_April 6_.--Palpable spring indeed, or the indications of it. I am sitting in bright sunshine, at the edge of the creek, the surface just rippled by the wind. All is solitude, morning freshness, negligence. For companions my two kingfishers sailing, winding, darting, dipping, sometimes capriciously separate, then flying together. I hear their guttural twittering again and again; for awhile nothing but that peculiar sound. As noon approaches other birds warm up. The reedy notes of the robin, and a musical passage of two parts, one a clear delicious gurgle, with several other birds I cannot place. To which is join'd, (yes, I just hear it,) one low purr at intervals from some impatient hylas at the pond-edge. The sibilant murmur of a pretty stiff breeze now and then through the trees. Then a poor little dead leaf, long frost-bound, whirls from somewhere up aloft in one wild escaped freedom-spree in space and sunlight, and then dashes down to the waters, which hold it closely and soon drown it out of sight. The bushes and trees are yet bare, but the beeches have their wrinkled yellow leaves of last season's foliage largely left, frequent cedars and pines yet green, and the grass not without proofs of coming fullness. And over all a wonderfully fine dome of clear blue, the play of light coming and going, and great fleeces of white clouds swimming so silently. THE COMMON EARTH, THE SOIL The soil, too--let others pen-and-ink the sea, the air, (as I sometimes try)--but now I feel to choose the common soil for theme--naught else. The brown soil here, (just between winter-close and opening spring and vegetation)--the rain-shower at night, and the fresh smell next morning--the red worms wriggling out of the ground--the dead leaves, the incipient grass, and the latent life underneath--the effort to start something--already in shelter'd spots some little flowers--the distant emerald show of winter wheat and the rye-fields--the yet naked trees, with clear insterstices, giving prospects hidden in summer--the tough fallow and the plow-team, and the stout boy whistling to his horses for encouragement--and there the dark fat earth in long slanting stripes upturn'd. BIRDS AND BIRDS AND BIRDS _A little later--bright weather_.--An unusual melodiousness, these days, (last of April and first of May) from the blackbirds; indeed all sorts of birds, darting, whistling, hopping or perch'd on trees. Never before have I seen, heard, or been in the midst of, and got so flooded and saturated with them and their performances, as this current month. Such oceans, such successions of them. Let me make a list of those I find here: