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Excursions

by Henry David Thoreau · English · Gutenberg #9846 · 418,717 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Excursions

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Contributor: Ralph Waldo Emerson


        
Release date: February 1, 2006 [eBook #9846]
                Most recently updated: January 21, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9846

Credits: Charles Bidwell and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXCURSIONS ***

[Illustration]




Excursions

by Henry David Thoreau

1863


Contents

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




BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
BY R.W. EMERSON.


HENRY DAVID THOREAU was the last male descendant of a French ancestor
who came to this country from the Isle of Guernsey. His character
exhibited occasional traits drawn from this blood in singular
combination with a very strong Saxon genius.

He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1817. He
was graduated at Harvard College in 1837, but without any literary
distinction. An iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges
for their service to him, holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his
debt to them was important. After leaving the University, he joined his
brother in teaching a private school, which he soon renounced. His
father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and Henry applied himself
for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil than
was then in use. After completing his experiments, he exhibited his
work to chemists and artists in Boston, and having obtained their
certificates to its excellence and to its equality with the best London
manufacture, he returned home contented. His friends congratulated him
that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied, that he
should never make another pencil. “Why should I? I would not do again
what I have done once.” He resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous
studies, making every day some new acquaintance with Nature, though as
yet never speaking of zoölogy or botany, since, though very studious of
natural facts, he was incurious of technical and textual science.

At this time, a strong, healthy youth, fresh from college, whilst all
his companions were choosing their profession, or eager to begin some
lucrative employment, it was inevitable that his thoughts should be
exercised on the same question, and it required rare decision to refuse
all the accustomed paths, and keep his solitary freedom at the cost of
disappointing the natural expectations of his family and friends: all
the more difficult that he had a perfect probity, was exact in securing
his own independence, and in holding every man to the like duty. But
Thoreau never faltered. He was a born protestant. He declined to give
up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or
profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of
living well. If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was
only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own
belief. Never idle or self-indulgent, he preferred, when he wanted
money, earning it by some piece of manual labor agreeable to him, as
building a boat or a fence, planting, grafting, surveying, or other
short work, to any long engagements. With his hardy habits and few
wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful arithmetic, he was
very competent to live in any part of the world. It would cost him less
time to supply his wants than another. He was therefore secure of his
leisure.

A natural skill for mensuration, growing out of his mathematical
knowledge, and his habit of ascertaining the measures and distances of
objects which interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent
of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains, and the air-line distance
of his favorite summits,—this, and his intimate knowledge of the
territory about Concord, made him drift into the profession of
land-surveyor. It had the advantage for him that it led him continually
into new and secluded grounds, and helped his studies of Nature. His
accuracy and skill in this work were readily appreciated, and he found
all the employment he wanted.

He could easily solve the problems of the surveyor, but he was daily
beset with graver questions, which he manfully confronted. He
interrogated every custom, and wished to settle all his practice on an
ideal foundation. He was a protestant _à l’outrance_, and few lives
contain so many renunciations. He was bred to no profession; he never
married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he
refused to pay a tax to the State: he ate no flesh, he drank no wine,
he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used
neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely, no doubt, for himself, to be
the bachelor of thought and Nature. He had no talent for wealth, and
knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance.
Perhaps he fell into his way of living without forecasting it much, but
approved it with later wisdom.

“I am often reminded,” he wrote in his journal, “that, if I had
bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must be still the same,
and my means essentially the same.” He had no temptations to fight
against,—no appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles. A
fine house, dress, the manners and talk of highly cultivated people
were all thrown away on him. He much preferred a good Indian, and
considered these refinements as impediments to conversation, wishing to
meet his companion on the simplest terms. He declined invitations to
dinner-parties, because there each was in every one’s way, and he could
not meet the individuals to any purpose. “They make their pride,” he
said, “in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my
dinner cost little.” When asked at table what dish he preferred, he
answered, “The nearest.” He did not like the taste of wine, and never
had a vice in his life. He said,—“I have a faint recollection of
pleasure derived from smoking dried lily-stems, before I was a man. I
had commonly a supply of these. I have never smoked anything more
noxious.”

He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them
himself. In his travels, he used the railroad only to get over so much
country as was unimportant to the present purpose, walking hundreds of
miles, avoiding taverns, buying a lodging in farmers’ and fishermen’s
houses, as cheaper, and more agreeable to him, and because there he
could better find the men and the information he wanted.

There was somewhat military in his nature not to be subdued, always
manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except
in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I
may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call
his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed,
he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first
instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient
was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course,
is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion
would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars
conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations
with one so pure and guileless. “I love Henry,” said one of his
friends, “but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as
soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.”

Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and
threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people
whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could,
with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and
river. And he was always ready to lead a huckleberry party or a search
for chestnuts or grapes. Talking, one day, of a public discourse, Henry
remarked, that whatever succeeded with the audience was bad. I said,
“Who would not like to write something which all can read, like
‘Robinson Crusoe’? and who does not see with regret that his page is
not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which delights
everybody?” Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better lectures
which reached only a few persons. But, at supper, a young girl,
understanding that he was to lecture at the Lyceum, sharply asked him,
“whether his lecture would be a nice, interesting story, such as she
wished to hear, or whether it was one of those old philosophical things
that she did not care about.” Henry turned to her, and bethought
himself, and, I saw, was trying to believe that he had matter that
might fit her and her brother, who were to sit up and go to the
lecture, if it was a good one for them.

