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Title: Excursions

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Release Date: October 23, 2003 [EBook #9846]
Last updated: December 24, 2019

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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Excursions

by Henry David Thoreau

1863

Contents

 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
 NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
 A WALK TO WACHUSETT
 THE LANDLORD
 A WINTER WALK
 THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES
 WALKING
 AUTUMNAL TINTS
 WILD APPLES
 NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT




BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
BY R.W. EMERSON.


HENRY DAVID THOREAU 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 _à l’outrance_, 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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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 _bon mots_ 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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
_Arnica mollis_.

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.

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
_you_ ride, then?”—and what accusing silences, and what searching and
irresistible speeches, battering down all defences, his companions can
remember!

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.

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
_Victoria regia_ 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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:—

“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]

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.

“I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning’s lore.”


And still more in these religious lines:—

“Now chiefly is my natal hour,
And only now my prime of life;
I will not doubt the love untold,
Which not my worth or want hath bought,
Which wooed me young, and wooes me old,
And to this evening hath me brought.”


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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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 _savans_ 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?”

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!

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.

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 _Mikania scandens_, 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.”

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.

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout
in the milk.”

“The chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper salted.”

“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.”

“The locust z-ing.”

“Devil’s-needles zigzagging along the Nut-Meadow brook.”

“Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear.”

“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.”

“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”

“The tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the
leaves.”

“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.”

“Immortal water, alive even to the superficies.”

“Fire is the most tolerable third party.”

“Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that
line.”

“No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the beech.”

“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?”

“Hard are the times when the infant’s shoes are second-foot.”

“We are strictly confined to our men to whom we give liberty.”

“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be
popular with God himself.”

“Of what significance the things you can forget? A little thought is
sexton to all the world.”

“How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of
character?”

“Only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to
expectations.”

“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.”

There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our
summer plant called “Life-Everlasting,” a _Gnaphalium_ 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
_Gnaphalium leontopodium_, but by the Swiss _Edelweisse_, which
signifies _Noble Purity_. 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.




EXCURSIONS




NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS.[1]


[1842.]

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.

Within the circuit of this plodding life,
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring strews them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievances.
I have remembered when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
On every twig and rail and jutting spout,
The icy spears were adding to their length
Against the arrows of the coming sun,
How in the shimmering noon of summer past
Some unrecorded beam slanted across
The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew;
Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,
The bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag
Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,
Which now through all its course stands still and dumb
Its own memorial,—purling at its play
Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,
Until its youthful sound was hushed at last
In the staid current of the lowland stream;
Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,
And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,
When all the fields around lay bound and hoar
Beneath a thick integument of snow.
So by God’s cheap economy made rich
To go upon my winter’s task again.


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.

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.

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.

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.

“We pronounce thee happy, Cicada,
For on the tops of the trees,
Drinking a little dew,
Like any king thou singest,
For thine are they all,
Whatever thou seest in the fields,
And whatever the woods bear.
Thou art the friend of the husbandmen,
In no respect injuring any one;
And thou art honored among men,
Sweet prophet of summer.
The Muses love thee,
And Phoebus himself loves thee,
And has given thee a shrill song;
Age does not wrack thee,
Thou skilful, earthborn, song-loving,
Unsuffering, bloodless one;
Almost thou art like the gods.”


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.

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[2] 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;—

His steady sails he never furls
At any time o’ year,
And perching now on Winter’s curls,
He whistles in his ear.


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

RETURN OF SPRING.


“Behold, how Spring appearing,
The Graces send forth roses;
Behold, how the wave of the sea
Is made smooth by the calm;
Behold, how the duck dives;
Behold, how the crane travels;
And Titan shines constantly bright.
The shadows of the clouds are moving;
The works of man shine;
The earth puts forth fruits;
The fruit of the olive puts forth.
The cup of Bacchus is crowned,
Along the leaves, along the branches,
The fruit, bending them down, flourishes.”


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.

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.

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.

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.

Each summer sound
Is a summer round.


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.

Sometimes-I hear the veery’s[3] clarion,
Or brazen trump of the impatient jay,
And in secluded woods the chicadee
Doles out her scanty notes, which sing the praise
Of heroes, and set forth the loveliness
Of virtue evermore.


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.

Upon the lofty elm-tree sprays
The vireo rings the changes sweet,
During the trivial summer days,
Striving to lift our thoughts above the street.


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.

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.

Thou dusky spirit of the wood,
Bird of an ancient brood,
Flitting thy lonely way,
A meteor in the summer’s day,
From wood to wood, from hill to hill,
Low over forest, field, and rill,
What wouldst thou say?
Why shouldst thou haunt the day?
What makes thy melancholy float?
What bravery inspires thy throat,
And bears thee up above the clouds,
Over desponding human crowds,
Which far below
Lay thy haunts low?


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have experienced such simple delight in the trivial matters of
fishing
and sporting, formerly, as might have inspired the muse of Homer or
Shakspeare; and now, when I turn the pages and ponder the plates of the
Angler’s Souvenir, I am fain to exclaim,—


               “Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer’s cloud?”


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.

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.

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.

I see the civil sun drying earth’s tears,
Her tears of joy, which only faster flow.


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.

The river swelleth more and more,
Like some sweet influence stealing o’er
The passive town; and for a while
Each tussuck makes a tiny isle,
Where, on some friendly Ararat,
Resteth the weary water-rat.

No ripple shows Musketaquid,
Her very current e’en is hid,
As deepest souls do calmest rest,
When thoughts are swelling in the breast,
And she that in the summer’s drought
Doth make a rippling and a rout,
Sleeps from Nabshawtuck to the Cliff,
Unruffled by a single skiff.
But by a thousand distant hills
The louder roar a thousand rills,
And many a spring which now is dumb,
And many a stream with smothered hum,
Doth swifter well and faster glide,
Though buried deep beneath the tide.

Our village shows a rural Venice,
Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;
As lovely as the Bay of Naples
Yon placid cove amid the maples;
And in my neighbor’s field of corn
I recognize the Golden Horn.

Here Nature taught from year to year,
When only red men came to hear,
Methinks ’twas in this school of art
Venice and Naples learned their part;
But still their mistress, to my mind,
Her young disciples leaves behind.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In May, the snapping turtle, _Emysaurus serpentina,_ 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.

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.

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 _their_ 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.”

That common muscle, the _Unio complanalus_, or more properly
_fluviatilis_, 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Quadrupeds deserved a more final and instructive report than they
have obtained.

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.

 [2] 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.


 [3] 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 “_yorrick_,”
 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.


 [1] _Reports—on the Fishes, Reptiles, and Birds; the Herbaceous Plants
 and Quadrupeds; the Insects Injurious to Vegetation; and the
 Invertebrate Animals of Massachusetts_. Published agreeably to an
 Order of the Legislature, by the Commissioners on the Zoölogical and
 Botanical Survey of the State.




A WALK TO WACHUSETT.


[1843.]

The needles of the pine
All to the west incline.

CONCORD, _July_ 19, 1842.

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.—

With frontier strength ye stand your ground,
With grand content ye circle round,
Tumultuous silence for all sound,
Ye distant nursery of rills,
Monadnock, and the Peterboro’ hills;
Like some vast fleet,
Sailing through rain and sleet,
Through winter’s cold and summer’s heat;
Still holding on, upon your high emprise,
Until ye find a shore amid the skies;
Not skulking close to land,
With cargo contraband.
For they who sent a venture out by ye
Have set the sun to see
Their honesty.
Ships of the line, each one,
Ye to the westward run,
Always before the gale,
Under a press of sail,
With weight of metal all untold.
I seem to feel ye, in my firm seat here,
Immeasurable depth of hold,
And breadth of beam, and length of running gear.

Methinks ye take luxurious pleasure
In your novel western leisure;
So cool your brows, and freshly blue,
As Time had nought for ye to do;
For ye lie at your length,
An unappropriated strength,
Unhewn primeval timber,
For knees so stiff, for masts so limber;
The stock of which new earths are made,
One day to be our western trade,
Fit for the stanchions of a world
Which through the seas of space is hurled.

While we enjoy a lingering ray,
Ye still o’ertop the western day,
Reposing yonder, on God’s croft,
Like solid stacks of hay.
Edged with silver, and with gold,
The clouds hang o’er in damask fold,
And with such depth of amber light
The west is dight,
Where still a few rays slant,
That even heaven seems extravagant.
On the earth’s edge mountains and trees
Stand as they were on air graven,
Or as the vessels in a haven
Await the morning breeze.
I fancy even
Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven;
And yonder still, in spite of history’s page,
Linger the golden and the silver age;
Upon the laboring gale
The news of future centuries is brought,
And of new dynasties of thought,
From your remotest vale.

But special I remember thee,
Wachusett, who like me
Standest alone without society.
Thy far blue eye,
A remnant of the sky,
Seen through the clearing or the gorge,
Or from the windows on the forge,
Doth leaven all it passes by.
Nothing is true,
But stands ’tween me and you,
Thou western pioneer,
Who know’st not shame nor fear,
By venturous spirit driven,
Under the eaves of heaven,
And can’st expand thee there,
And breathe enough of air?
Upholding heaven, holding down earth,
Thy pastime from thy birth,
Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other;
May I approve myself thy worthy brother!


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.

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.

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.

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.

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 _Way_-tatic, _Way_-chusett, but _Wor_-tatic,
_Wor_-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.

We could get no further into the Aeneid than

—atque altae moenia Romae,
—and the wall of high Rome,


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.

“He shook honey from the leaves, and removed fire,
And stayed the wine, everywhere flowing in rivers;
That experience, by meditating, might invent various arts
By degrees, and seek the blade of corn in furrows,
And strike out hidden fire from the veins of the flint.”


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.

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 _gelidae valles_ 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.

“The sultry sun had gained the middle sky,
And not a tree, and not an herb was nigh.”


and with melancholy pleasure we echoed the melodious plaint of our
fellow-traveller, Hassan, in the desert,—

“Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,
When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way.”


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.

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

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 _debut_ 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.

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.

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.

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:

“And he had lain beside his asses,
On lofty Cheviot hills.”

“And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales,
Among the rocks and winding _scars_,
Where deep and low the hamlets lie
Beneath their little patch of sky,
And little lot of stars.”


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,

Not unconcerned Wachusett rears his head
    Above the field, so late from nature won,
With patient brow reserved, as one who read
    New annals in the history of man.


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.

Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant,
Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.


And now the tops of the villas smoke afar off,
And the shadows fall longer from the high mountains.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Swearers are swift, sayd lyttle John,
    As the wind blows over the hill;
For if it be never so loud this night,
    To-morrow it may be still.”


And so it went up hill and down till a stone interrupted the line, when
a new verse was chosen.

“His shoote it was but loosely shot,
    Yet flewe not the arrowe in vaine,
For it met one of the sheriffe’s men,
    And William-a-Trent was slaine.”


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.

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.

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.

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.




THE LANDLORD.


[1843.]

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.

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.

Who has not imagined to himself a country inn, where the traveller
shall really feel _in_, and at home, and at his public-house, who was
before at his private house; whose host is indeed a _host_, and a
_lord_ of the _land_, 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.

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 _entertaining_ 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.

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.

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.

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
_pro_-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.

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:—

“A semely man our Hoste was, with alle,
For to han been an marshal in an halle.
A large man he was, with eyen stepe;
A fairer burgeis is ther nou in Chepe:
Bold of his speche, and wise, and well ytaught,
And of manhood him lacked righte naught.
Eke thereto, was he right a mery man,
And after souper plaien he began,
And spake of mirthe amonges other thinges,
Whan that we hadden made our reckoninges.”


