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<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Excursions, by Henry David Thoreau</div>
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<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Excursions</div>
<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Henry David Thoreau</div>
<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: 23, 2003 [eBook #9846]<br />
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<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXCURSIONS ***</div>
<div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
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</div>
<h1>Excursions</h1>
<h2>by Henry David Thoreau</h2>
<h4>1863</h4>
<hr />
<h2>Contents</h2>
<table summary="" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap01">BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap02">NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap03">A WALK TO WACHUSETT</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap04">THE LANDLORD</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap05">A WINTER WALK</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap06">THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap07">WALKING</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap08">AUTUMNAL TINTS</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap09">WILD APPLES</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap10">NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap01"></a>BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.<br/>
<small>BY R.W. EMERSON.</small></h2>
<p>
H<small>ENRY</small> D<small>AVID</small> T<small>HOREAU</small> was the last
male descendant of a French ancestor who came to this country from the Isle of
Guernsey. His character exhibited occasional traits drawn from this blood in
singular combination with a very strong Saxon genius.
</p>
<p>
He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1817. He was
graduated at Harvard College in 1837, but without any literary distinction. An
iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges for their service to him,
holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his debt to them was important. After
leaving the University, he joined his brother in teaching a private school,
which he soon renounced. His father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and
Henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a
better pencil than was then in use. After completing his experiments, he
exhibited his work to chemists and artists in Boston, and having obtained their
certificates to its excellence and to its equality with the best London
manufacture, he returned home contented. His friends congratulated him that he
had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied, that he should never make
another pencil. “Why should I? I would not do again what I have done
once.” He resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous studies, making
every day some new acquaintance with Nature, though as yet never speaking of
zoölogy or botany, since, though very studious of natural facts, he was
incurious of technical and textual science.
</p>
<p>
At this time, a strong, healthy youth, fresh from college, whilst all his
companions were choosing their profession, or eager to begin some lucrative
employment, it was inevitable that his thoughts should be exercised on the same
question, and it required rare decision to refuse all the accustomed paths, and
keep his solitary freedom at the cost of disappointing the natural expectations
of his family and friends: all the more difficult that he had a perfect
probity, was exact in securing his own independence, and in holding every man
to the like duty. But Thoreau never faltered. He was a born protestant. He
declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow
craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of
living well. If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was only that
he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief. Never idle or
self-indulgent, he preferred, when he wanted money, earning it by some piece of
manual labor agreeable to him, as building a boat or a fence, planting,
grafting, surveying, or other short work, to any long engagements. With his
hardy habits and few wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful
arithmetic, he was very competent to live in any part of the world. It would
cost him less time to supply his wants than another. He was therefore secure of
his leisure.
</p>
<p>
A natural skill for mensuration, growing out of his mathematical knowledge, and
his habit of ascertaining the measures and distances of objects which
interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent of ponds and rivers,
the height of mountains, and the air-line distance of his favorite
summits,—this, and his intimate knowledge of the territory about Concord,
made him drift into the profession of land-surveyor. It had the advantage for
him that it led him continually into new and secluded grounds, and helped his
studies of Nature. His accuracy and skill in this work were readily
appreciated, and he found all the employment he wanted.
</p>
<p>
He could easily solve the problems of the surveyor, but he was daily beset with
graver questions, which he manfully confronted. He interrogated every custom,
and wished to settle all his practice on an ideal foundation. He was a
protestant <i>à l’outrance</i>, and few lives contain so many
renunciations. He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone;
he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State:
he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and,
though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely, no doubt,
for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and Nature. He had no talent for
wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or
inelegance. Perhaps he fell into his way of living without forecasting it much,
but approved it with later wisdom.
</p>
<p>
“I am often reminded,” he wrote in his journal, “that, if I
had bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must be still the same, and
my means essentially the same.” He had no temptations to fight
against,—no appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles. A fine
house, dress, the manners and talk of highly cultivated people were all thrown
away on him. He much preferred a good Indian, and considered these refinements
as impediments to conversation, wishing to meet his companion on the simplest
terms. He declined invitations to dinner-parties, because there each was in
every one’s way, and he could not meet the individuals to any purpose.
“They make their pride,” he said, “in making their dinner
cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little.” When asked
at table what dish he preferred, he answered, “The nearest.” He did
not like the taste of wine, and never had a vice in his life. He
said,—“I have a faint recollection of pleasure derived from smoking
dried lily-stems, before I was a man. I had commonly a supply of these. I have
never smoked anything more noxious.”
</p>
<p>
He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself. In his
travels, he used the railroad only to get over so much country as was
unimportant to the present purpose, walking hundreds of miles, avoiding
taverns, buying a lodging in farmers’ and fishermen’s houses, as
cheaper, and more agreeable to him, and because there he could better find the
men and the information he wanted.
</p>
<p>
There was somewhat military in his nature not to be subdued, always manly and
able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He
wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little
sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. It
cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes. It
seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it,
so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of
course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion
would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation.
Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and
guileless. “I love Henry,” said one of his friends, “but I
cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking
the arm of an elm-tree.”
</p>
<p>
Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw
himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved,
and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and
endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river. And he was always
ready to lead a huckleberry party or a search for chestnuts or grapes. Talking,
one day, of a public discourse, Henry remarked, that whatever succeeded with
the audience was bad. I said, “Who would not like to write something
which all can read, like ‘Robinson Crusoe’? and who does not see
with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment,
which delights everybody?” Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the
better lectures which reached only a few persons. But, at supper, a young girl,
understanding that he was to lecture at the Lyceum, sharply asked him,
“whether his lecture would be a nice, interesting story, such as she
wished to hear, or whether it was one of those old philosophical things that
she did not care about.” Henry turned to her, and bethought himself, and,
I saw, was trying to believe that he had matter that might fit her and her
brother, who were to sit up and go to the lecture, if it was a good one for
them.
</p>
<p>
He was a speaker and actor of the truth,—born such,—and was ever
running into dramatic situations from this cause. In any circumstance, it
interested all bystanders to know what part Henry would take, and what he would
say; and he did not disappoint expectation, but used an original judgment on
each emergency. In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of
Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This
action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with
affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his
action. As soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he
abandoned it. In 1847, not approving some uses to which the public expenditure
was applied, he refused to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. A friend paid
the tax for him, and he was released. The like annoyance was threatened the
next year. But, as his friends paid the tax, notwithstanding his protest, I
believe he ceased to resist. No opposition or ridicule had any weight with him.
He coldly and fully stated his opinion without affecting to believe that it was
the opinion of the company. It was of no consequence, if every one present held
the opposite opinion. On one occasion he went to the University Library to
procure some books. The librarian refused to lend them. Mr. Thoreau repaired to
the President, who stated to him the rules and usages, which permitted the loan
of books to resident graduates, to clergymen who were alumni, and to some
others resident within a circle of ten miles’ radius from the College.
Mr. Thoreau explained to the President that the railroad had destroyed the old
scale of distances,—that the library was useless, yes, and President and
College useless, on the terms of his rules,—that the one benefit he owed
to the College was its library,— that, at this moment, not only his want
of books was imperative, but he wanted a large number of books, and assured him
that he, Thoreau, and not the librarian, was the proper custodian of these. In
short, the President found the petitioner so formidable, and the rules getting
to look so ridiculous, that he ended by giving him a privilege which in his
hands proved unlimited thereafter.
</p>
<p>
No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his country and
condition was genuine, and his aversation from English and European manners and
tastes almost reached contempt. He listened impatiently to news or <i>bon
mots</i> gleaned from London circles; and though he tried to be civil, these
anecdotes fatigued him. The men were all imitating each other, and on a small
mould. Why can they not live as far apart as possible, and each be a man by
himself? What he sought was the most energetic nature; and he wished to go to
Oregon, not to London. “In every part of Great Britain,” he wrote
in his diary, “are discovered traces of the Romans, their funereal urns,
their camps, their roads, their dwellings. But New England, at least, is not
based on any Roman ruins. We have not to lay the foundations of our houses on
the ashes of a former civilization.”
</p>
<p>
But, idealist as he was, standing for abolition of slavery, abolition of
tariffs, almost for abolition of government, it is needless to say he found
himself not only unrepresented in actual politics, but almost equally opposed
to every class of reformers. Yet he paid the tribute of his uniform respect to
the Anti-Slavery Party. One man, whose personal acquaintance he had formed, he
honored with exceptional regard. Before the first friendly word had been spoken
for Captain John Brown, after the arrest, he sent notices to most houses in
Concord, that he would speak in a public hall on the condition and character of
John Brown, on Sunday evening, and invited all people to come. The Republican
Committee, the Abolitionist Committee, sent him word that it was premature and
not advisable. He replied,—“I did not send to you for advice, but
to announce that I am to speak.” The hall was filled at an early hour by
people of all parties, and his earnest eulogy of the hero was heard by all
respectfully, by many with a sympathy that surprised themselves.
</p>
<p>
It was said of Plotinus that he was ashamed of his body, and ’tis very
likely he had good reason for it,—that his body was a bad servant, and he
had not skill in dealing with the material world, as happens often to men of
abstract intellect. But Mr. Thoreau was equipped with a most adapted and
serviceable body. He was of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion,
with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave aspect,—his face covered in
the late years with a becoming beard. His senses were acute, his frame
well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and skilful in the use of tools. And
there was a wonderful fitness of body and mind. He could pace sixteen rods more
accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. He could
find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes.
He could estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eyes; he could
estimate the weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. From a box containing a
bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough
just a dozen pencils at every grasp. He was a good swimmer, runner, skater,
boatman, and would probably outwalk most countrymen in a day’s journey.
And the relation of body to mind was still finer than we have indicated. He
said he wanted every stride his legs made. The length of his walk uniformly
made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at
all.
</p>
<p>
He had a strong common sense, like that which Rose Flammock, the weaver’s
daughter, in Scott’s romance, commends in her father, as resembling a
yardstick, which, whilst it measures dowlas and diaper, can equally well
measure tapestry and cloth of gold. He had always a new resource. When I was
planting forest-trees, and had procured half a peck of acorns, he said that
only a small portion of them would be sound, and proceeded to examine them, and
select the sound ones. But finding this took time, he said, “I think, if
you put them all into water, the good ones will sink;” which experiment
we tried with success. He could plan a garden, or a house, or a barn; would
have been competent to lead a “Pacific Exploring Expedition”; could
give judicious counsel in the gravest private or public affairs.
</p>
<p>
He lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. If he brought
you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you to-day another not less
revolutionary. A very industrious man, and setting, like all highly organized
men, a high value on his time, he seemed the only man of leisure in town,
always ready for any excursion that promised well, or for conversation
prolonged into late hours. His trenchant sense was never stopped by his rules
of daily prudence, but was always up to the new occasion. He liked and used the
simplest food, yet, when some one urged a vegetable diet, Thoreau thought all
diets a very small matter, saying that “the man who shoots the buffalo
lives better than the man who boards at the Graham House.” He
said,—“You can sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed:
Nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her
mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. But things respect the devout mind, and
a mental ecstasy was never interrupted.” He noted, what repeatedly befell
him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently
find the same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to
good players happened to him. One day, walking with a stranger, who inquired
where Indian arrow-heads could he found, he replied, “Everywhere,”
and, stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground. At Mount
Washington, in Tuckerman’s Ravine, Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained
his foot. As he was in the act of getting up from his fall, he saw for the
first time the leaves of the <i>Arnica mollis</i>.
</p>
<p>
His robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions, and strong
will, cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his simple and
hidden life. I must add the cardinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom
in him, proper to a rare class of men, which showed him the material world as a
means and symbol. This discovery, which sometimes yields to poets a certain
casual and interrupted light, serving for the ornament of their writing, was in
him an unsleeping insight; and whatever faults or obstructions of temperament
might cloud it, he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. In his youth, he
said, one day, “The other world is all my art: my pencils will draw no
other; my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a means.”
This was the muse and genius that ruled his opinions, conversation, studies,
work, and course of life. This made him a searching judge of men. At first
glance he measured his companion, and, though insensible to some fine traits of
culture, could very well report his weight and calibre. And this made the
impression of genius which his conversation often gave.
</p>
<p>
He understood the matter in hand at a glance, and saw the limitations and
poverty of those he talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed from such
terrible eyes. I have repeatedly known young men of sensibility converted in a
moment to the belief that this was the man they were in search of, the man of
men, who could tell them all they should do. His own dealing with them was
never affectionate, but superior, didactic,—scorning their petty
ways,—very slowly conceding, or not conceding at all, the promise of his
society at their houses, or even at his own. “Would he not walk with
them?” “He did not know. There was nothing so important to him as
his walk; he had no walks to throw away on company.” Visits were offered
him from respectful parties, but he declined them. Admiring friends offered to
carry him at their own cost to the Yellow-Stone River,—to the West
Indies,—to South America. But though nothing could be more grave or
considered than his refusals, they remind one in quite new relations of that
fop Brummel’s reply to the gentleman who offered him his carriage in a
shower, “But where will <i>you</i> ride, then?”—and what
accusing silences, and what searching and irresistible speeches, battering down
all defences, his companions can remember!
</p>
<p>
Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills,
and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all
reading Americans, and to people over the sea. The river on whose banks he was
born and died he knew from its springs to its confluence with the Merrimack. He
had made summer and winter observations on it for many years, and at every hour
of the day and the night. The result of the recent survey of the Water
Commissioners appointed by the State of Massachusetts he had reached by his
private experiments, several years earlier. Every fact which occurs in the bed,
on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and nests,
their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a certain
evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that
many of these die of repletion; the conical heaps of small stones on the
river-shallows, one of which heaps will sometimes overfill a cart,—these
heaps the huge nests of small fishes; the birds which frequent the stream,
heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake, musk-rat, otter, woodchuck,
and fox, on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla, and cricket, which make the
banks vocal,—were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and
fellow-creatures; so that he felt an absurdity or violence in any narrative of
one of these by itself apart, and still more of its dimensions on an inch-rule,
or in the exhibition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or a bird
in brandy. He liked to speak of the manners of the river, as itself a lawful
creature, yet with exactness, and always to an observed fact. As he knew the
river, so the ponds in this region.
</p>
<p>
One of the weapons he used, more important than microscope or alcohol-receiver
to other investigators, was a whim which grew on him by indulgence, yet
appeared in gravest statement, namely, of extolling his own town and
neighborhood as the most favored centre for natural observation. He remarked
that the Flora of Massachusetts embraced almost all the important plants of
America,—most of the oaks, most of the willows, the best pines, the ash,
the maple, the beech, the nuts. He returned Kane’s “Arctic
Voyage” to a friend of whom he had borrowed it, with the remark, that
“most of the phenomena noted might be observed in Concord.” He
seemed a little envious of the Pole, for the coincident sunrise and sunset, or
five minutes’ day after six months: a splendid fact, which Annursnuc had
never afforded him. He found red snow in one of his walks, and told me that he
expected to find yet the <i>Victoria regia</i> in Concord. He was the attorney
of the indigenous plants, and owned to a preference of the weeds to the
imported plants, as of the Indian to the civilized man,—and noticed, with
pleasure, that the willow bean-poles of his neighbor had grown more than his
beans. “See these weeds,” he said, “which have been hoed at
by a million farmers all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, and just
now come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields, and gardens, such is
their vigor. We have insulted them with low names, too,—as Pigweed,
Wormwood, Chickweed, Shad-Blossom.” He says, “They have brave
names, too,—Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchia, Amaranth, etc.”
</p>
<p>
I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not
grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but
was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all
places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. He expressed it
once in this wise:—“I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if
this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other
in this world, or in any world.”
</p>
<p>
The other weapon with which he conquered all obstacles in science was patience.
He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird,
the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back, and resume
its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him.
</p>
<p>
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a
fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew
every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path
before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great.
Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his
diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He
wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and
smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk’s or a squirrel’s nest. He
waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no
insignificant part of his armor. On the day I speak of he looked for the
Menyanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examination of the
florets, decided that it had been in flower five days. He drew out of his
breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom
on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due. The
Cypripedium not due till to-morrow. He thought, that, if waked up from a
trance, in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of the year it was
within two days. The redstart was flying about, and presently the fine
grosbeaks, whose brilliant scarlet makes the rash gazer wipe his eye, and whose
fine clear note Thoreau compared to that of a tanager which has got rid of its
hoarseness. Presently he heard a note which he called that of the
night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve
years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree
or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird that sings indifferently
by night and by day. I told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest
life should have nothing more to show him. He said, “What you seek in
vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon all the family at dinner.
You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its
prey.”
</p>
<p>
His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected
with Nature,—and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined
by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to the Natural History
Society. “Why should I? To detach the description from its connections in
my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and they do not wish
what belongs to it.” His power of observation seemed to indicate
additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and
his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none
knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or
effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of
the order and beauty of the whole. His determination on Natural History was
organic. He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if
born among Indians, would have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his
Massachusetts culture, he played out the game in this mild form of botany and
ichthyology. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of
Butler the apiologist, that “either he had told the bees things or the
bees had told him.” Snakes coiled round his leg; the fishes swam into his
hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its
hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters. Our
naturalist had perfect magnanimity; he had no secrets: he would carry you to
the heron’s haunt, or even to his most prized botanical
swamp,—possibly knowing that you could never find it again, yet willing
to take his risks.
</p>
<p>
No college ever offered him a diploma, or a professor’s chair; no academy
made him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer, or even its member.
Whether these learned bodies feared the satire of his presence. Yet so much
knowledge of Nature’s secret and genius few others possessed, none in a
more large and religious synthesis. For not a particle of respect had he to the
opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself; and
as he discovered everywhere among doctors some leaning of courtesy, it
discredited them. He grew to be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at
first known him only as an oddity. The farmers who employed him as a surveyor
soon discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of their lands, of
trees, of birds, of Indian remains, and the like, which enabled him to tell
every farmer more than he knew before of his own farm; so that he began to feel
as if Mr. Thoreau had better rights in his land than he. They felt, too, the
superiority of character which addressed all men with a native authority.
</p>
<p>
Indian relics abound in Concord,—arrow-heads, stone chisels, pestles, and
fragments of pottery; and on the river-bank, large heaps of clam-shells and
ashes mark spots which the savages frequented. These, and every circumstance
touching the Indian, were important in his eyes. His visits to Maine were
chiefly for love of the Indian. He had the satisfaction of seeing the
manufacture of the bark-canoe, as well as of trying his hand in its management
on the rapids. He was inquisitive about the making of the stone arrow-head, and
in his last days charged a youth setting out for the Rocky Mountains to find an
Indian who could tell him that: “It was well worth a visit to California
to learn it.” Occasionally, a small party of Penobscot Indians would
visit Concord, and pitch their tents for a few weeks in summer on the
river-bank. He failed not to make acquaintance with the best of them; though he
well knew that asking questions of Indians is like catechizing beavers and
rabbits. In his last visit to Maine he had great satisfaction from Joseph
Polis, an intelligent Indian of Oldtown, who was his guide for some weeks.
</p>
<p>
He was equally interested in every natural fact. The depth of his perception
found likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any genius who so
swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. He was no pedant of a
department. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these,
not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best of music
was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the
telegraph-wire.
</p>
<p>
His poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and
technical skill; but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception.
He was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry was to the ground
of it. He could not be deceived as to the presence or absence of the poetic
element in any composition, and his thirst for this made him negligent and
perhaps scornful of superficial graces. He would pass by many delicate rhythms,
but he would have detected every live stanza or line in a volume, and knew very
well where to find an equal poetic charm in prose. He was so enamored of the
spiritual beauty that he held all actual written poems in very light esteem in
the comparison. He admired Aeschylus and Pindar; but, when some one was
commending them, he said that “Aeschylus and the Greeks, in describing
Apollo and Orpheus, had given no song, or no good one. They ought not to have
moved trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a hymn as would have sung all
their old ideas out of their heads, and new ones in.” His own verses are
often rude and defective. The gold does not yet run pure, is drossy and crude.
The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric fineness and
technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the
causal thought, showing that his genius was better than his talent. He knew the
worth of the Imagination for the uplifting and consolation of human life, and
liked to throw every thought into a symbol. The fact you tell is of no value,
but only the impression. For this reason his presence was poetic, always piqued
the curiosity to know more deeply the secrets of his mind. He had many
reserves, an unwillingness to exhibit to profane eyes what was still sacred in
his own, and knew well how to throw a poetic veil over his experience. All
readers of “Walden” will remember his mythical record of his
disappointments:—
</p>
<p>
“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on
their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing
their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had
heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear
behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost
them themselves.” [“Walden” p.20]
</p>
<p>
His riddles were worth the reading, and I confide, that, if at any time I do
not understand the expression, it is yet just. Such was the wealth of his truth
that it was not worth his while to use words in vain. His poem entitled
“Sympathy” reveals the tenderness under that triple steel of
stoicism, and the intellectual subtilty it could animate. His classic poem on
“Smoke” suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of
Simonides. His biography is in his verses. His habitual thought makes all his
poetry a hymn to the Cause of causes, the Spirit which vivifies and controls
his own.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“I hearing get, who had but ears,<br/>
And sight, who had but eyes before;<br/>
I moments live, who lived but years,<br/>
And truth discern, who knew but learning’s lore.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
And still more in these religious lines:—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Now chiefly is my natal hour,<br/>
And only now my prime of life;<br/>
I will not doubt the love untold,<br/>
Which not my worth or want hath bought,<br/>
Which wooed me young, and wooes me old,<br/>
And to this evening hath me brought.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in reference to
churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender, and absolute
religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or by thought. Of
course, the same isolation which belonged to his original thinking and living
detached him from the social religious forms. This is neither to be censured
nor regretted. Aristotle long ago explained it, when he said, “One who
surpasses his fellow-citizens in virtue is no longer a part of the city. Their
law is not for him, since he is a law to himself.”
</p>
<p>
Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of prophets in
the ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative experience which
refused to be set aside. A truth-speaker he, capable of the most deep and
strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing
not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few persons
who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of
his mind and great heart. He thought that without religion or devotion of some
kind nothing great was ever accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted
sectarian had better bear this in mind.
</p>
<p>
His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to trace to
the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity which made this
willing hermit more solitary even than he wished. Himself of a perfect probity,
he required not less of others. He had a disgust at crime, and no worldly
success could cover it. He detected paltering as readily in dignified and
prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. Such dangerous
frankness was in his dealing that his admirers called him “that terrible
Thoreau,” as if he spoke when silent, and was still present when he had
departed. I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a
healthy sufficiency of human society.
</p>
<p>
The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined
him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced
his earlier writings,—a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his
later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical
opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air,
in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for
resembling Rome and Paris. “It was so dry, that you might call it
wet.”
</p>
<p>
The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one
object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do
not share the philosopher’s perception of identity. To him there was no
such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden
Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he meant to be
just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumption that the science of the
day pretended completeness, and he had just found out that the <i>savans</i>
had neglected to discriminate a particular botanical variety, had failed to
describe the seeds or count the sepals. “That is to say,” we
replied, “the blockheads were not born in Concord; but who said they
were? It was their unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or Paris, or
Rome; but, poor fellows, they did what they could, considering that they never
saw Bateman’s Pond, or Nine-Acre Corner, or Becky-Stow’s Swamp.
Besides, what were you sent into the world for, but to add this
observation?”
</p>
<p>
Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but
with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and
for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I
cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this,
instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry
party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days;
but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!
</p>
<p>
But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the incessant
growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its defeats with new
triumphs. His study of Nature was a perpetual ornament to him, and inspired his
friends with curiosity to see the world through his eyes, and to hear his
adventures. They possessed every kind of interest.
</p>
<p>
He had many elegances of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional elegance.
Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel;
and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on
mountains and in woods. His senses were acute, and he remarked that by night
every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. He liked the
pure fragrance of melilot. He honored certain plants with special regard, and,
over all, the pond-lily,—then, the gentian, and the <i>Mikania
scandens</i>, and “life-everlasting,” and a bass-tree which he
visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent
a more oracular inquisition than the sight,—more oracular and
trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other
senses. By it he detected earthiness. He delighted in echoes, and said they
were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard. He loved Nature so
well, was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities, and
the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with man and his
dwelling. The axe was always destroying his forest. “Thank God,” he
said, “they cannot cut down the clouds!” “All kinds of
figures are drawn on the blue ground with this fibrous white paint.”
</p>
<p>
I subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts, not only as
records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of description and
literary excellence.
</p>
<p>
“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in
the milk.”
</p>
<p>
“The chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper
salted.”
</p>
<p>
“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or,
perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man
concludes to built a wood-shed with them.”
</p>
<p>
“The locust z-ing.”
</p>
<p>
“Devil’s-needles zigzagging along the Nut-Meadow brook.”
</p>
<p>
“Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear.”
</p>
<p>
“I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their
leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments.
Dead trees love the fire.”
</p>
<p>
“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”
</p>
<p>
“The tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the
leaves.”
</p>
<p>
“If I wish for a horse-hair for my compass-sight, I must go to the
stable; but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road.”
</p>
<p>
“Immortal water, alive even to the superficies.”
</p>
<p>
“Fire is the most tolerable third party.”
</p>
<p>
“Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that
line.”
</p>
<p>
“No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the
beech.”
</p>
<p>
“How did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the
fresh-water clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river?”
</p>
<p>
“Hard are the times when the infant’s shoes are second-foot.”
</p>
<p>
“We are strictly confined to our men to whom we give liberty.”
</p>
<p>
“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be
popular with God himself.”
</p>
<p>
“Of what significance the things you can forget? A little thought is
sexton to all the world.”
</p>
<p>
“How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of
character?”
</p>
<p>
“Only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to
expectations.”
</p>
<p>
“I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender
to the fire that melts them. To nought else can they be tender.”
</p>
<p class="p2">
There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer
plant called “Life-Everlasting,” a <i>Gnaphalium</i> like that,
which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where
the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty,
and by his love, (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens,) climbs the
cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in
his hand. It is called by botanists the <i>Gnaphalium leontopodium</i>, but by
the Swiss <i>Edelweisse</i>, which signifies <i>Noble Purity</i>. Thoreau
seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of
right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require
longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The
country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It
seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task, which none
else can finish,—a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should
depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what
he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society;
he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there
is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find
a home.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2>EXCURSIONS</h2>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap02"></a>NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS.<a href="#linknote-1"
name="linknoteref-1" id="linknoteref-1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></h2>
<p class="center">
[1842.]
</p>
<p>
Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in
Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the
magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes; of the fence-rail,
and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of
winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri;
and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.
</p>
<p class="poem">
Within the circuit of this plodding life,<br/>
There enter moments of an azure hue,<br/>
Untarnished fair as is the violet<br/>
Or anemone, when the spring strews them<br/>
By some meandering rivulet, which make<br/>
The best philosophy untrue that aims<br/>
But to console man for his grievances.<br/>
I have remembered when the winter came,<br/>
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,<br/>
When in the still light of the cheerful moon,<br/>
On every twig and rail and jutting spout,<br/>
The icy spears were adding to their length<br/>
Against the arrows of the coming sun,<br/>
How in the shimmering noon of summer past<br/>
Some unrecorded beam slanted across<br/>
The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew;<br/>
Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,<br/>
The bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag<br/>
Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,<br/>
Which now through all its course stands still and dumb<br/>
Its own memorial,—purling at its play<br/>
Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,<br/>
Until its youthful sound was hushed at last<br/>
In the staid current of the lowland stream;<br/>
Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,<br/>
And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,<br/>
When all the fields around lay bound and hoar<br/>
Beneath a thick integument of snow.<br/>
So by God’s cheap economy made rich<br/>
To go upon my winter’s task again.<br/>
</p>
<p>
I am singularly refreshed in winter when I hear of service-berries, poke-weed,
juniper. Is not heaven made up of these cheap summer glories? There is a
singular health in those words, Labrador and East Main, which no desponding
creed recognizes. How much more than Federal are these States. If there were no
other vicissitudes than the seasons, our interest would never tire. Much more
is adoing than Congress wots of. What journal do the persimmon and the buckeye
keep, and the sharp-shinned hawk? What is transpiring from summer to winter in
the Carolinas, and the Great Pine Forest, and the Valley of the Mohawk? The
merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering; men are degraded
when considered as the members of a political organization. On this side all
lands present only the symptoms of decay. I see but Bunker Hill and Sing-Sing,
the District of Columbia and Sullivan’s Island, with a few avenues
connecting them. But paltry are they all beside one blast of the east or the
south wind which blows over them.
</p>
<p>
In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least
stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid. Society is
always diseased, and the best is the most so. There is no scent in it so
wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrating and
restorative as the life-everlasting in high pastures. I would keep some book of
natural history always by me as a sort of elixir, the reading of which should
restore the tone of the system. To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the
well, a fountain of health. To him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty
no harm nor disappointment can come. The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or
political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the
serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic
border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that
sound to cheer one under any circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the
pine will not countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and
churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that
the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern
night, the hunter does not give over to follow the seal and walrus on the ice.
They are of sick and diseased imaginations who would toll the world’s
knell so soon. Cannot these sedentary sects do better than prepare the shrouds
and write the epitaphs of those other busy living men? The practical faith of
all men belies the preacher’s consolation. What is any man’s
discourse to me, if I am not sensible of something in it as steady and cheery
as the creak of crickets? In it the woods must be relieved against the sky. Men
tire me when I am not constantly greeted and refreshed as by the flux of
sparkling streams. Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry
that leap in ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer
evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the
spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted
in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the
current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by the attrition is reflected
upon the bank.
</p>
<p>
We fancy that this din of religion, literature, and philosophy, which is heard
in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as
catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth’s axle; but if a man sleep
soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn. It is the three-inch
swing of a pendulum in a cupboard, which the great pulse of nature vibrates by
and through each instant. When we lift our eyelids and open our ears, it
disappears with smoke and rattle like the cars on a railroad. When I detect a
beauty in any of the recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and
retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible
privacy of a life,—how silent and unambitious it is. The beauty there is
in mosses must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook. What an admirable
training is science for the more active warfare of life. Indeed, the
unchallenged bravery, which these studies imply, is far more impressive than
the trumpeted valor of the warrior. I am pleased to learn that Thales was up
and stirring by night not unfrequently, as his astronomical discoveries prove.
Linnaeus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his “comb” and
“spare shirt,” “leathern breeches” and “gauze cap
to keep off gnats,” with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of
artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable.
His eye is to take in fish, flower, and bird, quadruped and biped. Science is
always brave, for to know, is to know good; doubt and danger quail before her
eye. What the coward overlooks in his hurry, she calmly scrutinizes, breaking
ground like a pioneer for the array of arts that follow in her train. But
cowardice is unscientific; for there cannot be a science of ignorance. There
may be a science of bravery, for that advances; but a retreat is rarely well
conducted; if it is, then is it an orderly advance in the face of
circumstances.
</p>
<p>
But to draw a little nearer to our promised topics. Entomology extends the
limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of
greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not
rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest
inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and
take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of
life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which
crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which
eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest
fly? There were ears for these sounds in Greece long ago, as Anacreon’s
ode will show.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“We pronounce thee happy, Cicada,<br/>
For on the tops of the trees,<br/>
Drinking a little dew,<br/>
Like any king thou singest,<br/>
For thine are they all,<br/>
Whatever thou seest in the fields,<br/>
And whatever the woods bear.<br/>
Thou art the friend of the husbandmen,<br/>
In no respect injuring any one;<br/>
And thou art honored among men,<br/>
Sweet prophet of summer.<br/>
The Muses love thee,<br/>
And Phoebus himself loves thee,<br/>
And has given thee a shrill song;<br/>
Age does not wrack thee,<br/>
Thou skilful, earthborn, song-loving,<br/>
Unsuffering, bloodless one;<br/>
Almost thou art like the gods.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
In the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over all the
land, and as in summer they are heard chiefly at nightfall, so then by their
incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year. Nor can all the vanities
that vex the world alter one whit the measure that night has chosen. Every
pulse-beat is in exact time with the cricket’s chant and the tickings of
the deathwatch in the wall. Alternate with these if you can.
</p>
<p>
About two hundred and eighty birds either reside permanently in the State, or
spend the summer only, or make us a passing visit. Those which spend the winter
with us have obtained our warmest sympathy. The nut-hatch and chicadee flitting
in company through the dells of the wood, the one harshly scolding at the
intruder, the other with a faint lisping note enticing him on; the jay
screaming in the orchard; the crow cawing in unison with the storm; the
partridge, like a russet link extended over from autumn to spring, preserving
unbroken the chain of summers; the hawk with warrior-like firmness abiding the
blasts of winter; the robin<a href="#linknote-2"
name="linknoteref-2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> and lark lurking by warm springs in the
woods; the familiar snow-bird culling a few seeds in the garden, or a few
crumbs in the yard; and occasionally the shrike, with heedless and unfrozen
melody bringing back summer again;—
</p>
<p class="poem">
His steady sails he never furls<br/>
At any time o’ year,<br/>
And perching now on Winter’s curls,<br/>
He whistles in his ear.<br/>
</p>
<p>
As the spring advances, and the ice is melting in the river, our earliest and
straggling visitors make their appearance. Again does the old Teian poet sing,
as well for New England as for Greece, in the
</p>
<h5>RETURN OF SPRING.</h5>
<p class="poem">
“Behold, how Spring appearing,<br/>
The Graces send forth roses;<br/>
Behold, how the wave of the sea<br/>
Is made smooth by the calm;<br/>
Behold, how the duck dives;<br/>
Behold, how the crane travels;<br/>
And Titan shines constantly bright.<br/>
The shadows of the clouds are moving;<br/>
The works of man shine;<br/>
The earth puts forth fruits;<br/>
The fruit of the olive puts forth.<br/>
The cup of Bacchus is crowned,<br/>
Along the leaves, along the branches,<br/>
The fruit, bending them down, flourishes.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
The ducks alight at this season in the still water, in company with the gulls,
which do not fail to improve an east wind to visit our meadows, and swim about
by twos and threes, pluming themselves, and diving to peck at the root of the
lily, and the cranberries which the frost has not loosened. The first flock of
geese is seen beating to north, in long harrows and waving lines; the gingle of
the song-sparrow salutes us from the shrubs and fences; the plaintive note of
the lark comes clear and sweet from the meadow; and the bluebird, like an azure
ray, glances past us in our walk. The fish-hawk, too, is occasionally seen at
this season sailing majestically over the water, and he who has once observed
it will not soon forget the majesty of its flight. It sails the air like a ship
of the line, worthy to struggle with the elements, falling back from time to
time like a ship on its beam ends, and holding its talons up as if ready for
the arrows, in the attitude of the national bird. It is a great presence, as of
the master of river and forest. Its eye would not quail before the owner of the
soil, but make him feel like an intruder on its domains. And then its retreat,
sailing so steadily away, is a kind of advance. I have by me one of a pair of
ospreys, which have for some years fished in this vicinity, shot by a
neighboring pond, measuring more than two feet in length, and six in the
stretch of its wings. Nuttall mentions that “The ancients, particularly
Aristotle, pretended that the ospreys taught their young to gaze at the sun,
and those who were unable to do so were destroyed. Linnaeus even believed, on
ancient authority, that one of the feet of this bird had all the toes divided,
while the other was partly webbed, so that it could swim with one foot, and
grasp a fish with the other.” But that educated eye is now dim, and those
talons are nerveless. Its shrill scream seems yet to linger in its throat, and
the roar of the sea in its wings. There is the tyranny of Jove in its claws,
and his wrath in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. It reminds me of
the Argonautic expedition, and would inspire the dullest to take flight over
Parnassus.
</p>
<p>
The booming of the bittern, described by Goldsmith and Nuttall, is frequently
heard in our fens, in the morning and evening, sounding like a pump, or the
chopping of wood in a frosty morning in some distant farm-yard. The manner in
which this sound is produced I have not seen anywhere described. On one
occasion, the bird has been seen by one of my neighbors to thrust its bill into
the water, and suck up as much as it could hold, then raising its head, it
pumped it out again with four or five heaves of the neck, throwing it two or
three feet, and making the sound each time.
</p>
<p>
At length the summer’s eternity is ushered in by the cackle of the
flicker among the oaks on the hill-side, and a new dynasty begins with calm
security.
</p>
<p>
In May and June the woodland quire is in full tune, and given the immense
spaces of hollow air, and this curious human ear, one does not see how the void
could be better filled.
</p>
<p class="poem">
Each summer sound<br/>
Is a summer round.<br/>
</p>
<p>
As the season advances, and those birds which make us but a passing visit
depart, the woods become silent again, and but few feathers ruffle the drowsy
air. But the solitary rambler may still find a response and expression for
every mood in the depths of the wood.
</p>
<p class="poem">
Sometimes-I hear the veery’s<a href="#linknote-3" name="linknoteref-3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> clarion,<br/>
Or brazen trump of the impatient jay,<br/>
And in secluded woods the chicadee<br/>
Doles out her scanty notes, which sing the praise<br/>
Of heroes, and set forth the loveliness<br/>
Of virtue evermore.<br/>
</p>
<p>
The phoebe still sings in harmony with the sultry weather by the brink of the
pond, nor are the desultory hours of noon in the midst of the village without
their minstrel.
</p>
<p class="poem">
Upon the lofty elm-tree sprays<br/>
The vireo rings the changes sweet,<br/>
During the trivial summer days,<br/>
Striving to lift our thoughts above the street.<br/>
</p>
<p>
With the autumn begins in some measure a new spring. The plover is heard
whistling high in the air over the dry pastures, the finches flit from tree to
tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly in flocks, and the goldfinch rides on the
earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping amid the rustle of the leaves. The
crows, too, begin now to congregate; you may stand and count them as they fly
low and straggling over the landscape, singly or by twos and threes, at
intervals of half a mile, until a hundred have passed.
</p>
<p>
I have seen it suggested somewhere that the crow was brought to this country by
the white man; but I shall as soon believe that the white man planted these
pines and hemlocks. He is no spaniel to follow our steps; but rather flits
about the clearings like the dusky spirit of the Indian, reminding me oftener
of Philip and Powhatan, than of Winthrop and Smith. He is a relic of the dark
ages. By just so slight, by just so lasting a tenure does superstition hold the
world ever; there is the rook in England, and the crow in New England.
</p>
<p class="poem">
Thou dusky spirit of the wood,<br/>
Bird of an ancient brood,<br/>
Flitting thy lonely way,<br/>
A meteor in the summer’s day,<br/>
From wood to wood, from hill to hill,<br/>
Low over forest, field, and rill,<br/>
What wouldst thou say?<br/>
Why shouldst thou haunt the day?<br/>
What makes thy melancholy float?<br/>
What bravery inspires thy throat,<br/>
And bears thee up above the clouds,<br/>
Over desponding human crowds,<br/>
Which far below<br/>
Lay thy haunts low?<br/>
</p>
<p>
The late walker or sailor, in the October evenings, may hear the murmurings of
the snipe, circling over the meadows, the most spirit-like sound in nature; and
still later in the autumn, when the frosts have tinged the leaves, a solitary
loon pays a visit to our retired ponds, where he may lurk undisturbed till the
season of moulting is passed, making the woods ring with his wild laughter.
This bird, the Great Northern Diver, well deserves its name; for when pursued
with a boat, it will dive, and swim like a fish under water, for sixty rods or
more, as fast as a boat can be paddled, and its pursuer, if he would discover
his game again, must put his ear to the surface to hear where it comes up. When
it comes to the surface, it throws the water off with one shake of its wings,
and calmly swims about until again disturbed.
</p>
<p>
These are the sights and sounds which reach our senses oftenest during the
year. But sometimes one hears a quite new note, which has for background other
Carolinas and Mexicos than the books describe, and learns that his ornithology
has done him no service.
</p>
<p>
It appears from the Report that there are about forty quadrupeds belonging to
the State, and among these one is glad to hear of a few bears, wolves, lynxes,
and wildcats.
</p>
<p>
When our river overflows its banks in the spring, the wind from the meadows is
laden with a strong scent of musk, and by its freshness advertises me of an
unexplored wildness. Those backwoods are not far off then. I am affected by the
sight of the cabins of the musk-rat, made of mud and grass, and raised three or
four feet along the river, as when I read of the barrows of Asia. The musk-rat
is the beaver of the settled States. Their number has even increased within a
few years in this vicinity. Among the rivers which empty into the Merrimack,
the Concord is known to the boatmen as a dead stream. The Indians are said to
have called it Musketaquid, or Prairie River. Its current being much more
sluggish, and its water more muddy than the rest, it abounds more in fish and
game of every kind. According to the History of the town, “The fur-trade
was here once very important. As early as 1641, a company was formed in the
colony, of which Major Willard of Concord was superintendent, and had the
exclusive right to trade with the Indians in furs and other articles; and for
this right they were obliged to pay into the public treasury one twentieth of
all the furs they obtained.” There are trappers in our midst still, as
well as on the streams of the far West, who night and morning go the round of
their traps, without fear of the Indian. One of these takes from one hundred
and fifty to two hundred musk-rats in a year, and even thirty-six have been
shot by one man in a day. Their fur, which is not nearly as valuable as
formerly, is in good condition in the winter and spring only; and upon the
breaking up of the ice, when they are driven out of their holes by the water,
the greatest number is shot from boats, either swimming or resting on their
stools, or slight supports of grass and reeds, by the side of the stream.
Though they exhibit considerable cunning at other times, they are easily taken
in a trap, which has only to be placed in their holes, or wherever they
frequent, without any bait being used, though it is sometimes rubbed with their
musk. In the winter the hunter cuts holes in the ice, and shoots them when they
come to the surface. Their burrows are usually in the high banks of the river,
with the entrance under water, and rising within to above the level of high
water. Sometimes their nests, composed of dried meadow grass and flags, may be
discovered where the bank is low and spongy, by the yielding of the ground
under the feet. They have from three to seven or eight young in the spring.
</p>
<p>
Frequently, in the morning or evening, a long ripple is seen in the still
water, where a musk-rat is crossing the stream, with only its nose above the
surface, and sometimes a green bough in its mouth to build its house with. When
it finds itself observed, it will dive and swim five or six rods under water,
and at length conceal itself in its hole, or the weeds. It will remain under
water for ten minutes at a time, and on one occasion has been seen, when
undisturbed, to form an air-bubble under the ice, which contracted and expanded
as it breathed at leisure. When it suspects danger on shore, it will stand
erect like a squirrel, and survey its neighborhood for several minutes, without
moving.
</p>
<p>
In the fall, if a meadow intervene between their burrows and the stream, they
erect cabins of mud and grass, three or four feet high, near its edge. These
are not their breeding-places, though young are sometimes found in them in late
freshets, but rather their hunting-lodges, to which they resort in the winter
with their food, and for shelter. Their food consists chiefly of flags and
fresh-water muscles, the shells of the latter being left in large quantities
around their lodges in the spring.
</p>
<p>
The Penobscot Indian wears the entire skin of a musk-rat, with the legs and
tail dangling, and the head caught under his girdle, for a pouch, into which he
puts his fishing tackle, and essences to scent his traps with.
</p>
<p>
The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten, have disappeared; the
otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than
formerly.
</p>
<p>
Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest and most
familiar reputation, from the time of Pilpay and Aesop to the present day. His
recent tracks still give variety to a winter’s walk. I tread in the steps
of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps I have
started, with such a tiptoe of expectation, as if I were on the trail of the
Spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its
lair. I am curious to know what has determined its graceful curvatures, and how
surely they were coincident with the fluctuations of some mind. I know which
way a mind wended, what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks, and
whether it moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less intervals and
distinctness; for the swiftest step leaves yet a lasting trace. Sometimes you
will see the trails of many together, and where they have gambolled and gone
through a hundred evolutions, which testify to a singular listlessness and
leisure in nature.
</p>
<p>
When I see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the carelessness of
freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the sunshine along the ridge of a
hill, I give up to him sun and earth as to their true proprietor. He does not
go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and there is a visible sympathy
between him and it. Sometimes, when the snow lies light, and but five or six
inches deep, you may give chase and come up with one on foot. In such a case he
will show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest direction,
though he may lose ground by it. Notwithstanding his fright, he will take no
step which is not beautiful. His pace is a sort of leopard canter, as if he
were in nowise impeded by the snow, but were husbanding his strength all the
while. When the ground is uneven, the course is a series of graceful curves,
conforming to the shape of the surface. He runs as though there were not a bone
in his back. Occasionally dropping his muzzle to the ground for a rod or two,
and then tossing his head aloft, when satisfied of his course. When he comes to
a declivity, he will put his forefeet together, and slide swiftly down it,
shoving the snow before him. He treads so softly that you would hardly hear it
from any nearness, and yet with such expression that it would not be quite
inaudible at any distance.
</p>
<p class="p2">
Of fishes, seventy-five genera and one hundred and seven species are described
in the Report. The fisherman will be startled to learn that there are but about
a dozen kinds in the ponds and streams of any inland town; and almost nothing
is known of their habits. Only their names and residence make one love fishes.
I would know even the number of their fin-rays, and how many scales compose the
lateral line. I am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better
qualified for all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook.
Methinks I have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a degree.
</p>
<p>
I have experienced such simple delight in the trivial matters of fishing<br/>
and sporting, formerly, as might have inspired the muse of Homer or<br/>
Shakspeare; and now, when I turn the pages and ponder the plates of the<br/>
Angler’s Souvenir, I am fain to exclaim,—<br/>
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Can these things be,<br/>
And overcome us like a summer’s cloud?”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Next to nature, it seems as if man’s actions were the most natural, they
so gently accord with her. The small seines of flax stretched across the
shallow and transparent parts of our river, are no more intrusion than the
cobweb in the sun. I stay my boat in midcurrent, and look down in the sunny
water to see the civil meshes of his nets, and wonder how the blustering people
of the town could have done this elvish work. The twine looks like a new river
weed, and is to the river as a beautiful memento of man’s presence in
nature, discovered as silently and delicately as a footprint in the sand.
</p>
<p>
When the ice is covered with snow, I do not suspect the wealth under my feet;
that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go. How many pickerel are
poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain. The revolution of the seasons
must be a curious phenomenon to them. At length the sun and wind brush aside
their curtain, and they see the heavens again.
</p>
<p>
Early in the spring, after the ice has melted, is the time for spearing fish.
Suddenly the wind shifts from northeast and east to west and south, and every
icicle, which has tinkled on the meadow grass so long, trickles down its stem,
and seeks its level unerringly with a million comrades. The steam curls up from
every roof and fence.
</p>
<p class="poem">
I see the civil sun drying earth’s tears,<br/>
Her tears of joy, which only faster flow.<br/>
</p>
<p>
In the brooks is heard the slight grating sound of small cakes of ice, floating
with various speed, full of content and promise, and where the water gurgles
under a natural bridge, you may hear these hasty rafts hold conversation in an
undertone. Every rill is a channel for the juices of the meadow. In the ponds
the ice cracks with a merry and inspiriting din, and down the larger streams is
whirled grating hoarsely, and crashing its way along, which was so lately a
highway for the woodman’s team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of
the skaters still fresh upon it, and the holes cut for pickerel. Town
committees anxiously inspect the bridges and causeways, as if by mere eye-force
to intercede with the ice, and save the treasury.
</p>
<p class="poem">
The river swelleth more and more,<br/>
Like some sweet influence stealing o’er<br/>
The passive town; and for a while<br/>
Each tussuck makes a tiny isle,<br/>
Where, on some friendly Ararat,<br/>
Resteth the weary water-rat.<br/>
<br/>
No ripple shows Musketaquid,<br/>
Her very current e’en is hid,<br/>
As deepest souls do calmest rest,<br/>
When thoughts are swelling in the breast,<br/>
And she that in the summer’s drought<br/>
Doth make a rippling and a rout,<br/>
Sleeps from Nabshawtuck to the Cliff,<br/>
Unruffled by a single skiff.<br/>
But by a thousand distant hills<br/>
The louder roar a thousand rills,<br/>
And many a spring which now is dumb,<br/>
And many a stream with smothered hum,<br/>
Doth swifter well and faster glide,<br/>
Though buried deep beneath the tide.<br/>
<br/>
Our village shows a rural Venice,<br/>
Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;<br/>
As lovely as the Bay of Naples<br/>
Yon placid cove amid the maples;<br/>
And in my neighbor’s field of corn<br/>
I recognize the Golden Horn.<br/>
<br/>
Here Nature taught from year to year,<br/>
When only red men came to hear,<br/>
Methinks ’twas in this school of art<br/>
Venice and Naples learned their part;<br/>
But still their mistress, to my mind,<br/>
Her young disciples leaves behind.<br/>
</p>
<p>
The fisherman now repairs and launches his boat. The best time for spearing is
at this season, before the weeds have begun to grow, and while the fishes lie
in the shallow water, for in summer they prefer the cool depths, and in the
autumn they are still more or less concealed by the grass. The first requisite
is fuel for your crate; and for this purpose the roots of the pitchpine are
commonly used, found under decayed stumps, where the trees have been felled
eight or ten years.
</p>
<p>
With a crate, or jack, made of iron hoops, to contain your fire, and attached
to the bow of your boat about three feet from the water, a fish-spear with
seven tines, and fourteen feet long, a large basket, or barrow, to carry your
fuel and bring back your fish, and a thick outer garment, you are equipped for
a cruise. It should be a warm and still evening; and then with a fire crackling
merrily at the prow, you may launch forth like a cucullo into the night. The
dullest soul cannot go upon such an expedition without some of the spirit of
adventure; as if he had stolen the boat of Charon and gone down the Styx on a
midnight expedition into the realms of Pluto. And much speculation does this
wandering star afford to the musing nightwalker, leading him on and on,
jack-o’lantern-like, over the meadows; or, if he is wiser, he amuses
himself with imagining what of human life, far in the silent night, is flitting
mothlike round its candle. The silent navigator shoves his craft gently over
the water, with a smothered pride and sense of benefaction, as if he were the
phosphor, or light-bringer, to these dusky realms, or some sister moon,
blessing the spaces with her light. The waters, for a rod or two on either hand
and several feet in depth, are lit up with more than noonday distinctness, and
he enjoys the opportunity which so many have desired, for the roofs of a city
are indeed raised, and he surveys the midnight economy of the fishes. There
they lie in every variety of posture; some on their backs, with their white
bellies uppermost, some suspended in midwater, some sculling gently along with
a dreamy motion of the fins, and others quite active and wide awake,—a
scene not unlike what the human city would present. Occasionally he will
encounter a turtle selecting the choicest morsels, or a musk-rat resting on a
tussuck. He may exercise his dexterity, if he sees fit, on the more distant and
active fish, or fork the nearer into his boat, as potatoes out of a pot, or
even take the sound sleepers with his hands. But these last accomplishments he
will soon learn to dispense with, distinguishing the real object of his
pursuit, and find compensation in the beauty and never-ending novelty of his
position. The pines growing down to the water’s edge will show newly as
in the glare of a conflagration; and as he floats under the willows with his
light, the song-sparrow will often wake on her perch, and sing that strain at
midnight, which she had meditated for the morning. And when he has done, he may
have to steer his way home through the dark by the north star, and he will feel
himself some degrees nearer to it for having lost his way on the earth.
</p>
<p>
The fishes commonly taken in this way are pickerel, suckers, perch, eels,
pouts, breams, and shiners,—from thirty to sixty weight in a night. Some
are hard to be recognized in the unnatural light, especially the perch, which,
his dark bands being exaggerated, acquires a ferocious aspect. The number of
these transverse bands, which the Report states to be seven, is, however, very
variable, for in some of our ponds they have nine and ten even.
</p>
<p class="p2">
It appears that we have eight kinds of tortoises, twelve snakes,—but one
of which is venomous,—nine frogs and toads, nine salamanders, and one
lizard, for our neighbors.
</p>
<p>
I am particularly attracted by the motions of the serpent tribe. They make our
hands and feet, the wings of the bird, and the fins of the fish seems very
superfluous, as if nature had only indulged her fancy in making them. The black
snake will dart into a bush when pursued, and circle round and round with an
easy and graceful motion, amid the thin and bare twigs, five or six feet from
the ground, as a bird flits from bough to bough, or hang in festoons between
the forks. Elasticity and flexibleness in the simpler forms of animal life are
equivalent to a complex system of limbs in the higher; and we have only to be
as wise and wily as the serpent, to perform as difficult feats without the
vulgar assistance of hands and feet.
</p>
<p>
In May, the snapping turtle, <i>Emysaurus serpentina,</i> is frequently taken
on the meadows and in the river. The fisherman, taking sight over the calm
surface, discovers its snout projecting above the water, at the distance of
many rods, and easily secures his prey through its unwillingness to disturb the
water by swimming hastily away, for, gradually drawing its head under, it
remains resting on some limb or clump of grass. Its eggs, which are buried at a
distance from the water, in some soft place, as a pigeon-bed, are frequently
devoured by the skunk. It will catch fish by daylight, as a toad catches flies,
and is said to emit a transparent fluid from its mouth to attract them.
</p>
<p>
Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and
refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which flowers exert,
no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk
in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my
most delicate experience is typified there. I am struck with the pleasing
friendships and unanimities of nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes
the form of their leaves. In the most stupendous scenes you will see delicate
and fragile features, as slight wreaths of vapor, dewlines, feathery sprays,
which suggest a high refinement, a noble blood and breeding, as it were. It is
not hard to account for elves and fairies; they represent this light grace,
this ethereal gentility. Bring a spray from the wood, or a crystal from the
brook, and place it on your mantel, and your household ornaments will seem
plebeian beside its nobler fashion and bearing. It will wave superior there, as
if used to a more refined and polished circle. It has a salute and a response
to all your enthusiasm and heroism.
</p>
<p>
In the winter, I stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow up without
forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances. They do not wait as man
does, but now is the golden age of the sapling. Earth, air, sun, and rain, are
occasion enough; they were no better in primeval centuries. The “winter
of <i>their</i> discontent” never comes. Witness the buds of the native
poplar standing gayly out to the frost on the sides of its bare switches. They
express a naked confidence. With cheerful heart one could be a sojourner in the
wilderness, if he were sure to find there the catkins of the willow or the
alder. When I read of them in the accounts of northern adventurers, by
Baffin’s Bay or Mackenzie’s river, I see how even there too I could
dwell. They are our little vegetable redeemers. Methinks our virtue will hold
out till they come again. They are worthy to have had a greater than Minerva or
Ceres for their inventor. Who was the benignant goddess that bestowed them on
mankind?
</p>
<p>
Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and
extravagance of genius. She has her luxurious and florid style as well as art.
Having a pilgrim’s cup to make, she gives to the whole, stem, bowl,
handle, and nose, some fantastic shape, as if it were to be the car of some
fabulous marine deity, a Nereus or Triton.
</p>
<p>
In the winter, the botanist needs not confine himself to his books and
herbarium, and give over his out-door pursuits, but may study a new department
of vegetable physiology, what may be called crystalline botany, then. The
winter of 1837 was unusually favorable for this. In December of that year, the
Genius of vegetation seemed to hover by night over its summer haunts with
unusual persistency. Such a hoarfrost, as is very uncommon here or anywhere,
and whose full effects can never be witnessed after sunrise, occurred several
times. As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked
like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together
with their gray hairs streaming in a secluded valley, which the sun had not
penetrated; on that hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while
the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide
their diminished heads in the snow. The river, viewed from the high bank,
appeared of a yellowish green color, though all the landscape was white. Every
tree, shrub, and spire of grass, that could raise its head above the snow, was
covered with a dense ice-foliage, answering, as it were, leaf for leaf to its
summer dress. Even the fences had put forth leaves in the night. The centre,
diverging, and more minute fibres were perfectly distinct, and the edges
regularly indented. These leaves were on the side of the twig or stubble
opposite to the sun, meeting it for the most part at right angles, and there
were others standing out at all possible angles upon these and upon one
another, with no twig or stubble supporting them. When the first rays of the
sun slanted over the scene, the grasses seemed hung with innumerable jewels,
which jingled merrily as they were brushed by the foot of the traveller, and
reflected all the hues of the rainbow as he moved from side to side. It struck
me that these ghost leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were
the creatures of but one law; that in obedience to the same law the vegetable
juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one hand, and the
crystalline particles troop to their standard in the same order, on the other.
As if the material were indifferent, but the law one and invariable, and every
plant in the spring but pushed up into and filled a permanent and eternal
mould, which, summer and winter forever, is waiting to be filled.
</p>
<p>
This foliate structure is common to the coral and the plumage of birds, and to
how large a part of animate and inanimate nature. The same independence of law
on matter is observable in many other instances, as in the natural rhymes, when
some animal form, color, or odor, has its counterpart in some vegetable. As,
indeed, all rhymes imply an eternal melody, independent of any particular
sense.
</p>
<p>
As confirmation of the fact, that vegetation is but a kind of crystallization,
every one may observe how, upon the edge of the melting frost on the window,
the needle-shaped particles are bundled together so as to resemble fields
waving with grain, or shocks rising here and there from the stubble; on one
side the vegetation of the torrid zone, high-towering palms and widespread
banyans, such as are seen in pictures of oriental scenery; on the other, arctic
pines stiff frozen, with downcast branches.
</p>
<p>
Vegetation has been made the type of all growth; but as in crystals the law is
more obvious, their material being more simple, and for the most part more
transient and fleeting, would it not be as philosophical as convenient to
consider all growth, all filling up within the limits of nature, but a
crystallization more or less rapid?
</p>
<p>
On this occasion, in the side of the high bank of the river, wherever the water
or other cause had formed a cavity, its throat and outer edge, like the
entrance to a citadel, bristled with a glistening ice-armor. In one place you
might see minute ostrich-feathers, which seemed the waving plumes of the
warriors filing into the fortress; in another, the glancing, fan-shaped banners
of the Lilliputian host; and in another, the needle-shaped particles collected
into bundles, resembling the plumes of the pine, might pass for a phalanx of
spears. From the under side of the ice in the brooks, where there was a thicker
ice below, depended a mass of crystallization, four or five inches deep, in the
form of prisms, with their lower ends open, which, when the ice was laid on its
smooth side, resembled the roofs and steeples of a Gothic city, or the vessels
of a crowded haven under a press of canvas. The very mud in the road, where the
ice had melted, was crystallized with deep rectilinear fissures, and the
crystalline masses in the sides of the ruts resembled exactly asbestos in the
disposition of their needles. Around the roots of the stubble and
flower-stalks, the frost was gathered into the form of irregular conical
shells, or fairy rings. In some places the ice-crystals were lying upon granite
rocks, directly over crystals of quartz, the frost-work of a longer night,
crystals of a longer period, but to some eye unprejudiced by the short term of
human life, melting as fast as the former.
</p>
<p>
In the Report on the Invertebrate Animals, this singular fact is recorded,
which teaches us to put a new value on time and space. “The distribution
of the marine shells is well worthy of notice as a geological fact. Cape Cod,
the right arm of the Commonwealth, reaches out into the ocean, some fifty or
sixty miles. It is nowhere many miles wide; but this narrow point of land has
hitherto proved a barrier to the migrations of many species of Mollusca.
Several genera and numerous species, which are separated by the intervention of
only a few miles of land, are effectually prevented from mingling by the Cape,
and do not pass from one side to the other…. Of the one hundred and
ninety-seven marine species, eighty-three do not pass to the south shore, and
fifty are not found on the north shore of the Cape.”
</p>
<p>
That common muscle, the <i>Unio complanalus</i>, or more properly
<i>fluviatilis</i>, left in the spring by the musk-rat upon rocks and stumps,
appears to have been an important article of food with the Indians. In one
place, where they are said to have feasted, they are found in large quantities,
at an elevation of thirty feet above the river, filling the soil to the depth
of a foot, and mingled with ashes and Indian remains.
</p>
<p>
The works we have placed at the head of our chapter, with as much license, as
the preacher selects his text, are such as imply more labor than enthusiasm.
The State wanted complete catalogues of its natural riches, with such
additional facts merely as would be directly useful.
</p>
<p>
The reports on Fishes, Reptiles, Insects, and Invertebrate Animals, however,
indicate labor and research, and have a value independent of the object of the
legislature.
</p>
<p>
Those on Herbaceous Plants and Birds cannot be of much value, as long as
Bigelow and Nuttall are accessible. They serve but to indicate, with more or
less exactness, what species are found in the State. We detect several errors
ourselves, and a more practised eye would no doubt expand the list.
</p>
<p>
The Quadrupeds deserved a more final and instructive report than they have
obtained.
</p>
<p>
These volumes deal much in measurements and minute descriptions, not
interesting to the general reader, with only here and there a colored sentence
to allure him, like those plants growing in dark forests, which bear only
leaves without blossoms. But the ground was comparatively unbroken, and we will
not complain of the pioneer, if he raises no flowers with his first crop. Let
us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is
astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural
history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being
gradually written. Men are knowing enough after their fashion. Every countryman
and dairymaid knows that the coats of the fourth stomach of the calf will
curdle milk, and what particular mushroom is a safe and nutritious diet. You
cannot go into any field or wood, but it will seem as if every stone had been
turned, and the bark on every tree ripped up. But, after all, it is much easier
to discover than to see when the cover is off! It has been well said that
“the attitude of inspection is prone.” Wisdom does not inspect, but
behold. We must look a long time before we can see. Slow are the beginnings of
philosophy. He has something demoniacal in him, who can discern a law or couple
two facts. We can imagine a time when,—“Water runs down
hill,”—may have been taught in the schools. The true man of science
will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see,
hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience.
We do not learn by inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics
to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as
with ethics,—we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian
is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the
most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a
more perfect Indian wisdom.
</p>
<p class="footnote">
<a name="linknote-2" id="linknote-2"></a> <a href="#linknoteref-2">[2]</a>
A white robin, and a white quail have occasionally been seen. It is mentioned
in Audubon as remarkable that the nest of a robin should be found on the
ground; but this bird seems to be less particular than most in the choice of a
building spot. I have seen its nest placed under the thatched roof of a
deserted barn, and in one instance, where the adjacent country was nearly
destitute of trees, together with two of the phoebe, upon the end of a board in
the loft of a saw-mill, but a few feet from the saw, which vibrated several
inches with the motion of the machinery.
</p>
<p class="footnote">
<a name="linknote-3" id="linknote-3"></a> <a href="#linknoteref-3">[3]</a>
This bird, which is so well described by Nuttall, but is apparently unknown by
the author of the Report, is one of the most common in the woods in this
vicinity, and in Cambridge I have heard the college yard ring with its trill.
The boys call it “<i>yorrick</i>,” from the sound of its querulous
and chiding note, as it flits near the traveller through the underwood. The
cowbird’s egg is occasionally found in its nest, as mentioned by Audubon.
</p>
<p class="footnote">
<a name="linknote-1" id="linknote-1"></a> <a href="#linknoteref-1">[1]</a>
<i>Reports—on the Fishes, Reptiles, and Birds; the Herbaceous Plants and
Quadrupeds; the Insects Injurious to Vegetation; and the Invertebrate Animals
of Massachusetts</i>. Published agreeably to an Order of the Legislature, by
the Commissioners on the Zoölogical and Botanical Survey of the State.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap03"></a>A WALK TO WACHUSETT.</h2>
<p class="center">
[1843.]
</p>
<p class="poem">
The needles of the pine<br/>
All to the west incline.<br/>
</p>
<p class="right">
C<small>ONCORD</small>, <i>July</i> 19, 1842.
</p>
<p>
Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in
our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their
own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and
travellers; whether with Homer, on a spring morning, we sat down on the
many-peaked Olympus, or, with Virgil and his compeers, roamed the Etrurian and
Thessalian hills, or with Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and
Teneriffe. Thus we spoke our mind to them, standing on the Concord
cliffs.—
</p>
<p class="poem">
With frontier strength ye stand your ground,<br/>
With grand content ye circle round,<br/>
Tumultuous silence for all sound,<br/>
Ye distant nursery of rills,<br/>
Monadnock, and the Peterboro’ hills;<br/>
Like some vast fleet,<br/>
Sailing through rain and sleet,<br/>
Through winter’s cold and summer’s heat;<br/>
Still holding on, upon your high emprise,<br/>
Until ye find a shore amid the skies;<br/>
Not skulking close to land,<br/>
With cargo contraband.<br/>
For they who sent a venture out by ye<br/>
Have set the sun to see<br/>
Their honesty.<br/>
Ships of the line, each one,<br/>
Ye to the westward run,<br/>
Always before the gale,<br/>
Under a press of sail,<br/>
With weight of metal all untold.<br/>
I seem to feel ye, in my firm seat here,<br/>
Immeasurable depth of hold,<br/>
And breadth of beam, and length of running gear.<br/>
<br/>
Methinks ye take luxurious pleasure<br/>
In your novel western leisure;<br/>
So cool your brows, and freshly blue,<br/>
As Time had nought for ye to do;<br/>
For ye lie at your length,<br/>
An unappropriated strength,<br/>
Unhewn primeval timber,<br/>
For knees so stiff, for masts so limber;<br/>
The stock of which new earths are made,<br/>
One day to be our western trade,<br/>
Fit for the stanchions of a world<br/>
Which through the seas of space is hurled.<br/>
<br/>
While we enjoy a lingering ray,<br/>
Ye still o’ertop the western day,<br/>
Reposing yonder, on God’s croft,<br/>
Like solid stacks of hay.<br/>
Edged with silver, and with gold,<br/>
The clouds hang o’er in damask fold,<br/>
And with such depth of amber light<br/>
The west is dight,<br/>
Where still a few rays slant,<br/>
That even heaven seems extravagant.<br/>
On the earth’s edge mountains and trees<br/>
Stand as they were on air graven,<br/>
Or as the vessels in a haven<br/>
Await the morning breeze.<br/>
I fancy even<br/>
Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven;<br/>
And yonder still, in spite of history’s page,<br/>
Linger the golden and the silver age;<br/>
Upon the laboring gale<br/>
The news of future centuries is brought,<br/>
And of new dynasties of thought,<br/>
From your remotest vale.<br/>
<br/>
But special I remember thee,<br/>
Wachusett, who like me<br/>
Standest alone without society.<br/>
Thy far blue eye,<br/>
A remnant of the sky,<br/>
Seen through the clearing or the gorge,<br/>
Or from the windows on the forge,<br/>
Doth leaven all it passes by.<br/>
Nothing is true,<br/>
But stands ’tween me and you,<br/>
Thou western pioneer,<br/>
Who know’st not shame nor fear,<br/>
By venturous spirit driven,<br/>
Under the eaves of heaven,<br/>
And can’st expand thee there,<br/>
And breathe enough of air?<br/>
Upholding heaven, holding down earth,<br/>
Thy pastime from thy birth,<br/>
Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other;<br/>
May I approve myself thy worthy brother!<br/>
</p>
<p>
At length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we resolved
to scale the blue wall which bound the western horizon, though not without
misgivings, that thereafter no visible fairy land would exist for us. But we
will not leap at once to our journey’s end, though near, but imitate
Homer, who conducts his reader over the plain, and along the resounding sea,
though it be but to the tent of Achilles. In the spaces of thought are the
reaches of land and water, where men go and come. The landscape lies far and
fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest travelled.
