These April days were inspiring. Occasionally a bleak squall of rain or snow obscured the sky, and silenced the music of Nature; but the heavens looked bluer, and the birds sang more lustily, after it passed away. In the latter part of the month the ground became settled, and the frogs, towards evening, and sometimes during the moist, smoky afternoons, sent up their melancholy wailing from the wide wastes of marsh that stretched themselves through the woods and along the river banks. Some of these marshes were ten miles long, and two or three broad; and such a concert of voices as congregated there was never equalled by anything else. I had, and still have, notions of my own about these vocalists. I am sure that they sang under discipline and system--that they performed on different kinds of instruments. Some of them seemed to be blowing a flageolet; others drew their bows across their violins; some played the fife; while here and there might be heard grum twangs, like the twanging of bass-viol strings. He who listened long and closely might detect delicate vibrations of almost every tone in art or nature. Sometimes their voices sounded like the dying echoes of ten thousand bells, all of a different key, yet the tangled melody was an entanglement of chords and discords, and it rolled away, and expired in waves of pure harmony; again, it was like a choir of human voices performing an anthem. I thought I could hear syllables, too--the articulation of words--something like a psalm. Then the words and sounds appeared to change, and, by the aid of the imagination, one would have supposed that the whole community were shouting--delivering political harangues--or that its members had got on a "bust," and were rattling off all kinds of nonsense in a drunken frolic.
April brought with it, too, flying showers and warm sunshine. The grass began to wake up, and scent the air with its sweetness. Along the watercourses the willows unfolded their leaves; the buds swelled in the forests; and the tree-tops were touched with a light shade of brown, and then a shade of green, which grew deeper and deeper each day. Large flocks of pigeons darkened the air, all moving from south to north,--from whence, or to where, I could not tell. A company would sometimes "hold up" for an hour or two, to "feed and rest," like a caravan at an oasis; but they soon took their wings again, and pursued their journey.