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There was a living, tender beauty, like a tender light of dawn shining from her face. He looked at her with a new pleasure, feeling gay in his heart, irresponsible. 'You are doing catkins? he asked, picking up a piece of hazel from a scholar's desk in front of him. 'Are they as far out as this? I hadn't noticed them this year. He looked absorbedly at the tassel of hazel in his hand.
On this the willow branches adhere like ivy, rooting at every joint and interlaced so as to form a dense mat. From these, erect leafy shoots, one or two inches high, appear, with the many flowered catkins extending above the foliage. The pistillate plants occupy separate but adjacent areas to the staminate ones.
The swelling of the bark occasioned by the flow of sap gives the whole mass a livelier hue; hence the ashen green of the poplar, the golden green of the willow and the dark crimson of the peach tree, the wild rose and the red osier are perceptibly heightened by the first warm days of spring." "Miss Harson," asked Clara, with a perplexed face, "what are catkins?"
Rain beat in drenching floods against the sallow, hailstorms lashed her branches, snow enshrouded her, hoar-frost bespangled her, the little Emperor was quite unmoved. As the bark weathered from ebony to rusty olive, chameleon-like, he changed with it. This was the only outward sign he gave of life. The catkins bloomed once more, and once more were rudely gathered.
In sheltered corners of that truculent instrument for the diffusion of the prejudices of the few among the many begin to grow the violets of tender sentiment, the early greens of yearning. The poet feels the sap of the new year before the marsh-willow. He blossoms in advance of the catkins. Man is greater than Nature. The poet is greater than man: he is nature on two legs, ambulatory.
It is hardly necessary to state that these willow branches, with their soft silvery catkins, the crown of the earliest spring nosegays which the hedges afford, are not even distantly related to the Princes of Vegetation, though we call them palms.
Oftentimes in the northern country this month is ushered in by drizzling rain, or even by the falling snow; but this year brought a May-day worthy of the name clear, mild, and balmy. There was not a cloud in all the sky, nor wind enough to stir the catkins hanging close over the waters of the creek.
Meadows, little strips of alpine freshness, begin before the timberline is reached. Here one treads on a carpet of dwarf willows, downy catkins of creditable size and the greatest economy of foliage and stems. No other plant of high altitudes knows its business so well.
The long green gray buds of the butternut, pistillate flowers in some, staminate flowers in others; the saffron buds of the butternut hickory; the ruby buds of the bass wood; the varnished bud scales of the sycamore and the poplar; the big gummy scales which protect the pussy catkins of the aspen; the queer little buds of the sumac and the rusty buds of the ash; every one of these refutes the aspersions cast upon the winter woods by those who never go out to see.
The catkins of the male flowers are yellowish; and being placed on slender shoots of the current year, near the extremity, twenty or thirty together, they form bundles, surmounted by some scarcely developed leaves. Each catkin is not more than half an inch long, on a very short peduncle, and with a rounded denticulated crest.
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