He was a speaker and actor of the truth,—born such,—and was ever
running into dramatic situations from this cause. In any circumstance,
it interested all bystanders to know what part Henry would take, and
what he would say; and he did not disappoint expectation, but used an
original judgment on each emergency. In 1845 he built himself a small
framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years
alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit
for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was
more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as
he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it. In
1847, not approving some uses to which the public expenditure was
applied, he refused to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. A friend
paid the tax for him, and he was released. The like annoyance was
threatened the next year. But, as his friends paid the tax,
notwithstanding his protest, I believe he ceased to resist. No
opposition or ridicule had any weight with him. He coldly and fully
stated his opinion without affecting to believe that it was the opinion
of the company. It was of no consequence, if every one present held the
opposite opinion. On one occasion he went to the University Library to
procure some books. The librarian refused to lend them. Mr. Thoreau
repaired to the President, who stated to him the rules and usages,
which permitted the loan of books to resident graduates, to clergymen
who were alumni, and to some others resident within a circle of ten
miles’ radius from the College. Mr. Thoreau explained to the President
that the railroad had destroyed the old scale of distances,—that the
library was useless, yes, and President and College useless, on the
terms of his rules,—that the one benefit he owed to the College was its
library,— that, at this moment, not only his want of books was
imperative, but he wanted a large number of books, and assured him that
he, Thoreau, and not the librarian, was the proper custodian of these.
In short, the President found the petitioner so formidable, and the
rules getting to look so ridiculous, that he ended by giving him a
privilege which in his hands proved unlimited thereafter.

No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his country
and condition was genuine, and his aversation from English and European
manners and tastes almost reached contempt. He listened impatiently to
news or _bon mots_ gleaned from London circles; and though he tried to
be civil, these anecdotes fatigued him. The men were all imitating each
other, and on a small mould. Why can they not live as far apart as
possible, and each be a man by himself? What he sought was the most
energetic nature; and he wished to go to Oregon, not to London. “In
every part of Great Britain,” he wrote in his diary, “are discovered
traces of the Romans, their funereal urns, their camps, their roads,
their dwellings. But New England, at least, is not based on any Roman
ruins. We have not to lay the foundations of our houses on the ashes of
a former civilization.”

But, idealist as he was, standing for abolition of slavery, abolition
of tariffs, almost for abolition of government, it is needless to say
he found himself not only unrepresented in actual politics, but almost
equally opposed to every class of reformers. Yet he paid the tribute of
his uniform respect to the Anti-Slavery Party. One man, whose personal
acquaintance he had formed, he honored with exceptional regard. Before
the first friendly word had been spoken for Captain John Brown, after
the arrest, he sent notices to most houses in Concord, that he would
speak in a public hall on the condition and character of John Brown, on
Sunday evening, and invited all people to come. The Republican
Committee, the Abolitionist Committee, sent him word that it was
premature and not advisable. He replied,—“I did not send to you for
advice, but to announce that I am to speak.” The hall was filled at an
early hour by people of all parties, and his earnest eulogy of the hero
was heard by all respectfully, by many with a sympathy that surprised
themselves.

It was said of Plotinus that he was ashamed of his body, and ’tis very
likely he had good reason for it,—that his body was a bad servant, and
he had not skill in dealing with the material world, as happens often
to men of abstract intellect. But Mr. Thoreau was equipped with a most
adapted and serviceable body. He was of short stature, firmly built, of
light complexion, with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave
aspect,—his face covered in the late years with a becoming beard. His
senses were acute, his frame well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and
skilful in the use of tools. And there was a wonderful fitness of body
and mind. He could pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man
could measure them with rod and chain. He could find his path in the
woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. He could
estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eyes; he could estimate
the weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. From a box containing a
bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast
enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp. He was a good swimmer,
runner, skater, boatman, and would probably outwalk most countrymen in
a day’s journey. And the relation of body to mind was still finer than
we have indicated. He said he wanted every stride his legs made. The
length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up
in the house, he did not write at all.

He had a strong common sense, like that which Rose Flammock, the
weaver’s daughter, in Scott’s romance, commends in her father, as
resembling a yardstick, which, whilst it measures dowlas and diaper,
can equally well measure tapestry and cloth of gold. He had always a
new resource. When I was planting forest-trees, and had procured half a
peck of acorns, he said that only a small portion of them would be
sound, and proceeded to examine them, and select the sound ones. But
finding this took time, he said, “I think, if you put them all into
water, the good ones will sink;” which experiment we tried with
success. He could plan a garden, or a house, or a barn; would have been
competent to lead a “Pacific Exploring Expedition”; could give
judicious counsel in the gravest private or public affairs.

He lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. If he
brought you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you to-day
another not less revolutionary. A very industrious man, and setting,
like all highly organized men, a high value on his time, he seemed the
only man of leisure in town, always ready for any excursion that
promised well, or for conversation prolonged into late hours. His
trenchant sense was never stopped by his rules of daily prudence, but
was always up to the new occasion. He liked and used the simplest food,
yet, when some one urged a vegetable diet, Thoreau thought all diets a
very small matter, saying that “the man who shoots the buffalo lives
better than the man who boards at the Graham House.” He said,—“You can
sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed: Nature knows very well
what sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind not to
hear the railroad-whistle. But things respect the devout mind, and a
mental ecstasy was never interrupted.” He noted, what repeatedly befell
him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would
presently find the same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck
which happen only to good players happened to him. One day, walking
with a stranger, who inquired where Indian arrow-heads could he found,
he replied, “Everywhere,” and, stooping forward, picked one on the
instant from the ground. At Mount Washington, in Tuckerman’s Ravine,
Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was in the act of
getting up from his fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of the
_Arnica mollis_.

His robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions, and
strong will, cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his
simple and hidden life. I must add the cardinal fact, that there was an
excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men, which showed
him the material world as a means and symbol. This discovery, which
sometimes yields to poets a certain casual and interrupted light,
serving for the ornament of their writing, was in him an unsleeping
insight; and whatever faults or obstructions of temperament might cloud
it, he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. In his youth, he
said, one day, “The other world is all my art: my pencils will draw no
other; my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a
means.” This was the muse and genius that ruled his opinions,
conversation, studies, work, and course of life. This made him a
searching judge of men. At first glance he measured his companion, and,
though insensible to some fine traits of culture, could very well
report his weight and calibre. And this made the impression of genius
which his conversation often gave.

He understood the matter in hand at a glance, and saw the limitations
and poverty of those he talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed
from such terrible eyes. I have repeatedly known young men of
sensibility converted in a moment to the belief that this was the man
they were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they
should do. His own dealing with them was never affectionate, but
superior, didactic,—scorning their petty ways,—very slowly conceding,
or not conceding at all, the promise of his society at their houses, or
even at his own. “Would he not walk with them?” “He did not know. There
was nothing so important to him as his walk; he had no walks to throw
away on company.” Visits were offered him from respectful parties, but
he declined them. Admiring friends offered to carry him at their own
cost to the Yellow-Stone River,—to the West Indies,—to South America.
But though nothing could be more grave or considered than his refusals,
they remind one in quite new relations of that fop Brummel’s reply to
the gentleman who offered him his carriage in a shower, “But where will
_you_ ride, then?”—and what accusing silences, and what searching and
irresistible speeches, battering down all defences, his companions can
remember!

Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields,
hills, and waters of his native town, that he made them known and
interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea. The
river on whose banks he was born and died he knew from its springs to
its confluence with the Merrimack. He had made summer and winter
observations on it for many years, and at every hour of the day and the
night. The result of the recent survey of the Water Commissioners
appointed by the State of Massachusetts he had reached by his private
experiments, several years earlier. Every fact which occurs in the bed,
on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and
nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on
a certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes
so ravenously that many of these die of repletion; the conical heaps of
small stones on the river-shallows, one of which heaps will sometimes
overfill a cart,—these heaps the huge nests of small fishes; the birds
which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the
snake, musk-rat, otter, woodchuck, and fox, on the banks; the turtle,
frog, hyla, and cricket, which make the banks vocal,—were all known to
him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow-creatures; so that he felt an
absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart,
and still more of its dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the exhibition
of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or a bird in brandy. He
liked to speak of the manners of the river, as itself a lawful
creature, yet with exactness, and always to an observed fact. As he
knew the river, so the ponds in this region.

One of the weapons he used, more important than microscope or
alcohol-receiver to other investigators, was a whim which grew on him
by indulgence, yet appeared in gravest statement, namely, of extolling
his own town and neighborhood as the most favored centre for natural
observation. He remarked that the Flora of Massachusetts embraced
almost all the important plants of America,—most of the oaks, most of
the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the nuts.
He returned Kane’s “Arctic Voyage” to a friend of whom he had borrowed
it, with the remark, that “most of the phenomena noted might be
observed in Concord.” He seemed a little envious of the Pole, for the
coincident sunrise and sunset, or five minutes’ day after six months: a
splendid fact, which Annursnuc had never afforded him. He found red
snow in one of his walks, and told me that he expected to find yet the
_Victoria regia_ in Concord. He was the attorney of the indigenous
plants, and owned to a preference of the weeds to the imported plants,
as of the Indian to the civilized man,—and noticed, with pleasure, that
the willow bean-poles of his neighbor had grown more than his beans.
“See these weeds,” he said, “which have been hoed at by a million
farmers all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, and just now
come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields, and gardens, such
is their vigor. We have insulted them with low names, too,—as Pigweed,
Wormwood, Chickweed, Shad-Blossom.” He says, “They have brave names,
too,—Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchia, Amaranth, etc.”

I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord
did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes
or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of
the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is
where he stands. He expressed it once in this wise:—“I think nothing is
to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not
sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world.”

The other weapon with which he conquered all obstacles in science was
patience. He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested
on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him,
should come back, and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity,
should come to him and watch him.

It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country
like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his
own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what
creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to
such a guide, and the reward was great. Under his arm he carried an old
music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a
spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore straw
hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax,
and to climb a tree for a hawk’s or a squirrel’s nest. He waded into
the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no
insignificant part of his armor. On the day I speak of he looked for
the Menyanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examination
of the florets, decided that it had been in flower five days. He drew
out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the
plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a
banker when his notes fall due. The Cypripedium not due till to-morrow.
He thought, that, if waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could
tell by the plants what time of the year it was within two days. The
redstart was flying about, and presently the fine grosbeaks, whose
brilliant scarlet makes the rash gazer wipe his eye, and whose fine
clear note Thoreau compared to that of a tanager which has got rid of
its hoarseness. Presently he heard a note which he called that of the
night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of
twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving
down into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird
that sings indifferently by night and by day. I told him he must beware
of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show
him. He said, “What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you
come full upon all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and
as soon as you find it you become its prey.”

His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was
connected with Nature,—and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to
be defined by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to
the Natural History Society. “Why should I? To detach the description
from its connections in my mind would make it no longer true or
valuable to me: and they do not wish what belongs to it.” His power of
observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with
microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a
photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better
than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or
effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a
type of the order and beauty of the whole. His determination on Natural
History was organic. He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound
or a panther, and, if born among Indians, would have been a fell
hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts culture, he played out the
game in this mild form of botany and ichthyology. His intimacy with
animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler the apiologist,
that “either he had told the bees things or the bees had told him.”
Snakes coiled round his leg; the fishes swam into his hand, and he took
them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the
tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters. Our
naturalist had perfect magnanimity; he had no secrets: he would carry
you to the heron’s haunt, or even to his most prized botanical
swamp,—possibly knowing that you could never find it again, yet willing
to take his risks.

No college ever offered him a diploma, or a professor’s chair; no
academy made him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer, or even
its member. Whether these learned bodies feared the satire of his
presence. Yet so much knowledge of Nature’s secret and genius few
others possessed, none in a more large and religious synthesis. For not
a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men,
but homage solely to the truth itself; and as he discovered everywhere
among doctors some leaning of courtesy, it discredited them. He grew to
be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at first known him only
as an oddity. The farmers who employed him as a surveyor soon
discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of their lands,
of trees, of birds, of Indian remains, and the like, which enabled him
to tell every farmer more than he knew before of his own farm; so that
he began to feel as if Mr. Thoreau had better rights in his land than
he. They felt, too, the superiority of character which addressed all
men with a native authority.

Indian relics abound in Concord,—arrow-heads, stone chisels, pestles,
and fragments of pottery; and on the river-bank, large heaps of
clam-shells and ashes mark spots which the savages frequented. These,
and every circumstance touching the Indian, were important in his eyes.
His visits to Maine were chiefly for love of the Indian. He had the
satisfaction of seeing the manufacture of the bark-canoe, as well as of
trying his hand in its management on the rapids. He was inquisitive
about the making of the stone arrow-head, and in his last days charged
a youth setting out for the Rocky Mountains to find an Indian who could
tell him that: “It was well worth a visit to California to learn it.”
Occasionally, a small party of Penobscot Indians would visit Concord,
and pitch their tents for a few weeks in summer on the river-bank. He
failed not to make acquaintance with the best of them; though he well
knew that asking questions of Indians is like catechizing beavers and
rabbits. In his last visit to Maine he had great satisfaction from
Joseph Polis, an intelligent Indian of Oldtown, who was his guide for
some weeks.

He was equally interested in every natural fact. The depth of his
perception found likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any
genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. He
was no pedant of a department. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear
to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he
went. He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found
poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph-wire.

His poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility
and technical skill; but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual
perception. He was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry
was to the ground of it. He could not be deceived as to the presence or
absence of the poetic element in any composition, and his thirst for
this made him negligent and perhaps scornful of superficial graces. He
would pass by many delicate rhythms, but he would have detected every
live stanza or line in a volume, and knew very well where to find an
equal poetic charm in prose. He was so enamored of the spiritual beauty
that he held all actual written poems in very light esteem in the
comparison. He admired Aeschylus and Pindar; but, when some one was
commending them, he said that “Aeschylus and the Greeks, in describing
Apollo and Orpheus, had given no song, or no good one. They ought not
to have moved trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a hymn as
would have sung all their old ideas out of their heads, and new ones
in.” His own verses are often rude and defective. The gold does not yet
run pure, is drossy and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet
honey. But if he want lyric fineness and technical merits, if he have
not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the causal thought, showing
that his genius was better than his talent. He knew the worth of the
Imagination for the uplifting and consolation of human life, and liked
to throw every thought into a symbol. The fact you tell is of no value,
but only the impression. For this reason his presence was poetic,
always piqued the curiosity to know more deeply the secrets of his
mind. He had many reserves, an unwillingness to exhibit to profane eyes
what was still sacred in his own, and knew well how to throw a poetic
veil over his experience. All readers of “Walden” will remember his
mythical record of his disappointments:—

“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still
on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,
describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met
one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and
even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious
to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.” [“Walden” p.20]

His riddles were worth the reading, and I confide, that, if at any time
I do not understand the expression, it is yet just. Such was the wealth
of his truth that it was not worth his while to use words in vain. His
poem entitled “Sympathy” reveals the tenderness under that triple steel
of stoicism, and the intellectual subtilty it could animate. His
classic poem on “Smoke” suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem
of Simonides. His biography is in his verses. His habitual thought
makes all his poetry a hymn to the Cause of causes, the Spirit which
vivifies and controls his own.

