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Part II.
Part II.
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 favourably 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
vineclad 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 stallfed 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 woodthrush, to
which I would migrate, - wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which,
methinks, I am already acclimated.
The African hunter Cumming 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 odour 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
graveled 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 parlour, 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 reentering 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 civilised 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 marrowbones.
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 bush - whack, the turfcutter, 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 corn - field 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. Dulness 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 hearthstone 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 Shakespeare, 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, - aye, 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 Platte, 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 to - day. 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, grey 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 unwieldy 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, title - 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. Niepce, 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 - Gramatica 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 can 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 some times 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 the sun: `Ms ri vowv ov
Kelvov vonoels, - "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 Purana, "which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which
is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto wariness; 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, aye, 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 Kobmos, 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 transient
forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose
territories I seem to retreat are those of a mosstrooper. 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 firefly 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
three - score 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
even seen the like before, but 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
even 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 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 hillside, 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 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 bankside in autumn.
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