</p>
<p>
At a cool and early hour on a pleasant morning in July, my companion and I
passed rapidly through Acton and Stow, stopping to rest and refresh us on the
bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Assabet, in the latter town. As we
traversed the cool woods of Acton, with stout staves in our hands, we were
cheered by the song of the red-eye, the thrushes, the phoebe, and the cuckoo;
and as we passed through the open country, we inhaled the fresh scent of every
field, and all nature lay passive, to be viewed and travelled. Every rail,
every farm-house, seen dimly in the twilight, every tinkling sound told of
peace and purity, and we moved happily along the dank roads, enjoying not such
privacy as the day leaves when it withdraws, but such as it has not profaned.
It was solitude with light; which is better than darkness. But anon, the sound
of the mower’s rifle was heard in the fields, and this, too, mingled with
the lowing kine.
</p>
<p>
This part of our route lay through the country of hops, which plant perhaps
supplies the want of the vine in American scenery, and may remind the traveller
of Italy, and the South of France, whether he traverses the country when the
hop-fields, as then, present solid and regular masses of verdure, hanging in
graceful festoons from pole to pole; the cool coverts where lurk the gales
which refresh the wayfarer; or in September, when the women and children, and
the neighbors from far and near, are gathered to pick the hops into long
troughs; or later still, when the poles stand piled in vast pyramids in the
yards, or lie in heaps by the roadside.
</p>
<p>
The culture of the hop, with the processes of picking, drying in the kiln, and
packing for the market, as well as the uses to which it is applied, so
analogous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford a theme for future
poets.
</p>
<p>
The mower in the adjacent meadow could not tell us the name of the brook on
whose banks we had rested, or whether it had any, but his younger companion,
perhaps his brother, knew that it was Great Brook. Though they stood very near
together in the field, the things they knew were very far apart; nor did they
suspect each other’s reserved knowledge, till the stranger came by. In
Bolton, while we rested on the rails of a cottage fence, the strains of music
which issued from within, probably in compliment to us, sojourners, reminded us
that thus far men were fed by the accustomed pleasures. So soon did we,
wayfarers, begin to learn that man’s life is rounded with the same few
facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find
it new. The flowers grow more various ways than he. But coming soon to higher
land, which afforded a prospect of the mountains, we thought we had not
travelled in vain, if it were only to hear a truer and wilder pronunciation of
their names, from the lips of the inhabitants; not <i>Way</i>-tatic,
<i>Way</i>-chusett, but <i>Wor</i>-tatic, <i>Wor</i>-chusett. It made us
ashamed of our tame and civil pronunciation, and we looked upon them as born
and bred farther west than we. Their tongues had a more generous accent than
ours, as if breath was cheaper where they wagged. A countryman, who speaks but
seldom, talks copiously, as it were, as his wife sets cream and cheese before
you without stint. Before noon we had reached the highlands overlooking the
valley of Lancaster, (affording the first fair and open prospect into the
west,) and there, on the top of a hill, in the shade of some oaks, near to
where a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we rested during the heat of the
day, reading Virgil, and enjoying the scenery. It was such a place as one feels
to be on the outside of the earth, for from it we could, in some measure, see
the form and structure of the globe. There lay Wachusett, the object of our
journey, lowering upon us with unchanged proportions, though with a less
ethereal aspect than had greeted our morning gaze, while further north, in
successive order, slumbered its sister mountains along the horizon.
</p>
<p>
We could get no further into the Aeneid than
</p>
<p class="poem">
—atque altae moenia Romae,<br/>
—and the wall of high Rome,
</p>
<p class="noindent">
before we were constrained to reflect by what myriad tests a work of genius has
to be tried; that Virgil, away in Rome, two thousand years off, should have to
unfold his meaning, the inspiration of Italian vales, to the pilgrim on New
England hills. This life so raw and modern, that so civil and ancient; and yet
we read Virgil, mainly to be reminded of the identity of human nature in all
ages, and, by the poet’s own account, we are both the children of a late
age, and live equally under the reign of Jupiter.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“He shook honey from the leaves, and removed fire,<br/>
And stayed the wine, everywhere flowing in rivers;<br/>
That experience, by meditating, might invent various arts<br/>
By degrees, and seek the blade of corn in furrows,<br/>
And strike out hidden fire from the veins of the flint.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
The old world stands serenely behind the new, as one mountain yonder towers
behind another, more dim and distant. Rome imposes her story still upon this
late generation. The very children in the school we had that morning passed,
had gone through her wars, and recited her alarms, ere they had heard of the
wars of neighboring Lancaster. The roving eye still rests inevitably on her
hills, and she still holds up the skirts of the sky on that side, and makes the
past remote.
</p>
<p>
The lay of the land hereabouts is well worthy the attention of the traveller.
The hill on which we were resting made part of an extensive range, running from
southwest to northeast, across the country, and separating the waters of the
Nashua from those of the Concord, whose banks we had left in the morning; and
by bearing in mind this fact, we could easily determine whither each brook was
bound that crossed our path. Parallel to this, and fifteen miles further west,
beyond the deep and broad valley in which lie Groton, Shirley, Lancaster, and
Boylston, runs the Wachusett range, in the same general direction. The descent
into the valley on the Nashua side, is by far the most sudden; and a couple of
miles brought us to the southern branch of the Nashua, a shallow but rapid
stream, flowing between high and gravelly banks. But we soon learned that there
were no <i>gelidae valles</i> into which we had descended, and missing the
coolness of the morning air, feared it had become the sun’s turn to try
his power upon us.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“The sultry sun had gained the middle sky,<br/>
And not a tree, and not an herb was nigh.”<br/>
</p>
<p class="noindent">
and with melancholy pleasure we echoed the melodious plaint of our
fellow-traveller, Hassan, in the desert,—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,<br/>
When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
The air lay lifeless between the hills, as in a seething caldron, with no leaf
stirring, and instead of the fresh odor of grass and clover, with which we had
before been regaled, the dry scent of every herb seemed merely medicinal.
Yielding, therefore, to the heat, we strolled into the woods, and along the
course of a rivulet, on whose banks we loitered, observing at our leisure the
products of these new fields. He who traverses the woodland paths, at this
season, will have occasion to remember the small drooping bell-like flowers and
slender red stem of the dogs-bane, and the coarser stem and berry of the poke,
which are both common in remoter and wilder scenes; and if “the sun casts
such a reflecting heat from the sweet fern,” as makes him faint, when he
is climbing the bare hills, as they complained who first penetrated into these
parts, the cool fragrance of the swamp pink restores him again, when traversing
the valleys between.
</p>
<p>
As we went on our way late in the afternoon, we refreshed ourselves by bathing
our feet in every rill that crossed the road, and anon, as we were able to walk
in the shadows of the hills, recovered our morning elasticity. Passing through
Sterling, we reached the banks of the Stillwater, in the western part of the
town, at evening, where is a small village collected. We fancied that there was
already a certain western look about this place, a smell of pines and roar of
water, recently confined by dams, belying its name, which were exceedingly
grateful. When the first inroad has been made, a few acres levelled, and a few
houses erected, the forest looks wilder than ever. Left to herself, nature is
always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where
the axe has
</p>
<p>
encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the
pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to
sight. This village had, as yet, no post-office, nor any settled name. In the
small villages which we entered, the villagers gazed after us, with a
complacent, almost compassionate look, as if we were just making our
<i>debut</i> in the world at a late hour. “Nevertheless,” did they
seem to say, “come and study us, and learn men and manners.” So is
each one’s world but a clearing in the forest, so much open and inclosed
ground. The landlord had not yet returned from the field with his men, and the
cows had yet to be milked. But we remembered the inscription on the wall of the
Swedish inn, “You will find at Trolhate excellent bread, meat, and wine,
provided you bring them with you,” and were contented. But I must confess
it did somewhat disturb our pleasure, in this withdrawn spot, to have our own
village newspaper handed us by our host, as if the greatest charm the country
offered to the traveller was the facility of communication with the town. Let
it recline on its own everlasting hills, and not be looking out from their
summits for some petty Boston or New York in the horizon.
</p>
<p>
At intervals we heard the murmuring of water, and the slumberous breathing of
crickets throughout the night; and left the inn the next morning in the gray
twilight, after it had been hallowed by the night air, and when only the
innocent cows were stirring, with a kind of regret. It was only four miles to
the base of the mountain, and the scenery was already more picturesque. Our
road lay along the course of the Stillwater, which was brawling at the bottom
of a deep ravine, filled with pines and rocks, tumbling fresh from the
mountains, so soon, alas! to commence its career of usefulness. At first, a
cloud hung between us and the summit, but it was soon blown away. As we
gathered the raspberries, which grew abundantly by the roadside, we fancied
that that action was consistent with a lofty prudence, as if the traveller who
ascends into a mountainous region should fortify himself by eating of such
light ambrosial fruits as grow there; and, drinking of the springs which gush
out from the mountain sides, as he gradually inhales the subtler and purer
atmosphere of those elevated places, thus propitiating the mountain gods, by a
sacrifice of their own fruits. The gross products of the plains and valleys are
for such as dwell therein; but it seemed to us that the juices of this berry
had relation to the thin air of the mountain-tops.
</p>
<p>
In due time we began to ascend the mountain, passing, first, through a grand
sugar maple wood, which bore the marks of the augur, then a denser forest,
which gradually became dwarfed, till there were no trees whatever. We at length
pitched our tent on the summit. It is but nineteen hundred feet above the
village of Princeton, and three thousand above the level of the sea; but by
this slight elevation it is infinitely removed from the plain, and when we
reached it, we felt a sense of remoteness, as if we had travelled into distant
regions, to Arabia Petrea, or the farthest east. A robin upon a staff, was the
highest object in sight. Swallows were flying about us, and the chewink and
cuckoo were heard near at hand. The summit consists of a few acres, destitute
of trees, covered with bare rocks, interspersed with blueberry bushes,
raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, moss, and a fine wiry grass. The
common yellow lily, and dwarf-cornel, grow abundantly in the crevices of the
rocks. This clear space, which is gently rounded, is bounded a few feet lower
by a thick shrubbery of oaks, with maples, aspens, beeches, cherries, and
occasionally a mountain-ash intermingled, among which we found the bright
blueberries of the Solomon’s Seal, and the fruit of the pyrola. From the
foundation of a wooden observatory, which was formerly erected on the highest
point, forming a rude, hollow structure of stone, a dozen feet in diameter, and
five or six in height, we could see Monadnock, in simple grandeur, in the
northwest, rising nearly a thousand feet higher, still the “far blue
mountain,” though with an altered profile. The first day the weather was
so hazy that it was in vain we endeavored to unravel the obscurity. It was like
looking into the sky again, and the patches of forest here and there seemed to
flit like clouds over a lower heaven. As to voyagers of an aërial Polynesia,
the earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low
as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it, a blue
Pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail near its
shores we see the waving of trees, and hear the lowing of kine.
</p>
<p>
We read Virgil and Wordsworth in our tent, with new pleasure there, while,
waiting for a clearer atmosphere, nor did the weather prevent our appreciating
the simple truth and beauty of Peter Bell:
</p>
<p class="poem">
“And he had lain beside his asses,<br/>
On lofty Cheviot hills.”<br/>
<br/>
“And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales,<br/>
Among the rocks and winding <i>scars</i>,<br/>
Where deep and low the hamlets lie<br/>
Beneath their little patch of sky,<br/>
And little lot of stars.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Who knows but this hill may one day be a Helvellyn, or even a Parnassus, and
the Muses haunt here, and other Homers frequent the neighboring plains,
</p>
<p class="poem">
Not unconcerned Wachusett rears his head<br/>
Above the field, so late from nature won,<br/>
With patient brow reserved, as one who read<br/>
New annals in the history of man.<br/>
</p>
<p>
The blue-berries which the mountain afforded, added to the milk we had brought,
made our frugal supper, while for entertainment the evensong of the wood-thrush
rung along the ridge. Our eyes rested on no painted ceiling nor carpeted hall,
but on skies of nature’s painting, and hills and forests of her
embroidery. Before sunset, we rambled along the ridge to the north, while a
hawk soared still above us. It was a place where gods might wander, so solemn
and solitary, and removed from all contagion with the plain. As the evening
came on, the haze was condensed in vapor, and the landscape became more
distinctly visible, and numerous sheets of water were brought to light.
</p>
<p class="poem">
Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant,<br/>
Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.<br/>
</p>
<p class="poem">
And now the tops of the villas smoke afar off,<br/>
And the shadows fall longer from the high mountains.<br/>
</p>
<p>
As we stood on the stone tower while the sun was setting, we saw the shades of
night creep gradually over the valleys of the east, and the inhabitants went
into their houses, and shut their doors, while the moon silently rose up, and
took possession of that part. And then the same scene was repeated on the west
side, as far as the Connecticut and the Green Mountains, and the sun’s
rays fell on us two alone, of all New England men.
</p>
<p>
It was the night but one before the full of the moon, so bright that we could
see to read distinctly by moonlight, and in the evening strolled over the
summit without danger. There was, by chance, a fire blazing on Monadnock that
night, which lighted up the whole western horizon, and by making us aware of a
community of mountains, made our position seem less solitary. But at length the
wind drove us to the shelter of our tent, and we closed its door for the night,
and fell asleep.
</p>
<p>
It was thrilling to hear the wind roar over the rocks, at intervals when we
waked, for it had grown quite cold and windy. The night was in its elements,
simple even to majesty in that bleak place,—a bright moonlight and a
piercing wind. It was at no time darker than twilight within the tent, and we
could easily see the moon through its transparent roof as we lay; for there was
the moon still above us, with Jupiter and Saturn on either hand, looking down
on Wachusett, and it was a satisfaction to know that they were our
fellow-travellers still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny. Truly
the stars were given for a consolation to man. We should not know but our life
were fated to be always grovelling, but it is permitted to behold them, and
surely they are deserving of a fair destiny. We see laws which never fail, of
whose failure we never conceived; and their lamps burn all the night, too, as
well as all day,— so rich and lavish is that nature which can afford this
superfluity of light.
</p>
<p>
The morning twilight began as soon as the moon had set, and we arose and
kindled our fire, whose blaze might have been seen for thirty miles around. As
the daylight increased, it was remarkable how rapidly the wind went down. There
was no dew on the summit, but coldness supplied its place. When the dawn had
reached its prime, we enjoyed the view of a distinct horizon line, and could
fancy ourselves at sea, and the distant hills the waves in the horizon, as seen
from the deck of a vessel. The cherry-birds flitted around us, the nuthatch and
flicker were heard among the bushes, the titmouse perched within a few feet,
and the song of the wood-thrush again rung along the ridge. At length we saw
the sun rise up out of the sea, and shine on Massachusetts; and from this
moment the atmosphere grew more and more transparent till the time of our
departure, and we began to realize the extent of the view, and how the earth,
in some degree, answered to the heavens in breadth, the white villages to the
constellations in the sky. There was little of the sublimity and grandeur which
belong to mountain scenery, but an immense landscape to ponder on a
summer’s day. We could see how ample and roomy is nature. As far as the
eye could reach, there was little life in the landscape; the few birds that
flitted past did not crowd. The travellers on the remote highways, which
intersect the country on every side, had no fellow-travellers for miles, before
or behind. On every side, the eye ranged over successive circles of towns,
rising one above another, like the terraces of a vineyard, till they were lost
in the horizon. Wachusett is, in fact, the observatory of the State. There lay
Massachusetts, spread out before us in its length and breadth, like a map.
There was the level horizon, which told of the sea on the east and south, the
well-known hills of New Hampshire on the north, and the misty summits of the
Hoosac and Green Mountains, first made visible to us the evening before, blue
and unsubstantial, like some bank of clouds which the morning wind would
dissipate, on the northwest and west. These last distant ranges, on which the
eye rests unwearied, commence with an abrupt boulder in the north, beyond the
Connecticut, and travel southward, with three or four peaks dimly seen. But
Monadnock, rearing its masculine front in the northwest, is the grandest
feature. As we beheld it, we knew that it was the height of land between the
two rivers, on this side the valley of the Merrimack, or that of the
Connecticut, fluctuating with their blue seas of air,—these rival vales,
already teeming with Yankee men along their respective streams, born to what
destiny who shall tell? Watatic, and the neighboring hills in this State and in
New Hampshire, are a continuation of the same elevated range on which we were
standing. But that New Hampshire bluff,—that promontory of a
State,—lowering day and night on this our State of Massachusetts, will
longest haunt our dreams.
</p>
<p>
We could, at length, realize the place mountains occupy on the land, and how
they come into the general scheme of the universe. When first we climb their
summits and observe their lesser irregularities, we do not give credit to the
comprehensive intelligence which shaped them; but when afterward we behold
their outlines in the horizon, we confess that the hand which moulded their
opposite slopes, making one to balance the other, worked round a deep centre,
and was privy to the plan of the universe. So is the least part of nature in
its bearings referred to all space. These lesser mountain ranges, as well as
the Alleghanies, run from northeast to southwest, and parallel with these
mountain streams are the more fluent rivers, answering to the general direction
of the coast, the bank of the great ocean stream itself. Even the clouds, with
their thin bars, fall into the same direction by preference, and such even is
the course of the prevailing winds, and the migration of men and birds. A
mountain-chain determines many things for the statesman and philosopher. The
improvements of civilization rather creep along its sides than cross its
summit. How often is it a barrier to prejudice and fanaticism? In passing over
these heights of land, through their thin atmosphere, the follies of the plain
are refined and purified; and as many species of plants do not scale their
summits, so many species of folly no doubt do not cross the Alleghanies; it is
only the hardy mountain plant that creeps quite over the ridge, and descends
into the valley beyond.
</p>
<p>
We get a dim notion of the flight of birds, especially of such as fly high in
the air, by having ascended a mountain. We can now see what landmarks mountains
are to their migrations; how the Catskills and Highlands have hardly sunk to
them, when Wachusett and Monadnock open a passage to the northeast; how they
are guided, too, in their course by the rivers and valleys; and who knows but
by the stars, as well as the mountain ranges, and not by the petty landmarks
which we use. The bird whose eye takes in the Green Mountains on the one side,
and the ocean on the other, need not be at a loss to find its way.
</p>
<p>
At noon we descended the mountain, and having returned to the abodes of men,
turned our faces to the east again; measuring our progress, from time to time,
by the more ethereal hues which the mountain assumed. Passing swiftly through
Stillwater and Sterling, as with a downward impetus, we found ourselves almost
at home again in the green meadows of Lancaster, so like our own Concord, for
both are watered by two streams which unite near their centres, and have many
other features in common. There is an unexpected refinement about this scenery;
level prairies of great extent, interspersed with elms and hop-fields and
groves of trees, give it almost a classic appearance. This, it will be
remembered, was the scene of Mrs. Kowlandson’s capture, and of other
events in the Indian wars, but from this July afternoon, and under that mild
exterior, those times seemed as remote as the irruption of the Goths. They were
the dark age of New England. On beholding a picture of a New England village as
it then appeared, with a fair open prospect, and a light on trees and river, as
if it were broad noon, we find we had not thought the sun shone in those days,
or that men lived in broad daylight then. We do not imagine the sun shining on
hill and valley during Philip’s war, nor on the war-path of Paugus, or
Standish, or Church, or Lovell, with serene summer weather, but a dim twilight
or night did those events transpire in. They must have fought in the shade of
their own dusky deeds.
</p>
<p>
At length, as we plodded along the dusty roads, our thoughts became as dusty as
they; all thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or proceeded only
passively in a sort of rhythmical cadence of the confused material of thought,
and we found ourselves mechanically repeating some familiar measure which timed
with our tread; some verse of the Robin Hood ballads, for instance, which one
can recommend to travel by.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Swearers are swift, sayd lyttle John,<br/>
As the wind blows over the hill;<br/>
For if it be never so loud this night,<br/>
To-morrow it may be still.”<br/>
</p>
<p class="noindent">
And so it went up hill and down till a stone interrupted the line, when a new
verse was chosen.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“His shoote it was but loosely shot,<br/>
Yet flewe not the arrowe in vaine,<br/>
For it met one of the sheriffe’s men,<br/>
And William-a-Trent was slaine.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
There is, however, this consolation to the most way-worn traveller, upon the
dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of
human life,—now climbing the hills, now descending into the vales. From
the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon, from the vales he looks up
to the heights again. He is treading his old lessons still, and though he may
be very weary and travel-worn, it is yet sincere experience.
</p>
<p>
Leaving the Nashua, we changed our route a little, and arrived at Stillriver
Village, in the western part of Harvard, just as the sun was setting. From this
place, which lies to the northward, upon the western slope of the same range of
hills on which we had spent the noon before, in the adjacent town, the prospect
is beautiful, and the grandeur of the mountain outlines unsurpassed. There was
such a repose and quiet here at this hour, as if the very hill-sides were
enjoying the scene, and we passed slowly along, looking back over the country
we had traversed, and listening to the evening song of the robin, we could not
help contrasting the equanimity of nature with the bustle and impatience of
man. His words and actions presume always a crisis near at hand, but she is
forever silent and unpretending.
</p>
<p>
And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let us
endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur into it. We will remember
within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its
summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue;
that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that
the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of
our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.
</p>
<p>
We rested that night at Harvard, and the next morning, while one bent his steps
to the nearer village of Groton, the other took his separate and solitary way
to the peaceful meadows of Concord; but let him not forget to record the brave
hospitality of a farmer and his wife, who generously entertained him at their
board, though the poor wayfarer could only congratulate the one on the
continuance of hayweather, and silently accept the kindness of the other.
Refreshed by this instance of generosity, no less than by the substantial
viands set before him, he pushed forward with new vigor, and reached the banks
of the Concord before the sun had climbed many degrees into the heavens.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap04"></a>THE LANDLORD.</h2>
<p class="center">
[1843.]
</p>
<p>
Under the one word, house, are included the school-house, the alms-house, the
jail, the tavern, the dwelling-house; and the meanest shed or cave in which men
live contains the elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the
entire and perfect house. The Parthenon, St. Peter’s, the Gothic minster,
the palace, the hovel, are but imperfect executions of an imperfect idea. Who
would dwell in them? Perhaps to the eye of the gods, the cottage is more holy
than the Parthenon, for they look down with no especial favor upon the shrines
formally dedicated to them, and that should be the most sacred roof which
shelters most of humanity. Surely, then, the gods who are most interested in
the human race preside over the Tavern, where especially men congregate.
Methinks I see the thousand shrines erected to Hospitality shining afar in all
countries, as well Mahometan and Jewish, as Christian, khans, and
caravansaries, and inns, whither all pilgrims without distinction resort.
</p>
<p>
Likewise we look in vain, east or west over the earth, to find the perfect man;
but each represents only some particular excellence. The Landlord is a man of
more open and general sympathies, who possesses a spirit of hospitality which
is its own reward, and feeds and shelters men from pure love of the creatures.
To be sure, this profession is as often filled by imperfect characters, and
such as have sought it from unworthy motives, as any other, but so much the
more should we prize the true and honest Landlord when we meet with him.
</p>
<p>
Who has not imagined to himself a country inn, where the traveller shall really
feel <i>in</i>, and at home, and at his public-house, who was before at his
private house; whose host is indeed a <i>host</i>, and a <i>lord</i> of the
<i>land</i>, a self-appointed brother of his race; called to his place, beside,
by all the winds of heaven and his good genius, as truly as the preacher is
called to preach; a man of such universal sympathies, and so broad and genial a
human nature, that he would fain sacrifice the tender but narrow ties of
private friendship, to a broad, sunshiny, fair-weather-and-foul friendship for
his race; who loves men, not as a philosopher, with philanthropy, nor as an
overseer of the poor, with charity, but by a necessity of his nature, as he
loves dogs and horses; and standing at his open door from morning till night,
would fain see more and more of them come along the highway, and is never
satiated. To him the sun and moon are but travellers, the one by day and the
other by night; and they too patronize his house. To his imagination all things
travel save his sign-post and himself; and though you may be his neighbor for
years, he will show you only the civilities of the road. But on the other hand,
while nations and individuals are alike selfish and exclusive, he loves all men
equally; and if he treats his nearest neighbor as a stranger, since he has
invited all nations to share his hospitality, the farthest travelled is in some
measure kindred to him who takes him into the bosom of his family.
</p>
<p>
He keeps a house of entertainment at the sign of the Black Horse or the Spread
Eagle, and is known far and wide, and his fame travels with increasing radius
every year. All the neighborhood is in his interest, and if the traveller ask
how far to a tavern, he receives some such answer as this: “Well, sir,
there’s a house about three miles from here, where they haven’t
taken down their sign yet; but it’s only ten miles to Slocum’s, and
that’s a capital house, both for man and beast.” At three miles he
passes a cheerless barrack, standing desolate behind its sign-post, neither
public nor private, and has glimpses of a discontented couple who have mistaken
their calling. At ten miles see where the Tavern stands,—really an
<i>entertaining</i> prospect,—so public and inviting that only the rain
and snow do not enter. It is no gay pavilion, made of bright stuffs, and
furnished with nuts and gingerbread, but as plain and sincere as a caravansary;
located in no Tarrytown, where you receive only the civilities of commerce, but
far in the fields it exercises a primitive hospitality, amid the fresh scent of
new hay and raspberries, if it be summer time, and the tinkling of cow-bells
from invisible pastures; for it is a land flowing with milk and honey, and the
newest milk courses in a broad, deep stream across the premises.
</p>
<p>
In these retired places the tavern is first of all a house—elsewhere,
last of all, or never,—and warms and shelters its inhabitants. It is as
simple and sincere in its essentials as the caves in which the first men dwelt,
but it is also as open and public. The traveller steps across the threshold,
and lo! he too is master, for he only can be called proprietor of the house
here who behaves with most propriety in it. The Landlord stands clear back in
nature, to my imagination, with his axe and spade felling trees and raising
potatoes with the vigor of a pioneer; with Promethean energy making nature
yield her increase to supply the wants of so many; and he is not so exhausted,
nor of so short a stride, but that he comes forward even to the highway to this
wide hospitality and publicity. Surely, he has solved some of the problems of
life. He comes in at his backdoor, holding a log fresh cut for the hearth upon
his shoulder with one hand, while he greets the newly arrived traveller with
the other.
</p>
<p>
Here at length we have free range, as not in palaces, nor cottages, nor
temples, and intrude nowhere. All the secrets of housekeeping are exhibited to
the eyes of men, above and below, before and behind. This is the necessary way
to live, men have confessed, in these days, and shall he skulk and hide? And
why should we have any serious disgust at kitchens? Perhaps they are the
holiest recess of the house. There is the hearth, after all,—and the
settle, and the fagots, and the kettle, and the crickets. We have pleasant
reminiscences of these. They are the heart, the left ventricle, the very vital
part of the house. Here the real and sincere life which we meet in the streets
was actually fed and sheltered. Here burns the taper that cheers the lonely
traveller by night, and from this hearth ascend the smokes that populate the
valley to his eyes by day. On the whole, a man may not be so little ashamed of
any other part of his house, for here is his sincerity and earnest, at least.
It may not be here that the besoms are plied most,—it is not here that
they need to be, for dust will not settle on the kitchen floor more than in
nature.
</p>
<p>
Hence it will not do for the Landlord to possess too fine a nature. He must
have health above the common accidents of life, subject to no modern
fashionable diseases; but no taste, rather a vast relish or appetite. His
sentiments on all subjects will be delivered as freely as the wind blows; there
is nothing private or individual in them, though still original, but they are
public, and of the hue of the heavens over his house,—a certain
out-of-door obviousness and transparency not to be disputed. What he does, his
manners are not to be complained of, though abstractly offensive, for it is
what man does, and in him the race is exhibited. When he eats, he is liver and
bowels, and the whole digestive apparatus to the company, and so all admit the
thing is done. He must have no idiosyncrasies, no particular bents or
tendencies to this or that, but a general, uniform, and healthy development,
such as his portly person indicates, offering himself equally on all sides to
men. He is not one of your peaked and inhospitable men of genius, with
particular tastes, but, as we said before, has one uniform relish, and taste
which never aspires higher than a tavern-sign, or the cut of a weather-cock.
The man of genius, like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a
diamond, or a patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road,
hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all possible
hints and signs, I wish to be alone—good-by—farewell. But the
landlord can afford to live without privacy. He entertains no private thought,
he cherishes no solitary hour, no Sabbath day, but thinks,—enough to
assert the dignity of reason,—and talks, and reads the newspaper. What he
does not tell to one traveller, he tells to another. He never wants to be
alone, but sleeps, wakes, eats, drinks, sociably, still remembering his race.
He walks abroad through the thoughts of men, and the Iliad and Shakspeare are
tame to him, who hears the rude but homely incidents of the road from every
traveller. The mail might drive through his brain in the midst of his most
lonely soliloquy, without disturbing his equanimity, provided it brought plenty
of news and passengers. There can be no <i>pro</i>-fanity where there is no
fane behind, and the whole world may see quite round him. Perchance his lines
have fallen to him in dustier places, and he has heroically sat down where two
roads meet, or at the Four Corners, or the Five Points, and his life is
sublimely trivial for the good of men. The dust of travel blows ever in his
eyes, and they preserve their clear, complacent look. The hourlies and
half-hourlies, the dailies and weeklies, whirl on well-worn tracks, round and
round his house, as if it were the goal in the stadium, and still he sits
within in unruffled serenity, with no show of retreat. His neighbor dwells
timidly behind a screen of poplars and willows, and a fence with sheaves of
spears at regular intervals, or defended against the tender palms of visitors
by sharp spikes,—but the traveller’s wheels rattle over the
door-step of the tavern, and he cracks his whip in the entry. He is truly glad
to see you, and sincere as the bull’s-eye over his door. The traveller
seeks to find, wherever he goes, some one who will stand in this broad and
catholic relation to him, who will be an inhabitant of the land to him a
stranger, and represent its human nature, as the rock stands for its inanimate
nature; and this is he. As his crib furnishes provender for the
traveller’s horse, and his larder provisions for his appetite, so his
conversation furnishes the necessary aliment to his spirits. He knows very well
what a man wants, for he is a man himself, and as it were the farthest
travelled, though he has never stirred from his door. He understands his needs
and destiny. He would be well fed and lodged, there can be no doubt, and have
the transient sympathy of a cheerful companion, and of a heart which always
prophesies fair weather. And after all the greatest men, even, want much more
the sympathy which every honest fellow can give, than that which the great only
can impart. If he is not the most upright, let us allow him this praise, that
he is the most downright of men. He has a hand to shake and to be shaken, and
takes a sturdy and unquestionable interest in you, as if he had assumed the
care of you, but if you will break your neck, he will even give you the best
advice as to the method.
</p>
<p>
The great poets have not been ungrateful to their landlords. Mine host of the
Tabard Inn, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, was an honor to his
profession:—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“A semely man our Hoste was, with alle,<br/>
For to han been an marshal in an halle.<br/>
A large man he was, with eyen stepe;<br/>
A fairer burgeis is ther nou in Chepe:<br/>
Bold of his speche, and wise, and well ytaught,<br/>
And of manhood him lacked righte naught.<br/>
Eke thereto, was he right a mery man,<br/>
And after souper plaien he began,<br/>
And spake of mirthe amonges other thinges,<br/>
Whan that we hadden made our reckoninges.”<br/>
</p>
<p class="noindent">
He is the true house-band, and centre of the company—of greater
fellowship and practical social talent than any. He it is that proposes that
each shall tell a tale to while away the time to Canterbury, and leads them
himself, and concludes with his own tale:—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Now, by my fader’s soule that is ded,<br/>
But ye be mery, smiteth of my hed:<br/>
Hold up your hondes withouten more speche.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
If we do not look up to the Landlord, we look round for him on all emergencies,
for he is a man of infinite experience, who unites hands with wit. He is a more
public character than a statesman,—a publican, and not consequently a
sinner; and surely, he, if any, should be exempted from taxation and military
duty.