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


And still more in these religious lines:—

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


Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in
reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender,
and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or
by thought. Of course, the same isolation which belonged to his
original thinking and living detached him from the social religious
forms. This is neither to be censured nor regretted. Aristotle long ago
explained it, when he said, “One who surpasses his fellow-citizens in
virtue is no longer a part of the city. Their law is not for him, since
he is a law to himself.”

Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of
prophets in the ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative
experience which refused to be set aside. A truth-speaker he, capable
of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of
any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but
almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their
confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great
heart. He thought that without religion or devotion of some kind
nothing great was ever accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted
sectarian had better bear this in mind.

His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to
trace to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity
which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished.
Himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. He had a
disgust at crime, and no worldly success could cover it. He detected
paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars,
and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that
his admirers called him “that terrible Thoreau,” as if he spoke when
silent, and was still present when he had departed. I think the
severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy
sufficiency of human society.

The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance
inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of
antagonism defaced his earlier writings,—a trick of rhetoric not quite
outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought
its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests
for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and
commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. “It was so dry,
that you might call it wet.”

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in
the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to
those who do not share the philosopher’s perception of identity. To him
there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the
Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to
cosmical laws. Though he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a
certain chronic assumption that the science of the day pretended
completeness, and he had just found out that the _savans_ had neglected
to discriminate a particular botanical variety, had failed to describe
the seeds or count the sepals. “That is to say,” we replied, “the
blockheads were not born in Concord; but who said they were? It was
their unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or Paris, or Rome;
but, poor fellows, they did what they could, considering that they
never saw Bateman’s Pond, or Nine-Acre Corner, or Becky-Stow’s Swamp.
Besides, what were you sent into the world for, but to add this
observation?”

Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life,
but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great
enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare
powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he
had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America,
he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to
the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of
years, it is still only beans!

But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the
incessant growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its
defeats with new triumphs. His study of Nature was a perpetual ornament
to him, and inspired his friends with curiosity to see the world
through his eyes, and to hear his adventures. They possessed every kind
of interest.

He had many elegances of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional
elegance. Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps,
the grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road,
but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. His senses were acute, and
he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like
a slaughter-house. He liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He honored
certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pond-lily,—then,
the gentian, and the _Mikania scandens_, and “life-everlasting,” and a
bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of
July. He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the
sight,—more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals
what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness.
He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of
kindred voices that he heard. He loved Nature so well, was so happy in
her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities, and the sad work
which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling.
The axe was always destroying his forest. “Thank God,” he said, “they
cannot cut down the clouds!” “All kinds of figures are drawn on the
blue ground with this fibrous white paint.”

I subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts, not
only as records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of
description and literary excellence.

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

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

“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon,
or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the
middle-aged man concludes to built a wood-shed with them.”

“The locust z-ing.”

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

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

“I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their
leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable
regiments. Dead trees love the fire.”

“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”

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

“If I wish for a horse-hair for my compass-sight, I must go to the
stable; but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road.”

“Immortal water, alive even to the superficies.”

“Fire is the most tolerable third party.”

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

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

“How did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the
fresh-water clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender
to the fire that melts them. To nought else can they be tender.”

There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our
summer plant called “Life-Everlasting,” a _Gnaphalium_ like that, which
grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where
the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its
beauty, and by his love, (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss
maidens,) climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at
the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by botanists the
_Gnaphalium leontopodium_, but by the Swiss _Edelweisse_, which
signifies _Noble Purity_. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to
gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on which
his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were
the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not
yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an
injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task, which none
else can finish,—a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should
depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers
for what he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the
noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of
this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue,
wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.




EXCURSIONS




NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS.[1]


[1842.]

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read
in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground,
of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes; of
the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the
rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of
the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health
to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.

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


I am singularly refreshed in winter when I hear of service-berries,
poke-weed, juniper. Is not heaven made up of these cheap summer
glories? There is a singular health in those words, Labrador and East
Main, which no desponding creed recognizes. How much more than Federal
are these States. If there were no other vicissitudes than the seasons,
our interest would never tire. Much more is adoing than Congress wots
of. What journal do the persimmon and the buckeye keep, and the
sharp-shinned hawk? What is transpiring from summer to winter in the
Carolinas, and the Great Pine Forest, and the Valley of the Mohawk? The
merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering; men are
degraded when considered as the members of a political organization. On
this side all lands present only the symptoms of decay. I see but
Bunker Hill and Sing-Sing, the District of Columbia and Sullivan’s
Island, with a few avenues connecting them. But paltry are they all
beside one blast of the east or the south wind which blows over them.

In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at
least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and
livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so. There
is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance
so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high
pastures. I would keep some book of natural history always by me as a
sort of elixir, the reading of which should restore the tone of the
system. To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a
fountain of health. To him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty
no harm nor disappointment can come. The doctrines of despair, of
spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such
as shared the serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag
here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur
Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any
circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not
countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do
forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the
Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the
northern night, the hunter does not give over to follow the seal and
walrus on the ice. They are of sick and diseased imaginations who would
toll the world’s knell so soon. Cannot these sedentary sects do better
than prepare the shrouds and write the epitaphs of those other busy
living men? The practical faith of all men belies the preacher’s
consolation. What is any man’s discourse to me, if I am not sensible of
something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of crickets? In it
the woods must be relieved against the sky. Men tire me when I am not
constantly greeted and refreshed as by the flux of sparkling streams.
Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry that leap
in ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer
evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in
the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and
change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow
stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by
the attrition is reflected upon the bank.

