As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.—Matthew Arnold.
Nothing is seen until it is separated from its surroundings. A man looks at the landscape, but the tree standing in the middle of the landscape he does not see until, for the instant at least, he singles it out as the object of vision. Two men walk the same road; as far as the bystander can perceive, they have before them the same sights; but let them be questioned at the end of the journey, and it will appear that one man saw one set of objects, and his companion another; and the more diverse the intellectual training and habits of the two travelers, the greater will be the discrepancy between the two reports.
And what is true of any two men is equally true of any one man at two different times. To-day he is in a dreamy, reflective mood,—he has been reading Wordsworth, perhaps,—and when he takes his afternoon saunter he looks at the bushy hillside, or at the wayside cottage, or down into the loitering brook, and he sees in them all such pictures as they never showed him before. Or he is in a matter-of-fact mood, a kind of stock-market frame of mind; and he looks at everything through economical spectacles,—as if he had been set to appraise the acres of meadow or woodland through which he passes. At another time he may have been reading some book or magazine article written by Mr. John Burroughs; and although he knows nothing of birds, and can scarcely tell a crow from a robin (perhaps for this very reason), he is certain to have tantalizing glimpses of some very strange and wonderful feathered specimens. They must be rarities, at least, if not absolute novelties; and likely enough, on getting home, he sits down and writes to Mr. Burroughs a letter full of gratitude and inquiry,—the gratitude very pleasant to receive, we may presume, and the inquiries quite impossible to answer.
Some men (not many, it is to be hoped) are specialists, and nothing else. They are absorbed in farming, or in shoemaking, in chemistry, or in Latin grammar, and have no thought for anything beyond or beside. Others of us, while there may be two or three subjects toward which we feel some special drawing, have nevertheless a general interest in whatever concerns humanity. We are different men on different days. There is a certain part of the year, say from April to July, when I am an ornithologist; for the time being, as often as I go out-of-doors, I have an eye for birds, and, comparatively speaking, for nothing else. Then comes a season during which my walks all take on a botanical complexion. I have had my turn at butterflies, also; for one or two summers I may be said to have seen little else but these winged blossoms of the air. I know, too, what it means to visit the seashore, and scarcely to notice the breaking waves because of the shells scattered along the beach. In short, if I see one thing, I am of necessity blind, or half-blind, to all beside. There are several men in me, and not more than one or two of them are ever at the window at once. Formerly, my enjoyment of nature was altogether reflective,imaginative; in a passive, unproductive sense, poetical. I delighted in the woods and fields, the seashore and the lonely road, not for the birds or flowers to be found there, but for the "serene and blessed mood" into which I was put by such friendship. Later in life, it transpired, as much to my surprise as to anybody's else, that I had a bent toward natural history, as well as toward nature; an inclination to study, as well as to dream over, the beautiful world about me. I must know the birds apart, and the trees, and the flowers. A bit of country was no longer a mere landscape, a picture, but a museum as well. For a time the poet seemed to be dead within me; and happy as I found myself in my new pursuits, I had fits of bewailing my former condition. Science and fancy, it appeared, would not travel hand in hand; if a man must be a botanist, let him bid good-by to the Muse. Then I fled again to Emerson and Wordsworth, trying to read the naturalist asleep and reawaken the poet. Happy thought! The two men, the student and the lover, were still there; and there they remain to this day. Sometimes one is at the window, sometimes the other.
So it is, undoubtedly, with other people. My fellow-travelers, who hear me discoursing enthusiastically of vireos and warblers, thrushes and wrens, whilst they see never a bird, unless it be now and then an English sparrow or a robin, talk sometimes as if the difference between us were one of eyesight. They might as well lay it to the window-glass of our respective houses. It is not the eye that sees, but the man behind the eye.
As to the comparative advantages and disadvantages of such a division of interests as I have been describing, there may be room for two opinions. If distinction be all that the student hungers for, perhaps he cannot limit himself too strictly; but for myself, I think I should soon tire of my own society if I were only one man,—a botanist or a chemist, an artist, or even a poet. I should soon tire of myself, I say; but I might have said, with equal truth, that I should soon tire of nature; for if I were only one man, I should see only one aspect of the natural world. This may explain why it is that some persons must be forever moving from place to place. If they travel the same road twice or thrice, or even to the hundredth time, they see only one set of objects. The same man is always at the window. No wonder they are restless and famished. For my own part, though I should delight to see new lands and new people, new birds and new plants, I am nevertheless pretty well contented where I am. If I take the same walks, I do not see the same things. The botanist spells the dreamer; and now and then the lover of beauty keeps the ornithologist in the background till he is thankful to come once more to the window, though it be only to look at a bluebird or a song sparrow.
How much influence has the will in determining which of these several tenants of a man's body shall have his turn at sightseeing? It would be hard to answer definitely. As much, it may be, as a teacher has over his pupils, or a father over his children; something depends upon the strength of the governing will, and something upon the tractability of the pupil. In general, I assume to command. As I start on my ramble I give out word, as it were, which of the men shall have the front seat. But there are days when some one of them proves too much both for me and for his fellows. It is not the botanist's turn, perhaps; but he takes his seat at the window, notwithstanding, and the ornithologist and the dreamer must be content to peep at the landscape over his shoulders.
On such occasions, it may as well be confessed, I make but a feeble remonstrance; and for the sufficient reason that I feel small confidence in my own wisdom. If the flower-lover or the poet must have the hour, then in all likelihood he ought to have it. So much I concede to the nature of things. A strong tendency is a strong argument, and of itself goes far to justify itself. I borrow no trouble on the score of such compulsions. On the contrary, my lamentations begin when nobody sues for the place of vision. Such days I have; blank days, days to be dropped from the calendar; when "those that look out of the windows be darkened." The fault is not with the world, nor with the eye. The old preacher had the right of it; it is not the windows that are darkened, but "those that look out of the windows."
I've gathered young spring-leaves, and flowers gay.—Keats.
I looked forward to the month with peculiar interest, as it was many years since I had passed a November in the country, and now that it is over I am moved to publish its praises: partly, as I hope, out of feelings of gratitude, and partly because it is an agreeable kind of originality to commend what everybody else has been in the habit of decrying.
In the first place, then, it was a month of pleasant weather; something too much of wind and dust (the dust for only the first ten days) being almost the only drawback. To me, with my prepossessions, it was little short of marvelous how many of the days were nearly or quite cloudless. The only snow fell on the 11th. I saw a few flakes in the afternoon, just enough to be counted, and there must have been another slight flurry after dark, as the grass showed white in favorable spots early the next morning. Making allowance for the shortness of the days, I doubt whether there has been a month during the past year in which a man could comfortably spend more of his time in out-of-door exercise.
The trees were mostly bare before the end of October, but the apple and cherry trees still kept their branches green (they are foreigners, and perhaps have been used to a longer season), and the younger growth of gray birches lighted up the woodlands with pale yellow. Of course the oak-leaves were still hanging, also; and for that matter they are hanging yet, and will be for months to come, let the north wind blow as it may. I wonder whether their winter rustling sounds as cold in other ears as in mine. My own feeling is most likely the result of boyish associations. How often I waded painfully through the forest paths, my feet and hands half frozen, while these ghosts of summer shivered sympathetically on every side as they saw me pass! I wonder, too, what can be the explanation of this unnatural oak-tree habit. The leaves are dead; why should they not obey the general law,—"ashes to ashes, dust to dust"? Is our summer too short to ripen them, and so to perfect the articulation? Whatever its cause, their singular behavior does much to beautify the landscape; particularly in such a district as mine, where the rocky hills are, so many of them, covered with young oak forests, which, especially for the first half of November, before the foliage is altogether faded, are dressed in subdued shades of maroon, beautiful at all hours, but touched into positive glory by the level rays of the afternoon sun.
