You should hear the grass grow. What! I repeat, you should hear the grass grow. I have a friend, a sound and sensible man, but a lover of the out-of-doors, who says he can hear it grow. But perhaps it is the soft stir of the working earthworms that he hears. Try it. Go out alone one of these April nights; select a green pasture with a slope to the south, at least a mile from any house, or railroad; lay your ear flat upon the grass, listen without a move for ten minutes. You hear something--or do you feel it? Is it the reaching up of the grass? is it the stir of the earthworms? is it the pulse of the throbbing universe? or is it your own throbbing pulse? It is all of these, I think; call it the heart of the grass beating in every tiny living blade, if you wish to. You should listen to hear the grass grow.
The fires have gone out on the open hearth. Listen early in the morning and toward evening for the rumbling, the small, muffled thunder, of the chimney swallows, as they come down from the open sky on their wonderful wings. Don't be frightened. It isn't Santa Claus this time of year; nor is it the Old Nick! The smothered thunder is caused by the rapid beating of the swallows' wings on the air in the narrow chimney-flue, as the birds settle down from the top of the chimney and hover over their nests. Stick your head into the fireplace and look up! Don't smoke the precious lodgers out, no matter how much racket they make.
Hurry out while the last drops of your first May thunder-shower are still falling and listen to the robins singing from the tops of the trees. Their liquid songs are as fresh as the shower, as if the raindrops in falling were running down from the trees in song--as indeed they are in the overflowing trout-brook. Go out and listen, and write a better poem than this one that I wrote the other afternoon when listening to the birds in our first spring shower:--
The warm rain drops aslant the sun And in the rain the robins sing; Across the creek in twos and troops, The hawking swifts and swallows wing.
The air is sweet with apple bloom, And sweet the laid dust down the lane, The meadow's marge of calamus, And sweet the robins in the rain.
O greening time of bloom and song! O fragrant days of tender pain! The wet, the warm, the sweet young days With robins singing in the rain.