Our baby’s dying and her new birth is an exact type of the death and birth of the day. One description serves for both. As she sank away, fainting and cold, so night expires. This takes place at various times, according to the season; but generally about two o’clock in the morning in these latitudes. If you happen to be watching or working within doors, you may note the time by a coldness and shuddering in your limbs, and by the sudden waning of the fire, in spite of your best efforts to keep it bright and cheerful. Then a wind--generally not a very gentle one--sweeps through the streets--_once_: it does not return, but hurries straight on, leaving all calm behind it: that is the breath that passed over the child. Now a blush suffuses the East, and then open the violet eyes of the day, bright and pure as if there were no death in the world, nor sin. All which the blackbird seems to announce to the natural world below. The wind we spoke of warns him; whereupon he takes his head from under his wing, and keeps a steady look-out toward the East. As soon as the glory of the morning appears, he sings his soldierly song; as soon as he sings, smaller fowl wake and listen, and peep about quietly; when--there comes the day overhead, sailing in the topmost air, in the golden boat with the purple sails. And the little winds that blow in the sails--here come they, swooping over the meadows, scudding along hedgerows, bounding into the big trees, and away to fill those purple sails again, not only with a wind, but with a hundred perfumes, and airs heavy with the echoes of a hundred songs.[25]