I began on the very first day of the month to make a list of the plants found in bloom, and happening, a week afterward, to be in the company of two experienced botanical collectors, I asked them how many species I was likely to find. One said thirty. The other, after a little hesitation, replied, "I don't know, but I shouldn't think you could find a dozen." Well, it is true that November is not distinctively a floral month in Massachusetts, but before its thirty days were over I had catalogued seventy-three species, though for six of these, to be sure, I have to thank one of the collectors just now mentioned. Indeed, I found thirty-nine sorts on my first afternoon ramble; and even as late as the 27th and 28th I counted twelve. All in all, there is little doubt that at least a hundred kinds of plants were in bloom about me during the month.
Having called my record a chronicle, I should be guilty of an almost wanton disregard of scriptural models if I did not fill it largely with names, and accordingly I do not hesitate to subjoin a full list of these my November flowers; omitting Latin titles,—somewhat unwillingly, I confess,—except where the vernacular is wanting altogether, or else is more than commonly ambiguous:—creeping buttercup, tall buttercup, field larkspur, celandine, pale corydalis, hedge mustard, shepherd's-purse, wild peppergrass, sea-rocket, wild radish, common blue violet, bird-foot violet, pansy, Deptford pink, common chickweed, larger mouse-ear chickweed, sand spurrey, knawel, common mallow, herb-robert, storksbill, red clover, alsyke, white clover, white sweet clover, black medick, white avens, common cinque-foil, silvery cinque-foil, witch-hazel, common evening-primrose, smaller evening-primrose, carrot, blue-stemmed golden-rod, white golden-rod (or silvery-rod), seaside golden-rod, Solidago juncea, Solidago rugosa, dusty golden-rod, early golden-rod, corymbed aster, wavy-leaved aster, heart-leaved aster, many-flowered aster, Aster vimineus, Aster diffusus, New York aster, Aster puniceus, narrow-leaved aster, flea-bane, horse-weed, everlasting, cudweed, cone-flower, mayweed, yarrow, tansy, groundsel, burdock, Canada thistle, fall dandelion, common dandelion, sow thistle, Indian tobacco, bell-flower (Campanula rapunculoides), fringed gentian, wild toad-flax, butter and eggs, self-heal, motherwort, jointweed, doorweed, and ladies' tresses (Spiranthes cernua).
Here, then, we have seventy-three species, all but one of which (Spiranthes cernua) are of the class of exogens. Twenty-two orders are represented, the great autumnal family of the Compositæ naturally taking the lead, with thirty species (sixteen of them asters and golden-rods), while the mustard, pink, and pulse families come next, with five species each. The large and hardy heath family is wanting altogether. Out of the whole number about forty-three are indigenous. Witch-hazel is the only shrub, and, as might have been expected, there is no climbing plant.
In setting down such a list one feels it a pity that so few of the golden-rods and asters have any specific designation in English. Under this feeling, I have presumed myself to name two of the golden-rods, Solidago Canadensis and Solidago nemoralis. With us, at all events, the former is the first of its genus to blossom, and may appropriately enough wear the title of early golden-rod, while the latter must have been noticed by everybody for its peculiar grayish, "dusty-miller" foliage. It has, moreover, an exceptional right to a vernacular name, being both one of the commonest and one of the showiest of our roadside weeds. Till something better is proposed, therefore, let us call it the dusty golden-rod.
It must in fairness be acknowledged that I did not stand upon the quality of my specimens. Many of them were nothing but accidental and not very reputable-looking laggards; but in November, especially if one is making a list, a blossom is a blossom. The greater part of the asters and golden-rods, I think, were plants that had been broken down by one means or another, and now, at this late day, had put forth a few stunted sprays. The narrow-leaved aster (Aster linariifolius) seemed peculiarly out of season, and was represented by only two heads, but these sufficed to bring the mouth-filling name into my catalogue. Of the two species of native violets I saw but a single blossom each. My pansy (common enough in gardens, and blooming well into December) was, of course, found by the roadside, and the larkspur likewise, as I made nothing of any but wild plants.
At this time of the year one must not expect to pick flowers anywhere and everywhere, and a majority of all my seventy-three species (perhaps as many as two thirds) were found only in one or more of three particular places. The first of these was along a newly laid-out road through a tract of woodland; the second was a sheltered wayside nook between high banks; and the third was at the seashore. At this last place, on the 8th of the month, I came unexpectedly upon a field fairly yellow with fall dandelions and silvery cinque-foils, and affording also my only specimens of burdock, Canada thistle, cone-flower, and the smaller evening-primrose; in addition to which were the many-flowered aster, yarrow, red clover, and sow thistle. In truth, the grassy hillside was quite like a garden, although there was no apparent reason why it should be so favored. The larger evening-primrose, of which I saw two stalks, one of them bearing six or eight blossoms, was growing among the rocks just below the edge of the cliff, in company with abundance of sow thistle, all perfectly fresh; while along the gravelly edge of the bank, just above them, was the groundsel (Senecio vulgaris), looking as bright and thrifty as if it had been the first of August instead of near the middle of November.
Perhaps my most surprising bit of good luck was the finding of the Deptford pink. Of this, for some inscrutable reason, one plant still remained green and showed several rosy blossoms, while all its fellows, far and near, were long since bleached and dead. Fortune has her favorites, even among pinks. The frail-looking, early-blooming corydalis (we have few plants that appear less able to bear exposure) was in excellent condition up to the very end of the month, though the one patch then explored was destitute of flowers. These were as pretty as could be—prettier even than in May, I thought—on the 16th, and no doubt might have been found on the 30th, with careful search. The little geranium known as herb-robert is a neighbor of the corydalis, and, like it, stands the cold remarkably well. Its reddening, finely cut leaves were fresh and flourishing, but though I often looked for its flowers, I found only one during the entire month. The storksbill, its less known cousin, does not grow within my limits, but came to me from Essex County, through the kindness of a friend, being one of the six species contributed by her, as I have before mentioned.
The hardiness of some of these late bloomers is surprising. It is now the 2d of December, and yesterday the temperature fell about thirty degrees below the freezing-point, yet I notice shepherd's-purse, peppergrass, chickweed, and knawel still bearing fresh-looking flowers. Nor are they the only plants that seem thus impervious to cold. The prostrate young St. John's-wort shoots, for instance, all uncovered and delicate as they are, appear not to know that winter with all its rigors is upon them.
It was impossible not to sympathize admiringly with some of my belated asters and golden-rods. Their perseverance was truly pathetic. They had been hindered, but they meant to finish their appointed task, nevertheless, in spite of short days and cold weather. I have especially in mind a plant of Solidago juncea. The species is normally one of the earliest, following hard upon Solidago Canadensis, but for some reason this particular specimen did not begin to flower till after the first heavy frosts. Indeed, when I first noticed it, the stem leaves were already frost-bitten; yet it kept on putting forth blossoms for at least a fortnight. Whatever may be true of the lilies of the field, this golden-rod was certainly a toiler, and of the most persistent sort.
Early in the month the large and hardy Antiopa butterflies were still not uncommon in the woods, and on the 3d—a delightful, [131]summer-like day, in which I made a pilgrimage to Walden—I observed a single clouded-sulphur (Philodice), looking none the worse for the low temperature of the night before, when the smaller ponds had frozen over for the first time.
Of course I kept account of the birds as well as of the flowers, but the number, both of individuals and of species, proved to be surprisingly small, the total list being as follows:—great black-backed gull, American herring gull, ruffed grouse, downy woodpecker, flicker, blue jay, crow, horned lark, purple finch, red crossbill, goldfinch, snow bunting, Ipswich sparrow, white-throated sparrow, tree sparrow, snowbird, song sparrow, fox sparrow, Northern shrike, myrtle warbler, brown creeper, white-breasted nuthatch, chickadee, golden-crowned kinglet, and robin. Here are only twenty-five species; a meagre catalogue, which might have been longer, it is true, but for the patriotism or prejudice (who will presume always to decide between these two feelings, one of them so given to counterfeiting the other?) which would not allow me to piece it out with the name of that all too numerous parasite, the so-called English sparrow.