</p>
<p>
Talking with our host is next best and instructive to talking with one’s
self. It is a more conscious soliloquy; as it were, to speak generally, and try
what we would say provided we had an audience. He has indulgent and open ears,
and does not require petty and particular statements. “Heigho!”
exclaims the traveller. Them’s my sentiments, thinks mine host, and
stands ready for what may come next, expressing the purest sympathy by his
demeanor. “Hot as blazes!” says the other,—“Hard
weather, sir,—not much stirring nowadays,” says he. He is wiser
than to contradict his guest in any case; he lets him go on, he lets him
travel.
</p>
<p>
The latest sitter leaves him standing far in the night, prepared to live right
on, while suns rise and set, and his “good night” has as brisk a
sound as his “good morning;” and the earliest riser finds him
tasting his liquors in the bar ere flies begin to buzz, with a countenance
fresh as the morning star over the sanded floor,—and not as one who had
watched all night for travellers. And yet, if beds be the subject of
conversation, it will appear that no man has been a sounder sleeper in his
time.
</p>
<p>
Finally, as for his moral character, we do not hesitate to say, that he has no
grain of vice or meanness in him, but represents just that degree of virtue
which all men relish without being obliged to respect. He is a good man, as his
bitters are good,—an unquestionable goodness. Not what is called a good
man,—good to be considered, as a work of art in galleries and
museums,—but a good fellow, that is, good to be associated with. Who ever
thought of the religion of an innkeeper—whether he was joined to the
Church, partook of the sacrament, said his prayers, feared God, or the like? No
doubt he has had his experiences, has felt a change, and is a firm believer in
the perseverance of the saints. In this last, we suspect, does the peculiarity
of his religion consist. But he keeps an inn, and not a conscience. How many
fragrant charities and sincere social virtues are implied in this, daily
offering of himself to the public. He cherishes good will to all, and gives the
wayfarer as good and honest advice to direct him on his road as the priest.
</p>
<p>
To conclude, the tavern will compare favorably with the church. The church is
the place where prayers and sermons are delivered, but the tavern is where they
are to take effect, and if the former are good, the latter cannot be bad.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap05"></a>A WINTER WALK.</h2>
<p class="center">
[1843.]
</p>
<p>
The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery
softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr
lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his
snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the
swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The
watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in
their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last
sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon
its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work,—the only sound
awake twixt Venus and Mars,—advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a
divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very
bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been
alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned,
showering her silvery grain over all the fields.
</p>
<p>
We sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning. The
snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window-sill; the broadened sash and
frosted panes admit a dim and private light, which enhances the snug cheer
within. The stillness of the morning is impressive. The floor creaks under our
feet as we move toward the window to look abroad through some clear space over
the fields. We see the roofs stand under their snow burden. From the eaves and
fences hang stalactites of snow, and in the yard stand stalagmites covering
some concealed core. The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every
side; and where were walls and fences, we see fantastic forms stretching in
frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if nature had strewn her fresh
designs over the fields by night as models for man’s art.
</p>
<p>
Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step abroad to
face the cutting air. Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle, and a
dull, leaden mist skirts the horizon. A lurid brazen light in the east
proclaims the approach of day, while the western landscape is dim and spectral
still, and clothed in a sombre Tartarian light, like the shadowy realms. They
are Infernal sounds only that you hear,—the crowing of cocks, the barking
of dogs, the chopping of wood, the lowing of kine, all seem to come from
Pluto’s barn-yard and beyond the Styx;—not for any melancholy they
suggest, but their twilight bustle is too solemn and mysterious for earth. The
recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the
night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and
making tracks in the snow. Opening the gate, we tread briskly along the lone
country road, crunching the dry and crisped snow under our feet, or aroused by
the sharp clear creak of the wood-sled, just starting for the distant market,
from the early farmer’s door, where it has lain the summer long, dreaming
amid the chips and stubble; while far through the drifts and powdered windows
we see the farmer’s early candle, like a paled star, emitting a lonely
beam, as if some severe virtue were at its matins there. And one by one the
smokes begin to ascend from the chimneys amidst the trees and snows.
</p>
<p class="poem">
The sluggish smoke curls up from some deep dell,<br/>
The stiffened air exploring in the dawn,<br/>
And making slow acquaintance with the day;<br/>
Delaying now upon its heavenward course,<br/>
In wreathed loiterings dallying with itself,<br/>
With as uncertain purpose and slow deed,<br/>
As its half-wakened master by the hearth,<br/>
Whose mind still slumbering and sluggish thoughts<br/>
Have not yet swept into the onward current<br/>
Of the new day;—and now it streams afar,<br/>
The while the chopper goes with step direct,<br/>
And mind intent to swing the early axe.<br/>
First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad<br/>
His early scout, his emissary, smoke,<br/>
The earliest, latest pilgrim from the roof,<br/>
To feel the frosty air, inform the day;<br/>
And while he crouches still beside the hearth,<br/>
Nor musters courage to unbar the door,<br/>
It has gone down the glen with the light wind,<br/>
And o’er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath,<br/>
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill,<br/>
And warmed the pinions of the early bird;<br/>
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air,<br/>
Has caught sight of the day o’er the earth’s edge,<br/>
And greets its master’s eye at his low door,<br/>
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky.<br/>
</p>
<p>
We hear the sound of wood-chopping at the farmers’ doors, far over the
frozen earth, the baying of the house-dog, and the distant clarion of the cock.
Though the thin and frosty air conveys only the finer particles of sound to our
ears, with short and sweet vibrations, as the waves subside soonest on the
purest and lightest liquids, in which gross substances sink to the bottom. They
come clear and bell-like, and from a greater distance in the horizon, as if
there were fewer impediments than in summer to make them faint and ragged. The
ground is sonorous, like seasoned wood, and even the ordinary rural sounds are
melodious, and the jingling of the ice on the trees is sweet and liquid. There
is the least possible moisture in the atmosphere, all being dried up, or
congealed, and it is of such extreme tenuity and elasticity, that it becomes a
source of delight. The withdrawn and tense sky seems groined like the aisles of
a cathedral, and the polished air sparkles as if there were crystals of ice
floating in it. As they who have resided in Greenland tell us, that, when it
freezes, “the sea smokes like burning turf-land, and a fog or mist
arises, called frost-smoke,” which “cutting smoke frequently raises
blisters on the face and hands, and is very pernicious to the health.”
But this pure stinging cold is an elixir to the lungs, and not so much a frozen
mist, as a crystallized midsummer haze, refined and purified by cold.
</p>
<p>
The sun at length rises through the distant woods, as if with the faint
clashing swinging sound of cymbals, melting the air with his beams, and with
such rapid steps the morning travels, that already his rays are gilding the
distant western mountains. Meanwhile we step hastily along through the powdery
snow, warmed by an inward heat, enjoying an Indian summer still, in the
increased glow of thought and feeling. Probably if our lives were more
conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats
and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and
quadrupeds. If our bodies were fed with pure and simple elements, and not with
a stimulating and heating diet, they would afford no more pasture for cold than
a leafless twig, but thrive like the trees, which find even winter genial to
their expansion.
</p>
<p>
The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact. Every
decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves of autumn, are
concealed by a clean napkin of snow. In the bare fields and tinkling woods, see
what virtue survives. In the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities
still maintain a foothold. A cold and searching wind drives away all contagion,
and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it; and accordingly,
whatever we meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we
respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness. All things beside
seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out must be part of the
original frame of the universe, and of such valor as God himself. It is
invigorating to breathe the cleansed air. Its greater fineness and purity are
visible to the eye, and we would fain stay out long and late, that the-gales
may sigh through us, too, as through the leafless trees, and fit us for the
winter:—as if we hoped so to borrow some pure and steadfast virtue, which
will stead us in all seasons.
</p>
<p>
There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and
which no cold can chill. It finally melts the great snow, and in January or
July is only buried under a thicker or thinner covering. In the coldest day it
flows somewhere, and the snow melts around every tree. This field of winter
rye, which sprouted late in the fall, and now speedily dissolves the snow, is
where the fire is very thinly covered. We feel warmed by it. In the winter,
warmth stands for all virtue, and we resort in thought to a trickling rill,
with its bare stones shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the woods, with
as much eagerness as rabbits and robins. The steam which rises from swamps and
pools, is as dear and domestic as that of our own kettle. What fire could ever
equal the sunshine of a winter’s day, when the meadow mice come out by
the wallsides, and the chicadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth
comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer;
and when we feel his beams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we
are grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us
into that by-place.
</p>
<p>
This subterranean fire has its altar in each man’s breast, for in the
coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveller cherishes a warmer fire
within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A healthy man,
indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his
heart. There is the south. Thither have all birds and insects migrated, and
around the warm springs in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark.
</p>
<p>
At length, having reached the edge of the woods, and shut out the gadding town,
we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of a cottage, and cross
its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with snow. They are glad and warm
still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in summer. As we stand in the
midst of the pines, in the nickering and checkered light which straggles but
little way into their maze, we wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple
story. It seems to us that no traveller has ever explored them, and
notwithstanding the wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every day, who
would not like to hear their annals? Our humble villages in the plain are their
contribution. We borrow from the forest the boards which shelter, and the
sticks which warm us. How important is their evergreen to the winter, that
portion of the summer which does not fade, the permanent year, the unwithered
grass. Thus simply, and with little expense of altitude, is the surface of the
earth diversified. What would human life be without forests, those natural
cities? From the tops of mountains they appear like smooth shaven lawns, yet
whither shall we walk but in this taller grass?
</p>
<p>
In this glade covered with bushes of a year’s growth, see how the silvery
dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such infinite and
luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the absence of color.
Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, and the triangular tracks of
the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs over all, as if the impurities of the
summer sky, refined and shrunk by the chaste winter’s cold, had been
winnowed from the heavens upon the earth.
</p>
<p>
Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be
nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to
ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic
summer.
</p>
<p>
How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life which still
survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and woods covered with
frost and snow, sees the sun rise.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“The foodless wilds<br/>
Pour forth their brown inhabitants.”.<br/>
</p>
<p class="noindent">
The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and playful in the remote glens, even on
the morning of the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and Labrador, and for our
Esquimaux and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed Indians, Novazemblaites, and
Spitzbergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and wood-chopper, the fox,
musk-rat, and mink?
</p>
<p>
Still, in the midst of the arctic day, we may trace the summer to its retreats,
and sympathize with some contemporary life. Stretched over the brooks, in the
midst of the frost-bound meadows, we may observe the submarine cottages of the
caddice-worms, the larvae of the Plicipennes. Their small cylindrical cases
built around themselves, composed of flags, sticks, grass, and withered leaves,
shells, and pebbles, in form and color like the wrecks which strew the
bottom,—now drifting along over the pebbly bottom, now whirling in tiny
eddies and dashing down steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along with the
current, or else swaying to and fro at the end of some grass-blade or root.
Anon they will leave their sunken habitations, and, crawling up the stems of
plants, or to the surface, like gnats, as perfect insects henceforth, flutter
over the surface of the water, or sacrifice their short lives in the flame of
our candles at evening. Down yonder little glen the shrubs are drooping under
their burden, and the red alder-berries contrast with the white ground. Here
are the marks of a myriad feet which have already been abroad. The sun rises as
proudly over such a glen, as over the valley of the Seine or the Tiber, and it
seems the residence of a pure and self-subsistent valor, such as they never
witnessed; which never knew defeat nor fear. Here reign the simplicity and
purity of a primitive age, and a health and hope far remote from towns and
cities. Standing quite alone, far in the forest, while the wind is shaking down
snow from the trees, and leaving the only human tracks behind us, we find our
reflections of a richer variety than the life of cities. The chicadee and
nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we
shall return to these last, as to more vulgar companions. In this lonely glen,
with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues,
where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere
wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to
contemplate.
</p>
<p>
As the day advances, the heat of the sun is reflected by the hill-sides, and we
hear a faint but sweet music, where flows the rill released from its fetters,
and the icicles are melting on the trees; and the nuthatch and partridge are
heard and seen. The south wind melts the snow at noon, and the bare ground
appears with its withered grass and leaves, and we are invigorated by the
perfume which exhales from it, as by the scent of strong meats.
</p>
<p>
Let us go into this deserted woodman’s hut, and see how he has passed the
long winter nights and the short and stormy days. For here man has lived under
this south hill-side, and it seems a civilized and public spot. We have such
associations as when the traveller stands by the ruins of Palmyra or
Hecatompolis. Singing birds and flowers perchance have begun to appear here,
for flowers as well as weeds follow in the footsteps of man. These hemlocks
whispered over his head, these hickory logs were his fuel, and these pitch-pine
roots kindled his fire; yonder fuming rill in the hollow, whose thin and airy
vapor still ascends as busily as ever, though he is far off now, was his well.
These hemlock boughs, and the straw upon this raised platform, were his bed,
and this broken dish held his drink. But he has not been here this season, for
the phoebes built their nest upon this shelf last summer. I find some embers
left, as if he had but just gone out, where he baked his pot of beans; and
while at evening he smoked his pipe, whose stemless bowl lies in the ashes,
chatted with his only companion, if perchance he had any, about the depth of
the snow on the morrow, already falling fast and thick without, or disputed
whether the last sound was the screech of an owl, or the creak of a bough, or
imagination only; and through this broad chimney throat, in the late winter
evening, ere he stretched himself upon the straw, he looked up to learn the
progress of the storm, and, seeing the bright stars of Cassiopeia’s chair
shining brightly down upon him, fell contentedly asleep. See how many traces
from which we may learn the chopper’s history. From this stump we may
guess the sharpness of his axe, and, from the slope of the stroke, on which
side he stood, and whether he cut down the tree without going round it or
changing hands; and, from the flexure of the splinters, we may know which way
it fell. This one chip contains inscribed on it the whole history of the
wood-chopper and of the world. On this scrap of paper, which held his sugar or
salt, perchance, or was the wadding of his gun, sitting on a log in the forest,
with what interest we read the tattle of cities, of those larger huts, empty
and to let, like this, in High Streets and Broadways. The eaves are dripping on
the south side of this simple roof, while the titmouse lisps in the pine, and
the genial warmth of the sun around the door is somewhat kind and human.
</p>
<p>
After two seasons, this rude dwelling does not deform the scene. Already the
birds resort to it, to build their nests, and you may track to its door the
feet of many quadrupeds. Thus, for a long time, nature overlooks the
encroachment and profanity of-man. The wood still cheerfully and unsuspiciously
echoes the strokes of the axe that fells it, and while they are few and seldom,
they enhance its wildness, and all the elements strive to naturalize the sound.
</p>
<p>
Now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill, from
whose precipitous south side we can look over the broad country, of forest and
field and river, to the distant snowy mountains. See yonder thin column of
smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farm-house; the standard
raised over some rural homestead. There must be a warmer and more genial spot
there below, as where we detect the vapor from a spring forming a cloud above
the trees. What fine relations are established between the traveller who
discovers this airy column from some eminence in the forest, and him who sits
below. Up goes the smoke as silently and naturally as the vapor exhales from
the leaves, and as busy disposing itself in wreathes as the housewife on the
hearth below. It is a hieroglyphic of man’s life, and suggests more
intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column
rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted
itself,—and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts,
and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America, or the
steppes of Asia.
</p>
<p>
And now we descend again to the brink of this woodland lake, which lies in a
hollow of the hills, as if it were their expressed juice, and that of the
leaves, which are annually steeped in it. Without outlet or inlet to the eye,
it has still its history, in the lapse of its waves, in the rounded pebbles on
its shore, and in the pines which grow down to its brink. It has not been idle,
though sedentary, but, like Abu Musa, teaches that “sitting still at home
is the heavenly way; the going out is the way of the world.” Yet in its
evaporation it travels as far as any. In summer it is the earth’s liquid
eye; a mirror in the breast of nature. The sins of the wood are washed out in
it. See how the woods form an amphitheatre about it, and it is an arena for all
the genialness of nature. All trees direct the traveller to its brink, all
paths seek it out, birds fly to it, quadrupeds flee to it, and the very ground
inclines toward it. It is nature’s saloon, where she has sat down to her
toilet. Consider her silent economy and tidiness; how the sun comes with his
evaporation to sweep the dust from its surface each morning, and a fresh
surface is constantly welling up; and annually, after whatever impurities have
accumulated herein, its liquid transparency appears again in the spring. In
summer a hushed music seems to sweep across its surface. But now a plain sheet
of snow conceals it from our eyes, except where the wind has swept the ice
bare, and the sere leaves are gliding from side to side, tacking and veering on
their tiny voyages. Here is one just keeled up against a pebble on shove, a dry
beech-leaf, rocking still, as if it would start again. A skilful engineer,
methinks, might project its course since it fell from the parent stem. Here are
all the elements for such a calculation. Its present position, the direction of
the wind, the level of the pond, and how much more is given. In its scarred
edges and veins is its log rolled up.
</p>
<p>
We fancy ourselves in the interior of a larger house. The surface of the pond
is our deal table or sanded floor, and the woods rise abruptly from its edge,
like the walls of a cottage. The lines set to catch pickerel through the ice
look like a larger culinary preparation, and the men stand about on the white
ground like pieces of forest furniture. The actions of these men, at the
distance of half a mile over the ice and snow, impress us as when we read the
exploits of Alexander in history. They seem not unworthy of the scenery, and as
momentous as the conquest of kingdoms.
</p>
<p>
Again we have wandered through the arches of the wood, until from its skirts we
hear the distant booming of ice from yonder bay of the river, as if it were
moved by some other and subtler tide than oceans know. To me it has a strange
sound of home, thrilling as the voice of one’s distant and noble kindred.
A mild summer sun shines over forest and lake, and though there is but one
green leaf for many rods, yet nature enjoys a serene health. Every sound is
fraught with the same mysterious assurance of health, as well now the creaking
of the boughs in January, as the soft sough of the wind in July.
</p>
<p class="poem">
When Winter fringes every bough<br/>
With his fantastic wreath,<br/>
And puts the seal of silence now<br/>
Upon the leaves beneath;<br/>
<br/>
When every stream in its pent-house<br/>
Goes gurgling on its way,<br/>
And in his gallery the mouse<br/>
Nibbleth the meadow hay;<br/>
<br/>
Methinks the summer still is nigh,<br/>
And lurketh underneath,<br/>
As that same meadow-mouse doth lie<br/>
Snug in that last year’s heath.<br/>
<br/>
And if perchance the chicadee<br/>
Lisp a faint note anon,<br/>
The snow is summer’s canopy,<br/>
Which she herself put on.<br/>
<br/>
Fair blossoms deck the cheerful trees,<br/>
And dazzling fruits depend,<br/>
The north wind sighs a summer breeze,<br/>
The nipping frosts to fend,<br/>
<br/>
Bringing glad tidings unto me,<br/>
The while I stand all ear,<br/>
Of a serene eternity,<br/>
Which need not winter fear.<br/>
<br/>
Out on the silent pond straightway<br/>
The restless ice doth crack,<br/>
And pond sprites merry gambols play<br/>
Amid the deafening rack.<br/>
<br/>
Eager I hasten to the vale,<br/>
As if I heard brave news,<br/>
How nature held high festival,<br/>
Which it were hard to lose.<br/>
<br/>
I gambol with my neighbor ice,<br/>
And sympathizing quake,<br/>
As each new crack darts in a trice<br/>
Across the gladsome lake.<br/>
<br/>
One with the cricket in the ground,<br/>
And fagot on the hearth,<br/>
Resounds the rare domestic sound<br/>
Along the forest path.<br/>
</p>
<p>
Before night we will take a journey on skates along the course of this
meandering river, as full of novelty to one who sits by the cottage fire all
the winter’s day, as if it were over the polar ice, with Captain Parry or
Franklin; following the winding of the stream, now flowing amid hills, now
spreading out into fair meadows, and forming a myriad coves and bays where the
pine and hemlock overarch. The river flows in the rear of the towns, and we see
all things from a new and wilder side. The fields and gardens come down to it
with a frankness, and freedom from pretension, which they do not wear on the
highway. It is the outside and edge of the earth. Our eyes are not offended by
violent contrasts. The last rail of the farmer’s fence is some swaying
willow bough, which still preserves its freshness, and here at length all
fences stop, and we no longer cross any road. We may go far up within the
country now by the most retired and level road, never climbing a hill, but by
broad levels ascending to the upland meadows. It is a beautiful illustration of
the law of obedience, the flow of a river; the path for a sick man, a highway
down which an acorn cup may float secure with its freight. Its slight
occasional falls, whose precipices would not diversify the landscape, are
celebrated by mist and spray, and attract the traveller from far and near. From
the remote interior, its current conducts him by broad and easy steps, or by
one gentle inclined plane, to the sea. Thus by an early and constant yielding
to the inequalities of the ground, it secures itself the easiest passage.
</p>
<p>
No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times, and now we draw near
to the empire of the fishes. Our feet glide swiftly over unfathomed depths,
where in summer our line tempted the pout and perch, and where the stately
pickerel lurked in the long corridors formed by the bulrushes. The deep,
impenetrable marsh, where the heron waded, and bittern squatted, is made
pervious to our swift shoes, as if a thousand railroads had been made into it.
With one impulse we are carried to the cabin of the musk-rat, that earliest
settler, and see him dart away under the transparent ice, like a furred fish,
to his hole in the bank; and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately
“the mower whet his scythe,” through beds of frozen cranberries
mixed with meadow grass. We skate near to where the blackbird, the pewee, and
the kingbird hung their nests over the water, and the hornets builded from the
maple in the swamp. How many gay warblers following the sun, have radiated from
this nest of silver-birch and thistledown. On the swamp’s outer edge was
hung the supermarine village, where no foot penetrated. In this hollow tree the
wood-duck reared her brood, and slid away each day to forage in yonder fen.
</p>
<p>
In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in
their natural order and position. The meadows and forests are a <i>hortus
siccus</i>. The leaves and grasses stand perfectly pressed by the air without
screw or gum, and the birds’ nests are not hung on an artificial twig,
but where they builded them. We go about dryshod to inspect the summer’s
work in the rank swamp, and see what a growth have got the alders, the willows,
and the maples; testifying to how many warm suns, and fertilizing dews and
showers. See what strides their boughs took in the luxuriant summer,—and
anon these dormant buds will carry them onward and upward another span into the
heavens.
</p>
<p>
Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the river is
lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left, where we least
expected; still holding on its way underneath, with a faint, stertorous,
rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot, it too had hibernated, and we
had followed its faint summer-trail to where it earthed itself in snow and ice.
At first we should have thought that rivers would be empty and dry in
midwinter, or else frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but their volume
is not diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surface. The
thousand springs which feed the lakes and streams are flowing still. The issues
of a few surface springs only are closed, and they go to swell the deep
reservoirs. Nature’s wells are below the frost. The summer brooks are not
filled with snow-water, nor does the mower quench his thirst with that alone.
The streams are swollen when the snow melts in the spring, because
nature’s work has been delayed, the water being turned into ice and snow,
whose particles are less smooth and round, and do not find their level so soon.
</p>
<p>
Far over the ice, between the hemlock woods and snow-clad hills, stands the
pickerel fisher, his lines set in some retired cove, like a Finlander, with his
arms thrust into the pouches of his dreadnought; with dull, snowy, fishy
thoughts, himself a finless fish, separated a few inches from his race; dumb,
erect, and made to be enveloped in clouds and snows, like the pines on shore.
In these wild scenes, men stand about in the scenery, or move deliberately and
heavily, having sacrificed the sprightliness and vivacity of towns to the dumb
sobriety of nature. He does not make the scenery less wild, more than the jays
and musk-rats, but stands there as a part of it, as the natives are represented
in the voyages of early navigators, at Nootka Sound, and on the Northwest
coast, with their furs about them, before they were tempted to loquacity by a
scrap of iron. He belongs to the natural family of man, and is planted deeper
in nature and has more root than the inhabitants of towns. Go to him, ask what
luck, and you will learn that he too is a worshipper of the unseen. Hear with
what sincere deference and waving gesture in his tone, he speaks of the lake
pickerel, which he has never seen, his primitive and ideal race of pickerel. He
is connected with the shore still, as by a fish-line, and yet remembers the
season when he took fish through the ice on the pond, while the peas were up in
his garden at home.
</p>
<p>
But now, while we have loitered, the clouds have gathered again, and a few
straggling snow-flakes are beginning to descend. Faster and faster they fall,
shutting out the distant objects from sight. The snow falls on every wood and
field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river and the pond, on the hill and
in the valley. Quadrupeds are confined to their coverts, and the birds sit upon
their perches this peaceful hour. There is not so much sound as in fair
weather, but silently and gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences,
and the polished ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are
concealed, and the tracks of men and beasts are lost. With so little effort
does nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men. Hear how Homer
has described the same. “The snow-flakes fall thick and fast on a
winter’s day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant,
covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the
lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are falling by the inlets
and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves.”
The snow levels all things, and infolds them deeper in the bosom of nature, as,
in the slow summer, vegetation creeps up to the entablature of the temple, and
the turrets of the castle, and helps her to prevail over art.
</p>
<p>
The surly night-wind rustles through the wood, and warns us to retrace our
steps, while the sun goes down behind the thickening storm, and birds seek
their roosts, and cattle their stalls.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Drooping the lab’rer ox<br/>
Stands covered o’er with snow, and <i>now</i> demands<br/>
The fruit of all his toil.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the wind and
sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of him as a merry
wood-chopper, and warm-blooded youth, as blithe as summer. The unexplored
grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the traveller. It does not trifle
with us, but has a sweet earnestness. In winter we lead a more inward life. Our
hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors
are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The
imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and
in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky
through the chimney top, enjoying the quiet and serene life that may be had in
a warm corner by the chimney side, or feeling our pulse by listening to the low
of cattle in the street, or the sound of the flail in distant barns all the
long afternoon. No doubt a skilful physician could determine our health by
observing how these simple and natural sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an
oriental, but a boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch
the shadow of motes in the sunbeams.
</p>
<p>
Sometimes our fate grows too homely and familiarly serious ever to be cruel.
Consider how for three months the human destiny is wrapped in furs. The good
Hebrew Revelation takes no cognizance of all this cheerful snow. Is there no
religion for the temperate and frigid zones? We know of no scripture which
records the pure benignity of the gods on a New England winter night. Their
praises have never been sung, only their wrath deprecated. The best scripture,
after all, records but a meagre faith. Its saints live reserved and austere.
Let a brave devout man spend the year in the woods of Maine or Labrador, and
see if the Hebrew Scriptures speak adequately to his condition and experience,
from the setting in of winter to the breaking up of the ice.
</p>
<p>
Now commences the long winter evening around the farmer’s hearth, when
the thoughts of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are by nature and
necessity charitable and liberal to all creatures. Now is the happy resistance
to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and thinks of his preparedness for
winter, and, through the glittering panes, sees with equanimity “the
mansion of the northern bear,” for now the storm is over,
</p>
<p class="poem">
“The full ethereal round,<br/>
Infinite worlds disclosing to the view,<br/>
Shines out intensely keen; and all one cope<br/>
Of starry glitter glows from pole to pole.”<br/>
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap06"></a>THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES.<a href="#linknote-4"
name="linknoteref-4" id="linknoteref-4"><sup>[4]</sup></a></h2>
<p class="center">
[1860.]
</p>
<p>
Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-show, even a transcendentalist; and for
my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle. I wish to see once
more those old familiar faces, whose names I do not know, which for me
represent the Middlesex country, and come as near being indigenous to the soil
as a white man can; the men who are not above their business, whose coats are
not too black, whose shoes do not shine very much, who never wear gloves to
conceal their hands. It is true, there are some queer specimens of humanity
attracted to our festival, but all are welcome. I am pretty sure to meet once
more that weak-minded and whimsical fellow, generally weak-bodied too, who
prefers a crooked stick for a cane; perfectly useless, you would say, only
<i>bizarre</i>, fit for a cabinet, like a petrified snake. A ram’s horn
would be as convenient, and is yet more curiously twisted. He brings that much
indulged bit of the country with him, from some town’s end or other, and
introduces it to Concord groves, as if he had promised it so much sometime. So
some, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think
that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler.
Or why choose a man to do plain work who is distinguished for his oddity?
However, I do not know but you will think that they have committed this mistake
who invited me to speak to you to-day.
</p>
<p>
In my capacity of surveyor, I have often talked with some of you, my employers,
at your dinner-tables, after having gone round and round and behind your
farming, and ascertained exactly what its limits were. Moreover, taking a
surveyor’s and a naturalist’s liberty, I have been in the habit of
going across your lots much oftener than is usual, as many of you, perhaps to
your sorrow, are aware. Yet many of you, to my relief, have seemed not to be
aware of it; and when I came across you in some out-of-the-way nook of your
farms, have inquired, with an air of surprise, if I were not lost, since you
had never seen me in that part of the town or county before; when, if the truth
were known, and it had not been for betraying my secret, I might with more
propriety have inquired if <i>you</i> were not lost, since I had never seen
<i>you</i> there before. I have several times shown the proprietor the shortest
way out of his wood-lot.
</p>
<p>
Therefore, it would seem that I have some title to speak to you to-day; and
considering what that title is, and the occasion that has called us together, I
need offer no apology if I invite your attention, for the few moments that are
allotted me, to a purely scientific subject.
</p>
<p>
At those dinner-tables referred to, I have often been asked, as many of you
have been, if I could tell how it happened, that when a pine wood was cut down
an oak one commonly sprang up, and <i>vice versa</i>. To which I have answered,
and now answer, that I can tell,—that it is no mystery to me. As I am not
aware that this has been clearly shown by any one, I shall lay the more stress
on this point. Let me lead you back into your wood-lots again.
</p>
<p>
When, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a forest springs up naturally where
none of its kind grew before, I do not hesitate to say, though in some quarters
still it may sound paradoxical, that it came from a seed. Of the various ways
by which trees are <i>known</i> to be propagated,—by transplanting,
cuttings, and the like,—this is the only supposable one under these
circumstances. No such tree has ever been known to spring from anything else.
If any one asserts that it sprang from something else, or from nothing, the
burden of proof lies with him.
</p>
<p>
It remains, then, only to show how the seed is transported from where it grows,
to where it is planted. This is done chiefly by the agency of the wind, water,
and animals. The lighter seeds, as those of pines and maples, are transported
chiefly by wind and water; the heavier, as acorns and nuts, by animals.
</p>
<p>
In all the pines, a very thin membrane, in appearance much like an
insect’s wing, grows over and around the seed, and independent of it,
while the latter is being developed within its base. Indeed this is often
perfectly developed, though the seed is abortive; nature being, you would say,
more sure to provide the means of transporting the seed, than to provide the
seed to be transported. In other words, a beautiful thin sack is woven around
the seed, with a handle to it such as the wind can take hold of, and it is then
committed to the wind, expressly that it may transport the seed and extend the
range of the species; and this it does, as effectually, as when seeds are sent
by mail in a different kind of sack from the patent-office. There is a
patent-office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as
much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and
their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.
</p>
<p>
There is then no necessity for supposing that the pines have sprung up from
nothing, and I am aware that I am not at all peculiar in asserting that they
come from seeds, though the mode of their propagation <i>by nature</i> has been
but little attended to. They are very extensively raised from the seed in
Europe, and are beginning to be here.
</p>
<p>
When you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood will not <i>at once</i> spring up
there unless there are, or have been, quite recently, seed-bearing pines near
enough for the seeds to be blown from them. But, adjacent to a forest of pines,
if you prevent other crops from growing there, you will surely have an
extension of your pine forest, provided the soil is suitable.
</p>
<p>
As for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not furnished with wings, the notion
is still a very common one that, when the trees which bear these spring up
where none of their kind were noticed before, they have come from seeds or
other principles spontaneously generated there in an unusual manner, or which
have lain dormant in the soil for centuries, or perhaps been called into
activity by the heat of a burning. I do not believe these assertions, and I
will state some of the ways in which, according to my observation, such forests
are planted and raised.
