Fannie Hardy Eckstorm

“One never knows the idyllic charm of our northern woods who has not seen them in April, when it is all a feast of birds and buds and waking life. Midsummer does not compare with this. This month belongs to the birds and flowers; but most of all to the robin. I cannot tell this story without giving the robins the place which I know they must have had in it, — great husky fellows, as red as blood in the lifting between showers that made a golden sunset, sitting high in the treetops and splitting their throats with their rain-carol, singing in jubilance at being back again, glad to find once more the corner of the earth that they were born in, and trolling forth such lusty music that all their pertness and swagger and pilfering of a later date is forgiven in advance. Of all the birds of springtime, I would like best to be the robin just getting back to his old home; for it is brave and blithe and bonny that he is, and he is April to all of us in the far north.”

“Very unchivalrous the world counts these woodsmen; — very little the world knows about their ways and romances, for nowhere does romance bear a more fragrant blossom or bloom so long. The sprig of cedar, many years preserved, because with it a woman crowned an act of daring; the wild flower, pressed in the crumpled corner of a greasy pocketbook, because a woman called it beautiful; the chance track in the roadway where a week before an unknown woman stepped, kept from obliteration just because she was a woman, — no line of life that men follow to-day comes so close to the high mark of mediaeval chivalry with its superb faith in womankind, regardless of the faults of individual women. But the life is rough? So surely was chivalry! Rougher than we know for. Its faith saved it; and what grew into mariolatry in the past is still, in the unromantic present, the better part of many other rough men's religion.”