“Our misty primrose dell is fast lighting its pale lamps in the twilight. One by one they flash out in the gloom as if obedient to the hovering touch of some Ariel unseen--or is it the bright response to the firefly’s flitting torch? The sun has long sunk beneath the hill. And now, when the impenetrable dusk has deepened round about, involving all, where but a moment since all was visible, this shadowy dell has forgotten the sunset, and knows a twilight all its own, independent of the fading glow of the sky. It was a sleepy nook by day, where it is now all life and vigilance; it was dark and still at noon, where it is now bright and murmurous. The ‘delicious secret’ is now whispered abroad, and where in all the mystic alchemy of odors or attars shall you find such a witching fragrance as this which is here borne on the diaphanous tide of the jealous gliding mist, and fills the air with its sweet enchantment--the stilly night’s own spirit guised in perfume? Yonder bright cluster, deep within the recess of the alders, how it glows! fanned by numerous feathery wings, it glimmers in the dark like a phosphorescent aureole--verily as though some merry will-o’-the-wisp, tired of his dancing, had perched him there, while other luminous spires rise above the mist, or here and there hover in lambent banks beyond, or, like those throbbing fires beneath the ocean surge, illume the fog with half-smothered halo. This lustrous tuft at our elbow! Let us turn our lantern upon it. Its nightly whorl of lamps is already lit, save one or two that have escaped our fairy in his rounds, but not for long, for the green veil of this sunset bud is now rent from base to tip. The confined folded petals are pressing hard for their release. In a moment more, with an audible impulse, the green apex bursts asunder, and the four freed sepals slowly reflex against the hollow tube of the flower, while the lustrous corolla shakes out its folds, saluting the air with its virgin breath. “The slender stamens now explore the gloom, and hang their festoons of webby pollen across their tips. None too soon, for even now a silvery moth circles about the blossom, and settles among the outstretched filaments, sipping the nectar in tremulous content. But he carries a precious token as he hies away, a golden necklace, perhaps, and with it a message to yonder blossom among the alders, and thus until the dawn, his rounds directed with a deep design of which he is an innocent instrument, but which insures a perpetual paradise of primroses for future sippers like himself.” The reader feels the pure delight he takes in the beauty of bird-and flower-forms; and there is no stinting of phrases in his determination to convey some sense of them to those who, “having eyes, see not.” He is as accurate as Audubon and as poetic as Lowell in his description of the rose-breasted grosbeak and his rich song.