</p>
<p>
Every one of these seeds, too, will be found to be winged or legged in another
fashion. Surely it is not wonderful that cherry-trees of all kinds are widely
dispersed, since their fruit is well known to be the favorite food of various
birds. Many kinds are called bird-cherries, and they appropriate many more
kinds, which are not so called. Eating cherries is a bird-like employment, and
unless we disperse the seeds occasionally, as they do, I shall think that the
birds have the best right to them. See how artfully the seed of a cherry is
placed in order that a bird may be compelled to transport it—in the very
midst of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour this must
commonly take the stone also into its mouth or bill. If you ever ate a cherry,
and did not make two bites of it, you must have perceived it—right in the
centre of the luscious morsel, a large earthy residuum left on the tongue. We
thus take into our mouths cherry stones as big as peas, a dozen at once, for
Nature can persuade us to do almost anything when she would compass her ends.
Some wild men and children instinctively swallow these, as the birds do when in
a hurry, it being the shortest way to get rid of them. Thus, though these seeds
are not provided with vegetable wings, Nature has impelled the thrush tribe to
take them into their bills and fly away with them; and they are winged in
another sense, and more effectually than the seeds of pines, for these are
carried even against the wind. The consequence is, that cherry-trees grow not
only here but there. The same is true of a great many other seeds.
</p>
<p>
But to come to the observation which suggested these remarks. As I have said, I
suspect that I can throw some light on the fact, that when hereabouts a dense
pine wood is cut down, oaks and other hard woods may at once take its place. I
have got only to show that the acorns and nuts, provided they are grown in the
neighborhood, are regularly planted in such woods; for I assert that if an
oak-tree has not grown within ten miles, and man has not carried acorns
thither, then an oak wood will not spring up <i>at once</i>, when a pine wood
is cut down.
</p>
<p>
Apparently, there were only pines there before. They are cut off, and after a
year or two you see oaks and other hard woods springing up there, with scarcely
a pine amid them, and the wonder commonly is, how the seed could have lain in
the ground so long without decaying. But the truth is, that it has not lain in
the ground so long, but is regularly planted each year by various quadrupeds
and birds.
</p>
<p>
In this neighborhood, where oaks and pines are about equally dispersed, if you
look through the thickest pine wood, even the seemingly unmixed pitch-pine
ones, you will commonly detect many little oaks, birches, and other hard woods,
sprung from seeds carried into the thicket by squirrels and other animals, and
also blown thither, but which are over-shadowed and choked by the pines. The
denser the evergreen wood, the more likely it is to be well planted with these
seeds, because the planters incline to resort with their forage to the closest
covert. They also carry it into birch and other woods. This planting is carried
on annually, and the oldest seedlings annually die; but when the pines are
cleared off, the oaks, having got just the start they want, and now secured
favorable conditions, immediately spring up to trees.
</p>
<p>
The shade of a dense pine wood, is more unfavorable to the springing up of
pines of the same species than of oaks within it, though the former may come up
abundantly when the pines are cut, if there chance to be sound seed in the
ground.
</p>
<p>
But when you cut off a lot of hard wood, very often the little pines mixed with
it have a similar start, for the squirrels have carried off the nuts to the
pines, and not to the more open wood, and they commonly make pretty clean work
of it; and moreover, if the wood was old, the sprouts will be feeble or
entirely fail; to say nothing about the soil being, in a measure, exhausted for
this kind of crop.
</p>
<p>
If a pine wood is surrounded by a white oak one chiefly, white oaks may be
expected to succeed when the pines are cut. If it is surrounded, instead by an
edging of shrub-oaks, then you will probably have a dense shrub-oak thicket.
</p>
<p>
I have no time to go into details, but will say, in a word, that while the wind
is conveying the seeds of pines into hard woods and open lands, the squirrels
and other animals are conveying the seeds of oaks and walnuts into the pine
woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept up.
</p>
<p>
I affirmed this confidently many years ago, and an occasional examination of
dense pine woods confirmed me in my opinion. It has long been known to
observers that squirrels bury nuts in the ground, but I am not aware that any
one has thus accounted for the regular succession of forests.
</p>
<p>
On the 24th of September, in 1857, as I was paddling down the Assabet, in this
town, I saw a red squirrel run along the bank under some herbage, with
something large in its mouth. It stopped near the foot of a hemlock, within a
couple of rods of me, and, hastily pawing a hole with its forefeet, dropped its
booty into it, covered it up, and retreated part way up the trunk of the tree.
As I approached the shore to examine the deposit, the squirrel, descending part
way, betrayed no little anxiety about its treasure, and made two or three
motions to recover it before it finally retreated. Digging there, I found two
green pig-nuts joined together, with the thick husks on, buried about an inch
and a half under the reddish soil of decayed hemlock leaves,—just the
right depth to plant it. In short, this squirrel was then engaged in
accomplishing two objects, to wit, laying up a store of winter food for itself,
and planting a hickory wood for all creation. If the squirrel was killed, or
neglected its deposit, a hickory would spring up. The nearest hickory tree was
twenty rods distant. These nuts were there still just fourteen days later, but
were gone when I looked again, November 21, or six weeks later still.
</p>
<p>
I have since examined more carefully several dense woods, which are said to be,
and are apparently exclusively pine, and always with the same result. For
instance, I walked the same day to a small, but very dense and handsome
white-pine grove, about fifteen rods square, in the east part of this town. The
trees are large for Concord, being from ten to twenty inches in diameter, and
as exclusively pine as any wood that I know. Indeed, I selected this wood
because I thought it the least likely to contain anything else. It stands on an
open plain or pasture, except that it adjoins another small pine wood, which
has a few little oaks in it, on the southeast side. On every other side, it was
at least thirty rods from the nearest woods. Standing on the edge of this grove
and looking through it, for it is quite level and free from underwood, for the
most part bare, red-carpeted ground, you would have said that there was not a
hard wood tree in it, young or old. But on looking carefully along over its
floor I discovered, though it was not till my eye had got used to the search,
that, alternating with thin ferns, and small blueberry bushes, there was, not
merely here and there, but as often as every five feet and with a degree of
regularity, a little oak, from three to twelve inches high, and in one place I
found a green acorn dropped by the base of a pine.
</p>
<p>
I confess, I was surprised to find my theory so perfectly proved in this case.
One of the principal agents in this planting, the red squirrels, were all the
while curiously inspecting me, while I was inspecting their plantation. Some of
the little oaks had been browsed by cows, which resorted to this wood for
shade.
</p>
<p>
After seven or eight years, the hard woods evidently find such a locality
unfavorable to their growth, the pines being allowed to stand. As an evidence
of this, I observed a diseased red-maple twenty-five feet long, which had been
recently prostrated, though it was still covered with green leaves, the only
maple in any position in the wood.
</p>
<p>
But although these oaks almost invariably die if the pines are not cut down, it
is probable that they do better for a few years under their shelter than they
would anywhere else.
</p>
<p>
The very extensive and thorough experiments of the English, have at length led
them to adopt a method of raising oaks almost precisely like this, which
somewhat earlier had been adopted by nature and her squirrels here; they have
simply rediscovered the value of pines as nurses for oaks. The English
experimenters seem early and generally, to have found out the importance of
using trees of some kind, as nurse-plants for the young oaks. I quote from
Loudon what he describes as “the ultimatum on the subject of planting and
sheltering oaks,”—“an abstract of the practice adopted by the
government officers in the national forests” of England, prepared by
Alexander Milne.
</p>
<p>
At first some oaks had been planted by themselves, and others mixed with Scotch
pines; “but in all cases,” says Mr. Milne, “where oaks were
planted actually among the pines, and surrounded by them, [though the soil
might be inferior,] the oaks were found to be much the best.” “For
several years past, the plan pursued has been to plant the inclosures with
Scotch pines only, [a tree very similar to our pitch-pine,] and when the pines
have got to the height of five or six feet, then to put in good strong oak
plants of about four or five years’ growth among the pines,—not
cutting away any pines at first, unless they happen to be so strong and thick
as to overshadow the oaks. In about two years, it becomes necessary to shred
the branches of the pines, to give light and air to the oaks, and in about two
or three more years to begin gradually to remove the pines altogether, taking
out a certain number each year, so that, at the end of twenty or twenty-five
years, not a single Scotch pine shall be left; although, for the first ten or
twelve years, the plantation may have appeared to contain nothing else but
pine. The advantage of this mode of planting has been found to be that the
pines dry and ameliorate the soil, destroying the coarse grass and brambles
which frequently choke and injure oaks; and that no mending over is necessary,
as scarcely an oak so planted is found to fail.”
</p>
<p>
Thus much the English planters have discovered by patient experiment, and, for
aught I know, they have taken out a patent for it; but they appear not to have
discovered that it was discovered before, and that they are merely adopting the
method of Nature, which she long ago made patent to all. She is all the while
planting the oaks amid the pines without our knowledge, and at last, instead of
government officers, we send a party of wood-choppers to cut down the pines,
and so rescue an oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped from the
skies.
</p>
<p>
As I walk amid hickories, even in August, I hear the sound of green pig-nuts
falling from time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my head. In the fall,
I notice on the ground, either within or in the neighborhood of oak woods, on
all sides of the town, stout oak twigs three or four inches long, bearing
half-a-dozen empty acorn-cups, which twigs have been gnawed off by squirrels,
on both sides of the nuts, in order to make them more portable. The jays scream
and the red squirrels scold while you are clubbing and shaking the chestnut
trees, for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree. I
frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut bur, as I am
going through the woods, and I used to think, sometimes, that they were cast at
me. In fact, they are so busy about it, in the midst of the chestnut season,
that you cannot stand long in the woods without hearing one fall. A sportsman
told me that he had, the day before,—that was in the middle of
October,—seen a green chestnut bur dropt on our great river meadow, fifty
rods from the nearest wood, and much further from the nearest chestnut-tree,
and he could not tell how it came there. Occasionally, when chestnutting in
midwinter, I find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just
under the leaves, by the common wood-mouse (<i>mus leucopus</i>).
</p>
<p>
But especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation and
planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. In almost every
wood, you will see where the red or gray squirrels have pawed down through the
snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet deep, and almost always directly
to a nut or a pine-cone, as directly as if they had started from it and bored
upward,—which you and I could not have done. It would be difficult for us
to find one before the snow falls. Commonly, no doubt, they had deposited them
there in the fall. You wonder if they remember the localities, or discover them
by the scent. The red squirrel commonly has its winter abode in the earth under
a thicket of evergreens, frequently under a small clump of evergreens in the
midst of a deciduous wood. If there are any nut-trees, which still retain their
nuts, standing at a distance without the wood, their paths often lead directly
to and from them. We, therefore, need not suppose an oak standing here and
there <i>in</i> the wood in order to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty
or thirty rods of it, it is sufficient.
</p>
<p>
I think that I may venture to say that every white-pine cone that falls to the
earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing its seeds, and almost
every pitch-pine one that falls at all, is cut off by a squirrel, and they
begin to pluck them long before they are ripe, so that when the crop of
white-pine cones is a small one, as it commonly is, they cut off thus almost
every one of these before it fairly ripens. I think, moreover, that their
design, if I may so speak, in cutting them off green, is, partly, to prevent
their opening and losing their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig
through the snow, and the only white-pine cones which contain anything then. I
have counted in one heap, within a diameter of four feet, the cores of 239
pitch-pine cones which had been cut off and stripped by the red squirrel the
previous winter.
</p>
<p>
The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are placed in the
most favorable circumstances for germinating. I have sometimes wondered how
those which merely fell on the surface of the earth got planted; but, by the
end of December, I find the chestnut of the same year partially mixed with the
mould, as it were, under the decaying and mouldy leaves, where there is all the
moisture and manure they want, for the nuts fall first. In a plentiful year, a
large proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are, of
course, somewhat concealed from squirrels. One winter, when the crop had been
abundant, I got, with the aid of a rake, many quarts of these nuts as late as
the tenth of January, and though some bought at the store the same day were
more than half of them mouldy, I did not find a single mouldy one among these
which I picked from under the wet and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed
on once or twice. Nature knows how to pack them best. They were still plump and
tender. Apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. In the spring they were
all sprouting.
</p>
<p>
Loudon says that “when the nut [of the common walnut of Europe] is to be
preserved through the winter for the purpose of planting in the following
spring, it should be laid in a rot-heap, as soon as gathered, with the husk on;
and the heap should be turned over frequently in the course of the
winter.”
</p>
<p>
Here, again, he is stealing Nature’s “thunder.” How can a
poor mortal do otherwise? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and
the treasure to be stolen. In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the best
gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know it.
Generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate, and succeed
best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a spade, and then
covered with leaves or straw. These results to which planters have arrived,
remind us of the experience of Kane and his companions at the North, who, when
learning to live in that climate, were surprised to find themselves steadily
adopting the customs of the natives, simply becoming Esquimaux. So, when we
experiment in planting forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does.
Would it not be well to consult with Nature in the outset? for she is the most
extensive and experienced planter of us all, not excepting the Dukes of Athol.
</p>
<p>
In short, they who have not attended particularly to this subject are but
little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed, especially in
the fall, in collecting, and so disseminating and planting the seeds of trees.
It is the almost constant employment of the squirrels at that season and you
rarely meet with one that has not a nut in its mouth, or is not just going to
get one. One squirrel-hunter of this town told me that he knew of a walnut-tree
which bore particularly good nuts, but that on going to gather them one fall,
he found that he had been anticipated by a family of a dozen red squirrels. He
took out of the tree, which was hollow, one bushel and three pecks by
measurement, without the husks, and they supplied him and his family for the
winter. It would be easy to multiply instances of this kind. How commonly in
the fall you see the cheek-pouches of the striped squirrel distended by a
quantity of nuts! This species gets its scientific name <i>Tamias</i>, or the
steward, from its habit of storing up nuts and other seeds. Look under a
nut-tree a month after the nuts have fallen, and see what proportion of sound
nuts to the abortive ones and shells you will find ordinarily. They have been
already eaten, or dispersed far and wide. The ground looks like a platform
before a grocery, where the gossips of the village sit to crack nuts and less
savory jokes. You have come, you would say, after the feast was over, and are
presented with the shells only.
</p>
<p>
Occasionally, when threading the woods in the fall, you will hear a sound as if
some one had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay pecking at an acorn, or
you will see a flock of them at once about it, in the top of an oak, and hear
them break them off. They then fly to a suitable limb, and placing the acorn
under one foot, hammer away at it busily, making a sound like a
woodpecker’s tapping, looking round from time to time to see if any foe
is approaching, and soon reach the meat, and nibble at it, holding up their
heads to swallow, while they hold the remainder very firmly with their claws.
Nevertheless, it often drops to the ground before the bird has done with it. I
can confirm what Wm. Bartram wrote to Wilson, the Ornithologist, that
“The jay is one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature, for
disseminating forest trees and other nuciferous and hard-seeded vegetables on
which they feed. Their chief employment during the autumnal season is foraging
to supply their winter stores. In performing this necessary duty they drop
abundance of seed in their flight over fields, hedges, and by fences, where
they alight to deposit them in the post-holes, &c. It is remarkable what
numbers of young trees rise up in fields and pastures after a wet winter and
spring. These birds alone are capable, in a few years’ time, to replant
all the cleared lands.”
</p>
<p>
I have noticed that squirrels also frequently drop their nuts in open land,
which will still further account for the oaks and walnuts which spring up in
pastures, for, depend on it, every new tree comes from a seed. When I examine
the little oaks, one or two years old, in such places, I invariably find the
empty acorn from which they sprung.
</p>
<p>
So far from the seed having lain dormant in the soil since oaks grew there
before, as many believe, it is well known that it is difficult to preserve the
vitality of acorns long enough to transport them to Europe; and it is
recommended in Loudon’s Arboretum, as the safest course, to sprout them
in pots on the voyage. The same authority states that “very few acorns of
any species will germinate after having been kept a year,” that
beechmast, “only retains its vital properties one year,” and the
black-walnut, “seldom more than six months after it has ripened.” I
have frequently found that in November, almost every acorn left on the ground
had sprouted or decayed. What with frost, drouth, moisture, and worms, the
greater part are soon destroyed. Yet it is stated by one botanical writer that
“acorns that have lain for centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon
vegetated.”
</p>
<p>
Mr. George B. Emerson, in his valuable Report on the Trees and Shrubs of this
State, says of the pines: “The tenacity of life of the seeds is
remarkable. They will remain for many years unchanged in the ground, protected
by the coolness and deep shade of the forest above them. But when the forest is
removed, and the warmth of the sun admitted, they immediately vegetate.”
Since he does not tell us on what observation his remark is founded, I must
doubt its truth. Besides, the experience of nurserymen makes it the more
questionable.
</p>
<p>
The stories of wheat raised from seed buried with an ancient Egyptian, and of
raspberries raised from seed found in the stomach of a man in England, who is
supposed to have died sixteen or seventeen hundred years ago, are generally
discredited, simply because the evidence is not conclusive.
</p>
<p>
Several men of science, Dr. Carpenter among them, have used the statement that
beach-plums sprang up in sand which was dug up forty miles inland in Maine, to
prove that the seed had lain there a very long time, and some have inferred
that the coast has receded so far. But it seems to me necessary to their
argument to show, first, that beach-plums grow only on a beach. They are not
uncommon here, which is about half that distance from the shore; and I remember
a dense patch a few miles north of us, twenty-five miles inland, from which the
fruit was annually carried to market. How much further inland they grow, I know
not. Dr. Chas. T. Jackson speaks of finding “beach-plums” (perhaps
they were this kind) more than one hundred miles inland in Maine.
</p>
<p>
It chances that similar objections lie against all the more notorious instances
of the kind on record.
</p>
<p>
Yet I am prepared to believe that some seeds, especially small ones, may retain
their vitality for centuries under favorable circumstances. In the spring of
1859, the old Hunt House, so called, in this town, whose chimney bore the date
1703, was taken down. This stood on land which belonged to John Winthrop, the
first Governor of Massachusetts, and a part of the house was evidently much
older than the above date, and belonged to the Winthrop family. For many years,
I have ransacked this neighborhood for plants, and I consider myself familiar
with its productions. Thinking of the seeds which are said to be sometimes dug
up at an unusual depth in the earth, and thus to reproduce long extinct plants,
it occurred to me last fall that some new or rare plants might have sprung up
in the cellar of this house, which had been covered from the light so long.
Searching there on the 22d of September, I found, among other rank weeds, a
species of nettle (<i>Urtica urens</i>), which I had not found before; dill,
which I had not seen growing spontaneously; the Jerusalem oak (<i>Chenopodium
botrys</i>), which I had seen wild in but one place; black nightshade
(<i>Solanum nigrum</i>), which is quite rare hereabouts, and common tobacco,
which, though it was often cultivated here in the last century, has for fifty
years been an unknown plant in this town, and a few months before this not even
I had heard that one man in the north part of the town, was cultivating a few
plants for his own use. I have no doubt that some or all of these plants sprang
from seeds which had long been buried under or about that house, and that that
tobacco is an additional evidence that the plant was formerly cultivated here.
The cellar has been filled up this year, and four of those plants, including
the tobacco, are now again extinct in that locality.
</p>
<p>
It is true, I have shown that the animals consume a great part of the seeds of
trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent their becoming trees; but in all
these cases, as I have said, the consumer is compelled to be at the same time
the disperser and planter, and this is the tax which he pays to nature. I think
it is Linnaeus, who says, that while the swine is rooting for acorns, he is
planting acorns.
</p>
<p>
Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I
have great faith in a seed—a, to me, equally mysterious origin for it.
Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders. I
shall even believe that the millennium is at hand, and that the reign of
justice is about to commence, when the Patent Office, or Government, begins to
distribute, and the people to plant the seeds of these things.’
</p>
<p>
In the spring of 1857, I planted six seeds sent to me from the Patent Office,
and labelled, I think, “<i>Poitrine jaune grosse,</i>” large yellow
squash. Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighed 123-1/2 pounds, the
other bore four, weighing together 186-1/4 pounds. Who would have believed that
there was 310 pounds of <i>poitrine jaune grosse</i> in that corner of my
garden? These seeds were the bait I used to catch it, my ferrets which I sent
into its burrow, my brace of terriers which unearthed it. A little mysterious
hoeing and manuring was all the <i>abra cadabra presto-change,</i> that I used,
and lo! true to the label, they found for me 310 pounds of <i>poitrine jaune
grosse</i> there, where it never was known to be, nor was before. These
talismen had perchance sprung from America at first, and returned to it with
unabated force. The big squash took a premium at your fair that fall, and I
understood that the man who bought it, intended to sell the seeds for ten cents
a piece. (Were they not cheap at that?) But I have more hounds of the same
breed. I learn that one which I despatched to a distant town, true to its
instinct, points to the large yellow squash there, too, where no hound ever
found it before, as its ancestors did here and in France.
</p>
<p>
Other seeds I have which will find other things in that corner of my garden, in
like fashion, almost any fruit you wish, every year for ages, until the crop
more than fills the whole garden. You have but little more to do, than throw up
your cap for entertainment these American days. Perfect alchemists I keep, who
can transmute substances without end; and thus the corner of my garden is an
inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which
gold merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it. Yet
farmers’ sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from
his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love darkness
rather than light.
</p>
<p class="footnote">
<a name="linknote-4" id="linknote-4"></a> <a href="#linknoteref-4">[4]</a>
An Address read to the Middlesex Agricultural Society, in Concord, September,
1860.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap07"></a>WALKING.</h2>
<p class="center">
[1862.]
</p>
<p>
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as
contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an
inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I
wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there
are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee,
and every one of you will take care of that.
</p>
<p class="p2">
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood
the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to
speak, for <i>sauntering</i>: which word is beautifully derived “from
idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity,
under pretence of going <i>à la Sainte Terre</i>” to the Holy Land, till
the children exclaimed, “There goes a <i>Sainte-Terrer</i>,” a
Saunterer,—a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their
walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do
go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would
derive the word from <i>sans terre</i>, without land or a home, which,
therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally
at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who
sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the
saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river,
which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I
prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every
walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth
and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.
</p>
<p>
It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who
undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but
tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set
out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the
shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to
return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our
desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and
sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you
have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are
a free man, then you are ready for a walk.
</p>
<p>
To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a
companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an
old, order,—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or riders, but
Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and
heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or
perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,—not the Knight, but Walker
Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.
</p>
<p>
We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art; though,
to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be received, moat
of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth
can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence, which are the capital
in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct
dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family
of the Walkers. <i>Ambulator nascitur, non fit.</i> Some of my townsmen, it is
true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten
years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour
in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the
highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select
class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a
previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“When he came to grene wode,<br/>
In a mery mornynge,<br/>
There he herde the notes small<br/>
Of byrdes mery syngynge.<br/>
<br/>
“It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,<br/>
That I was last here;<br/>
Me lyste a lytell for to shote<br/>
At the donne dere.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours
a day at least,—and it is commonly more than that,—sauntering
through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all
worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a
thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and
shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the
afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them,—as if the legs
were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon,—I think that they
deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.
</p>
<p>
I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,
and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour of four
o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of
night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I
had committed some sin to be atoned for,—I confess that I am astonished
at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my
neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks
and months, ay, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they
are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if
it were three o’clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the
three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage
which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against
one’s self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison
to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this
time, or say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for
the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general
explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and
house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing,—and so the
evil cure itself.
</p>
<p>
How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do
not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not <i>stand</i> it
at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the
village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses with
purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my
companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone
to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture,
which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch
over the slumberers.
</p>
<p>
No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. As a
man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations
increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life
approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all
the walk that he requires in half an hour.
</p>
<p>
But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as
it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours,—as the swinging
of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.
If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a
man’s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling
up in far-off pastures unsought by him!
</p>
<p>
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which
ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to
show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library,
but his study is out of doors.”
</p>
<p>
Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain
roughness of character,—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of
the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe
manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in
the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say
thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain
impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important
to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown
on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the
thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast
enough,—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which
the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience.
There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous
palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and
heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.
That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far
from the tan and callus of experience.
</p>
<p>
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us,
if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have
felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go
to the woods. “They planted groves and walks of Platanes,” where
they took <i>subdiales ambulationes</i> in porticos open to the air. Of course
it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us
thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods
bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain
forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it
sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of
some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is,—I am out of
my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I
in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself,
and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are
called good works,—for this may sometimes happen.
</p>
<p>
My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked
almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet
exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can
still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me
to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had
not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.
There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the
landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an
afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never
become quite familiar to you.
</p>
<p>
Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of
houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply
deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who
would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences
half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly
miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place
around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for
an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing
in the middle of a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found
his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven,
and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.
</p>
<p>
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my
own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the
fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the
meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no
inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar.
The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their
burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce,
and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them
all,—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.
Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to
it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political
world, follow the great road,—follow that market-man, keep his dust in
your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place
merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field into
the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some
portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one
year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for
they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.
</p>
<p>
The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the
highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and
legs,—a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of
travellers. The word is from the Latin <i>villa</i>, which, together with
<i>via</i>, a way, or more anciently <i>ved</i> and <i>vella</i>, Varro derives
from <i>veho</i>, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which
things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said
<i>vellaturam facere</i>. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word <i>vilis</i>
and our vile; also <i>villain</i>. This suggests what kind of degeneracy
villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over
them, without travelling themselves.
</p>
<p>
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots.
Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much,
comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or
livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not
from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a
road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as
the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may
name it America, but it is not America: neither Atnericus Vespucius, nor
Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of
it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.
</p>
<p>
However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they
led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old
Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that
is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here,
because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.
</p>
<h5>THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.</h5>
<p class="poem">
Where they once dug for money,<br/>
But never found any;<br/>
Where sometimes Martial Miles<br/>
Singly files,<br/>
And Elijah Wood,<br/>
I fear for no good:<br/>
No other man,<br/>
Save Elisha Dugan,—<br/>
O man of wild habits,<br/>
Partridges and rabbits,<br/>
Who hast no cares<br/>
Only to set snares,<br/>
Who liv’st all alone,<br/>
Close to the bone,<br/>
And where life is sweetest<br/>
Constantly eatest.<br/>
When the spring stirs my blood<br/>
With the instinct to travel,<br/>
I can get enough gravel<br/>
On the Old Marlborough Road.<br/>
Nobody repairs it,<br/>
For nobody wears it;<br/>
It is a living way,<br/>
As the Christians say.<br/>
Not many there be<br/>
Who enter therein,<br/>
Only the guests of the<br/>
Irishman Quin.<br/>
What is it, what is it,<br/>
But a direction out there,<br/>
And the bare possibility<br/>
Of going somewhere?<br/>
Great guide-boards of stone,<br/>
But travellers none;<br/>
Cenotaphs of the towns<br/>
Named on their crowns.<br/>
It is worth going to see<br/>
Where you <i>might</i> be.<br/>
What king<br/>
Did the thing,<br/>
I am still wondering;<br/>
Set up how or when,<br/>
By what selectmen,<br/>
Gourgas or Lee,<br/>
Clark or Darby?<br/>
They’re a great endeavor<br/>
To be something forever;<br/>
Blank tablets of stone,<br/>
Where a traveller might groan,<br/>
And in one sentence<br/>
Grave all that is known;<br/>
Which another might read,<br/>
In his extreme need.<br/>
I know one or two<br/>
Lines that would do,<br/>
Literature that might stand<br/>
All over the land,<br/>
Which a man could remember<br/>
Till next December,<br/>
And read again in the spring,<br/>
After the thawing.<br/>
If with fancy unfurled<br/>
You leave your abode,<br/>
You may go round the world<br/>
By the Old Marlborough Road.<br/>
</p>
<p>
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative
freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into
so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive
pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other
engines invented to confine men to the <i>public</i> road, and walking over the
surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some
gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude
yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then,
before the evil days come.
</p>
<p class="p2">
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I
believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously
yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we
walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and
stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken
by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path
which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no
doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet
exist distinctly in our idea.
</p>
<p>
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my
steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and
whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest,
toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that
direction. My needle is slow to settle,—varies a few degrees, and does
not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this
variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future
lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that
side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a
parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought
to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house
occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for
a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk
into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go
free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall
find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern
horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that
the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward
the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence
to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the
wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into
the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not
believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I
must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is
moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few
years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the
settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and,
judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of
Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars
think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. “The world ends
there,” say they, “beyond there is nothing but a shoreless
sea.” It is unmitigated East where they live.
</p>
<p>
We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature,
retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a
spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our
passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its
institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance
for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in
the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.
</p>
<p>
I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity,
that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general
movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct
in birds and quadrupeds,—which, in some instances, is known to have
affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious
movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each
on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower
streams with their dead,—that something like the <i>furor</i> which
affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in
their tails,—affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or
from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to
some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I
should probably take that disturbance into account.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,<br/>
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as
distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate
westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer
whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the
horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.
The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort
of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients,
enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking
into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all
those fables?
</p>
<p>
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed
it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those days
scented fresh pastures from afar.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,<br/>
And now was dropped into the western bay;<br/>
At last <i>he</i> rose, and twitched his mantle blue;<br/>
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that
occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its
productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is?
Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees
are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States
there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in
height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later
botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to
realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its
greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic
wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer
Guyot, himself a European, goes farther,—farther than I am ready to
follow him; yet not when he says,— “As the plant is made for the
animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made
for the man of the Old World…. The man of the Old World sets out upon his way.
Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards
Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the
preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he
pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not,
and turns upon his footprints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the
rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his
adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” So far Guyot.
</p>
<p>
From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic
sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his
“Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,” says that the common
inquiry in the newly settled West was, “‘From what part of the
world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would
naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of
the globe.”
</p>
<p>
To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, <i>Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente</i>
<small>FRUX</small>. From the East light; from the West fruit.
</p>
<p>
Sir Francis, Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of Canada, tells
us that “in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World,
Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the
whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating
and in beautifying the Old World…. The heavens of America appear infinitely
higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon
looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is
vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher,
the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.” This
statement will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of this part
of the world and its productions.
</p>
<p>
Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies <i>laeta, glabra</i> plantis
Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of
American plants;” and I think that in this country there are no, or at
most very few, <i>Africanae bestiae</i>, African beasts, as the Romans called
them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation
of man. We are told that within three miles of the centre of the East-Indian
city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers;
but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North
America without fear of wild beasts.
</p>
<p>
These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in
Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear
infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are
symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her
inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will
appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as
much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man,—as
there is something in the mountain-air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will
not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under
these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his
life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be
clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky,—our understanding more
comprehensive and broader, like our plains,—our intellect generally on a
grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and
forests,—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and
grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveller
something, he knows not what, of <i>laeta</i> and <i>glabra</i>, of joyous and
serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was
America discovered?
</p>
<p>
To Americans I hardly need to say,—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”
</p>
<p class="noindent">
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more
favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.
</p>
<p>
Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though we may
be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There is the home of
the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their
inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to
understand even the slang of to-day.
</p>
<p>
Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of
the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than
imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes,
past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of
which was the subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck
and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me
chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and
valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated
along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic
age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.
</p>
<p>
Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way
up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted
the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians
moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle now
looked up the Ohio and the Missouri, and heard the legends of Dubuque and of
Wenona’s Cliff,—still thinking more of the future than of the past
or present,—I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that
the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet
to be thrown over the river; and I felt that <i>this was the heroic age
itself</i>, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and
obscurest of men.
</p>
<p class="p2">
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have
been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.
Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it
at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come
the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story
of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The
founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their
nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children
of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and
displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were.
</p>
<p>
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn
grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea.
There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere
gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other
antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our Northern Indians eat raw the
marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the
summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they
have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed
the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork
to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can
endure,—as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.
</p>
<p>
There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to which I
would migrate,—wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which,
methinks, I am already acclimated.
</p>
<p>
The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as
that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of
trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a
part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise
our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of Nature which he
most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper’s
coat emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that
which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the scholar’s
garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am
reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but
of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.
</p>
<p>
A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter
color than white for a man,—a denizen of the woods. “The pale white
man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist
says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant
bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one,
growing vigorously in the open fields.”
</p>
<p>
Ben Jonson exclaims,—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“How near to good is what is fair!”
</p>
<p class="noindent">
So I would say,—
</p>
<p class="poem">
How near to good is what is <i>wild</i>!
</p>
<p class="noindent">
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to
man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never
rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would
always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw
material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive
forest-trees.
</p>
<p>
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns
and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have
analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I
have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of
impermeable and unfathomable bog,—a natural sink in one corner of it.
That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the
swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the
village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf
andromeda <i>(Cassandra calyculata</i>) which cover these tender places on the
earth’s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the
shrubs which grow there,—the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda,
lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora,—all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I
often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red
bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim
box, even gravelled walks,—to have this fertile spot under my windows,
not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown
out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot,
instead of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for
a Nature and Art, which I call my front-yard? It is an effort to clear up and
make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though
done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful
front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most
elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me.
Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then, (though it may not be
the best place for a dry cellar,) so that there be no access on that side to
citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you
could go in the back way.