We fancy that this din of religion, literature, and philosophy, which
is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the
universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth’s
axle; but if a man sleep soundly, he will forget it all between sunset
and dawn. It is the three-inch swing of a pendulum in a cupboard, which
the great pulse of nature vibrates by and through each instant. When we
lift our eyelids and open our ears, it disappears with smoke and rattle
like the cars on a railroad. When I detect a beauty in any of the
recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in
which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of a
life,—how silent and unambitious it is. The beauty there is in mosses
must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook. What an admirable
training is science for the more active warfare of life. Indeed, the
unchallenged bravery, which these studies imply, is far more impressive
than the trumpeted valor of the warrior. I am pleased to learn that
Thales was up and stirring by night not unfrequently, as his
astronomical discoveries prove. Linnaeus, setting out for Lapland,
surveys his “comb” and “spare shirt,” “leathern breeches” and “gauze
cap to keep off gnats,” with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of
artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is
admirable. His eye is to take in fish, flower, and bird, quadruped and
biped. Science is always brave, for to know, is to know good; doubt and
danger quail before her eye. What the coward overlooks in his hurry,
she calmly scrutinizes, breaking ground like a pioneer for the array of
arts that follow in her train. But cowardice is unscientific; for there
cannot be a science of ignorance. There may be a science of bravery,
for that advances; but a retreat is rarely well conducted; if it is,
then is it an orderly advance in the face of circumstances.

But to draw a little nearer to our promised topics. Entomology extends
the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a
sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the
universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will
bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with
the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no
interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure,
the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which
seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not
remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest fly? There were ears for
these sounds in Greece long ago, as Anacreon’s ode will show.

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


In the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over all
the land, and as in summer they are heard chiefly at nightfall, so then
by their incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year. Nor can
all the vanities that vex the world alter one whit the measure that
night has chosen. Every pulse-beat is in exact time with the cricket’s
chant and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall. Alternate with
these if you can.

About two hundred and eighty birds either reside permanently in the
State, or spend the summer only, or make us a passing visit. Those
which spend the winter with us have obtained our warmest sympathy. The
nut-hatch and chicadee flitting in company through the dells of the
wood, the one harshly scolding at the intruder, the other with a faint
lisping note enticing him on; the jay screaming in the orchard; the
crow cawing in unison with the storm; the partridge, like a russet link
extended over from autumn to spring, preserving unbroken the chain of
summers; the hawk with warrior-like firmness abiding the blasts of
winter; the robin[2] and lark lurking by warm springs in the woods; the
familiar snow-bird culling a few seeds in the garden, or a few crumbs
in the yard; and occasionally the shrike, with heedless and unfrozen
melody bringing back summer again;—

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


As the spring advances, and the ice is melting in the river, our
earliest and straggling visitors make their appearance. Again does the
old Teian poet sing, as well for New England as for Greece, in the

RETURN OF SPRING.


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


The ducks alight at this season in the still water, in company with the
gulls, which do not fail to improve an east wind to visit our meadows,
and swim about by twos and threes, pluming themselves, and diving to
peck at the root of the lily, and the cranberries which the frost has
not loosened. The first flock of geese is seen beating to north, in
long harrows and waving lines; the gingle of the song-sparrow salutes
us from the shrubs and fences; the plaintive note of the lark comes
clear and sweet from the meadow; and the bluebird, like an azure ray,
glances past us in our walk. The fish-hawk, too, is occasionally seen
at this season sailing majestically over the water, and he who has once
observed it will not soon forget the majesty of its flight. It sails
the air like a ship of the line, worthy to struggle with the elements,
falling back from time to time like a ship on its beam ends, and
holding its talons up as if ready for the arrows, in the attitude of
the national bird. It is a great presence, as of the master of river
and forest. Its eye would not quail before the owner of the soil, but
make him feel like an intruder on its domains. And then its retreat,
sailing so steadily away, is a kind of advance. I have by me one of a
pair of ospreys, which have for some years fished in this vicinity,
shot by a neighboring pond, measuring more than two feet in length, and
six in the stretch of its wings. Nuttall mentions that “The ancients,
particularly Aristotle, pretended that the ospreys taught their young
to gaze at the sun, and those who were unable to do so were destroyed.
Linnaeus even believed, on ancient authority, that one of the feet of
this bird had all the toes divided, while the other was partly webbed,
so that it could swim with one foot, and grasp a fish with the other.”
But that educated eye is now dim, and those talons are nerveless. Its
shrill scream seems yet to linger in its throat, and the roar of the
sea in its wings. There is the tyranny of Jove in its claws, and his
wrath in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. It reminds me of
the Argonautic expedition, and would inspire the dullest to take flight
over Parnassus.

The booming of the bittern, described by Goldsmith and Nuttall, is
frequently heard in our fens, in the morning and evening, sounding like
a pump, or the chopping of wood in a frosty morning in some distant
farm-yard. The manner in which this sound is produced I have not seen
anywhere described. On one occasion, the bird has been seen by one of
my neighbors to thrust its bill into the water, and suck up as much as
it could hold, then raising its head, it pumped it out again with four
or five heaves of the neck, throwing it two or three feet, and making
the sound each time.

