by earth splitting with verdure,

and by the earth ever bursting with verdure,

And the earth which opens up (with verdure),

Yet I rarely failed to find, even in midwinter, some warm and springly swamp where the grass and the skunk cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring.

At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February's snow.