MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES



Balmy Spring--weeks later than we expected and months later than we
longed for her--comes at last to revive the moss on the roof and
walls of our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my study-window,
inviting me to throw it open and create a summer atmosphere by the
intermixture of her genial breath with the black and cheerless
comfort of the stove. As the casement ascends, forth into infinite
space fly the innumerable forms of thought or fancy that have kept me
company in the retirement of this little chamber during the sluggish
lapse of wintry weather; visions, gay, grotesque, and sad; pictures
of real life, tinted with nature's homely gray and russet; scenes in
dreamland, bedizened with rainbow hues which faded before they were
well laid on,--all these may vanish now, and leave me to mould a
fresh existence out of sunshine, Brooding Meditation may flap her
dusky wings and take her owl-like Right, blinking amid the
cheerfulness of noontide. Such companions befit the season of
frosted window-panes and crackling fires, when the blast howls
through the black-ash trees of our avenue and the drifting snow-
storm chokes up the wood-paths and fills the highway from stone wall
to stone wall. In the spring and summer time all sombre thoughts
should follow the winter northward with the sombre and thoughtful
crows. The old paradisiacal economy of life is again in force; we
live, not to think or to labor, but for the simple end of being