At length the summer’s eternity is ushered in by the cackle of the
flicker among the oaks on the hill-side, and a new dynasty begins with
calm security.

In May and June the woodland quire is in full tune, and given the
immense spaces of hollow air, and this curious human ear, one does not
see how the void could be better filled.

Each summer sound
Is a summer round.


As the season advances, and those birds which make us but a passing
visit depart, the woods become silent again, and but few feathers
ruffle the drowsy air. But the solitary rambler may still find a
response and expression for every mood in the depths of the wood.

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


The phoebe still sings in harmony with the sultry weather by the brink
of the pond, nor are the desultory hours of noon in the midst of the
village without their minstrel.

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


With the autumn begins in some measure a new spring. The plover is
heard whistling high in the air over the dry pastures, the finches flit
from tree to tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly in flocks, and the
goldfinch rides on the earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping amid
the rustle of the leaves. The crows, too, begin now to congregate; you
may stand and count them as they fly low and straggling over the
landscape, singly or by twos and threes, at intervals of half a mile,
until a hundred have passed.

I have seen it suggested somewhere that the crow was brought to this
country by the white man; but I shall as soon believe that the white
man planted these pines and hemlocks. He is no spaniel to follow our
steps; but rather flits about the clearings like the dusky spirit of
the Indian, reminding me oftener of Philip and Powhatan, than of
Winthrop and Smith. He is a relic of the dark ages. By just so slight,
by just so lasting a tenure does superstition hold the world ever;
there is the rook in England, and the crow in New England.

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


The late walker or sailor, in the October evenings, may hear the
murmurings of the snipe, circling over the meadows, the most
spirit-like sound in nature; and still later in the autumn, when the
frosts have tinged the leaves, a solitary loon pays a visit to our
retired ponds, where he may lurk undisturbed till the season of
moulting is passed, making the woods ring with his wild laughter. This
bird, the Great Northern Diver, well deserves its name; for when
pursued with a boat, it will dive, and swim like a fish under water,
for sixty rods or more, as fast as a boat can be paddled, and its
pursuer, if he would discover his game again, must put his ear to the
surface to hear where it comes up. When it comes to the surface, it
throws the water off with one shake of its wings, and calmly swims
about until again disturbed.

These are the sights and sounds which reach our senses oftenest during
the year. But sometimes one hears a quite new note, which has for
background other Carolinas and Mexicos than the books describe, and
learns that his ornithology has done him no service.

It appears from the Report that there are about forty quadrupeds
belonging to the State, and among these one is glad to hear of a few
bears, wolves, lynxes, and wildcats.

When our river overflows its banks in the spring, the wind from the
meadows is laden with a strong scent of musk, and by its freshness
advertises me of an unexplored wildness. Those backwoods are not far
off then. I am affected by the sight of the cabins of the musk-rat,
made of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet along the river,
as when I read of the barrows of Asia. The musk-rat is the beaver of
the settled States. Their number has even increased within a few years
in this vicinity. Among the rivers which empty into the Merrimack, the
Concord is known to the boatmen as a dead stream. The Indians are said
to have called it Musketaquid, or Prairie River. Its current being much
more sluggish, and its water more muddy than the rest, it abounds more
in fish and game of every kind. According to the History of the town,
“The fur-trade was here once very important. As early as 1641, a
company was formed in the colony, of which Major Willard of Concord was
superintendent, and had the exclusive right to trade with the Indians
in furs and other articles; and for this right they were obliged to pay
into the public treasury one twentieth of all the furs they obtained.”
There are trappers in our midst still, as well as on the streams of the
far West, who night and morning go the round of their traps, without
fear of the Indian. One of these takes from one hundred and fifty to
two hundred musk-rats in a year, and even thirty-six have been shot by
one man in a day. Their fur, which is not nearly as valuable as
formerly, is in good condition in the winter and spring only; and upon
the breaking up of the ice, when they are driven out of their holes by
the water, the greatest number is shot from boats, either swimming or
resting on their stools, or slight supports of grass and reeds, by the
side of the stream. Though they exhibit considerable cunning at other
times, they are easily taken in a trap, which has only to be placed in
their holes, or wherever they frequent, without any bait being used,
though it is sometimes rubbed with their musk. In the winter the hunter
cuts holes in the ice, and shoots them when they come to the surface.
Their burrows are usually in the high banks of the river, with the
entrance under water, and rising within to above the level of high
water. Sometimes their nests, composed of dried meadow grass and flags,
may be discovered where the bank is low and spongy, by the yielding of
the ground under the feet. They have from three to seven or eight young
in the spring.

Frequently, in the morning or evening, a long ripple is seen in the
still water, where a musk-rat is crossing the stream, with only its
nose above the surface, and sometimes a green bough in its mouth to
build its house with. When it finds itself observed, it will dive and
swim five or six rods under water, and at length conceal itself in its
hole, or the weeds. It will remain under water for ten minutes at a
time, and on one occasion has been seen, when undisturbed, to form an
air-bubble under the ice, which contracted and expanded as it breathed
at leisure. When it suspects danger on shore, it will stand erect like
a squirrel, and survey its neighborhood for several minutes, without
moving.

In the fall, if a meadow intervene between their burrows and the
stream, they erect cabins of mud and grass, three or four feet high,
near its edge. These are not their breeding-places, though young are
sometimes found in them in late freshets, but rather their
hunting-lodges, to which they resort in the winter with their food, and
for shelter. Their food consists chiefly of flags and fresh-water
muscles, the shells of the latter being left in large quantities around
their lodges in the spring.