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:—

“Now, by my fader’s soule that is ded,
But ye be mery, smiteth of my hed:
Hold up your hondes withouten more speche.”


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.




A WINTER WALK.


[1843.]

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.

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.

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.

The sluggish smoke curls up from some deep dell,
The stiffened air exploring in the dawn,
And making slow acquaintance with the day;
Delaying now upon its heavenward course,
In wreathed loiterings dallying with itself,
With as uncertain purpose and slow deed,
As its half-wakened master by the hearth,
Whose mind still slumbering and sluggish thoughts
Have not yet swept into the onward current
Of the new day;—and now it streams afar,
The while the chopper goes with step direct,
And mind intent to swing the early axe.
    First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad
His early scout, his emissary, smoke,
The earliest, latest pilgrim from the roof,
To feel the frosty air, inform the day;
And while he crouches still beside the hearth,
Nor musters courage to unbar the door,
It has gone down the glen with the light wind,
And o’er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath,
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill,
And warmed the pinions of the early bird;
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air,
Has caught sight of the day o’er the earth’s edge,
And greets its master’s eye at his low door,
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

      “The foodless wilds
Pour forth their brown inhabitants.”.


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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Winter fringes every bough
    With his fantastic wreath,
And puts the seal of silence now
    Upon the leaves beneath;

When every stream in its pent-house
    Goes gurgling on its way,
And in his gallery the mouse
    Nibbleth the meadow hay;

Methinks the summer still is nigh,
    And lurketh underneath,
As that same meadow-mouse doth lie
    Snug in that last year’s heath.

And if perchance the chicadee
    Lisp a faint note anon,
The snow is summer’s canopy,
    Which she herself put on.

Fair blossoms deck the cheerful trees,
    And dazzling fruits depend,
The north wind sighs a summer breeze,
    The nipping frosts to fend,

Bringing glad tidings unto me,
    The while I stand all ear,
Of a serene eternity,
    Which need not winter fear.

Out on the silent pond straightway
    The restless ice doth crack,
And pond sprites merry gambols play
    Amid the deafening rack.

Eager I hasten to the vale,
    As if I heard brave news,
How nature held high festival,
    Which it were hard to lose.

I gambol with my neighbor ice,
    And sympathizing quake,
As each new crack darts in a trice
    Across the gladsome lake.

One with the cricket in the ground,
    And fagot on the hearth,
Resounds the rare domestic sound
    Along the forest path.


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.

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.

In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens,
in their natural order and position. The meadows and forests are a
_hortus siccus_. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

      “Drooping the lab’rer ox
Stands covered o’er with snow, and _now_ demands
The fruit of all his toil.”


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.

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.

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,

      “The full ethereal round,
Infinite worlds disclosing to the view,
Shines out intensely keen; and all one cope
Of starry glitter glows from pole to pole.”




THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES.[4]


[1860.]

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 _bizarre_, 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.

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 _you_ were not lost, since I had never seen _you_
there before. I have several times shown the proprietor the shortest
way out of his wood-lot.

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.

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 _vice versa_. 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.

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 _known_ 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.

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.

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.

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 _by
nature_ has been but little attended to. They are very extensively
raised from the seed in Europe, and are beginning to be here.

When you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood will not _at once_ 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.

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.

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.

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 _at once_, when a pine wood is cut down.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 (_mus leucopus_).

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 _in_ the
wood in order to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or thirty
rods of it, it is sufficient.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 _Tamias_, 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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

It chances that similar objections lie against all the more notorious
instances of the kind on record.

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 (_Urtica urens_), which I
had not found before; dill, which I had not seen growing spontaneously;
the Jerusalem oak (_Chenopodium botrys_), which I had seen wild in but
one place; black nightshade (_Solanum nigrum_), 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.