My best ornithological day was the 17th, which, with a friend like-minded, I passed at Ipswich Beach. The special object of our search was the Ipswich sparrow, a bird unknown to science until 1868, when it was discovered at this very place by Mr. Maynard. Since then it has been found to be a regular fall and winter visitant along the Atlantic coast, passing at least as far south as New Jersey. It is a mystery how the creature could so long have escaped detection. One cannot help querying whether there can be another case like it. Who knows? Science, even in its flourishing modern estate, falls a trifle short of omniscience.
My comrade and I separated for a little, losing sight of each other among the sand-hills, and when we came together again he reported that he had seen the sparrow. He had happened upon it unobserved, and had been favored with excellent opportunities for scrutinizing it carefully through a glass at short range; and being familiar with its appearance through a study of cabinet specimens, he had no doubt whatever of its identity. This was within five minutes of our arrival, and naturally we anticipated no difficulty in finding others; but for two or three hours we followed the chase in vain. Twice, to be sure, a sparrow of some sort flew up in front of us, but in both cases it got away without our obtaining so much as a peep at it. Up and down the beach we went, exploring the basins and sliding down the smooth, steep hills. Every step was interesting, but it began to look as if I must go home without seeing Ammodramus princeps. But patience was destined to have its reward, and just as we were traversing the upper part of the beach for the last time, I caught a glimpse of a bird skulking in the grass before us. He had seen us first, and was already on the move, ducking behind the scattered tufts of beach-grass, crouching and running by turns; but we got satisfactory observations, nevertheless, and he proved to be, like the other, an Ipswich sparrow. He did not rise, but finally made off through the grass without uttering a sound. Then we examined his footprints, and found them to be, so far as could be made out, the same as we had been noticing all about among the hills.
[134]Meanwhile, our perambulations had not been in vain. Flocks of snow buntings were seen here and there, and we spent a long time in watching a trio of horned larks. These were feeding amid some stranded rubbish, and apparently felt not the slightest suspicion of the two men who stood fifteen or twenty feet off, eying their motions. It was too bad they could not hear our complimentary remarks about their costumes, so tastefully trimmed with black and yellow. Our loudest exclamations, however, were called forth by a dense flock of sea-gulls at the distant end of the beach. How many hundreds there were I should not dare to guess, but when they rose in a body their white wings really filled the air, and with the bright sunlight upon them they made, for a landsman, a spectacle to be remembered.
Altogether it was a high day for two enthusiasts, though no doubt it would have looked foolish enough to ordinary mortals, our spending several dollars of money and a whole day of time,—in November, at that,—all for the sake of ogling a few birds, not one of which we even attempted to shoot. But what then? Tastes will differ; and as for enthusiasm, it is worth more than money and learning put together (so I believe, at least, without having experimented with the other two) as a producer of happiness. For my own part, I mean to be enthusiastic as long as possible, foreseeing only too well that high spirits cannot last forever.
The sand-hills themselves would have repaid all our trouble. Years ago this land just back of the beach was covered with forest, while at one end of it was a flourishing farm. Then when man, with his customary foolishness, cut off the forest, Nature revenged herself by burying his farm. We did not verify the fact, but according to the published accounts of the matter it used to be possible to walk over the grave of an old orchard, and pick here and there an apple from some topmost branch still jutting out through the sand.
Among the dunes we found abundance of a little red, heath-like plant, still in full blossom. Neither of us recognized it, but it turned out to be jointweed (Polygonum articulatum), and made a famous addition to my November flower catalogue.
In connection with all this I ought, perhaps, to say a word about our Ipswich driver, especially as naturalists are sometimes reprehended for taking so much interest in all other creatures, and so little in their fellow-men. As we drew near the beach, which is some five miles from the town, we began to find the roads quite under water, with the sea still rising. We remarked the fact, the more as we were to return on foot, whereupon the man said that the tide was uncommonly high on account of the heavy rain of the day before! A little afterward, when we came in sight of a flock of gulls, he gravely informed us that they were "some kind of ducks"! He had lived by the seashore all his life, I suppose, and of course felt entirely competent to instruct two innocent cockneys such as he had in his wagon.
Four days after this I made a trip to Nahant. If Ammodramus princeps was at Ipswich, why should it not be at other similar places? True enough, I found the birds feeding beside the road that runs along the beach. I chased them about for an hour or two in a cold high wind, and stared at them till I was satisfied. They fed much of the time upon the golden-rods, alighted freely upon the fence-posts (which is what some writers would lead us never to expect), and often made use of the regular family tseep. Two of them kept persistently together, as if they were mated. One staggered me by showing a blotch in the middle of the breast, a mark that none of the published descriptions mention, but which I have since found exemplified in one of the skins at the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy, in Cambridge.
A day is happily spent that shows me any bird I never saw alive before. So says Dr. Coues, and he would be a poor ornithologist who could not echo the sentiment. The Ipswich sparrow was the third such bird that I had seen during the year without going out of New England, the other two being the Tennessee warbler and the Philadelphia vireo.
Of the remainder of my November list there is not much to be said. Robins were very scarce after the first week. My last glimpse of them was on the 20th, when I saw two. Tree sparrows, snowbirds, chickadees, kinglets, crows, and jays were oftenest met with, while the shrike, myrtle warbler, purple finch, and song sparrow were represented by one individual each. My song sparrow was not seen till the 28th, after I had given him up. He did not sing (of course he scolded; the song sparrow can always do that), but the mere sight of him was enough to suggest thoughts of springtime, especially as he happened to be in the neighborhood of some Pickering hylas, which were then in full cry for the only time during the month. Near the end of the month many wild geese flew over the town, but, thanks to a rebellious tooth (how happy are the birds in this respect!), I was shut indoors, and knew the fact only by hearsay. I did, however, see a small flock on the 30th of October, an exceptionally early date. As it chanced, I was walking at the time with one of my neighbors, a man more than forty years old, and he assured me that he had never seen such a thing before.
For music, I one day heard a goldfinch warbling a few strains, and on the 21st a chickadee repeated his clear phœbe whistle [139]two or three times. The chickadees are always musical,—there is no need to say that; but I heard them sing only on this one morning.
Altogether, with the cloudless, mild days, the birds, the tree-frogs, the butterflies, and the flowers, November did not seem the bleak and cheerless season it has commonly been painted. Still it was not exactly like summer. On the last day I saw some very small boys skating on the Cambridge marshes, and the next morning December showed its hand promptly, sending the mercury down to within two or three degrees of zero.
While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.—Thoreau.
Those who will have us all to be studying the Sacred Books of the East, and other such literature, are given to laying it down as an axiom that whoever knows only one religion knows none at all,—an assertion, I am bound to acknowledge, that commends itself to my reason, notwithstanding the somewhat serious inferences fairly deducible from it touching the nature and worth of certain convictions of my own, which I have been wont to look upon as religious. I cannot profess ever to have pried into the mysteries of any faith except Christianity. So, of course, I do not understand even that. And the people about me, so far as I can discover, are all in the same predicament. Yet I would fain believe that we are not exactly heathen. Some of my neighbors (none too many of them, I confess) are charitable and devout. They must be pleasing to their Creator, I say to myself, unless He is hard to please. Sometimes I go so far as to think that possibly a man may be religious without knowing even his own religion. Let us hope so. Otherwise, we of the laity are assuredly undone.
And what is true of creeds and churches is true likewise of countries and climates. We grow wise by comparison of one thing with another, not by direct and exclusive contemplation of one thing by itself. Human knowledge is relative, not absolute, and the inveterate stayer at home is but a poor judge of his own birthplace.
All this I have in lively remembrance as I sit down to record some impressions of our New England winter. With what propriety do I discourse upon winter in Massachusetts, having never passed one anywhere else? Had I spent a portion of my life where roses bloom the year round, then, to be sure, I might assume to say something to the purpose about snow and ice.