</p>
<p>
Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in
the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or
else of a Dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain,
then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!
</p>
<p>
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the
ocean, the desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude
compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of
it,—“Your <i>morale</i> improves; you become frank and cordial,
hospitable and single-minded….. In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only
disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.” They who
have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say,—“On
reëntering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of
civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we
felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” When I would recreate
myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to
the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place,—a
<i>sanctum sanctorum</i>. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. The
wild-wood covers the virgin mould,—and the same soil is good for men and
for trees. A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his
prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he
feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods
and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above,
while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise
not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In
such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness
comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.
</p>
<p>
To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to
dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in
our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive
and rugged trees, there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and
consolidated the fibres of men’s thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for
these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot
collect a load of bark of good thickness,—and we no longer produce tar
and turpentine.
</p>
<p>
The civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by
the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as
long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be
expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is
compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains
himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on
his marrow-bones.
</p>
<p>
It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin
soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions
unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian
even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some
respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single
straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp, at whose
entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance
to the infernal regions,—“Leave all hope, ye that
enter,”—that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw
my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property,
though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not
survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with
regard to a third swamp, which I did <i>survey</i> from a distance, he remarked
to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any
consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends
to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so
redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a
class.
</p>
<p>
The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which
should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and
the lance, but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe,
rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a
hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian’s cornfield into the
meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no
better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam-shell.
But the farmer is armed with plough and spade.
</p>
<p>
In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another
name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in
“Hamlet” and the “Iliad,” in all the Scriptures and
Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is
more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the
mallard—thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the
fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and
unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of
the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the
darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters
the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the
hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
</p>
<p>
English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,—
Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakspeare, included,—breathes
no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It is an essentially tame and
civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green
wood,—her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of
Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her
wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.
</p>
<p>
The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day,
notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of
mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.
</p>
<p>
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet
who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who
nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the
spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used
them,—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots;
whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand
like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between
two musty leaves in a library,—ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after
their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding
Nature.
</p>
<p>
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning
for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know
where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents
me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I
demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no
<i>culture</i>, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything.
How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in
than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before
its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with
blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All
other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this
is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and,
whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other
literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.
</p>
<p>
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of
the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine, having yielded their crop, it remains to
be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St.
Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of
ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some
extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired
by American mythology.
</p>
<p>
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may
not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and
Americans today. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common
sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage.
Some expressions of truth are reminiscent,— others merely
<i>sensible</i>, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some forms of
disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that
the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful
embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil
species which were extinct before man was created, and hence “indicate a
faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.”
The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant
coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise
has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I
confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of
time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The
partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.
</p>
<p>
In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of
music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice,—take the
sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,—which by its wildness,
to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in
their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give
me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the
savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers
meet.
</p>
<p>
I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights,—any
evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor;
as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring
and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide,
swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This
exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes,—already dignified.
The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses,
like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
</p>
<p>
Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen
bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldly sport, like huge
rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed
up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their
activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud
<i>Whoa</i>! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison
to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the
Evil One has cried, “Whoa!” to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle,
like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a
time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.
Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think
of a <i>side</i> of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a <i>side</i>
of beef?
</p>
<p>
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the
slaves of men, and that men themselves have some, wild oats still left to sow
before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not
equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and
sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others
should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level.
Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might
be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as
well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any
man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare
a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says,—“The
skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of
the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true culture
to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their
skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.
</p>
<p class="p2">
When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, as of
military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am
reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for
instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may
belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours
to them. It is as if they had been named by the child’s
rigmarole,—<i>Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan.</i> I see in my mind
a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has
affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are of course
as cheap and meaningless as <i>Bose</i> and <i>Tray</i>, the names of dogs.
</p>
<p>
Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in
the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and
perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to
believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his
own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own. At
present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar
energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly
supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no
name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among
some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a
man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.
</p>
<p>
I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in
herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It
may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the
woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere
recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet
William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when
asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear
pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some
jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.
</p>
<p class="p2">
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around,
with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet
we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is
exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in,
which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to
have a speedy limit.
</p>
<p>
In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain
precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men.
Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the
soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements
and modes of culture only!
</p>
<p>
Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both
intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he
honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.
</p>
<p>
There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman, discovered
“actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a
chemical effect,—that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of
metal, “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of
sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon
perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the
universe.” But he observed that “those bodies which underwent this
change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their
original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was
no-longer influencing them.” Hence it has been inferred that “the
hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night
and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not even does the moon shine every
night, but gives place to darkness.
</p>
<p>
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I
would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the
greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but
preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the
vegetation which it supports.
</p>
<p>
There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus
invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky
knowledge,—<i>Gramática parda</i>, tawny grammar,—a kind of
mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.
</p>
<p>
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said
that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful
Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our
boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us
of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our
positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient
industry and reading of the newspapers,—for what are the libraries of
science but files of newspapers?—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays
them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters
abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a
horse, and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,—Go to grass.
You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The
very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I
have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on
hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge treats its cattle.
</p>
<p>
A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but
beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than
useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,—he who
knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows
nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows
all?
</p>
<p>
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in
atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we
can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know
that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and
grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we
called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven
and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the
mist by the sun. Man cannot <i>know</i> in any higher sense than this, any more
than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of sun: Ὁς
τὶ νοῶν, οὐ
κεῖνον
νοήσεις,—“You will not perceive
that, as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.
</p>
<p>
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may
obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a
successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of
a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live
free, child of the mist,—and with respect to knowledge we are all
children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all
the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. “That is active
duty,” says the Vishnu Parana, “which is not for our bondage; that
is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto
weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.”
</p>
<p class="p2">
It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how
little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have had. I
would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth
disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be with struggle through long,
dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well, if all our lives were
a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan,
and others, appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they
were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges
do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a
good deal more to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly.
</p>
<p>
When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on
a railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by
some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,<br/>
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,<br/>
Traveller of the windy glens,<br/>
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”<br/>
</p>
<p>
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are
attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear to me for
the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not
often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little
appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be
told that the Greeks called the world Κόσμος,
Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it
at best only a curious philological fact.
</p>
<p>
For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on
the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transional and
transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose
territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I
call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs
and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to
it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one
of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my
native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their
owners’ deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the confines of the
actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word
Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself
surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a
mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the
glass; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath.
The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will
have no anniversary.
</p>
<p>
I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting
sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays
straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed
as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled
there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me,—to whom the
sun was servant,—who had not gone into society in the village,—who
had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through
the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with
gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious, to vision; the trees grew
through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity
or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters.
They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through
their hall, does not in the least put them out,—as the muddy bottom of a
pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of
Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,—notwithstanding I
heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the
serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it
painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They
are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they
were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing
was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a distant
hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle
thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not
as in knots and excrescences embayed.
</p>
<p>
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind
even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect myself. It is
only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I
become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as
this, I think I should move out of Concord.
</p>
<p class="p2">
We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us
every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and
fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our
minds is laid waste,—sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent
to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer
build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow
flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the <i>wings</i> of some
thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to
detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to
poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and
Cochin-China grandeur. Those <i>gra-a-ate thoughts</i>, those <i>gra-a-ate
men</i> you hear of!
</p>
<p class="p2">
We hug the earth,—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate
ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in
climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and
though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new
mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,—so much more of
the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for
threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But,
above all, I discovered around me,—it was near the end of June,—on
the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like
blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried
straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen
who walked the streets,—for it was court-week,—and to farmers and
lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the
like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient
architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the
lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute
blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and
unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the
meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs
of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red
children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has
ever seen them.
</p>
<p class="p2">
Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all
mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless
our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is
belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique
in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more
recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer
testament,—the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern;
he has got up early, and kept up early, and to be where he is to be in season,
in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness
of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst
forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time.
Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his
master many times since last he heard that note?
</p>
<p>
The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness.
The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can
excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful
stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the
house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself,
“There is one of us well, at any rate,”—and with a sudden
gush return to my senses.
</p>
<p class="p2">
We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow,
the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a
cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest,
brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees
in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side,
while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the
only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a
moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting
to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a
solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever
and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest
child that walked there, it was more glorious still.
</p>
<p>
The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the
glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has never
set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have his wings
gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some
little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander,
winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light,
gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought
I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it.
The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of
Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home
at evening.
</p>
<p>
So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more
brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and
hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and
serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap08"></a>AUTUMNAL TINTS.</h2>
<p class="center">
[1862.]
</p>
<p>
Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal
foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because
the trees acquire but few bright colors there. The most that Thomson says on
this subject in his “Autumn” is contained in the lines,—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“But see the fading many-colored woods,<br/>
Shade deepening over shade, the country round<br/>
Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun,<br/>
Of every hue, from wan declining green to sooty dark”:—<br/>
</p>
<p class="noindent">
and in the line in which he speaks of
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Autumn beaming o’er the yellow woods.”
</p>
<p>
The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our own
literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry.
</p>
<p>
A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never chanced to
come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the flower, or
rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding with one such citizen,
who, though a fortnight too, late for the most brilliant tints, was taken by
surprise, and would not believe that there had been any brighter. He had never
heard of this phenomenon before. Not only many in our towns have never
witnessed it, but it is scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.
</p>
<p>
Most appear to confound changed leaves with withered ones, as if they were to
confound ripe apples with rotten ones. I think that the change to some higher
color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a late and perfect
maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits. It is generally the lowest and
oldest leaves which change first. But as the perfect winged and usually
bright-colored insect is short-lived, so the leaves ripen but to fall.
</p>
<p>
Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it
commences a more independent and individual existence, requiring less
nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth through its
stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. So do leaves. The
physiologist says it is “due to an increased absorption of oxygen.”
That is the scientific account of the matter,—only a reassertion of the
fact. But I am more interested in the rosy cheek than I am to know what
particular diet the maiden fed on. The very forest and herbage, the pellicle of
the earth, must acquire a bright color, an evidence of its ripeness,—as
if the globe itself were a fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the sun.
</p>
<p>
Flowers are but colored leaves, fruits but ripe ones. The edible part of most
fruits is, as the physiologist says, “the parenchyma or fleshy tissue of
the leaf,” of which they are formed.
</p>
<p>
Our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its phenomena,
color, mellowness, and perfectness, to the fruits which we eat, and we are wont
to forget that an immense harvest which we do not eat, hardly use at all, is
annually ripened by Nature. At our annual Cattle Shows and Horticultural
Exhibitions, we make, as we think, a great show of fair fruits, destined,
however, to a rather ignoble end, fruits not valued for their beauty chiefly.
But round about and within our towns there is annually another show of fruits,
on an infinitely grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty
alone.
</p>
<p>
October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the
world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just
before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky;
November the later twilight.
</p>
<p>
I formerly thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen leaf from
each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had acquired its
brightest characteristic color, in its transition from the green to the brown
state, outline it, and copy its color exactly, with paint in a book, which
should be entitled, “<i>October, or Autumnal
Tints</i>”;—beginning with the earliest reddening,—Woodbine
and the lake of radical leaves, and coming down through the Maples, Hickories,
and Sumachs, and many beautifully freckled leaves less generally known, to the
latest Oaks and Aspens. What a memento such a book would be! You would need
only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the autumn woods whenever
you pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves themselves, unfaded, it would be
better still. I have made but little progress toward such a book, but I have
endeavored, instead, to describe all these bright tints in the order in which
they present themselves. The following are some extracts from my notes.
</p>
<h5>THE PURPLE GRASSES.</h5>
<p>
By the twentieth of August, everywhere in woods and swamps, we are reminded of
the fall, both by the richly spotted Sarsaparilla-leaves and Brakes, and the
withering and blackened Skunk-Cabbage and Hellebore, and, by the river-side,
the already blackening Pontederia.
</p>
<p>
The Purple Grass (<i>Eragròstis pectinàcea</i>) is now in the height of its
beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass particularly. Standing
on a hillside near our river, I saw, thirty or forty rods off, a stripe of
purple half a dozen rods long, under the edge of a wood, where the ground
sloped toward a meadow. It was as high-colored and interesting, though not
quite so bright, as the patches of Rhexia, being a darker purple, like a
berry’s stain laid on close and thick. On going to and examining it, I
found it to be a kind of grass in bloom, hardly a foot high, with but few green
blades, and a fine spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish
mist trembling around me. Close at hand it appeared but a dull purple, and made
little impression on the eye; it was even difficult to detect; and if you
plucked a single plant, you were surprised to find how thin it was, and how
little color it had. But viewed at a distance in a favorable light, it was of a
fine lively purple, flower-like, enriching the earth. Such puny causes combine
to produce these decided effects. I was the more surprised and charmed because
grass is commonly of a sober and humble color.
</p>
<p>
With its beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the place, of the
Rhexia, which is now leaving off, and it is one of the most interesting
phenomena of August. The finest patches of it grow on waste strips or selvages
of land at the base of dry hills, just above the edge of the meadows, where the
greedy mower does not deign to swing his scythe; for this is a thin and poor
grass, beneath his notice. Or, it may be, because it is so beautiful he does
not know that it exists; for the same eye does not see this and Timothy. He
carefully gets the meadow hay and the more nutritious grasses which grow next
to that, but he leaves this fine purple mist for the walker’s
harvest,—fodder for his fancy stock. Higher up the hill, perchance, grow
also Blackberries, John’s-Wort, and neglected, withered, and wiry
June-Grass. How fortunate that it grows in such places, and not in the midst of
the rank grasses which are annually cut! Nature thus keeps use and beauty
distinct. I know many such localities, where it does not fail to present itself
annually, and paint the earth with its blush. It grows on the gentle slopes,
either in a continuous patch or in scattered and rounded tufts a foot in
diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by the first smart frosts.
</p>
<p>
In most plants the corolla or calyx is the part which attains the highest
color, and is the most attractive; in many it is the seed-vessel or fruit; in
others, as the Red Maple, the leaves; and in others still it is the very culm
itself which is the principal flower or blooming part.
</p>
<p>
The last is especially the case with the Poke or Garget (<i>Phytolacca
decandra</i>). Some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with their
purple stems now and early in September. They are as interesting to me as most
flowers, and one of the most important fruits of our autumn. Every part is
flower, (or fruit,) such is its superfluity of color,—stem, branch,
peduncle, pedicel, petiole, and even the at length yellowish purple-veined
leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of berries of various hues, from green to dark
purple, six or seven inches long, are gracefully drooping on all sides,
offering repasts to the birds; and even the sepals from which the birds have
picked the berries are a brilliant lake-red, with crimson flame-like
reflections, equal to anything of the kind,—all on fire with ripeness.
Hence the <i>lacca</i>, from <i>lac</i>, lake. There are at the same time
flower-buds, flowers, green berries, dark purple or ripe ones, and these
flower-like sepals, all on the same plant.
</p>
<p>
We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the
color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a bright sun on it to
make it show to best advantage, and it must be seen at this season of the year.
On warm hillsides its stems are ripe by the twenty-third of August. At that
date I walked through a beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, on the
side of one of our cliffs, where they ripen early. Quite to the ground they
were a deep brilliant purple with a bloom, contrasting with the still clear
green leaves. It appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and
perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer. What a perfect
maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a
death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature
as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the
Poke! I confess that it excites me to behold them. I cut one for a cane, for I
would fain handle and lean on it. I love to press the berries between my
fingers, and see their juice staining my hand. To walk amid these upright,
branching casks of purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting
each one with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a
privilege! For Nature’s vintage is not confined to the vine. Our poets
have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never
saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers. Indeed,
this has been called by some the American Grape, and, though a native of
America, its juices are used in some foreign countries to improve the color of
the wine; so that the poetaster may be celebrating the virtues of the Poke
without knowing it. Here are berries enough to paint afresh the western sky,
and play the bacchanal with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems
would make, to be used in such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could
spend the evening of the year musing amid the Poke-stems. And perchance amid
these groves might arise at last a new school of philosophy or poetry. It lasts
all through September.
</p>
<p>
At the same time with this, or near the end of August, a to me very interesting
genus of grasses, Andropogons, or Beard-Grasses, is in its prime. <i>Andropogon
furcatus</i>, Forked Beard-Grass, or call it Purple-Fingered Grass;
<i>Andropogon scoparius,</i> Purple Wood Grass; and <i>Andropogon</i> (now
called <i>Sorghum</i>) <i>nutans</i>, Indian-Grass. The first is a very tall
and slender-culmed grass, three to seven feet high, with four or five purple
finger-like spikes raying upward from the top. The second is also quite
slender, growing in tufts two feet high by one wide, with culms often somewhat
curving, which, as the spikes go out of bloom, have a whitish fuzzy look. These
two are prevailing grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and
hillsides. The culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a
purple tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have the
more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer, and occupy
sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like ripe grapes, and
express a maturity which the spring did not suggest. Only the August sun could
have thus burnished these culms and leaves. The farmer has long since done his
upland haying, and he will not condescend to bring his scythe to where these
slender wild grasses have at length flowered thinly; you often see spaces of
bare sand amid them. But I walk encouraged between the tufts of Purple
Wood-Grass, over the sandy fields, and along the edge of the Shrub-Oaks, glad
to recognize these simple contemporaries. With thoughts cutting a broad swathe
I “get” them, with horse-raking thoughts I gather them into
windrows. The fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe. These two
were almost the first grasses that I learned to distinguish, for I had not
known by how many friends I was surrounded,—I had seen them simply as
grasses standing. The purple of their culms also excites me like that of the
Poke-Weed stems.
</p>
<p>
Think what refuge there is for one, before August is over, from college
commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the tufts of Purple
Wood-Grass on the borders of the “Great Fields.” Wherever I walk
these afternoons, the Purple-Fingered Grass also stands like a guide-board, and
points my thoughts to more poetic paths than they have lately travelled.
</p>
<p>
A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his head, and
cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have cut many tons of
them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to his cattle for years.
Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he may be overcome by their beauty.
Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some
thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it stands in vain! I had walked over
those Great Fields so many Augusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these
purple companions that I had there. I had brushed against them and trodden on
them, forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and blessed me.
Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised. Heaven might be
defined as the place which men avoid. Who can doubt that these grasses, which
the farmer says are of no account to him, find some compensation in your
appreciation of them? I may say that I never saw them before,—though,
when I came to look them face to face, there did come down to me a purple gleam
from previous years; and now, wherever I go, I see hardly anything else. It is
the reign and presidency of the Andropogons.
</p>
<p>
Almost the very sands confess the ripening influence of the August sun, and
methinks, together with the slender grasses waving over them, reflect a purple
tinge. The impurpled sands! Such is the consequence of all this sunshine
absorbed into the pores of plants and of the earth. All sap or blood is now
wine-colored. At last we have not only the purple sea, but the purple land.
</p>
<p>
The Chestnut Beard-Grass, Indian-Grass, or Wood-Grass, growing here and there
in waste places, but more rare than the former, (from two to four or five feet
high,) is still handsomer and of more vivid colors than its congeners, and
might well have caught the Indian’s eye. It has a long, narrow,
one-sided, and slightly nodding panicle of bright purple and yellow flowers,
like a banner raised above its reedy leaves. These bright standards are now
advanced on the distant hill-sides, not in large armies, but in scattered
troops or single file, like the red men. They stand thus fair and bright,
representative of the race which they are named after, but for the most part
unobserved as they. The expression of this grass haunted me for a week, after I
first passed and noticed it, like the glance of an eye. It stands like an
Indian chief taking a last look at his favorite hunting-grounds.
</p>
<h5>THE RED MAPLE.</h5>
<p>
By the twenty-fifth of September, the Red Maples generally are beginning to be
ripe. Some large ones have been conspicuously changing for a week, and some
single trees are now very brilliant. I notice a small one, half a mile off
across a meadow, against the green wood-side there, a far brighter red than the
blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. I have observed this tree
for several autumns invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one
tree ripens its fruit earlier than another. It might serve to mark the season,
perhaps. I should be sorry, if it were cut down. I know of two or three such
trees in different parts of our town, which might, perhaps, be propagated from,
as early ripeners or September trees, and their seed be advertised in the
market, as well as that of radishes, if we cared as much about them.
</p>
<p>
At present these burning bushes stand chiefly along the edge of the meadows, or
I distinguish them afar on the hillsides here and there. Sometimes you will see
many small ones in a swamp turned quite crimson when all other trees around are
still perfectly green, and the former appear so much the brighter for it. They
take you by surprise, as you are going by on one side, across the fields, thus
early in the season, as if it were some gay encampment of the red men, or other
foresters, of whose arrival you had not heard.
</p>
<p>
Some single trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen against others of their kind
still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more memorable than whole
groves will be by-and-by. How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great
scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost
spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable
object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be
believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by
tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.
</p>
<p>
The whole tree thus ripening in advance of its fellows attains a singular
preeminence, and sometimes maintains it for a week or two. I am thrilled at the
sight of it, bearing aloft its scarlet standard for the regiment of green-clad
foresters around, and I go half a mile out of my way to examine it. A single
tree becomes thus the crowning beauty of some meadowy vale, and the expression
of the whole surrounding forest is at once more spirited for it.
</p>
<p>
A small Red Maple has grown, perchance, far away at the head of some retired
valley, a mile from any road, unobserved. It has faithfully discharged the
duties of a Maple there, all winter and summer, neglected none of its
economies, but added to its stature in the virtue which belongs to a Maple, by
a steady growth for so many months, never having gone gadding abroad, and is
nearer heaven than it was in the spring. It has faithfully husbanded its sap,
and afforded a shelter to the wandering bird, has long since ripened its seeds
and committed them to the winds, and has the satisfaction of knowing, perhaps,
that a thousand little well-behaved Maples are already settled in life
somewhere. It deserves well of Mapledom. Its leaves have been asking it from
time to time, in a whisper, “When shall we redden?” And now, in
this month of September, this month of travelling, when men are hastening to
the sea-side, or the mountains, or the lakes, this modest Maple, still without
budging an inch, travels in its reputation,—runs up its scarlet flag on
that hillside, which shows that it has finished its summer’s work before
all other trees, and withdraws from the contest. At the eleventh hour of the
year, the tree which no scrutiny could have detected here when it was most
industrious is thus, by the tint of its maturity, by its very blushes, revealed
at last to the careless and distant traveller, and leads his thoughts away from
the dusty road into those brave solitudes which it inhabits. It flashes out
conspicuous with all the virtue and beauty of a Maple,—<i>Acer
rubrum</i>. We may now read its title, or <i>rubric</i>, clear. Its
<i>virtues</i>, not its sins, are as scarlet.
</p>
<p>
Notwithstanding the Red Maple is the most intense scarlet of any of our trees,
the Sugar-Maple has been the most celebrated, and Michaux in his
“Sylva” does not speak of the autumnal color of the former. About
the second of October, these trees, both large and small, are most brilliant,
though many are still green. In “sprout-lands” they seem to vie
with one another, and ever some particular one in the midst of the crowd will
be of a peculiarly pure scarlet, and by its more intense color attract our eye
even at a distance, and carry off the palm. A large Red-Maple swamp, when at
the height of its change, is the most obviously brilliant of all tangible
things, where I dwell, so abundant is this tree with us. It varies much both in
form and color. A great many are merely yellow, more scarlet, others scarlet
deepening into crimson, more red than common. Look at yonder swamp of Maples
mixed with Pines, at the base of a Pine-clad hill, a quarter of a mile off, so
that you get the full effect of the bright colors, without detecting the
imperfections of the leaves, and see their yellow, scarlet, and crimson fires,
of all tints, mingled and contrasted with the green. Some Maples are yet green,
only yellow or crimson-tipped on the edges of their flakes, like the edges of a
Hazel-Nut burr; some are wholly brilliant scarlet, raying out regularly and
finely every way, bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf; others, of more
irregular form, when I turn my head slightly, emptying out some of its
earthiness and concealing the trunk of the tree, seem to rest heavily flake on
flake, like yellow and scarlet clouds, wreath upon wreath, or like snowdrifts
driving through the air, stratified by the wind. It adds greatly to the beauty
of such a swamp at this season, that, even though there may be no other trees
interspersed, it is not seen as a simple mass of color, but, different trees
being of different colors and hues, the outline of each crescent tree-top is
distinct, and where one laps on to another. Yet a painter would hardly venture
to make them thus distinct a quarter of a mile off.
</p>
<p>
As I go across a meadow directly toward a low rising ground this bright
afternoon, I see, some fifty rods off toward the sun, the top of a Maple swamp
just appearing over the sheeny russet edge of the hill, a stripe apparently
twenty rods long by ten feet deep, of the most intensely brilliant scarlet,
orange, and yellow, equal to any flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted.
As I advance, lowering the edge of the hill which makes the firm foreground or
lower frame of the picture, the depth of the brilliant grove revealed steadily
increases, suggesting that the whole of the inclosed valley is filled with such
color. One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the town are not out to
see what the trees mean by their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing
that some mischief is brewing. I do not see what the Puritans did at this
season, when the Maples blaze out in scarlet. They certainly could not have
worshipped in groves then. Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and
fenced them round with horse-sheds for.
</p>
<h5>THE ELM.</h5>
<p>
Now, too, the first of October, or later, the Elms are at the height of their
autumnal beauty, great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their September oven,
hanging over the highway Their leaves are perfectly ripe. I wonder if there is
any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them. As I look
down our street, which is lined with them, they remind me both by their form
and color of yellowing sheaves of grain, as if the harvest had indeed come to
the village itself, and we might expect to find some maturity and <i>flavor</i>
in the thoughts of the villagers at last. Under those bright rustling yellow
piles just ready to fall on the heads of the walkers, how can any crudity or
greenness of thought or act prevail? When I stand where half a dozen large Elms
droop over a house, it is as if I stood within a ripe pumpkin-rind, and I feel
as mellow as if I were the pulp, though I may be somewhat stringy and seedy
withal. What is the late greenness of the English Elm, like a cucumber out of
season, which does not know when to have done, compared with the early and
golden maturity of the American tree? The street is the scene of a great
harvest-home. It would be worth the while to set out these trees, if only for
their autumnal value. Think of these great yellow canopies or parasols held
over our heads and houses by the mile together, making the village all one and
compact,—an <i>ulmarium</i>, which is at the same time a nursery of men!
And then how gently and unobserved they drop their burden and let in the sun
when it is wanted, their leaves not heard when they fall on our roofs and in
our streets; and thus the village parasol is shut up and put away! I see the
market-man driving into the village, and disappearing under its canopy of
Elm-tops, with <i>his</i> crop, as into a great granary or barn-yard. I am
tempted to go thither as to a husking of thoughts, now dry and ripe, and ready
to be separated from their integuments; but, alas! I foresee that it will be
chiefly husks and little thought, blasted pig-corn, fit only for
cob-meal,—for, as you sow, so shall you reap.
</p>
<h5>FALLEN LEAVES.</h5>
<p>
By the sixth of October the leaves generally begin to fall, in successive
showers, after frost or rain; but the principal leaf-harvest, the acme of the
<i>Fall</i>, is commonly about the sixteenth. Some morning at that date there
is perhaps a harder frost than we have seen, and ice formed under the pump, and
now, when the morning wind rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than
ever. They suddenly form thick beds or carpets on the ground, in this gentle
air, or even without wind, just the size and form of the tree above. Some
trees, as small Hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously,
as a soldier grounds arms at a signal; and those of the Hickory, being bright
yellow still, though withered, reflect a blaze of light from the ground where
they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at the first earnest touch of
autumn’s wand, making a sound like rain.
</p>
<p>
Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a fall of
leaves there has been in the night, though it may not yet be the touch that
loosens the Rock-Maple leaf. The streets are thickly strewn with the trophies,
and fallen Elm-leaves make a dark brown pavement under our feet. After some
remarkably warm Indian-summer day or days, I perceive that it is the unusual
heat which, more than anything, causes the leaves to fall, there having been,
perhaps, no frost nor rain for some time. The intense heat suddenly ripens and
wilts them, just as it softens and ripens peaches and other fruits, and causes
them to drop.
</p>
<p>
The leaves of late Red Maples, still bright, strew the earth, often
crimson-spotted on a yellow ground, like some wild apples,—though they
preserve these bright colors on the ground but a day or two, especially if it
rains. On causeways I go by trees here and there all bare and smoke-like,
having lost their brilliant clothing; but there it lies, nearly as bright as
ever, on the ground on one side, and making nearly as regular a figure as
lately on the tree, I would rather say that I first observe the trees thus flat
on the ground like a permanent colored shadow, and they suggest to look for the
boughs that bore them. A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant trees
have spread their bright cloaks in the mud. I see wagons roll over them as a
shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just as little as they did
their shadows before.
</p>
<p>
Birds’-nests, in the Huckleberry and other shrubs, and in trees, are
already being filled with the withered leaves. So many have fallen in the
woods, that a squirrel cannot run after a falling nut without being heard. Boys
are raking them in the streets, if only for the pleasure of dealing with such
clean crisp substances. Some sweep the paths scrupulously neat, and then stand
to see the next breath strew them with new trophies. The swamp-floor is thickly
covered, and the <i>Lycopodium lucidulum</i> looks suddenly greener amid them.
In dense woods they half-cover pools that are three or four rods long. The
other day I could hardly find a well-known spring, and even suspected that it
had dried up, for it was completely concealed by freshly fallen leaves; and
when I swept them aside and revealed it, it was like striking the earth, with
Aaron’s rod, for a new spring. Wet grounds about the edges of swamps look
dry with them. At one swamp, where I was surveying, thinking to step on a leafy
shore from a rail, I got into the water more than a foot deep. When I go to the
river the day after the principal fall of leaves, the sixteenth, I find my boat
all covered, bottom and seats, with the leaves of the Golden Willow under which
it is moored, and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I
empty it, it will be full again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to
be swept out, but accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my
carriage. When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large
fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it were getting out to sea,
with room to tack; but next the shore, a little farther up, they are thicker
than foam, quite concealing the water for a rod in width, under and amid the
Alders, Button-Bushes, and Maples, still perfectly light and dry, with fibre
unrelaxed; and at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning
wind, they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river.
When I turn my prow that way, and the wave which it makes strikes them, list
what a pleasant rustling from these dry substances grating on one another!
Often it is their undulation only which reveals the water beneath them. Also
every motion of the wood-turtle on the shore is betrayed by their rustling
there. Or even in mid-channel, when the wind rises, I hear them blown with a
rustling sound. Higher up they are slowly moving round and round in some great
eddy which the river makes, as that at the “Leaning Hemlocks,”
where the water is deep, and the current is wearing into the bank.
</p>
<p>
Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly calm and
full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream, and, turning up the
Assabet, reach a quiet cove, where I unexpectedly find myself surrounded by
myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers, which seem to have the same purpose,
or want of purpose, with myself. See this great fleet of scattered leaf-boats
which we paddle amid, in this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every
side by the sun’s skill, each nerve a stiff spruce-knee,—like boats
of hide, and of all patterns, Charon’s boat probably among the rest, and
some with lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients,
scarcely moving in the sluggish current,—like the great fleets, the dense
Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering some great mart,
some New York or Canton, which we are all steadily approaching together. How
gently each has been deposited on the water! No violence has been used towards
them yet, though, perchance, palpitating hearts were present at the launching.
And painted ducks, too, the splendid wood-duck among the rest, often come to
sail and float amid the painted leaves,—barks of a nobler model still!
</p>
<p>
What wholesome herb-drinks are to be had in the swamps now! What strong
medicinal, but rich, scents from the decaying leaves! The rain falling on the
freshly dried herbs and leaves, and filling the pools and ditches into which
they have dropped thus clean and rigid, will soon convert them into
tea,—green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of all degrees of strength,
enough to set all Nature a gossiping. Whether we drink them or not, as yet,
before their strength is drawn, these leaves, dried on great Nature’s
coppers, are of such various pure and delicate tints as might make the fame of
Oriental teas.
</p>
<p>
How they are mixed up, of all species, Oak and Maple and Chestnut and Birch!
But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect husbandman; she stores
them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This,
more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees
are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are
discounting. They are about to add a leaf’s thickness to the depth of the
soil. This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I chaffer
with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the cost of carting.
We are all the richer for their decay. I am more interested in this crop than
in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for
future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens. It keeps our
homestead in good heart.
</p>
<p>
For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not merely the
plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that we know, the
brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing Maple, the Poison-Sumach
blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry Ash, the rich chrome-yellow of the
Poplars, the brilliant red Huckleberry, with which the hills’ backs are
painted, like those of sheep. The frost touches them, and, with the slightest
breath of returning day or jarring of earth’s axle, see in what showers
they come floating down! The ground is all party-colored with them. But they
still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the
forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming
years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees, and the
sapling’s first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its
crown, when, in after-years, it has become the monarch of the forest.