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.

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.’

In the spring of 1857, I planted six seeds sent to me from the Patent
Office, and labelled, I think, “_Poitrine jaune grosse,_” 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 _poitrine jaune
grosse_ 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 _abra cadabra presto-change,_ that I used, and lo! true to
the label, they found for me 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_
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.

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.

 [4] An Address read to the Middlesex Agricultural Society, in Concord,
 September, 1860.




WALKING.


[1862.]

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.

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 _sauntering_: which word is beautifully
derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle
Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going _à la Sainte Terre_”
to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a
_Sainte-Terrer_,” 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 _sans terre_,
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.

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.

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.

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.
_Ambulator nascitur, non fit._ 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.

“When he came to grene wode,
    In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
    Of byrdes mery syngynge.

“It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
    That I was last here;
Me lyste a lytell for to shote
    At the donne dere.”


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.

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.

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
_stand_ 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.

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.

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!

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.”

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.

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 _subdiales ambulationes_ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 _villa_, which,
together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and _vella_, Varro
derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the place to and
from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming
were said _vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word
_vilis_ and our vile; also _villain_. 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.

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.

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.

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.


    Where they once dug for money,
    But never found any;
    Where sometimes Martial Miles
    Singly files,
    And Elijah Wood,
    I fear for no good:
    No other man,
    Save Elisha Dugan,—
    O man of wild habits,
    Partridges and rabbits,
    Who hast no cares
    Only to set snares,
    Who liv’st all alone,
    Close to the bone,
    And where life is sweetest
    Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
  With the instinct to travel,
  I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
    Nobody repairs it,
    For nobody wears it;
    It is a living way,
    As the Christians say.
Not many there be
  Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
  Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is it,
  But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
  Of going somewhere?
    Great guide-boards of stone,
    But travellers none;
    Cenotaphs of the towns
    Named on their crowns.
    It is worth going to see
    Where you _might_ be.
    What king
    Did the thing,
    I am still wondering;
    Set up how or when,
    By what selectmen,
    Gourgas or Lee,
    Clark or Darby?
    They’re a great endeavor
    To be something forever;
    Blank tablets of stone,
    Where a traveller might groan,
    And in one sentence
    Grave all that is known;
    Which another might read,
    In his extreme need.
    I know one or two
    Lines that would do,
    Literature that might stand
    All over the land,
    Which a man could remember
    Till next December,
    And read again in the spring,
    After the thawing.
If with fancy unfurled
  You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
  By the Old Marlborough Road.


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 _public_ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 _furor_ 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.

“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”


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?

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.

“And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”


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.

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.”

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, _Ex Oriente lux; ex
Occidente_ FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

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.

Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies _laeta, glabra_ 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, _Africanae bestiae_, 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.

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 _laeta_
and _glabra_, of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end
does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say,—

“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”


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.

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.

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.

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 _this was the heroic age
itself_, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest
and obscurest of men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Ben Jonson exclaims,—

“How near to good is what is fair!”


So I would say,—

How near to good is what is _wild_!


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.

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
_(Cassandra calyculata_) 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.

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!

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 _morale_ 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 _sanctum sanctorum_. 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.

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.

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.

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 _survey_
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 _culture_, 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.

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.

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 _sensible_, 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.

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.

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.

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 _Whoa_! 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
_side_ of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a _side_ of beef?

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.

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,—_Iery wiery ichery van,
tittle-tol-tan._ 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 _Bose_ and _Tray_, the names of dogs.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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,—_Gramática parda_, tawny grammar,—a kind of mother-wit
derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

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.

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?

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 _know_ 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.

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.”

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.

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.

“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveller of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”


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.

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.

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.

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.

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 _wings_ 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 _gra-a-ate thoughts_, those _gra-a-ate
men_ you hear of!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.




AUTUMNAL TINTS.


[1862.]