But if the "tillers of paper" wrote only of such topics as they possessed full and accurate acquaintance with, how would the [142]Scripture be fulfilled? "Of making many books" there surely would be an end, and that speedily. I venture to think, moreover, that a man may never have set foot beyond the boundaries of his native city, and yet prove a reasonably competent guide to its streets and by-ways. His information is circumscribed, but such as it is, it is precise and to the point. Though he assure you soberly that the principal thoroughfare of his tenth-rate town is more magnificent than any in New York or London, you may none the less depend upon him to pilot you safely out of its most intricate and bewildering corner. Indeed, he might fairly claim membership in what is, at present, one of the most flourishing of intellectual guilds: I mean the sect of the specialists; whose creed is that one may know something without knowing everything, and who choose for their motto: Remain ignorant in order that you may learn.
In this half-developed world there is nothing so perfect as to be past a liability to drawbacks and exceptions. The best of beef is poisonous to some eaters, and strawberries are an abomination to others; and in like manner there is no climate, nor any single feature of any climate, but by some constitutions it will be found unendurable. The earth is to be populated throughout, so it would appear; and to that end sundry necessary precautions have been taken against human inertia. A certain proportion of boys must be born with a propensity for wandering and adventure; and the most favored spot must not contain within itself all conceivable advantages. If everybody could stand the rigors of New England weather, what would become of the rest of the continent?
Unless I misjudge myself, I should soon tire of perpetual summer. Like the ungrateful Israelites with the manna, my soul would loathe such light bread. To my provincial mind, as I believe, nothing else could ever quite take the place of a rotation of the seasons. There should be rain and shine, cold and heat. A change from good weather to bad, and back again, is on the whole better than unbroken good weather. Dullness to set off brightness, night to give relief to the day, such is the wise order of nature; and I do not account it altogether a token of depravity that honest people, who love a paradox without knowing it, find perfection, of no matter how innocent a sort, just a little wearisome. Therefore, I say, let me have a year made up of well-defined contrasts; in short, a New England year, of four clearly marked seasons.
It is often alleged, I know, that we really have only three seasons; that winter leaps into the lap of summer, and spring is nothing but a myth of the almanac makers. I shall credit this story when I am convinced of the truth of another statement, equally current and equally well vouched, that every successive summer is the hottest (or the coldest) for the last twenty-five years. As there is no subject so much talked about as the weather, so, almost of course, there is none so much lied about. Winter claims most of March, as the astronomers give it leave to do, I believe; but April and May, despite a snow-storm or two in the former, and a torrid week in the latter, are neither summer nor winter, but spring; somewhat fickle, it is true, more or less uncertain of itself, but still retaining its personal identity.
As for our actual winter, it may enhance its value in our eyes if we take into account that the three other seasons all depend upon it for their peculiar charms. In the case of spring this dependence is palpable to every one. Berate as we may its backwardness and deceit, muffle ourselves never so pettishly against its harsh breath, yea, even deny it all claim to its own proper title, yet anon it gets the better of our discontent, and we thank our stars that we have lived to see again the greening of the grass, and to hear once more the song of a bird. A mild day in March is like a foretaste of heaven; the first robin seems an angel; while saxifrage, anemones, and dandelions win kindly notice from many a matter-of-fact countryman who lets all the June roses go by him unregarded. It is pleasures of this kind, natural, wholesome, and universal, that largely make up the total of human happiness. Our instinct for them only strengthens with age. They are like the "divine ideas" of Olympian bards,—
"
Which always find us young, And always keep us so.
"All this glory of the revival would be wanting but for the previous months of desolation. The hepatica is not more beautiful than many another flower, but it takes us when we are hungry for the sight of a blossom. What can we do? When it peeps out of its bed of withered leaves, puts off its furs, and opens to the sunlight its little purple cup, we have no choice but to love it as we cannot love the handsomer and more fragrant hosts that follow in its train.
And as winter over and gone sets in brighter relief the warmth and resurrection of springtime, so does the shadow of its approach lend a real if somewhat indefinable attractiveness to the fall months. The blooming of the late flowers, the ripening of leaf and fruit, the frosty air, the flocking of birds, all the thousand signs of the autumnal season take on a kind of pathetic and solemn interest, as being but prelusive to the whiteness and deadness so soon to cover the earth. Indeed, if there were no winter, there could be neither spring nor autumn; nay, nor any summer. Leave out the snow and ice, and the whole round year would be metamorphosed; or, rather, the year itself would pass away, and nothing be left but time.
I am not yet a convert to the pessimistic doctrine that "all pleasure is merely relief from pain;" but I gladly believe that pain has its use in heightening subsequent happiness, and that one man's evil qualities (mine, for example) may partly atone for themselves by setting off the amiable characteristics of worthier men around him. It consoles me to feel that my neighbors seem better to themselves and to each other because of the abrupt antithesis between their dispositions and mine. It is better than nothing, if my failure can serve as a background for their virtuous success. With reverent thankfulness do I acknowledge the gracious and far-reaching frugality which, by one means and another, saves even my foolishness and imperfection from running altogether to waste.
Viewed in this light, as an offset or foil for the remainder of the year, we may say that the worse the winter is, the better it is. Within reasonable limits, it can hardly be too long or too rigorous. And just here, as it appears to me, our New England climate shows most admirably. Without being unendurably hot or insufferably cold, it does offer us an abundant contrast. An opposition of one hundred and twenty-five degrees between January and July ought to be enough, one would say, to impress even the dullest imagination.
But winter has its positively favorable side, and is not to be passed off with merely negative compliments; as if it were like a toothache or a tiresome sermon,—something of which the only good word to be said is, that it cannot last forever. It is not to be charged as a defect upon cold weather that some people find it to disagree with them. We might as well chide the hill for putting a sick man out of breath. It is with persons as with plants: some are hardy, others not. The date-palm cannot be made to grow in Massachusetts; but is Massachusetts to blame for the palm-tree's incapacity? All things of which the specific office is to promote strength (exercise, food, climate) presuppose a degree of strength sufficient for their use. So it is with cold weather. Its proper effect is to brace and invigorate the system; but there must be vigor to start with. The law is universal: "To him that hath shall be given."
Enough, then, of apologies and negative considerations. There was never a good Yankee, of moderately robust health, and under fifty years of age, that did not welcome cold weather as a friend. Ask the school-boys, especially such as live in country places, whether summer or winter brings the greater pleasure. Two to one they will vote for winter. Or look back over your own childhood, and see whether the sports of winter-time do not seem, in the retrospect, to have been the very crown of the year. How vivid my own recollections are! Other seasons had their own distinctive felicities; the year was full of delights; but we watched for the first snow-fall and the first ice as eagerly as I now see elderly and sickly people watching for the first symptoms of summer. As well as I can remember, winter was never too long nor too cold, whatever may have been true of a single day now and then, when the old school-house, with its one small stove, and its eight or ten large windows, ought, in all reason, to have been condemned as uninhabitable. But the frolics out-of-doors! It makes the blood tingle even now to think of them. How brief the days were! How cruel the authority that kept us in the house after dark, while so many of our mates were still "sliding down hill" (we knew nothing of "coasting" where I was born), or skating in the meadow! Childhood in the sunny South must be a very tame affair, New England youngsters being judges.
Trifles of this kind, if any be moved to call them such, are not to be sneered out of court. Fifteen years form no small part of a human life, and whatever helps us to grow up happy contributes in no slight degree to keep us happy to the end. "When I became a man I put away childish things"? Yes, it may be; but the very things that I boast of outgrowing have made me what I am. In truth, when it comes to such a question as this, I confess to putting more faith in the verdict of healthy children than in the unanimous theories and groans of whole congresses of valetudinarians. I am not yet so old nor so feeble but I gaze with something of my youthful enthusiasm upon the first snow. It quickens my pulse to see the ponds frozen over, although my skates long since went out of commission; and I still find comfort in a tramp of five or six miles, with the path none too good, and the mercury half-way between the freezing point and zero. I like the buffeting of the north wind, and am not indisposed once in a while to wrestle with the frost for the possession of my own ears. Well as I love to loiter, I rejoice also in weather which makes loitering impossible; which puts new springs into a man's legs, and sets him spinning over the course whether he will or no. It will be otherwise with me by and by, I suppose, seeing how my venerable fellow-citizens are affected, but for the present nothing renews my physical youth more surely than a low temperature; a fact which I welcome as evidence that I am not yet going down-hill, however closely I may be nearing the summit.
