Robins in Spring

It appears to me that, to one standing on the heights of philosophy, mankind and the works of man will have sunk out of sight altogether; that man is altogether too much insisted on. The poet says the proper study of mankind is man. I say, study to forget all that; take wider views of the universe. That is the egotism of the race.   In order to avoid delusions, I would fain let man go by and behold a universe in which man is but as a grain of sand. It is a test I would apply to my companion, — can he forget man?  What is the village, city, State, nation, aye the civilized world, that it should concern a man so much?  I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite. It is not a chamber of mirrors which reflect me.  When I reflect, I find that there is other than me.  The universe is larger than enough for man's abode. Man is a past phenomenon to philosophy.   ~ April 2, 1852