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,—

“But see the fading many-colored woods,
Shade deepening over shade, the country round
Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun,
Of every hue, from wan declining green to sooty dark”:—


and in the line in which he speaks of

“Autumn beaming o’er the yellow woods.”


The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our
own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, “_October, or Autumnal
Tints_”;—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.

THE PURPLE GRASSES.


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.

The Purple Grass (_Eragròstis pectinàcea_) 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.

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.

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.

The last is especially the case with the Poke or Garget (_Phytolacca
decandra_). 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 _lacca_,
from _lac_, 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.

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.

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. _Andropogon furcatus_, Forked Beard-Grass, or call it
Purple-Fingered Grass; _Andropogon scoparius,_ Purple Wood Grass; and
_Andropogon_ (now called _Sorghum_) _nutans_, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

THE RED MAPLE.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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,—_Acer rubrum_.
We may now read its title, or _rubric_, clear. Its _virtues_, not its
sins, are as scarlet.

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.

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.

THE ELM.


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 _flavor_ 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 _ulmarium_, 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 _his_ 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.

FALLEN LEAVES.


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 _Fall_, 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.

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.

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.

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
_Lycopodium lucidulum_ 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

THE SUGAR-MAPLE.


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.

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.

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.

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 _Red_ 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.

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 _earth_ under our feet,—ay, and a sky over our
heads? Or is the last _all_ 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.

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.

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?

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 _never sere_ 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.

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.

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?

What meant the fathers by establishing this _perfectly living_
institution before the church,—this institution which needs no
repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired by
its growth? Surely they

“Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Themselves from God they could not free;
They _planted_ better than they knew;—
The conscious _trees_ to beauty grew.”


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.

THE SCARLET OAK.


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.

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 _terra firma_ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 _our_ 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

These are _my_ China-asters, _my_ 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?

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
_will_ see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,—if you _look_
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 _Juncaceoe_ and _Gramineoe_: 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!

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 _spy_?—what
will he _select_ 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.

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 _anticipate_ 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 _therefore_ 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 _with the
feathers on_. 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.

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.




WILD APPLES.


(1862.)

THE HISTORY OF THE APPLE-TREE.

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
_Rosaceae_, which includes the Apple, also the true Grasses, and the
_Labiatae_ or Mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the
appearance of man on the globe.

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.

Tacitus says of the ancient Germans, that they satisfied their hunger
with wild apples (_agrestia poma_) among other things.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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).

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.”

The apple-tree (_Pyrus malus_) 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.

Pliny, adopting the distinction of Theophrastus, says,—“Of trees there
are some which are altogether wild (_sylvestres_), some more civilized
(_urbaniores_).” 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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!

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,—

“At Michaelmas time, or a little before,
Half an apple goes to the core.”


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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:—

    ‘Here’s to thee, old apple-tree,
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
    Hats-full! caps-full!
    Bushel, bushel, sacks-full!
    And my pockets full, too! Hurra!’”


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:—

“Stand fast, root! bear well, top!
Pray God send us a good howling crop:
Every twig, apples big;
Every bow, apples enow!”


“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.”

Herrick sings,—

“Wassaile the trees that they may beare
You many a plum and many a peare;
For more or less fruits they will bring
As you so give them wassailing.”


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.

THE WILD APPLE.


So much for the more civilized apple-trees (_urbaniores_, 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!

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.

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 _such_ 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?

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.

Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable
position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.

THE CRAB.


Nevertheless, _our_ 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, _Malus
coronaria_, “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.”

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.

HOW THE WILD APPLE GROWS.


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:—

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.

In two years’ time ’t had thus
    Reached the level of the rocks,
Admired the stretching world,
    Nor feared the wandering flocks.

But at this tender age
    Its sufferings began:
There came a browsing ox
    And cut it down a span.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its
hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, “_Et injussu consternitur ubere
mali_”: And the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden
apple-tree.

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

               “highest plot
To plant the Bergamot.”

THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR.


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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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 _tang_ nor _smack_ to them.