Winter does us the honor to assume that we are not weaklings. Summer may coddle and flatter, but cold weather is no sentimentalist. Its kindest and tenderest mood has something of a stoical severity about it. It lays its finger without mercy on our most vulnerable and sensitive spots. But withal, as I have said, if we really possess any reserved strength, it knows how to bring it out and make the most of it. What a fullness of vitality do we suddenly develop as we come into close quarters with this well-intentioned but rough and ready antagonist! In fine, winter is one of those rare and invaluable friends of whom Emerson speaks, who enable us to do what we can. To its good offices it is largely attributable, no doubt, that in the long run the inhabitants of temperate regions have always been too powerful for their rivals within the tropics. Frigidity is like poverty, a blessing to those who can bear it.
Winter in New England is not a time for gathering flowers out-of-doors, though, taking the years together, there is no month of the twelve wherein one may not pick a few blossoms even in Massachusetts; but if it effaces one set of pictures, it paints for us another; and a wise and liberal taste will reckon itself a debtor to both. To say nothing of the half-dozen mornings on which every tree and bush is arrayed in all the splendor of diamonds, or the other half-dozen when they bow themselves under masses of new-fallen snow,—making no account of such exceptional pageants, which, indeed, are often so destructive as to lose much of their glory in the eyes of provident spectators,—I, for my own part, find a beauty in the very commonest of winter landscapes. Let the ground be altogether white, or altogether brown, or let it be covered so thinly that the grass-blades show dark above the snow; in any case, white or brown, or white and brown, to me it is all beautiful; beautiful in itself, and also by contrast with the greenness before and after; while, as for the trees, I like them so well in their state of undress that I question sometimes whether their leafy garments do not conceal more loveliness than they confer. We are grateful, of course, to pines and spruces; but what if all trees were evergreen? A questionable improvement, surely. No; suggestive and solemn as the falling of the leaves must ever be to us who read our own destiny in the annual parable, it would be sadder still if there were no such alternation, no diversity, but only one monotonous year on year of changeless verdure.
Winter beauty, such as I have been hinting at, is not far to seek, whether by townsman or rustic. Bostonians have only to cross the Mill-Dam,—a rather too fashionable promenade, it is true, but even here one may be tolerably certain of elbow-room on a January morning. Often have I taken this road to health and happiness, waxing enthusiastic as I have proceeded, admiring the snow-bound scene with a fervor which the most opulent of summer landscapes seldom excites; and, pushing on with increasing exhilaration, have brought up at last on Corey Hill, where the inquisitive north-wind has very likely abbreviated my stay, but has never yet spoiled my rapture at the wonderful white world underneath.
Economy has its pleasures, it is said, for all healthily constituted minds. We like, all of us, to make much out of little; to do a notable piece of work with ordinary tools; to treat a meagre and commonplace theme in such a manner that whoever begins to read has no alternative but to finish; to tempt an epicure with the daintiest of repasts out of the simplest and fewest of every-day materials; to paint a picture which has nothing in it, but compels the eye; in a word, to demonstrate to others, and not less to ourselves, that the secret of success lies in the man and not in the stuff. It is good, once in a while, to take advantage of a disadvantage to show what we can do.
On the same principle we are glad to find ourselves, if only not too often, in unpropitious circumstances. Otherwise how should we ever make proof of our philosophy? It heightens my confidence in the goodness at the heart of things to see how, as if by instinct, men of sound natures inevitably right the scale in seasons of loss and scarcity. If half the fortune disappears, the other half straightway doubles in value. Faith easily puts aside calculation, and proves, off-hand, that a part is equal to the whole.
Thus it is with me as a lover of out-door life, and especially as a field student of ornithology. At no time of the year does the fellowship of the birds afford me keener enjoyment than in the dead of winter. In June one may see them everywhere, and hear them at all hours; a few more or a few less are nothing to make account of; but in January the sight of a single brown creeper is sufficient to brighten the day, and the twittering of half a dozen goldfinches is like the music of angels.
As a certain outspoken philosopher would not visit some of his relatives because he disliked to be alone, so do I in my jaunts avoid the highway whenever it is possible, even in midwinter. What so lonesome as the presence of people with whom we must not speak, or, worse yet, with whom we must speak, but only about the weather and like exciting topics! As I have intimated, however, it is usually the public street or nothing with me during the cold season. All the more grateful am I, therefore, to those familiar winter birds, some of whom are sure to bid me good morning out of the hedges and shade-trees as I go past. Not unlikely a shrike sits motionless and dumb upon a telegraph wire, or in contrary mood whistles and chirrups industriously from some tree-top. He is no angel, that is plain enough; but none the less I am glad to meet him. If he fails of being lovable, he is at least a study. It is wonderful how abruptly his whim changes; how disconnected his behavior seems; how quickly and unexpectedly he can pass from the most perfect quiescence into a fit of most intense activity. I came upon such a fellow the other day in crossing the Common, who, just as I espied him, swooped upon a bunch of sparrows in an elm. He missed his aim, and in half a minute made a second attempt upon a similar group in another tree. This time he singled out one of the flock, and took chase after it; but the terrified creature ducked and turned, and finally got away, whereupon the shrike betook himself to a perch, and fell to making all manner of noises,—squeaks, whistles, twitters, and what not,—hopping about nervously meanwhile. The passers-by all stopped to look at the show (perhaps because they saw me staring upward), till finally a laborer yielded to the school-boy instinct and let fly a stone. The scamp was not greatly frightened by this demonstration, and merely flew to the tip of one of the tall cotton-woods, where he immediately resumed his vocal practice.
It ought to be helpful to a man's independence of spirit to fall in once in a while with such a self-reliant and nonchalant brother. For one, I wish I were better able to profit by his example. He seems made for hard times and short rations. Doubtless it is a delusion of the fancy, but he and winter are so connected in my thought that I can hardly conceive of him as knowing what summer means, or as caring to know.
To a person of my tastes it is one of winter's capital recommendations that it brings its own birds with it, thus affording sundry ornithological pleasures which otherwise one would be compelled to go without. The tree-sparrows, for instance, are very good cold-weather acquaintances of mine. There is nothing peculiarly taking about their dress or demeanor; but they are steady-going, good-humored, diligent people, whose presence you may always depend upon. I lately witnessed a very pretty trick of theirs. It was in the marsh just over the fence from Beacon Street, where a company of the birds, a dozen perhaps, were breakfasting off the seeds of evening primrose. Less skillful acrobats than their neighbors and frequent traveling companions, the red-poll linnets, it is not easy for them to feed while hanging upon the pods. So, taking the weeds one by one, they alighted at the very tip, and then with various twitchings and stampings shook the stalk as violently as possible, after which they dropped quickly upon the snow to gather up the results of their labors. As I say, it was an extremely pretty performance, and by itself would have rewarded me for my morning tramp, putting me in mind, as it did, of happy hours long since past, when I climbed into the tops of nut-trees on business of the same sort. One of the principal uses of friendship, human or other, is this of keeping the heart young.
I hope I am not lacking in a wholesome disrespect for sentimentality and affectation; for artificial ecstasies over sunsets and landscapes, birds and flowers; the fashionable cant of nature-worship, which is enough almost to seal a true worshiper's lips under a vow of everlasting silence. But such repugnances belong to the library and the parlor, and are left behind when a man goes abroad, either by himself or in any other really good company. For my own part the first lisp of a chickadee out of a wayside thicket disperses with a breath all such unhappy and unhallowed recollections. Here is a voice sincere, and the response is instantaneous and irresistible.
