As matters are, we must come back (we cannot do so too often, in winter especially) to the good and wholesome doctrine that pleasure is not in proportion to numbers or rarity. It depends upon the kind and degree of sympathy excited. One day, in one mood, you will derive more inspiration from a five-minute chat with a chickadee than on another day, in some mood of dryness, you would get from the sight of nightingales and birds of paradise. Worldlings and matter-of-fact men do not know it, but what quiet nature lovers (not scenery hunting tourists) go to nature in search of is not the excitement of novelty, but a refreshment of the sensibilities. You may call it comfort, consolation, tranquillity, peace of mind, a vision of truth, an uplifting of the heart, a stillness of the soul, a quickening of the imagination, what you will. It is of different shades, and so may be named in different words. It is theirs who have the secret, and the rest would not divine your meaning though your speech were transparency itself. To my thinking, no one, not even Thoreau, or Jefferies, or Wordsworth, ever said a truer word about it than Keats dropped in one of his letters. Nothing in his poems is more deeply poetical. “The setting sun will always set me to rights,” he says, “or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in his existence and pick about the gravel.” There you have the soul of the matter. “I take part in his existence.” When you do that, the bird or the flower may be never so common or so humble. Your walk has prospered. SIGNS OF SPRING They are not imaginary, but visible and tangible. I have brought them home from the woods in my hands, and here they lie before me. I call them my books of the Minor Prophets. This one is an alder branch. Along its whole length, spirally disposed at intervals of an inch or two, are fat, purplish leaf-buds, each on its stalk. As I look at them I can see, only four months away, the tender, richly green, newly unfolded, partly grown leaves. How daintily they are crinkled! And how prettily the edges are cut! It is like the work of fairy fingers. And what perfection of veining and texture! I have never heard any one praise them; but half the things that bring a price in florists’ shops are many degrees less beautiful.