What if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine
_verjuice_, do they not still belong to the _Pomaceae_, which are
uniformly innocent and kind to our race? I still begrudge them to the
cider-mill. Perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet.

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.”

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.

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 _mild_ apples and soft chestnuts,—_mitia
poma, castaneae molles_. 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.

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
_seasoned,_ and they _pierce_ and _sting_ and _permeate_ us with their
spirit. They must be eaten in _season_, accordingly,—that is,
out-of-doors.

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.”

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.

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.

I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum-tree in Provence is “called
_Prunes sibarelles_, 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?

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.

Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate
the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses,
_papillae_ firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily
flattened and tamed.

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.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of
life, the apple of the world, then!

“Nor is it every apple I desire,
    Nor that which pleases every palate best;
’T is not the lasting Deuxan I require,
    Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,
Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife,
Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife:
No, no I bring me an apple from the tree of life.”


So there is one _thought_ 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.

THEIR BEAUTY.


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.

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.

THE NAMING OF THEM.


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
_lingua vernacula_? 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 _lingua vernacula_ 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.

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.

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.

There is, first of all, the Wood-Apple (_Malus sylvatica_); the
Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods,
(_sylvestrivallis_,) also in Hollows in Pastures (_campestrivallis_);
the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (_Malus cellaris_); the
Meadow-Apple; the Partridge-Apple; the Truant’s Apple, (_Cessatoris_,)
which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however _late_
it may be; the Saunterer’s Apple,—you must lose yourself before you can
find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (_Decus Aeris_);
December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed _(gelato-soluta),_ good only in that
state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the
_Musketaquidensis_; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New
England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple _(Malus viridis);_—this
has many synonymes; in an imperfect state, it is the _Cholera morbifera
aut dysenterifera, puerulis dilectissima_;—the Apple which Atalanta
stopped to pick up; the Hedge-Apple _(Malus Sepium_); the Slug-Apple
_(limacea)_; 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,—_Pedestrium
Solatium_; 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,—

“Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these _wild apples_.”


THE LAST GLEANING.


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.

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.”

THE “FROZEN-THAWED” APPLE.


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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

This is “The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.

“Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land!
Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?…


“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.

“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.

“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.

“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….

“Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen! howl, O ye vine-dressers!…

“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.”




NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT.


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.

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 _selenitic_ in this sense.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 _them_,—though he was considerably reduced
in his circumstances,—that they were a kind of bread and cheese that
never failed.

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

“not believe that the great architect
With all these fires the heavenly arches decked
Only for show, and with these glistering shields,
T’ awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields.”
He’ll “not believe that the least flower which pranks
Our garden borders, or our common banks,
And the least stone, that in her warming lap
Our mother earth doth covetously wrap,
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,
And that the glorious stars of heav’n have none.”


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, “_Deus
regit inferiora corpora per superiora_:” God rules the bodies below by
those above. But best of all is this which another writer has
expressed: “_Sapiens adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola
terrae naturam_:” a wise man assisteth the work of the stars as the
husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil.

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 _her_
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.

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.

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.

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.”

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,

            “gives us his blaze again,
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime.”


Diana still hunts in the New England sky.

“In Heaven queen she is among the spheres.
    She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.
Eternity in her oft change she bears;
    She Beauty is; by her the fair endure.

Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;
    Mortality below her orb is placed;
By her lie virtues of the stars down slide;
    By her is Virtue’s perfect image cast.”


The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the
last stage of bodily existence.

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!

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.

“In such a night let me abroad remain
Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again.”


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.

When Ossian in his address to the sun exclaims,

“Where has darkness its dwelling?
Where is the cavernous home of the stars,
When thou quickly followest their steps,
Pursuing them like a hunter in the sky,—
Thou climbing the lofty hills,
They descending on barren mountains?”


who does not in his thought accompany the stars to their “cavernous
home,” “descending” with them “on barren mountains?”

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.

THE END.




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