It would be a breach of good manners, an inexcusable ingratitude, to write never so briefly of the New England winter without noting this, the most engaging and characteristic enlivener of our winter woods; who revels in snow and ice, and is never lacking in abundant measures of faith and cheerfulness, enough not only for himself, but for any chance wayfarer of our own kind. He is every whit as independent as the shrike, but in how opposite a manner!—with a self-reliance that is never self-sufficiency, and bravery that offers no suspicion of bravado. Happy in himself, he is at the same time of a most companionable spirit. Perfect little philosopher! What a paradise New England would be if all her inhabitants were like him!
In such a winter climate as ours it is emphatically true that we "know not what shall be on the morrow." The season is not straitened in its resources, and caters to all tastes in a way which some may look upon as fickleness, but which I prefer to regard as catholicity. Its days are of many types, and it spreads them out before us like a patient shopkeeper,—as if it recognized in the Yankee a customer hard to suit. I do not mean to affirm that the weather and I are never at odds; but all in all, in the long run and theoretically, I approve its methods. What a humdrum round life would be if nothing ever happened but the expected! I wonder if there are beings anywhere who have forgotten how it feels to be surprised. The children of this world, at all events, were not intended for any such condition of fixity. When there is no longer anything new under the sun, it will be time to get above it.
Even in so simple and regular a proceeding as a morning walk, one wishes always to see something new, or failing of that, something old in a new light; an easy enough task, if one has eyes. For as we cannot drink twice of the same river, so we cannot twice take the same ramble. I went over the same course yesterday and to-day; but yesterday's landscape and sky were different from to-day's. I saw different birds, and had different thoughts; and after all, the principal part of a walk is what goes on in the mind. Still, the activities of the intellect are greatly under the influence of external surroundings, a fact which makes largely in favor of a varied year like that we have been praising. The experience of it tends to widen and diversify the thinking of men. In a smaller degree it answers the same end as travel. For aught I know, it may possibly have its little share in the onerous task of liberalizing systems of theology. Who shall say that our New England climate, with its frequent and extreme contrasts,—what I have called its habit of catholicity,—may not have had more or less to do with that diffusion of free thought which has made the home of the Pilgrims the birthplace of heresies without number? The suggestion is fanciful, perhaps. Let it pass. Such profundities do not come within my province. Only I must believe that, even in the matter of weather, it is good for us to be educated out of bigotry into a large-minded toleration. Hence it is, in part, that I give my suffrage for our Massachusetts winter, which not only widens the scope of the year, but contains within itself a variety wellnigh endless.
I have kept my subject out-of-doors. It is well always to have at least one point of originality. Let it be mine, in the present instance, that I have said nothing about the pleasures of the fireside, about long evenings and drawn curtains. If I were in winter's place, I should not greatly care to hear people tell how comfortable they could make themselves by jealously shutting me out. Their speech might be eloquent, and their language eulogistic; but somehow I should not feel that they were praising me.
A MOUNTAIN-SIDE RAMBLE.
I will go lose myself.—Shakespeare.
There are two sayings of Scripture which to my mind seem peculiarly appropriate for pleasant Sundays,—"Behold the fowls of the air," and "Consider the lilies." The first is a morning text, as anybody may see, while the second is more conveniently practiced upon later in the day, when the dew is off the grass. With certain of the more esoteric doctrines of the Bible (the duty of turning the other cheek, for example, or of selling all that one has and giving to the poor) we may sometimes be troubled what to do,—unless, like the world in general, we turn them over to Count Tolstoï and his followers; but such precepts as I have quoted nobody is likely ever to quarrel with, least of all any "natural man." For myself, I find them always a comfort, no matter what my mood or condition, while their observance becomes doubly agreeable when I am away from home; the thought of beholding a strange species of fowl, or of considering a new sort of lily, proving even more attractive than the prospect of listening to a new minister, or, what is somewhat less probable, of hearing a new sermon.
Thus it was with me, not long ago, when I found myself suddenly left alone at a small hotel in the Franconia Valley. The day was lowery, as days in the mountains are apt to be; but when duty goes along with inclination, a possible sprinkling is no very serious hindrance. Besides, a fortnight of "catching weather" had brought me into a state of something like philosophical indifference. I must be reckoned either with the just or with the unjust,—so I had come to reason,—and of course must expect now and then to be rained on. Accordingly, after dinner I tucked my faithful umbrella under my arm, and started up the Notch road.
I had in view a quiet, meditative ramble, in harmony with the spirit of the day, and could think of nothing more to the purpose than a visit to a pair of deserted farms, out in the woods on the mountain-side. The [166]lonesome fields and the crumbling houses would touch my imagination, and perhaps chasten my spirit. Thither would I go, and "consider the lilies." I am never much of a literalist,—except when a strict construction favors the argument,—and in the present instance it did not strike me as at all essential that I should find any specimens of the genus Lilium. One of the humbler representatives of the great and noble family of the Liliaceæ—the pretty clintonia, now a little out of season, or even the Indian cucumber-root—would come fairly within the spirit of the text; while, if worst came to worst, there would certainly be no scarcity of grass, itself nothing but a kind of degenerate lily, if some recent theories may be trusted.
I followed the highway for a mile or two, and then took a wood-road (a "cart-path" I should call it, if I dared to speak in my own tongue wherein I was born) running into the forest on the left. This brought me before long to a "pair of bars," over which I clambered into a grassy field, the first of the two ancient clearings I had come out to see. The scanty acres must have been wrested from the encompassing forest at no small cost of patience and hard labor; and after all, they had proved not to pay for their tillage. A waste of energy, as things now looked; but who is to judge of such matters? It is not given to every man to see the work of his hands established. A good many of us, I suspect, might be thankful to know that anything we have ever done would be found worthy of mention fifty years hence, though the mention were only by way of pointing a moral.
The old barn was long ago blown down, and as I mounted the fence a woodchuck went scampering out of sight among the timbers. The place was not entirely uninhabited, as it seemed, in spite of appearances: and as I turned toward the house, the door of which stood uninvitingly open, there sat a second woodchuck in the doorway, facing me, intent and motionless, full of wonderment, no doubt, at the unspeakable impertinence of such an intrusion. I was glad to see him, at any rate, and made haste to tell him so; greeting him in the rather unceremonious language wherewith the now famous titmouse is said to have addressed our foremost American gentleman and philosopher:—
"
Good day, good sir! Fine afternoon, old passenger! Happy to meet you in these places.
"But the churlish fellow had no notion of doing the honors, and by the time I had advanced two or three paces he whisked about and vanished inside the door. "Well done!" I thought. "Great is evolution. Woodchucks used to be cave-dwellers, but they are getting to live above ground, like the rest of us. So does history repeat itself. Who knows how soon they may be putting up cottages on their own account?" Perhaps I gave the creature more credit than really belonged to him. I followed him into the house, but he was nowhere to be seen, and it is not unlikely that he lived in a cave, after all. Nearly half the flooring had rotted away, and there was nothing to hinder his getting into the cellar. He may have taken the old farmhouse as a convenient portico for his burrow, a sort of storm-porch, as it were. In his eyes this may be the final end and aim, the teleological purpose, of all such board-and-shingle edifices. Mr. Ruskin seems to hold that a house falls short of its highest usefulness until it has become a ruin; and who knows but woodchucks may be of the same opinion?
This particular house was in two parts, one of them considerably more ancient than the other. This older portion it was, of which the floor had so badly (or so well) fallen into decay; while the ceiling, as if in a spirit of emulation, had settled till it described almost a semicircle of convexity. To look at it, one felt as if the law of gravity were actually being imposed upon.
It must have marked an epoch in the history of the household, this doubling of its quarters. Things were looking well with the man. His crops were good, his family increasing; his wife had begun to find the house uncomfortably small; they could afford to enlarge it. Hence this addition, this "new part," as no doubt they were in the habit of calling it, with pardonable satisfaction. It was more substantially built than the original dwelling, and possessed, what I dare say its mistress had set her heart upon, one plastered room. The "new part"! How ironical the words sounded, as I repeated them to myself! If things would only stay new, or if it were men's houses only that grew old!