</p>
<p>
It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling
leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down
and turn to mould!—painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds
of us living. So they troop to their last resting-place, light and frisky. They
put on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting the
spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods
about it,—some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering
beneath, and meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they rest
quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they
return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot
of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well
as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will
ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as
gracefully and as ripe,—with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed
their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.
</p>
<p>
When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love
to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain
epitaphs. What though you own no lot at Mount Auburn? Your lot is surely cast
somewhere in this vast cemetery, which has been consecrated from of old. You
need attend no auction to secure a place. There is room enough here. The
Loose-strife shall bloom and the Huckleberry-bird sing over your bones. The
woodman and hunter shall be your sextons, and the children shall tread upon the
borders as much as they will. Let us walk in the cemetery of the
leaves,—this is your true Greenwood Cemetery.
</p>
<h5>THE SUGAR-MAPLE.</h5>
<p>
But think not that the splendor of the year is over; for as one leaf does not
make a summer, neither does one falling leaf make an autumn. The smallest
Sugar-Maples in our streets make a great show as early as the fifth of October,
more than any other trees there. As I look up the Main Street, they appear like
painted screens standing before the houses; yet many are green. But now, or
generally by the seventeenth of October, when almost all Red Maples, and some
White Maples, are bare, the large Sugar-Maples also are in their glory, glowing
with yellow and red, and show unexpectedly bright and delicate tints. They are
remarkable for the contrast they often afford of deep blushing red on one half
and green on the other. They become at length dense masses of rich yellow with
a deep scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the exposed surfaces. They are the
brightest trees now in the street.
</p>
<p>
The large ones on our Common are particularly beautiful. A delicate, but warmer
than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with scarlet cheeks. Yet,
standing on the east side of the Common just before sundown, when the western
light is transmitted through them, I see that their yellow even, compared with
the pale lemon yellow of an Elm close by, amounts to a scarlet, without
noticing the bright scarlet portions. Generally, they are great regular oval
masses of yellow and scarlet. All the sunny warmth of the season, the
Indian-summer, seems to be absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and inmost
leaves next the bole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and green, like
the complexion of young men brought up in the house. There is an auction on the
Common to-day, but its red flag is hard to be discerned amid this blaze of
color.
</p>
<p>
Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success, when they
caused to be imported from farther in the country some straight poles with
their tops cut off, which they called Sugar-Maples; and, as I remember, after
they were set out, a neighboring merchant’s clerk, by way of jest,
planted beans about them. Those which were then jestingly called bean-poles are
to-day far the most beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth
all and more than they have cost,—though one of the selectmen, while
setting them out, took the cold which occasioned his death,—if only
because they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color
unstintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask them to yield us sugar in the
spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn. Wealth in-doors
may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally distributed on the Common. All
children alike can revel in this golden harvest.
</p>
<p>
Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October
splendor; though I doubt whether this is ever considered by the “Tree
Society.” Do you not think it will make some odds to these children that
they were brought up under the Maples? Hundreds of eyes are steadily drinking
in this color, and by these teachers even the truants are caught and educated
the moment they step abroad. Indeed, neither the truant nor the studious is at
present taught color in the schools. These are instead of the bright colors in
apothecaries’ shops and city windows. It is a pity that we have no more
<i>Red</i> Maples, and some Hickories, in our streets as well. Our paint-box is
very imperfectly filled. Instead of, or beside, supplying such paint-boxes as
we do, we might supply these natural colors to the young. Where else will they
study color under greater advantages? What School of Design can vie with this?
Think how much the eyes of painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth
and paper, and paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by
these autumnal colors. The stationer’s envelopes may be of very various
tints, yet, not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. If you want
a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have only to look farther
within or without the tree or the wood. These leaves are not many dipped in one
dye, as at the dye-house, but they are dyed in light of infinitely various
degrees of strength, and left to set and dry there.
</p>
<p>
Shall the names of so many of our colors continue to be derived from those of
obscure foreign localities, as Naples yellow, Prussian blue, raw Sienna, burnt
Umber, Gamboge?—(surely the Tyrian purple must have faded by this
time),—or from comparatively trivial articles of commerce,—
chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinnamon, claret?—(shall we compare our Hickory
to a lemon, or a lemon to a Hickory?)—or from ores and oxides which few
ever see? Shall we so often, when describing to our neighbors the color of
something we have seen, refer them, not to some natural object in our
neighborhood, but perchance to a bit of earth fetched from the other side of
the planet, which possibly they may find at the apothecary’s, but which
probably neither they nor we ever saw? Have we not an <i>earth</i> under our
feet,—ay, and a sky over our heads? Or is the last <i>all</i>
ultramarine? What do we know of sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, amber, and
the like,—most of us who take these names in vain? Leave these precious
words to cabinet-keepers, virtuosos, and maids-of-honor,— to the Nabobs,
Begums, and Chobdars of Hindostan, or wherever else. I do not see why, since
America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves should not
compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors; and, indeed, I
believe that in course of time the names of some of our trees and shrubs, as
well as flowers, will get into our popular chromatic nomenclature.
</p>
<p>
But of much more importance than a knowledge of the names and distinctions of
color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored leaves excite. Already
these brilliant trees throughout the street, without any more variety, are at
least equal to an annual festival and holiday, or a week of such. These are
cheap and innocent gala-days, celebrated by one and all without the aid of
committees or marshals, such a show as may safely be licensed, not attracting
gamblers or rum-sellers, not requiring any special police to keep the peace.
And poor indeed must be that New-England village’s October which has not
the Maple in its streets. This October festival costs no powder, nor ringing of
bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags
are waving.
</p>
<p>
No wonder that we must have our annual Cattle-Show, and Fall Training, and
perhaps Cornwallis, our September Courts, and the like. Nature herself holds
her annual fair in October, not only in the streets, but in every hollow and on
every hill-side. When lately we looked into that Red-Maple swamp all ablaze,
where the trees were clothed in their vestures of most dazzling tints, did it
not suggest a thousand gypsies beneath,—a race capable of wild
delight,—or even the fabled fawns, satyrs, and wood-nymphs come back to
earth? Or was it only a congregation of wearied wood-choppers, or of
proprietors come to inspect their lots, that we thought of? Or, earlier still,
when we paddled on the river through that fine-grained September air, did there
not appear to be something new going on under the sparkling surface of the
stream, a shaking of props, at least, so that we made haste in order to be up
in time? Did not the rows of yellowing Willows and Button-Bushes on each side
seem like rows of booths, under which, perhaps, some fluviatile egg-pop equally
yellow was effervescing? Did not all these suggest that man’s spirits
should rise as high as Nature’s,—should hang out their flag, and
the routine of his life be interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and
hilarity?
</p>
<p>
No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and
banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of
our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will
find the colored drapery,—flags of all her nations, some of whose private
signals hardly the botanist can read,—while we walk under the triumphal
arches of the Elms. Leave it to Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as
in neighboring States or not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if
they can understand them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her Woodbine flag!
What public-spirited merchant, think you, has contributed this part of the
show? There is no handsomer shingling and paint than this vine, at present
covering a whole side of some houses. I do not believe that the Ivy <i>never
sere</i> is comparable to it. No wonder it has been extensively introduced into
London. Let us have a good many Maples and Hickories and Scarlet Oaks, then, I
say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the
colors a village can display? A village is not complete unless it have these
trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town-clock. A
village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose,
an essential part is wanting. Let us have Willows for spring, Elms for summer,
Maples and Walnuts and Tupeloes for autumn, Evergreens for winter, and Oaks for
all seasons. What is a gallery in a house to a gallery in the streets, which
every market-man rides through, whether he will or not? Of course, there is not
a picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as is the
western view at sunset under the Elms of our main street. They are the frame to
a picture which is daily painted behind them. An avenue of Elms as large as our
largest and three miles long would seem to lead to some admirable place, though
only C—— were at the end of it.
</p>
<p>
A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering prospects to
keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two villages, one embowered in
trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial
and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall
be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted
religionists and the most desperate drinkers. Every washtub and milkcan and
gravestone will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind
their barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look to
see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most barren and
forlorn doctrine,—as that the world is speedily coming to an end, or has
already got to it, or that they themselves are turned wrong side outward. They
will perchance crack their dry joints at one another and call it a spiritual
communication.
</p>
<p>
But to confine ourselves to the Maples. What if we were to take half as much
pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out,—not stupidly tie
our horses to our dahlia-stems?
</p>
<p>
What meant the fathers by establishing this <i>perfectly living</i> institution
before the church,—this institution which needs no repairing nor
repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired by its growth? Surely
they
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Wrought in a sad sincerity;<br/>
Themselves from God they could not free;<br/>
They <i>planted</i> better than they knew;—<br/>
The conscious <i>trees</i> to beauty grew.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Verily these Maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which preach
their half-century, and century, ay, and century-and-a-half sermons, with
constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering to many generations of
men; and the least we can do is to supply them with suitable colleagues as they
grow infirm.
</p>
<h5>THE SCARLET OAK.</h5>
<p>
Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful form of its leaves,
I suspect that some Scarlet-Oak leaves surpass those of all other Oaks in the
rich and wild beauty of their outlines. I judge from an acquaintance with
twelve species, and from drawings which I have seen of many others.
</p>
<p>
Stand under this tree and see how finely its leaves are cut against the
sky,—as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a midrib. They
look like double, treble, or quadruple crosses. They are far more ethereal than
the less deeply scolloped Oak-leaves. They have so little leafy <i>terra
firma</i> that they appear melting away in the light, and scarcely obstruct our
view. The leaves of very young plants are, like those of full-grown Oaks of
other species, more entire, simple, and lumpish in their outlines; but these,
raised high on old trees, have solved the leafy problem. Lifted higher and
higher, and sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and
cultivating more intimacy with the light each year, they have at length the
least possible amount of earthy matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of
skyey influences. There they dance, arm in arm with the light,—tripping
it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial halls. So intimately
mingled are they with it, that, what with their slenderness and their glossy
surfaces, you can hardly tell at last what in the dance is leaf and what is
light. And when no zephyr stirs, they are at most but a rich tracery to the
forest-windows.
</p>
<p>
I am again struck with their beauty, when, a month later, they thickly strew
the ground in the woods, piled one upon another under my feet. They are then
brown above, but purple beneath. With their narrow lobes and their bold deep
scollops reaching almost to the middle, they suggest that the material must be
cheap, or else there has been a lavish expense in their creation, as if so much
had been cut out. Or else they seem to us the remnants of the stuff out of
which leaves have been cut with a die. Indeed, when they lie thus one upon
another, they remind me of a pile of scrap-tin.
</p>
<p>
Or bring one home, and study it closely at your leisure, by the fireside. It is
a type, not from any Oxford font, not in the Basque nor the arrow-headed
character, not found on the Rosetta Stone, but destined to be copied in
sculpture one day, if they ever get to whittling stone here. What a wild and
pleasing outline, a combination of graceful curves and angles! The eye rests
with equal delight on what is not leaf and on what is leaf,—on the broad,
free, open sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple
oval outline would include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf; but
how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep scollops, in which
the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed! If I were a drawing-master, I
would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to draw
firmly and gracefully.
</p>
<p>
Regarded as water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded
promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each side, while its
watery bays extend far inland, like sharp friths, at each of whose heads
several fine streams empty in,—almost a leafy archipelago.
</p>
<p>
But it oftener suggests land, and, as Dionysius and Pliny compared the form of
the Morea to that of the leaf of the Oriental Plane-tree, so this leaf reminds
me of some fair wild island in the ocean, whose extensive coast, alternate
rounded bays with smooth strands, and sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as
fitted for the habitation of man, and destined to become a centre of
civilization at last. To the sailor’s eye, it is a much-indented shore.
Is it not, in fact, a shore to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats?
At sight of this leaf we are all mariners,—if not vikings, buccaneers,
and filibusters. Both our love of repose and our spirit of adventure are
addressed. In our most casual glance, perchance, we think, that, if we succeed
in doubling those sharp capes, we shall find deep, smooth, and secure havens in
the ample bays. How different from the White-Oak leaf, with its rounded
headlands, on which no lighthouse need be placed! That is an England, with its
long civil history, that may be read. This is some still unsettled New-found
Island or Celebes. Shall we go and be rajahs there?
</p>
<p>
By the twenty-sixth of October the large Scarlet Oaks are in their prime, when
other Oaks are usually withered. They have been kindling their fires for a week
past, and now generally burst into a blaze. This alone of <i>our</i> indigenous
deciduous trees (excepting the Dogwood, of which I do not know half a dozen,
and they are but large bushes) is now in its glory. The two Aspens and the
Sugar-Maple come nearest to it in date, but they have lost the greater part of
their leaves. Of evergreens, only the Pitch-Pine is still commonly bright.
</p>
<p>
But it requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these phenomena, to
appreciate the wide-spread, but late and unexpected glory of the Scarlet Oaks.
I do not speak here of the small trees and shrubs, which are commonly observed,
and which are now withered, but of the large trees. Most go in and shut their
doors, thinking that bleak and colorless November has already come, when some
of the most brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit.
</p>
<p>
This very perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in an open
pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now, the twenty-sixth,
completely changed to bright dark scarlet,—every leaf, between you and
the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet dye. The whole tree is much
like a heart in form, as well as color. Was not this worth waiting for? Little
did you think, ten days ago, that that cold green tree would assume such color
as this. Its leaves are still firmly attached, while those of other trees are
falling around it. It seems to say,—“I am the last to blush, but I
blush deeper than any of ye. I bring up the rear in my red coat. We Scarlet
ones, alone of Oaks, have not given up the fight.”
</p>
<p>
The sap is now, and even far into November, frequently flowing fast in these
trees, as in Maples in the spring; and apparently their bright tints, now that
most other Oaks are withered, are connected with this phenomenon. They are full
of life. It has a pleasantly astringent, acorn-like taste, this strong
Oak-wine, as I find on tapping them with my knife.
</p>
<p>
Looking across this woodland valley, a quarter of a mile wide, how rich those
Scarlet Oaks, embosomed in Pines, their bright red branches intimately
intermingled with them! They have their full effect there. The Pine-boughs are
the green calyx to their red petals. Or, as we go along a road in the woods,
the sun striking endwise through it, and lighting up the red tents of the Oaks,
which on each side are mingled with the liquid green of the Pines, makes a very
gorgeous scene. Indeed, without the evergreens for contrast, the autumnal tints
would lose much of their effect.
</p>
<p>
The Scarlet Oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late October days. These
bring out its colors. If the sun goes into a cloud, they become comparatively
indistinct. As I sit on a cliff in the southwest part of our town, the sun is
now getting low, and the woods in Lincoln, south and east of me, are lit up by
its more level rays; and in the Scarlet Oaks, scattered so equally over the
forest, there is brought out a more brilliant redness than I had believed was
in them. Every tree of this species which is visible in those directions, even
to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift their red
backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge roses with a myriad of
fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a small grove of White Pines on
Pine Hill in the east, on the very verge of the horizon, alternating with the
Pines on the edge of the grove, and shouldering them with their red coats, look
like soldiers in red amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too.
Till the sun got low, I did not believe that there were so many red coats in
the forest army. Theirs is an intense burning red, which would lose some of its
strength, methinks, with every step you might take toward them; for the shade
that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at this distance, and they
are unanimously red. The focus of their reflected color is in the atmosphere
far on this side. Every such tree becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where,
with the declining sun, that color grows and glows. It is partly borrowed fire,
gathering strength from the sun on its way to your eye. It has only some
comparatively dull red leaves for a rallying-point, or kindling-stuff, to start
it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire, which finds fuel
for itself in the very atmosphere. So vivacious is redness. The very rails
reflect a rosy light at this hour and season. You see a redder tree than
exists.
</p>
<p>
If you wish to count the Scarlet Oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand thus on
a hill-top in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and every one within
range of your vision, excepting in the west, will be revealed. You might live
to the age of Methuselah and never find a tithe of them, otherwise. Yet
sometimes even in a dark day I have thought them as bright as I ever saw them.
Looking westward, their colors are lost in a blaze of light; but in other
directions the whole forest is a flower-garden, in which these late roses burn,
alternating with green, while the so-called “gardeners,” walking
here and there, perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, see only a few
little asters amid withered leaves.
</p>
<p>
These are <i>my</i> China-asters, <i>my</i> late garden-flowers. It costs me
nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are protecting
the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen, and you will have
garden enough, without deepening the soil in your yard. We have only to elevate
our view a little, to see the whole forest as a garden. The blossoming of the
Scarlet Oak,—the forest-flower, surpassing all in splendor, (at least
since the Maple)! I do not know but they interest me more than the Maples, they
are so widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy, a
nobler tree on the whole;—our chief November flower, abiding the approach
of winter with us, imparting warmth to early November prospects. It is
remarkable that the latest bright color that is general should be this deep,
dark scarlet and red, the intensest of colors. The ripest fruit of the year;
like the cheek of a hard, glossy, red apple, from the cold Isle of Orleans,
which will not be mellow for eating till next spring! When I rise to a hilltop,
a thousand of these great Oak roses, distributed on every side, as far as the
horizon! I admire them four or five miles off! This my unfailing prospect for a
fortnight past! This late forest-flower surpasses all that spring or summer
could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty specks comparatively, (created
for the near-sighted, who walk amid the humblest herbs and underwoods,) and
made no impression on a distant eye. Now it is an extended forest or a
mountain-side, through or along which we journey from day to day, that bursts
into bloom. Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale,—the
gardener still nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic
asters and roses, which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his
care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up against the
sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views, walk in the great
garden, not skulk in a little “debauched” nook of it? consider the
beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few impounded herbs?
</p>
<p>
Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If, about
the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our town, and
probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may see—well, what I
have endeavored to describe. All this you surely <i>will</i> see, and much
more, if you are prepared to see it,—if you <i>look</i> for it.
Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, whether you stand on
the hill-top or in the hollow, you will think for threescore years and ten that
all the wood is, at this season, sere and brown. Objects are concealed from our
view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as
because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no
power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not
realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The
greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us
all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener’s garden. Here, too,
as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast
pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the
landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more. The actual
objects which one man will see from a particular hill-top are just as different
from those which another will see as the beholders are different. The Scarlet
Oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see anything
until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,—and
then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical rambles, I find, that,
first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may seem
very foreign to this locality,—no nearer than Hudson’s
Bay,—and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it, and expecting it,
unconsciously, and at length I surely see it. This is the history of my finding
a score or more of rare plants, which I could name. A man sees only what
concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the study of grasses does not distinguish
the grandest Pasture Oaks. He, as it were, tramples down Oaks unwittingly in
his walk, or at most sees only their shadows. I have found that it required a
different intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different plants,
even when they were closely allied, as <i>Juncaceoe</i> and <i>Gramineoe</i>:
when I was looking for the former, I did not see the latter in the midst of
them. How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of
the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the
poet and the naturalist look at objects!
</p>
<p>
Take a New-England selectman, and set him on the highest of our hills, and tell
him to look,—sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting on the
glasses that suit him best, (ay, using a spy-glass, if he likes,)—and
make a full report. What, probably, will he <i>spy</i>?—what will he
<i>select</i> to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre of himself.
He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and, perhaps, that somebody ought
to be assessed higher than he is, since he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take
Julius Caesar, or Immanuel Swedenborg, or a Fegee-Islander, and set him up
there. Or suppose all together, and let them compare notes afterward. Will it
appear that they have enjoyed the same prospect? What they will see will be as
different as Rome was from Heaven or Hell, or the last from the Fegee Islands.
For aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always at our elbow.
</p>
<p>
Why, it takes a sharp-shooter to bring down even such trivial game as snipes
and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what he is aiming at.
He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at random into the sky, being
told that snipes were flying there. And so is it with him that shoots at
beauty; though he wait till the sky falls, he will not bag any, if he does not
already know its seasons and haunts, and the color of its wing,—if he has
not dreamed of it, so that he can <i>anticipate</i> it; then, indeed, he
flushes it at every step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels,
even in cornfields. The sportsman trains himself, dresses and watches
unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. He prays for it, and
offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. After due and long preparation, schooling
his eye and hand, dreaming awake and asleep, with gun and paddle and boat he
goes out after meadow-hens, which most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed
of, and paddles for miles against a head-wind, and wades in water up to his
knees, being out all day without his dinner, and <i>therefore</i> he gets them.
He had them half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them
down. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his windows:
what else has he windows or eyes for? It comes and perches at last on the
barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it <i>with the feathers
on</i>. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and honk when they get there,
and he will keep himself supplied by firing up his chimney; twenty musquash
have the refusal of each one of his traps before it is empty. If he lives, and
his game-spirit increases, heaven and earth shall fail him sooner than game;
and when he dies, he will go to more extensive, and, perchance, happier
hunting-grounds. The fisherman, too, dreams of fish, sees a bobbing cork in his
dreams, till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. I knew a girl who,
being sent to pick huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by the quart, where
no one else knew that there were any, because she was accustomed to pick them
up country where she came from. The astronomer knows where to go
star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind before any have seen it with a
glass. The hen scratches and finds her food right under where she stands; but
such is not the way with the hawk.
</p>
<p class="p2">
These bright leaves which I have mentioned are not the exception, but the rule;
for I believe that all leaves, even grasses and mosses, acquire brighter colors
just before their fall. When you come to observe faithfully the changes of each
humblest plant, you find that each has, sooner or later, its peculiar autumnal
tint; and if you undertake to make a complete list of the bright tints, it will
be nearly as long as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap09"></a>WILD APPLES.</h2>
<p class="center">
(1862.)
</p>
<h4>THE HISTORY OF THE APPLE-TREE.</h4>
<p>
It is remarkable how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with
that of man. The geologist tells us that the order of the <i>Rosaceae</i>,
which includes the Apple, also the true Grasses, and the <i>Labiatae</i> or
Mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on
the globe.
</p>
<p>
It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown primitive people
whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of the Swiss lakes, supposed
to be older than the foundation of Rome, so old that they had no metallic
implements. An entire black and shrivelled Crab-Apple has been recovered from
their stores.
</p>
<p>
Tacitus says of the ancient Germans, that they satisfied their hunger with wild
apples (<i>agrestia poma</i>) among other things.
</p>
<p>
Niebuhr observes that “the words for a house, a field, a plough,
ploughing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to agriculture
and the gentler way of life, agree in Latin and Greek, while the Latin words
for all objects pertaining to war or the chase are utterly alien from the
Greek.” Thus the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less
than the olive.
</p>
<p>
The apple was early so important, and generally distributed, that its name
traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general.
Μῆλον, in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of
other trees, also a sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general.
</p>
<p>
The apple-tree has been celebrated by the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and
Scandinavians. Some have thought that the first human pair were tempted by its
fruit. Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it, dragons were set to watch
it, and heroes were employed to pluck it.
</p>
<p>
The tree is mentioned in at least three places in the Old Testament, and its
fruit in two or three more. Solomon sings,—“As the apple-tree among
the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.” And
again,—“Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples.” The
noblest part of man’s noblest feature is named from this fruit,
“the apple of the eye.”
</p>
<p>
The apple-tree is also mentioned by Homer and Herodotus. Ulysses saw in the
glorious garden of Alcinous “pears and pomegranates, and apple-trees
bearing beautiful fruit” (καὶ
μηλέαι
ἀγλαόκαρποι). And
according to Homer, apples were among the fruits which Tantalus could not
pluck, the wind ever blowing their boughs away from him. Theophrastus knew and
described the apple-tree as a botanist.
</p>
<p>
According to the Prose Edda, “Iduna keeps in a box the apples which the
gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste of to become young
again. It is in this manner that they will be kept in renovated youth until
Ragnarök” (or the destruction of the gods).
</p>
<p>
I learn from Loudon that “the ancient Welsh bards were rewarded for
excelling in song by the token of the apple-spray;” and “in the
Highlands of Scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the-clan Lamont.”
</p>
<p>
The apple-tree (<i>Pyrus malus</i>) belongs chiefly to the northern temperate
zone. Loudon says, that “it grows spontaneously in every part of Europe
except the frigid zone, and throughout Western Asia, China, and Japan.”
We have also two or three varieties of the apple indigenous in North America.
The cultivated apple-tree was first introduced into this country by the
earliest settlers, and is thought to do as well or better here than anywhere
else. Probably some of the varieties which are now cultivated were first
introduced into Britain by the Romans.
</p>
<p>
Pliny, adopting the distinction of Theophrastus, says,—“Of trees
there are some which are altogether wild (<i>sylvestres</i>), some more
civilized (<i>urbaniores</i>).” Theophrastus includes the apple among the
last; and, indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees. It is
as harmless as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valuable as flocks and
herds. It has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is more humanized;
and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be no longer traceable to
its wild original? It migrates with man, like the dog and horse and cow: first,
perchance, from Greece to Italy, thence to England, thence to America; and our
Western emigrant is still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the
seeds of the apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his
load. At least a million apple-trees are thus set farther westward this year
than any cultivated ones grew last year. Consider how the Blossom-Week, like
the Sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the prairies; for when man
migrates, he carries with him not only his birds, quadrupeds, insects,
vegetables, and his very sward, but his orchard also.
</p>
<p>
The leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable food to many domestic animals, as
the cow, horse, sheep, and goat; and the fruit is sought after by the first, as
well as by the hog. Thus there appears to have existed a natural alliance
between these animals and this tree from the first. “The fruit of the
Crab in the forests of France” is said to be “a great resource for
the wild-boar.”
</p>
<p>
Not only the Indian, but many indigenous insects, birds, and quadrupeds,
welcomed the apple-tree to these shores. The tent-caterpillar saddled her eggs
on the very first twig that was formed, and it has since shared her affections
with the wild cherry; and the canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm
to feed on it. As it grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, king-bird,
and many more, came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs,
and so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. It was an era in
the history of their race. The downy woodpecker found such a savory morsel
under its bark, that he perforated it in a ring quite round the tree, before he
left it,—a thing which he had never done before, to my knowledge. It did
not take the partridge long to find out how sweet its buds were, and every
winter eve she flew, and still flies, from the wood, to pluck them, much to the
farmer’s sorrow. The rabbit, too, was not slow to learn the taste of its
twigs and bark; and when the fruit was ripe, the squirrel half-rolled,
half-carried it to his hole; and even the musquash crept up the bank from the
brook at evening, and greedily devoured it, until he had worn a path in the
grass there; and when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the jay were glad
to taste it occasionally. The owl crept into the first apple-tree that became
hollow, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for him; so,
settling down into it, he has remained there ever since.
</p>
<p>
My theme being the Wild Apple, I will merely glance at some of the seasons in
the annual growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to my special province.
</p>
<p>
The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree’s, so
copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. The walker is frequently
tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually handsome one, whose
blossoms are two thirds expanded. How superior it is in these respects to the
pear, whose blossoms are neither colored nor fragrant!
</p>
<p>
By the middle of July, green apples are so large as to remind us of coddling,
and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little ones which fall
still-born, as it were,—Nature thus thinning them for us. The Roman
writer Palladius said,—“If apples are inclined to fall before their
time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them.” Some such notion,
still surviving, may account for some of the stones which we see placed to be
overgrown in the forks of trees. They have a saying in Suffolk, England,—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“At Michaelmas time, or a little before,<br/>
Half an apple goes to the core.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that none
of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more to scent your
handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell in the shops. The fragrance
of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. Some gnarly
apple which I pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth
of Pomona,—carrying me forward to those days when they will be collected
in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.
</p>
<p>
A week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens, especially in the
evenings, you pass through a little region possessed by the fragrance of ripe
apples, and thus enjoy them without price, and without robbing anybody.
</p>
<p>
There is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and ethereal
quality which represents their highest value, and which cannot be vulgarized,
or bought and sold. No mortal has ever enjoyed the perfect flavor of any fruit,
and only the godlike among men begin to taste its ambrosial qualities. For
nectar and ambrosia are only those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which
our coarse palates fail to perceive,—just as we occupy the heaven of the
gods without knowing it. When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of
fair and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on
between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the other, and,
to my mind, the apples always gain it. Pliny says that apples are the heaviest
of all things, and that the oxen begin to sweat at the mere sight of a load of
them. Our driver begins to lose his load the moment he tries to transport them
to where they do not belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. Though he
gets out from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, I
see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to heaven from
his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going to market. They are
not apples, but pomace. Are not these still Iduna’s apples, the taste of
which keeps the gods forever young? and think you that they will let Loki or
Thjassi carry them off to Jötunheim, while they grow wrinkled and gray? No, for
Ragnarök, or the destruction of the gods, is not yet.
</p>
<p>
There is another thinning of the fruit, commonly near the end of August or in
September, when the ground is strewn with windfalls; and this happens
especially when high winds occur after rain. In some orchards you may see fully
three quarters of the whole crop on the ground, lying in a circular form
beneath the trees, yet hard and green,—or, if it is a hill-side, rolled
far down the hill. However, it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. All
the country over, people are busy picking up the windfalls, and this will make
them cheap for early apple-pies.
</p>
<p>
In October, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the trees. I
saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit than I remember
to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging over the road. The
branches were gracefully drooping with their weight, like a barberry-bush, so
that the whole tree acquired a new character. Even the topmost branches,
instead of standing erect, spread and drooped in all directions; and there were
so many poles supporting the lower ones, that they looked like pictures of
banian-trees. As an old English manuscript says, “The mo appelen the tree
bereth, the more sche boweth to the folk.”
</p>
<p>
Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let the most beautiful or the
swiftest have it. That should be the “going” price of apples.
</p>
<p>
Between the fifth and twentieth of October I see the barrels lie under the
trees. And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some choice barrels to
fulfil an order. He turns a specked one over many times before he leaves it
out. If I were to tell what is passing in my mind, I should say that every one
was specked which he had handled; for he rubs off all the bloom, and those
fugacious ethereal qualities leave it. Cool eveings prompt the farmers to make
haste, and at length I see only the ladders here and there left leaning against
the trees.
</p>
<p>
It would be well, if we accepted these gifts with more joy and gratitude, and
did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of compost about the tree.
Some old English customs are suggestive at least. I find them described chiefly
in Brand’s “Popular Antiquities.” It appears that “on
Christmas eve the farmers and their men in Devonshire take a large bowl of
cider, with a toast in it, and carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute
the apple-trees with much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next
season.” This salutation consists in “throwing some of the cider
about the roots of the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches,”
and then, “encircling one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they
drink the following toast three several times:—
</p>
<p class="poem">
‘Here’s to thee, old apple-tree,<br/>
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,<br/>
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!<br/>
Hats-full! caps-full!<br/>
Bushel, bushel, sacks-full!<br/>
And my pockets full, too! Hurra!’”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Also what was called “apple-howling” used to be practised in
various counties of England on New-Year’s eve. A troop of boys visited
the different orchards, and, encircling the apple-trees, repeated the following
words:—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Stand fast, root! bear well, top!<br/>
Pray God send us a good howling crop:<br/>
Every twig, apples big;<br/>
Every bow, apples enow!”<br/>
</p>
<p class="noindent">
“They then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a
cow’s horn. During this ceremony they rap the trees with their
sticks.” This is called “wassailing” the trees, and is
thought by some to be “a relic of the heathen sacrifice to Pomona.”
</p>
<p>
Herrick sings,—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Wassaile the trees that they may beare<br/>
You many a plum and many a peare;<br/>
For more or less fruits they will bring<br/>
As you so give them wassailing.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine; but it
behooves them to sing better than English Phillips did, else they will do no
credit to their Muse.
</p>
<h5>THE WILD APPLE.</h5>
<p>
So much for the more civilized apple-trees (<i>urbaniores</i>, as Pliny calls
them). I love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted apple-trees,
at whatever season of the year,—so irregularly planted: sometimes two
trees standing close together; and the rows so devious that you would think
that they not only had grown while the owner was sleeping, but had been set out
by him in a somnambulic state. The rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to
wander amid them like these. But I now, alas, speak rather from memory than
from any recent experience, such ravages have been made!
</p>
<p>
Some soils, like a rocky tract called the Easterbrooks Country in my
neighborhood, are so suited to the apple, that it will grow faster in them
without any care, or if only the ground is broken up once a year, than it will
in many places with any amount of care. The owners of this tract allow that the
soil is excellent for fruit, but they say that it is so rocky that they have
not patience to plough it, and that, together with the distance, is the reason
why it is not cultivated. There are, or were recently, extensive orchards there
standing without order. Nay, they spring up wild and bear well there in the
midst of pines, birches, maples, and oaks. I am often surprised to see rising
amid these trees the rounded tops of apple-trees glowing with red or yellow
fruit; in harmony with the autumnal tints of the forest.
