This year, Rokeby Museum is putting a spotlight on the work of Rowland E. Robinson (1833–1900), beloved Vermont author and environmentalist. In honor of his deep love for the outdoors, we have selected passages from In New England Field and Woods (1896), a collection of his nature writings inspired by his rambles around Rokeby.

Back and forth across the land, in swift and sudden alternation, the March winds toss days of bitter cold and days of genial warmth, now out of the eternal winter of the north, now from the endless summer of the tropics.

This year, Rokeby Museum is putting a spotlight on the work of Rowland E. Robinson (1833–1900), beloved Vermont author and environmentalist. In honor of his deep love for the outdoors, we have selected passages from In New England Field and Woods (1896), a collection of his nature writings inspired by his rambles around Rokeby.

In the blur of storm or under clear skies, the span of daylight stretches farther from the fading dusk of dawn to the thickening dusk of evening. Now in the silent downfall of snow, now in the drift and whirl of flakes driven from the sky and tossed from the earth by the shrieking wind, the day’s passage is unmarked by shadows. It is but a long twilight, coming upon the world out of one misty gloom, and going from it into another. Now the stars fade and vanish in the yellow morning sky, the long shadows of the hills, clear cut on the shining fields, swing slowly northward and draw eastward to the netted umbrage of the wood. So the dazzling day grows and wanes and the attenuated shadows are again stretched to their utmost, then dissolved in the flood of shade, and the pursued sunlight takes flight from the mountain peaks to the clouds, from cloud to cloud along the darkening sky, and vanishes beyond the blue barrier of the horizon.