The people who lived here had little occasion to hang their walls with pictures. When they wanted something to look at, they had but to go to the window and gaze upon the upper slopes of Mount Lafayette and Mount Cannon, rising in beauty beyond the intervening forest. But every New England woman must have a bit of flower garden, no matter what her surroundings; and even here I was glad to notice, just in front of the door, a clump of cinnamon rose-bushes, all uncared for, of course, but flourishing as in a kind of immortal youth (this old-fashioned rose must be one of Time's favorites), and just now bright with blossoms. For sentiment's sake I plucked one, thinking of the hands that did the same years ago, and ere this, in all likelihood, were under the sod; thinking, too, of other hands, long, long vanished, and of a white rose-bush that used to stand beside another door.
On both sides of the house were apple-trees, a few of them still in good trim, but the greater number decrepit after years of buffeting by mountain storms. A phœbe sat quietly on the ridge-pole, and a chipper was singing from the orchard. What knew they of time, or of time's mutations? The house might grow old,—the house and the trees; but if the same misfortune ever befalls phœbes and sparrows, we are, fortunately, none the wiser. To human eyes they are always young and fresh, like the buttercups that bespangled the grass before me, or like the sun that shone brightly upon the tranquil scene.
Turning away from the house and the grassy field about it, I got over a stone wall into a pasture fast growing up to wood: spruces, white pines, red pines, paper birches, and larches, with a profusion of meadow-sweet sprinkled everywhere among them. A nervous flicker started at my approach, stopped for an instant to reconnoitre, and then made off in haste. A hermit thrush was singing, and the bird that is called the "preacher"—who takes no summer vacation, but holds forth in "God's first temple" for the seven days of every week—was delivering his homily with all earnestness. He must preach, it seemed, whether men would hear or forbear. He had already announced his text, but I could not certainly make out what it was. "Here we have no continuing city," perhaps; or it might have been, "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity." It should have been one of these, or so I thought; but, as all church-goers must have observed, the connection between text and sermon is sometimes more or less recondite, and once in a while, like the doctrine of the sermon itself, requires to be taken on faith. In the present instance, indeed, as no doubt in many others, the pew was quite as likely to be at fault as the pulpit. The red-eye's eloquence was never very persuasive to my ear. Its short sentences, its tiresome upward inflections, its everlasting repetitiousness, and its sharp, querulous tone long since became to me an old story; and I have always thought that whoever dubbed this vireo the "preacher" could have had no very exalted opinion of the clergy.
I stayed not to listen, therefore, but kept on through the wood, while a purple finch pitched a tune on one side of the path (he appeared to feel no compunctions about interrupting the red-eye's exhortation), and a squirrel sprung his rattle on the other; and presently I came to the second farm: a large clearing, bounded by the forest on all hands, but after these many years still yielding a very respectable hay-crop (so does the good that men do live after them), and with a house and barn still standing at the lower end. I reached the house just in time to escape a shower, making an enforced obeisance as I entered. It was but the ghost of a dwelling,—the door off its hinges, and no glass in the four small windows; but it had a substantial quality about it, notwithstanding, as a not very tall man was liable at any moment to be reminded should he carry himself a trifle too proudly under the big unhewn timbers. It is better to stoop than to bump your head, they seemed to be saying. Hither came no tourists but the rabbits; and they, it was plain, were not so much tourists as permanent residents. As I looked at the blank walls and door-posts, after a fortnight's experience among the mountains, I felt grateful at the sight of boards on which Brown of Boston and Smith of Smithfield had not yet inscribed their illustrious names. I had left the city in search of rest and seclusion. For the time, in the presence of Nature herself, I would gladly have forgotten the very existence of my all-too-famous countrymen; and I rejoiced accordingly to have found one lonely spot to which their restless feet had not yet penetrated. Tall grass grew untrodden quite up to the door-sill; raspberry vines thrust their arms in at the pane-less windows; there was neither paint nor plastering; and the tiny cupboard was so bare that it set my irreverent fancy to quoting Mother Goose in the midst of my most serious moralizings.
The owner of this farm, like his neighbor, had planted an apple orchard, and his wife a patch of cinnamon roses; and, not to treat one better than another, I picked a rose here also. There is no lover of flowers but likes to have his garden noticed, and the good housewife would have been pleased, I knew, could she have seen me looking carefully for her handsomest and sweetest bud.
By this time the shower was over, and a song-sparrow was giving thanks. I might never have another opportunity to follow up an old forest path, of which I had heard vague reports as leading from this point to the railway. "It starts from the upper corner of the farm," my informant had said. To the upper corner I went, therefore, through the rank, wet grass. But I found no sign of what I was looking for, and with some heartfelt but unreportable soliloquizings, to the effect that a countryman's directions, like dreams, are always to be read backwards, I started straight down toward the lower corner, saying to myself that I ought to have had the wit to take that course in the beginning. Sure enough, the path was there, badly overgrown with bushes and young trees, but still traceable. A few rods, and I came to the brook. The bridge was mostly gone, as I had been forewarned it probably would be, but a single big log answered a foot passenger's requirements. Once across the bridge, however, I could discover no sign of a trail. But what of that? The sun was shining; I had only to keep it at my back, and I was sure to bring up at the railroad. So I set out, and for a while traveled on bravely. Then I began to bethink myself that I was not going up-hill quite so fast as it seemed I ought to be doing. Was I really approaching the railway, after all? Or had I started in a wrong direction (being in the woods at the time), and was I heading along the mountain-side in such a course that I might walk all night, and all the while be only plunging deeper and deeper into the forest? The suggestion was not pleasurable. If I could only see the mountain! But the thick foliage put that out of the question.
After a short debate with myself I concluded to be prudent, and make my way back to the brook while I still had the sun to guide me; for I now called to mind the showeriness of the day, and the strong likelihood that the sky might at any moment be overcast. Even as things were, there was no assurance that I might not strike the brook at some distance from the bridge, and so at some distance from the trail, with no means of determining whether it was above or below me. I began my retreat, and pretty soon, luckily or unluckily,—I am not yet certain which,—in some unaccountable manner my feet found themselves again in the path.
Now, then, I would carry out my original intention, and I turned straight about. For a while the path held clear. Then it was blocked by a big tree that had toppled into it lengthwise. I must go round the obstruction, and pick up the trail at the other end. But the trail would not be picked up. It had faded out or run into the ground. Finally, when I was just on the point of owning myself beaten, my eyes all at once fell upon it, running along before me. A second experience of the same kind set me thinking how long it would take to go a mile or two at this rate (it was already half past four o'clock), even if I did not in the end lose my way altogether. But I kept on till I was stopped, not by a single windfall, but by a tangle of half a dozen. This time I hunted for a continuation of the path on the further side till I was out of patience, and then determined to be done with the foolish business, and go back by the way I had come. A very sensible resolve, but when I came to put it into execution it turned out to be too late. The path was lost entirely. I must fall back upon the sun; and if the truth is to be told, I commenced feeling slightly uncomfortable. The bushes were wet; my clothing was drenched; I had neither compass nor matches; it certainly would be anything but agreeable to spend the night in the forest.
Happily there was, for the present, no great danger of matters coming to such a pass. If the sun would only shine for half an hour longer I could reach the brook (I could probably reach it without the sun), and even if I missed the bridge I could follow the stream out of the woods before dark. I was not frightened, but I was beginning to tremble lest I should be. The loss of the path was in itself little to worry about. But what if I should lose my wits also, as many a man had done in circumstances no worse, and with consequences most disastrous? Unpleasant stories came into my head, and I remember repeating to myself more than once (candor is better than felicity of phrase), "Be careful, now; don't get rattled!" Then, having thus pulled myself together, as an Englishman would say, I faced the sun and began "stepping westward," though with no thought of Wordsworth's poem. A spectator might have suspected that if I was not "rattled," I was at least not far from it. "Now who is this," he might have queried,
"
whose sore task Does not divide the Sunday from the week?