</p>
<p>
Going up the side of a cliff about the first of November, I saw a vigorous
young apple-tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot up amid the rocks
and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it, uninjured by the frosts,
when all cultivated apples were gathered. It was a rank wild growth, with many
green leaves on it still, and made an impression of thorniness. The fruit was
hard and green, but looked as if it would be palatable in the winter. Some was
dangling on the twigs, but more half-buried in the wet leaves under the tree,
or rolled far down the hill amid the rocks. The owner knows nothing of it. The
day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it first bore fruit,
unless by the chickadee. There was no dancing on the green beneath it in its
honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its fruit,—which is only gnawed
by squirrels, as I perceive. It has done double duty,—not only borne this
crop, but each twig has grown a foot into the air. And this is <i>such</i>
fruit! bigger than many berries, we must admit, and carried home will be sound
and palatable next spring. What care I for Iduna’s apples so long as I
can get these?
</p>
<p>
When I go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling fruit, I
respect the tree, and I am grateful for Nature’s bounty, even though I
cannot eat it. Here on this rugged and woody hill-side has grown an apple-tree,
not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard, but a natural growth, like
the pines and oaks. Most fruits which we prize and use depend entirely on our
care. Corn and grain, potatoes, peaches, melons, etc., depend altogether on our
planting; but the apple emulates man’s independence and enterprise. It is
not simply carried, as I have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has
migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its way amid
the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild and
maintain themselves.
</p>
<p>
Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable
position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.
</p>
<h5>THE CRAB.</h5>
<p>
Nevertheless, <i>our</i> wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who
belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from
the cultivated stock. Wilder still, as I have said, there grows elsewhere in
this country a native and aboriginal Crab-Apple, <i>Malus coronaria</i>,
“whose nature has not yet been modified by cultivation.” It is
found from Western New-York to Minnesota, and southward. Michaux says that its
ordinary height “is fifteen or eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found
twenty-five or thirty feet high,” and that the large ones “exactly
resemble the common apple-tree.” “The flowers are white mingled
with rose-color, and are collected in corymbs.” They are remarkable for
their delicious odor. The fruit, according to him, is about an inch and a half
in diameter, and is intensely acid. Yet they make fine sweetmeats, and also
cider of them. He concludes, that “if, on being cultivated, it does not
yield new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the
beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume.”
</p>
<p>
I never saw the Crab-Apple till May, 1861. I had heard of it through Michaux,
but more modern botanists, so far as I know, have not treated it as of any
peculiar importance. Thus it was a half-fabulous tree to me. I contemplated a
pilgrimage to the “Glades,” a portion of Pennsylvania where it was
said to grow to perfection. I thought of sending to a nursery for it, but
doubted if they had it, or would distinguish it from European varieties. At
last I had occasion to go to Minnesota, and on entering Michigan I began to
notice from the cars a tree with handsome rose-colored flowers. At first I
thought it some variety of thorn; but it was not long before the truth flashed
on me, that this was my long-sought Crab-Apple. It was the prevailing flowering
shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at that season of the year,—about
the middle of May. But the cars never stopped before one, and so I was launched
on the bosom of the Mississippi without having touched one, experiencing the
fate of Tantalus. On arriving at St. Anthony’s Falls, I was sorry to be
told that I was too far north for the Crab-Apple. Nevertheless I succeeded in
finding it about eight miles west of the Falls; touched it and smelled it, and
secured a lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. This must have been
near its northern limit.
</p>
<h5>HOW THE WILD APPLE GROWS.</h5>
<p>
But though these are indigenous, like the Indians, I doubt whether they are any
hardier than those backwoodsmen among the apple-trees, which, though descended
from cultivated stocks, plant themselves in distant fields and forests, where
the soil is favorable to them. I know of no trees which have more difficulties
to contend with, and which more sturdily resist their foes. These are the ones
whose story we have to tell. It oftentimes reads thus:—
</p>
<p>
Near the beginning of May, we notice little thickets of apple-trees just
springing up in the pastures where cattle have been,—as the rocky ones of
our Easterbrooks Country, or the top of Nobscot Hill, in Sudbury. One or two of
these perhaps survive the drought and other accidents,—their very
birthplace defending them against the encroaching grass and some other dangers,
at first.
</p>
<p class="poem">
In two years’ time ’t had thus<br/>
Reached the level of the rocks,<br/>
Admired the stretching world,<br/>
Nor feared the wandering flocks.<br/>
<br/>
But at this tender age<br/>
Its sufferings began:<br/>
There came a browsing ox<br/>
And cut it down a span.<br/>
</p>
<p>
This time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid the grass; but the next
year, when it has grown more stout, he recognizes it for a fellow-emigrant from
the old country, the flavor of whose leaves and twigs he well knows; and though
at first he pauses to welcome it, and express his surprise, and gets for
answer, “The same cause that brought you here brought me,” he
nevertheless browses it again, reflecting, it may be, that he has some title to
it.
</p>
<p>
Thus cut down annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two short twigs
for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or
between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree
as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and
impenetrable as a rock. Some of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of
bushes that I have ever seen, as well on account of the closeness and
stubbornness of their branches as of their thorns, have been these wild-apple
scrubs. They are more like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand,
and sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they
contend with, than anything else. No wonder they are prompted to grow thorns at
last, to defend themselves against such foes. In their thorniness, however,
there is no malice, only some malic acid.
</p>
<p>
The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred to,—for they maintain
their ground best in a rocky field,—are thickly sprinkled with these
little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or lichens, and you
see thousands of little trees just springing up between them, with the seed
still attached to them.
</p>
<p>
Being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge with
shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form, from one to four
feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by the gardener’s art.
In the pastures on Nobscot Hill and its spurs, they make fine dark shadows when
the sun is low. They are also an excellent covert from hawks for many small
birds that roost and build in them. Whole flocks perch in them at night, and I
have seen three robins’ nests in one which was six feet in diameter.
</p>
<p>
No doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the day they
were planted, but infants still when you consider their development and the
long life before them. I counted the annual rings of some which were just one
foot high, and as wide as high, and found that they were about twelve years
old, but quite sound and thrifty! They were so low that they were unnoticed by
the walker, while many of their contemporaries from the nurseries were already
bearing considerable crops. But what you gain in time is perhaps in this case,
too, lost in power,—that is, in the vigor of the tree. This is their
pyramidal state.
</p>
<p>
The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping them
down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad that they
become their own fence, when some interior shoot, which their foes cannot
reach, darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten its high calling, and
bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph.
</p>
<p>
Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now, if you
have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see that it is no
longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its apex there rises a sprig
or two, growing more lustily perchance than an orchard-tree, since the plant
now devotes the whole of its repressed energy to these upright parts. In a
short time these become a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex
of the other, so that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. The
spreading bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the
generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in its shade,
and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in spite of them, and
even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse the seed.
</p>
<p>
Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its hour-glass
being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.
</p>
<p>
It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should trim young
apple-trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes. The ox trims them up
as high as he can reach, and that is about the right height, I think.
</p>
<p>
In spite of wandering kine, and other adverse circumstances, that despised
shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter from hawks, has its
blossom-week at last, and in coarse of time its harvest, sincere, though small.
</p>
<p>
By the end of some October, when its leaves have fallen, I frequently see such
a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I thought it had forgotten
its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop of small green or yellow or rosy
fruit, which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and thorny hedge which
surrounds it, and I make haste to taste the new and undescribed variety. We
have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and
Knight. This is the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more and more
memorable varieties than both of them.
</p>
<p>
Through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit! Though somewhat
small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that which has grown
in a garden,—will perchance be all the sweeter and more palatable for the
very difficulties it has had to contend with. Who knows but this chance wild
fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on some remote and rocky hillside, where it
is as yet unobserved by man, may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign
potentates shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though
the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard
of,—at least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter
and the Baldwin grew.
</p>
<p>
Every wild-apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild
child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to man! So are human
beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they
suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate; and only the most persistent
and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward
at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and
philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast
the hosts of unoriginal men.
</p>
<p>
Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden
apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which
never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.
</p>
<p>
This is one, and the most remarkable way, in which the wild apple is
propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and swamps,
and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows with comparative
rapidity. Those which grow in dense woods are very tall and slender. I
frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly mild and tamed fruit. As
Palladius says, “<i>Et injussu consternitur ubere mali</i>”: And
the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden apple-tree.
</p>
<p>
It is an old notion, that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable fruit of
their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to posterity the most
highly prized qualities of others. However, I am not in search of stocks, but
the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust has suffered no
“inteneration.” It is not my
</p>
<p class="poem">
“highest plot<br/>
To plant the Bergamot.”
</p>
<h5>THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR.</h5>
<p>
The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of November. They
then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still perhaps as
beautiful as ever. I make a great account of these fruits, which the farmers do
not think it worth the while to gather,—wild flavors of the Muse,
vivacious and inspiriting. The farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels,
but he is mistaken, unless he has a walker’s appetite and imagination,
neither of which can he have.
</p>
<p>
Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November, I presume
that the owner does not mean to gather. They belong to children as wild as
themselves,—to certain active boys that I know,—to the wild-eyed
woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who gleans after all the
world,—and, moreover, to us walkers. We have met with them, and they are
ours. These rights, long enough insisted upon, have come to be an institution
in some old countries, where they have learned how to live. I hear that
“the custom of grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was
formerly, practised in Herefordshire. It consists in leaving a few apples,
which are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering, for
the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them.”
</p>
<p>
As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this quarter
of the earth,—fruit of old trees that have been dying ever since I was a
boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the woodpecker and the squirrel,
deserted now by the owner, who has not faith enough to look under their boughs.
From the appearance of the tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect
nothing but lichens to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the
ground strewn with spirited fruit,—some of it, perhaps, collected at
squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried
them,—some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and some,
especially in damp days, a shelless snail. The very sticks and stones lodged in
the tree-top might have convinced you of the savoriness of the fruit which has
been so eagerly sought after in past years.
</p>
<p>
I have seen no account of these among the “Fruits and Fruit-Trees of
America,” though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted
kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess, when October and
November, when December and January, and perhaps February and March even, have
assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my neighborhood, who always selects
the right word, says that “they have a kind of bow-arrow tang.”
</p>
<p>
Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much for
their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and bearing
qualities,—not so much for their beauty, as for their fairness and
soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists of pomological
gentlemen. Their “Favorites” and “None-suches” and
“Seek-no-farthers,” when I have fruited them, commonly turn out
very tame and forgetable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest, and
have no real <i>tang</i> nor <i>smack</i> to them.
</p>
<p>
What if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine <i>verjuice</i>,
do they not still belong to the <i>Pomaceae</i>, which are uniformly innocent
and kind to our race? I still begrudge them to the cider-mill. Perhaps they are
not fairly ripe yet.
</p>
<p>
No wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make the best
cider. Loudon quotes from the “Herefordshire Report,” that
“apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be preferred
to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel may bear the
greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the weakest and most watery
juice.” And he says, that, “to prove this, Dr. Symonds, of
Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider entirely from the
rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp only, when the first was
found of extraordinary strength and flavor, while the latter was sweet and
insipid.”
</p>
<p>
Evelyn says that the “Red-strake” was the favorite cider-apple in
his day; and he quotes one Dr. Newburg as saying, “In Jersey ’t is
a general observation, as I hear, that the more of red any apple has in its
rind, the more proper it is for this use. Pale-faced apples they exclude as
much as may be from their cider-vat.” This opinion still prevails.
</p>
<p>
All apples are good in November. Those which the farmer leaves out as
unsalable, and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets, are choicest
fruit to the walker. But it is remarkable that the wild apple, which I praise
as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into
the house, has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste. The Saunterer’s
Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. The palate rejects it there,
as it does haws and acorns, and demands a tamed one; for there you miss the
November air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with. Accordingly, when
Tityrus, seeing the lengthening shadows, invites Meliboeus to go home and pass
the night with him, he promises him <i>mild</i> apples and soft
chestnuts,—<i>mitia poma, castaneae molles</i>. I frequently pluck wild
apples of so rich and spicy a flavor that I wonder all orchardists do not get a
scion from that tree, and I fail not to bring home my pockets full. But
perchance, when I take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber, I find it
unexpectedly crude,—sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge
and make a jay scream.
</p>
<p>
These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed
the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly <i>seasoned,</i>
and they <i>pierce</i> and <i>sting</i> and <i>permeate</i> us with their
spirit. They must be eaten in <i>season</i>, accordingly,—that is,
out-of-doors.
</p>
<p>
To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is
necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. The out-door
air and exercise which the walker gets give a different tone to his palate, and
he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh and crabbed. They must
be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, when the
frosty weather nips your fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles
the few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. What is sour
in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be
labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”
</p>
<p>
Of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the taste that is
up to them. Some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps one-half of them
must be eaten in the house, the other out-doors. One Peter Whitney wrote from
Northborough in 1782, for the Proceedings of the Boston Academy, describing an
apple-tree in that town “producing fruit of opposite qualities, part of
the same apple being frequently sour and the other sweet;” also some all
sour, and others all sweet, and this diversity on all parts of the tree.
</p>
<p>
There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuck Hill in my town which has to me a
peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three-quarters
tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it smells exactly like a
squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and relish it.
</p>
<p>
I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum-tree in Provence is “called
<i>Prunes sibarelles</i>, because it is impossible to whistle after having
eaten them, from their sourness.” But perhaps they were only eaten in the
house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging atmosphere, who
knows but you could whistle an octave higher and clearer?
</p>
<p>
In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated; just as the
wood-chopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle of a winter day,
with content, basks in a sunny ray there and dreams of summer in a degree of
cold which, experienced in a chamber, would make a student miserable. They who
are at work abroad are not cold, but rather it is they who sit shivering in
houses. As with temperatures, so with flavors; as, with cold and heat, so with
sour and sweet. This natural raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased
palate refuses, are the true condiments.
</p>
<p>
Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate the
flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses,
<i>papillae</i> firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily flattened
and tamed.
</p>
<p>
From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason
for a savage’s preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man
rejects. The former has the palate of an out-door man. It takes a savage or
wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.
</p>
<p>
What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the
apple of the world, then!
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Nor is it every apple I desire,<br/>
Nor that which pleases every palate best;<br/>
’T is not the lasting Deuxan I require,<br/>
Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,<br/>
Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife,<br/>
Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife:<br/>
No, no I bring me an apple from the tree of life.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
So there is one <i>thought</i> for the field, another for the house. I would
have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not
warrant them to be palatable, if tasted in the house.
</p>
<h5>THEIR BEAUTY.</h5>
<p>
Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and
rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the
eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed or sprinkled on some
protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that the summer lets an apple go
without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere. It will have some
red stains, commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark
and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have
passed over it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of
Nature,—green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a
milder flavor,—yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.
</p>
<p>
Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,—apples not of Discord, but of
Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share. Painted by
the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their
spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the influence of the sun on all
sides alike,—some with the faintest pink blush imaginable,— some
brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red
rays running regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional
lines, on a straw-colored ground,—some touched with a greenish rust, like
a fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less
confluent and fiery when wet,—and others gnarly, and freckled or peppered
all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white ground, as if
accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints the autumn leaves.
Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused with a beautiful blush, fairy
food, too beautiful to eat,—apple of the Hesperides, apple of the evening
sky! But like shells and pebbles on the sea-shore, they must be seen as they
sparkle amid the withering leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal
air, or as they lie in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded
in the house.
</p>
<h5>THE NAMING OF THEM.</h5>
<p>
It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties
which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not tax a man’s
invention,—no one to be named after a man, and all in the <i>lingua
vernacula</i>? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples?
It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the
<i>lingua vernacula</i> flag. We should have to call in the sunrise and the
sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the
woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly,
the November traveller and the truant boy, to our aid.
</p>
<p>
In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society more than
fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which they have not in
their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our Crab might yield to
cultivation.
</p>
<p>
Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all, to give
the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live where English is not
spoken,—for they are likely to have a world-wide reputation.
</p>
<p>
There is, first of all, the Wood-Apple (<i>Malus sylvatica</i>); the Blue-Jay
Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods, (<i>sylvestrivallis</i>,)
also in Hollows in Pastures (<i>campestrivallis</i>); the Apple that grows in
an old Cellar-Hole (<i>Malus cellaris</i>); the Meadow-Apple; the
Partridge-Apple; the Truant’s Apple, (<i>Cessatoris</i>,) which no boy
will ever go by without knocking off some, however <i>late</i> it may be; the
Saunterer’s Apple,—you must lose yourself before you can find the
way to that; the Beauty of the Air (<i>Decus Aeris</i>); December-Eating; the
Frozen-Thawed <i>(gelato-soluta),</i> good only in that state; the Concord
Apple, possibly the same with the <i>Musketaquidensis</i>; the Assabet Apple;
the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple
<i>(Malus viridis);</i>—this has many synonymes; in an imperfect state,
it is the <i>Cholera morbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis
dilectissima</i>;—the Apple which Atalanta stopped to pick up; the
Hedge-Apple <i>(Malus Sepium</i>); the Slug-Apple <i>(limacea)</i>; the
Railroad-Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the
Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our Particular Apple, not to be found
in any catalogue,—<i>Pedestrium Solatium</i>; also the Apple where hangs
the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna’s Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in
the Wood; and a great many more I have on my list, too numerous to
mention,—all of them good. As Bodaeus exclaims, referring to the
cultivated kinds, and adapting Virgil to his case, so I, adapting
Bodaeus,—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,<br/>
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms<br/>
And reckon up all the names of these <i>wild apples</i>.”<br/>
</p>
<h5>THE LAST GLEANING.</h5>
<p>
By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy,
and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the ground, and the sound
ones are more palatable than before. The note of the chickadee sounds now more
distinct, as you wander amid the old trees, and the autumnal dandelion is
half-closed and tearful. But still, if you are a skilful gleaner, you may get
many a pocket-full even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be
gone out-of-doors. I know a Blue-Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of a
swamp, almost as good as wild. You would not suppose that there was any fruit
left there, on the first survey, but you must look according to system. Those
which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show
one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with
experienced eyes, I explore amid the bare alders and the huckleberry-bushes and
the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves,
and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder
leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen
into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree
itself,—a proper kind of packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere
within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet and
glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets and perhaps with
a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript from a
monastery’s mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it, and at
least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, more crisp
and lively than they. If these resources fail to yield anything, I have learned
to look between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some
horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an
alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have
smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I
fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve,
being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and
then from that, to keep my balance.
</p>
<p>
I learn from Topsell’s Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus,
that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries home
his apples. He says,—“His meat is apples, worms, or grapes: when he
findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon them, until he
have filled all his prickles, and then carrieth them home to his den, never
bearing above one in his mouth; and if it fortune that one of them fall off by
the way, he likewise shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them
afresh, until they be all settled upon his back again. So, forth he goeth,
making a noise like a cart-wheel; and if he have any young ones in his nest,
they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what they
please, and laying up the residue for the time to come.”
</p>
<h5>THE “FROZEN-THAWED” APPLE.</h5>
<p>
Toward the end of November, though some of the sound ones are yet more mellow
and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves, lost their
beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is finger-cold, and prudent farmers get
in their barrelled apples, and bring you the apples and cider which they have
engaged; for it is time to put them into the cellar. Perhaps a few on the
ground show their red cheeks above the early snow, and occasionally some even
preserve their color and soundness under the snow throughout the winter. But
generally at the beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though
undecayed, acquire the color of a baked apple.
</p>
<p>
Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first thawing.
Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the
civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun
come to thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to
be filled with a rich, sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know
of, and with which I am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good
in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have more
substance, are a sweet and luscious food,—in my opinion of more worth
than the pine-apples which are imported from the West Indies. Those which
lately even I tasted only to repent of it,—for I am
semi-civilized,—which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I am now
glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the young oaks.
It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. Let the frost come to freeze
them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw
them, and they will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the
medium of the air in which they hang. Or perchance you find, when you get home,
that those which rattled in your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to
cider. But after the third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be
found so good.
</p>
<p>
What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid South, to this fruit
matured by the cold of the frigid North? These are those crabbed apples with
which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that I might tempt him to
eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets with them,—bending to drink
the cup and save our lappets from the overflowing juice,—and grow more
social with their wine. Was there one that hung so high and sheltered by the
tangled branches that our sticks could not dislodge it?
</p>
<p>
It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,—quite distinct
from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and cider,—and it is
not every winter that produces it in perfection.
</p>
<p class="p2">
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably
become extinct in New England. You may still wander through old orchards of
native fruit of great extent, which for the most part went to the cider-mill,
now all gone to decay. I have heard of an orchard in a distant town, on the
side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and lay four feet deep against a
wall on the lower side, and this the owner cut down for fear they should be
made into cider. Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of
grafted fruit, no native apple-trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted
pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out. I fear
that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure
of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he
will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I
doubt if so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my town as there were a
century ago, when those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men
both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees
cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to
stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see nobody
planting trees to-day in such out-of-the-way places, along the lonely roads and
lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now that they have grafted
trees, and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plat by their houses,
and fence them in,—and the end of it all will be that we shall be
compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.
</p>
<p>
This is “The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.
</p>
<p>
“Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the
land!<br/>
Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?…<br/>
</p>
<p>
“That which the palmer-worm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that
which the locust hath left hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which the
canker-worm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten.
</p>
<p>
“Awake, ye drunkards, and weep! and howl, all ye drinkers of wine,
because of the new wine! for it is cut off from your mouth.
</p>
<p>
“For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose
teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek-teeth of a great lion.
</p>
<p>
“He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig-tree; he hath made it
clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white….
</p>
<p>
“Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen! howl, O ye vine-dressers!…
</p>
<p>
“The vine is dried up, and the fig-tree languisheth; the
pomegranate-tree, the palm-tree also, and the apple-tree, even all the trees of
the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of
men.”
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap10"></a>NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT.</h2>
<p>
Chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago, I resolved to
take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another side of nature: I have
done so.
</p>
<p>
According to Pliny, there is a stone in Arabia called Selenites, “wherein
is a white, which increases and decreases with the moon.” My journal for
the last year or two, has been <i>selenitic</i> in this sense.
</p>
<p>
Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to
explore it,—to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover
the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what
fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found? In the
Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all
Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to
the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black
Nile that concerns us.
</p>
<p>
I shall be a benefactor if I conquer some realms from the night, if I report to
the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season worthy of their
attention,—if I can show men that there is some beauty awake while they
are asleep,—if I add to the domains of poetry.
</p>
<p>
Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon discovered that
I was acquainted only with its complexion, and as for the moon, I had seen her
only as it were through a crevice in a shutter, occasionally. Why not walk a
little way in her light?
</p>
<p>
Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month,
commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in literature or
religion? But why not study this Sanscrit? What if one moon has come and gone
with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular
suggestions,—so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have
not used her? One moon gone by unnoticed?
</p>
<p>
I think it was Dr. Chalmers who said, criticising Coleridge, that for his part
he wanted ideas which he could see all round, and not such as he must look at
away up in the heavens. Such a man, one would say, would never look at the
moon, because she never turns her other side to us. The light which comes from
ideas which have their orbit as distant from the earth, and which is no less
cheering and enlightening to the benighted traveller than that of the moon and
stars, is naturally reproached or nicknamed as moonshine by such. They are
moonshine, are they? Well, then do your night-travelling when there is no moon
to light you; but I will be thankful for the light that reaches me from the
star of least magnitude. Stars are lesser or greater only as they appear to us
so. I will be thankful that I see so much as one side of a celestial
idea,—one side of the rainbow,—and the sunset sky.
</p>
<p>
Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very
well, and despised them; as owls might talk of sunshine. None of your
sunshine,—but this word commonly means merely something which they do not
understand,—which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be
worth their while to be up and awake to it.
</p>
<p>
It must be allowed that the light of the moon, sufficient though it is for the
pensive walker, and not disproportionate to the inner light we have, is very
inferior in quality and intensity to that of the sun. But the moon is not to be
judged alone by the quantity of light she sends to us, but also by her
influence on the earth and its inhabitants. “The moon gravitates toward
the earth, and the earth reciprocally toward the moon.” The poet who
walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be
referred to lunar influence. I will endeavor to separate the tide in my
thoughts from the current distractions of the day. I would warn my hearers that
they must not try my thoughts by a daylight standard, but endeavor to realize
that I speak out of the night. All depends on your point of view. In
Drake’s “Collection of Voyages,” Wafer says of some Albinoes
among the Indians of Darien, “They are quite white, but their whiteness
is like that of a horse, quite different from the fair or pale European, as
they have not the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion. * * * Their
eyebrows are milk-white, as is likewise the hair of their heads, which is very
fine. * * * They seldom go abroad in the daytime, the sun being disagreeable to
them, and causing their eyes, which are weak and poring, to water, especially
if it shines towards them, yet they see very well by moonlight, from which we
call them moon-eyed.”
</p>
<p>
Neither in our thoughts in these moonlight walks, methinks, is there “the
least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion,” but we are
intellectually and morally Albinoes,—children of Endymion,—such is
the effect of conversing much with the moon.
</p>
<p>
I complain of Arctic voyagers that, they do not enough remind us of the
constant peculiar dreariness of the scenery, and the perpetual twilight of the
Arctic night. So he whose theme is moonlight, though he may find it difficult,
must, as it were, illustrate it with the light of the moon alone.
</p>
<p>
Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a very different season. Take a
July night, for instance. About ten o’clock,—when man is asleep,
and day fairly forgotten,—the beauty of moonlight is seen over lonely
pastures where cattle are silently feeding. On all sides novelties present
themselves. Instead of the sun there are the moon and stars, instead of the
wood-thrush there is the whip-poor-will,—instead of butterflies in the
meadows, fire-flies, winged sparks of fire! who would have believed it? What
kind of cool deliberate life dwells in those dewy abodes associated with a
spark of fire? So man has fire in his eyes, or blood, or brain. Instead of
singing birds, the half-throttled note of a cuckoo flying over, the croaking of
frogs, and the intenser dream of crickets. But above all, the wonderful trump
of the bull-frog, ringing from Maine to Georgia. The potato-vines stand
upright, the corn grows apace, the bushes loom, the grain-fields are boundless.
On our open river terraces once cultivated by the Indian, they appear to occupy
the ground like an army,— their heads nodding in the breeze.
</p>
<p>
Small trees and shrubs are seen in the midst, overwhelmed as by an inundation.
The shadows of rocks and trees, and shrubs and hills, are more conspicuous than
the objects themselves. The slightest irregularities in the ground are revealed
by the shadows, and what the feet find comparatively smooth, appears rough and
diversified in consequence. For the same reason the whole landscape is more
variegated and picturesque than by day. The smallest recesses in the rocks are
dim and cavernous; the ferns in the wood appear of tropical size. The sweet
fern and indigo in overgrown wood-paths wet you with dew up to your middle. The
leaves of the shrub-oak are shining as if a liquid were flowing over them. The
pools seen through the trees are as full of light as the sky. “The light
of the day takes refuge in their bosoms,” as the Purana says of the
ocean. All white objects are more remarkable than by day. A distant cliff looks
like a phosphorescent space on a hillside. The woods are heavy and dark. Nature
slumbers. You see the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in the
recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on. These small
fractions of her light remind one of the plant called moon-seed,—as if
the moon were sowing it in such places.
</p>
<p>
In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head. Other senses
take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant
and field and forest emits its odor now, swamp-pink in the meadow and tansy in
the road; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show
its tassels. The senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert. We hear
the tinkling of rills which we never detected before. From time to time, high
up on the sides of hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air. A blast which
has come up from the sultry plains of noon. It tells of the day, of sunny
noon-tide hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming
amid flowers. It is an air in which work has been done,—which men have
breathed. It circulates about from wood-side to hill-side like a dog that has
lost its master, now that the sun is gone. The rocks retain all night the
warmth of the sun which they have absorbed. And so does the sand. If you dig a
few inches into it you find a warm bed. You lie on your back on a rock in a
pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the height
of the starry canopy. The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance
surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing one
very windy but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint,
thought that a man could get along with <i>them</i>,—though he was
considerably reduced in his circumstances,—that they were a kind of bread
and cheese that never failed.
</p>
<p>
No wonder that there have been astrologers, that some have conceived that they
were personally related to particular stars. Dubartas, as translated by
Sylvester, says he’ll
</p>
<p class="poem">
“not believe that the great architect<br/>
With all these fires the heavenly arches decked<br/>
Only for show, and with these glistering shields,<br/>
T’ awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields.”<br/>
He’ll “not believe that the least flower which pranks<br/>
Our garden borders, or our common banks,<br/>
And the least stone, that in her warming lap<br/>
Our mother earth doth covetously wrap,<br/>
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,<br/>
And that the glorious stars of heav’n have none.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
And Sir Walter Raleigh well says, “the stars are instruments of far
greater use, than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after
sunset;” and he quotes Plotinus as affirming that they “are
significant, but not efficient;” and also Augustine as saying,
“<i>Deus regit inferiora corpora per superiora</i>:” God rules the
bodies below by those above. But best of all is this which another writer has
expressed: “<i>Sapiens adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola
terrae naturam</i>:” a wise man assisteth the work of the stars as the
husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil.
</p>
<p>
It does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very important
to the traveller, whether the moon shines brightly or is obscured. It is not
easy to realize the serene joy of all the earth, when she commences to shine
unobstructedly, unless you have often been abroad alone in moonlight nights.
She seems to be waging continual war with the clouds in your behalf. Yet we
fancy the clouds to be <i>her</i> foes also. She comes on magnifying her
dangers by her light, revealing, displaying them in all their hugeness and
blackness, then suddenly casts them behind into the light concealed, and goes
her way triumphant through a small space of clear sky.
</p>
<p>
In short, the moon traversing, or appearing to traverse, the small clouds which
lie in her way, now obscured by them, now easily dissipating and shining
through them, makes the drama of the moonlight night to all watchers and
night-travellers. Sailors speak of it as the moon eating up the clouds. The
traveller all alone, the moon all alone, except for his sympathy, overcoming
with incessant victory whole squadrons of clouds above the forests and lakes
and hills. When she is obscured he so sympathizes with her that he could whip a
dog for her relief, as Indians do. When she enters on a clear field of great
extent in the heavens, and shines unobstructedly, he is glad. And when she has
fought her way through all the squadron of her foes, and rides majestic in a
clear sky unscathed, and there are no more any obstructions in her path, he
cheerfully and confidently pursues his way, and rejoices in his heart, and the
cricket also seems to express joy in its song.
</p>
<p>
How insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and darkness
did not come to restore the drooping world. As the shades begin to gather
around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our
lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and
brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect.
</p>
<p>
Richter says that “The earth is every day overspread with the veil of
night for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened, viz: that we may
the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and
quiet of darkness. Thoughts which day turns into smoke and mist, stand about us
in the night as light and flames; even as the column which fluctuates above the
crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a
pillar of fire.”
</p>
<p>
There are nights in this climate of such serene and majestic beauty, so
medicinal and fertilizing to the spirit, that methinks a sensitive nature would
not devote them to oblivion, and perhaps there is no man but would be better
and wiser for spending them out of doors, though he should sleep all the next
day to pay for it; should sleep an Endymion sleep, as the ancients expressed
it,—nights which warrant the Grecian epithet ambrosial, when, as in the
land of Beulah, the atmosphere is charged with dewy fragrance, and with music,
and we take our repose and have our dreams awake,—when the moon, not
secondary to the sun,
</p>
<p class="poem">
“gives us his blaze again,<br/>
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.<br/>
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,<br/>
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Diana still hunts in the New England sky.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“In Heaven queen she is among the spheres.<br/>
She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.<br/>
Eternity in her oft change she bears;<br/>
She Beauty is; by her the fair endure.<br/>
<br/>
Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;<br/>
Mortality below her orb is placed;<br/>
By her lie virtues of the stars down slide;<br/>
By her is Virtue’s perfect image cast.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the last stage
of bodily existence.
</p>
<p>
Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter. In a mild night, when the harvest
or hunter’s moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our village,
whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only a master. The
village street is then as wild as the forest. New and old things are
confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the
material which is to compose a new one. Nature is an instructed and impartial
teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither
radical nor conservative. Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!
</p>
<p>
The light is more proportionate to our knowledge than that of day. It is no
more dusky in ordinary nights, than our mind’s habitual atmosphere, and
the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated moments are.
</p>
<p class="poem">
“In such a night let me abroad remain<br/>
Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again.”<br/>
</p>
<p>
Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward
dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning
reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.
</p>
<p>
When Ossian in his address to the sun exclaims,
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Where has darkness its dwelling?<br/>
Where is the cavernous home of the stars,<br/>
When thou quickly followest their steps,<br/>
Pursuing them like a hunter in the sky,—<br/>
Thou climbing the lofty hills,<br/>
They descending on barren mountains?”<br/>
</p>
<p>
who does not in his thought accompany the stars to their “cavernous
home,” “descending” with them “on barren
mountains?”
</p>
<p>
Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see through
the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day, where the sunbeams
are revelling.
</p>
<h5>THE END.</h5>
</div><!--end chapter-->
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