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March 18th, 1903. Wildflowers, everywhere, up in profusion. Within a few feet of each other I found anemones, spring-beauties and wood-violets blooming, and the adder's-tongue, or dog's-tooth violet, showing its brown-freckled leaf.
The trees were perfect clerestories for the birds, whence the bluebird, the robin, the wren, sap-sucker, sparrow,
catbird and redbird chorused their songs, to which the meadowlark, like a priest before the altar celebrating the High Mass of Spring, antiphoned responses.
Suddenly, in a shadowy opening of the trees, I glimpsed the bluebell, or Virginia cowslip, its porcelain-like, purple-pink heads of clustered buds bowing heavily over the lush green stem of greener leaves—promises of beauty that the month, a week hence, shall behold perfect and blushing beneath the million leaf-points of the beeches.
A little further on, in a hollow of sodden loam and leaf the bloodroot lifted its virgin chalices of hollow snow, making the moist, musk-haunted aisles of the cathedral-like forest holy with its pale, lamp-like flowers—the spiritual presences, as it were, of many little sangraals. Or here a clumped colony of the twin-leaf,
hardly distinguishable from the bloodroot, immaculate, with sloping, white, half-open blossoms, tapered through the enfolding leaves like frail candles of souls celebrating the advent of spring.
The bloodroot leaves of middle March Lift up their blooms, each one a torch Of creamy crystal in whose white The calyx is a golden light.