"Meanwhile I was, of course, on the lookout for any signs of the missing path, and after a time I descried in the distance, on one side, what looked like a patch of bushes growing in the midst of the forest. I made for it, and, as I expected, found myself once more on the trail. This time I held it, reached the bridge, crossed it, and, still keeping up my pace, was presently out in the sunshine of the old farm, startling a brood of young partridges on the way. Happy birds! They were never afraid of passing a night in the woods. A most absurd notion! But man, as he is the strongest of all animals, so is he also the weakest and most defenseless.
This last reflection is an afterthought, I freely acknowledge. At the moment I was taken up with the peacefulness of the pastoral scene into which I had so happily emerged, and was in no mood to envy anybody. How bright and cheerful the ragworts and buttercups looked, and what sweet and homelike music the robin made, singing from one of the apple-trees! The cool north wind wafted the spicy odor of the cinnamon roses to my nostrils; but—alas for the prosaic fact!—the same cool wind struck through my saturated garments, bidding me move on. The pessimistic preacher was right when he said, "Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." I wonder whether he was ever bewildered in a dark wood. From boyhood I have loved the forest, with its silence, its shadows, and its deep isolation, but for the present I had had my fill of such mercies.
As I came out upon the highway, it occurred to me what Emerson says of Thoreau,—that "he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, and therefore never willingly walked in the road." My own taste, I was obliged to admit, was somewhat less fastidious. Indeed, my boots, soaked through and through as they were, made very grateful music striking along the gravel. And after supper, while walking back and forth upon the piazza, in all the luxury of slippers and a winter overcoat, I turned more than once from the glories of the sunset to gaze upon the black slope of Lafayette, thinking within myself how much less comfortable I should be up yonder in the depths of the forest, so dark and wet, without company, without fire, without overcoat, and without supper. After all, mere animal comfort is not to be despised. Let us be thankful, I said, for the good things of life, of no matter what grade; yes, though they be only a change of clothing and a summer hotel.
It was laughable how my quiet ramble had turned out. My friend, the red-eyed vireo, may or may not have stuck to his text; but if he had seen me in the midst of my retreat, dashing through the bushes and clambering over the fallen trees, he certainly never would have guessed mine. "Consider the lilies," indeed! He was more likely to think of a familiar Old Testament scripture: "The wicked flee when no man pursueth."
So waved the pine-tree through my thought.
Emerson.
In outward, every-day affairs, in what we foolishly call real life, man is a stickler for regularity, a devout believer in the maxim, "Order is heaven's first law." He sets his house at right angles with the street; lays out his grounds in the straightest of straight lines, or in the most undeviating of curves; selects his shade-trees for their trim, geometrical habit; and, all in all, carries himself as if precision and conformity were the height of virtue. Yet this same man, when he comes to deal with pictorial representations, makes up his judgment according to quite another standard; finding nothing picturesque in tidy gardens and shaven lawns, discarding without hesitation every well-rounded, symmetrical tree, delighting in disorder and disproportion, loving a ruin better than the best appointed [183]palace, and a tumble-down wall better than the costliest and stanchest of new-laid masonry. It is hard to know what to think of an inconsistency like this. Why should taste and principle be thus opposed to each other, as if the same man were half Philistine, half Bohemian? Can this strong æsthetic preference for imperfection be based upon some permanent, universal law, or is it only a passing whim, the fashion of an hour?
Whatever we may say of such a problem,—and where one knows nothing, it is perhaps wisest to say nothing,—we may surely count it an occasion for thankfulness that a thing so common as imperfection should have at least its favorable side. Music would soon become tame, if not intolerable, without here and there a discord; and who knows how stupid life itself might prove without some slight admixture of evil? From my study-windows I can see sundry of the newest and most commodious mansions in town; but I more often look, not at them, but at a certain dilapidated old house, blackening for want of paint, and fast falling into decay, but with one big elm before the door. I have no hankerings to live in it; as a dwelling-place, I should no doubt prefer one of the more modern establishments; but for an object to look at, give me the shanty.
Human nature is nothing if not paradoxical. In its eyes everything is both good and bad; and for my own part, I sometimes wonder whether this may not be the sum of all wisdom,—to find everything good in its place, and everything bad out of its place.
Thoughts like these suggest themselves as I look at the pitch-pine, which, to speak only of such trees as grow within the range of my own observation, is the one irregular member of the family of cone-bearers. The white or Weymouth pine, the hemlock, the cedars, the spruces, the fir, and the larch, these are all, in different ways, of a decidedly symmetrical turn. Each of them has its own definite plan, and builds itself up in fastidious conformity therewith, except as untoward outward conditions may now and then force an individual into some abnormal peculiarity. And all of them, it need not be said, have the defect of this quality. They are not without charm, not even the black spruce, while the Weymouth pine and the hemlock are often of surpassing magnificence and beauty; but a punctilious adherence to rule must of necessity be attended with a corresponding absence of freedom and variety. The pitch-pine, on the other hand, if it works upon any set scheme, as no doubt it does, has the grace to keep it out of sight. Its gift is genius rather than talent. It has an air, as genius always has, of achieving its results without effort or premeditation. Its method is that of spontaneity; its style, that of the picturesque-homely, so dear to the artistic temperament. Its whole make-up is consistent with this germinal or controlling idea. Angular in outline, rough and ragged in its bole, with its needles stiff and its cones hard and sharp, it makes no attempt at gracefulness, yet by virtue of its very waywardness it becomes, as if in spite of itself, more attractive than any of its relatives.
The Puritans of New England are mostly dead; the last of their spiritual descendants, we may fear, will soon be dead likewise; but as long as Pinus rigida covers the sandy knolls of Massachusetts, the sturdy, uncompromising, independent, economical, indefatigable, all-enduring spirit of Puritanism will be worthily represented in this its sometime thriving-place.
For the pitch-pine's noblest qualities are, after all, not artistic, but moral. Such unalterable contentment, such hardiness and persistency, are enough to put the stoutest of us to shame. Once give it root, and no sterility of soil can discourage it. Everything else may succumb, but it—it and the gray birch—will make shift to live. Like the resin that exudes from it, having once taken hold, it has no thought of letting go. It is never "planted by the rivers of water," but all the same its leaf does not wither. No summer so hot and dry, no winter so cold and wet, but it keeps its perennial green. What cannot be done in one year may, perchance, be accomplished in three or four. It spends several seasons in ripening its fruit. Think of an apple-tree thus patient!
The pitch-pine is beautiful to look at, and "profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness," but it would be a shame not to add that it is also most excellent to smell of. If I am to judge, scarcely any odor wears better than this of growing turpentine. There is something unmistakably clean and wholesome about it. The very first whiff savors of salubrity. "The belief in the good effects of pine forests in cases of phthisis is quite unanimous" (so I read the other day in a scientific journal), "and the clinical evidence in favor of their beneficial influence is unquestioned." Who can tell whether our New England climate, with all its consumptive provocations, might not be found absolutely unendurable but for the amelioration furnished by this generously diffused terebinthine prophylactic?
When all is said, however, nothing else about the pitch-pine ever affects me so deeply as its behavior after man has done his worst upon it. It would appear to have some vague sense of immortality, some gropings after a resurrection. The tree was felled in the autumn, and the trunk cut up ignominiously into cord-wood; but in the spring the prostrate logs begin to put forth scattered tufts of bright green leaves,—life still working under the ribs of death,—while the stump, whether "through the scent of water" I cannot say, is perhaps sending up fresh shoots,—a piece of post-mortem hopefulness the like of which no white pine, for all its seemingly greater vitality, was ever known to exhibit. But leaves and shoots alike come to nothing. If a pitch-pine die, it shall not live again. The wood's blind impulses, if not false in themselves, were at least falsely interpreted. Alas! alas! who has not found it so? What seemed like the prophetic stirrings of a new life were only the last flickerings of a lamp that was going out.