The Penobscot Indian wears the entire skin of a musk-rat, with the legs
and tail dangling, and the head caught under his girdle, for a pouch,
into which he puts his fishing tackle, and essences to scent his traps
with.

The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten, have
disappeared; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the
mink is less common than formerly.

Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest
and most familiar reputation, from the time of Pilpay and Aesop to the
present day. His recent tracks still give variety to a winter’s walk. I
tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or
which perhaps I have started, with such a tiptoe of expectation, as if
I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood, and
expected soon to catch it in its lair. I am curious to know what has
determined its graceful curvatures, and how surely they were coincident
with the fluctuations of some mind. I know which way a mind wended,
what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks, and whether it
moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less intervals and
distinctness; for the swiftest step leaves yet a lasting trace.
Sometimes you will see the trails of many together, and where they have
gambolled and gone through a hundred evolutions, which testify to a
singular listlessness and leisure in nature.

When I see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the carelessness
of freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the sunshine along the
ridge of a hill, I give up to him sun and earth as to their true
proprietor. He does not go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and
there is a visible sympathy between him and it. Sometimes, when the
snow lies light, and but five or six inches deep, you may give chase
and come up with one on foot. In such a case he will show a remarkable
presence of mind, choosing only the safest direction, though he may
lose ground by it. Notwithstanding his fright, he will take no step
which is not beautiful. His pace is a sort of leopard canter, as if he
were in nowise impeded by the snow, but were husbanding his strength
all the while. When the ground is uneven, the course is a series of
graceful curves, conforming to the shape of the surface. He runs as
though there were not a bone in his back. Occasionally dropping his
muzzle to the ground for a rod or two, and then tossing his head aloft,
when satisfied of his course. When he comes to a declivity, he will put
his forefeet together, and slide swiftly down it, shoving the snow
before him. He treads so softly that you would hardly hear it from any
nearness, and yet with such expression that it would not be quite
inaudible at any distance.

Of fishes, seventy-five genera and one hundred and seven species are
described in the Report. The fisherman will be startled to learn that
there are but about a dozen kinds in the ponds and streams of any
inland town; and almost nothing is known of their habits. Only their
names and residence make one love fishes. I would know even the number
of their fin-rays, and how many scales compose the lateral line. I am
the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for
all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook. Methinks
I have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a degree.

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


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


Next to nature, it seems as if man’s actions were the most natural,
they so gently accord with her. The small seines of flax stretched
across the shallow and transparent parts of our river, are no more
intrusion than the cobweb in the sun. I stay my boat in midcurrent, and
look down in the sunny water to see the civil meshes of his nets, and
wonder how the blustering people of the town could have done this
elvish work. The twine looks like a new river weed, and is to the river
as a beautiful memento of man’s presence in nature, discovered as
silently and delicately as a footprint in the sand.

When the ice is covered with snow, I do not suspect the wealth under my
feet; that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go. How many
pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain. The
revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. At
length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the
heavens again.

Early in the spring, after the ice has melted, is the time for spearing
fish. Suddenly the wind shifts from northeast and east to west and
south, and every icicle, which has tinkled on the meadow grass so long,
trickles down its stem, and seeks its level unerringly with a million
comrades. The steam curls up from every roof and fence.

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


In the brooks is heard the slight grating sound of small cakes of ice,
floating with various speed, full of content and promise, and where the
water gurgles under a natural bridge, you may hear these hasty rafts
hold conversation in an undertone. Every rill is a channel for the
juices of the meadow. In the ponds the ice cracks with a merry and
inspiriting din, and down the larger streams is whirled grating
hoarsely, and crashing its way along, which was so lately a highway for
the woodman’s team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of the
skaters still fresh upon it, and the holes cut for pickerel. Town
committees anxiously inspect the bridges and causeways, as if by mere
eye-force to intercede with the ice, and save the treasury.

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

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

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

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


The fisherman now repairs and launches his boat. The best time for
spearing is at this season, before the weeds have begun to grow, and
while the fishes lie in the shallow water, for in summer they prefer
the cool depths, and in the autumn they are still more or less
concealed by the grass. The first requisite is fuel for your crate; and
for this purpose the roots of the pitchpine are commonly used, found
under decayed stumps, where the trees have been felled eight or ten
years.

With a crate, or jack, made of iron hoops, to contain your fire, and
attached to the bow of your boat about three feet from the water, a
fish-spear with seven tines, and fourteen feet long, a large basket, or
barrow, to carry your fuel and bring back your fish, and a thick outer
garment, you are equipped for a cruise. It should be a warm and still
evening; and then with a fire crackling merrily at the prow, you may
launch forth like a cucullo into the night. The dullest soul cannot go
upon such an expedition without some of the spirit of adventure; as if
he had stolen the boat of Charon and gone down the Styx on a midnight
expedition into the realms of Pluto. And much speculation does this
wandering star afford to the musing nightwalker, leading him on and on,
jack-o’lantern-like, over the meadows; or, if he is wiser, he amuses
himself with imagining what of human life, far in the silent night, is
flitting mothlike round its candle. The silent navigator shoves his
craft gently over the water, with a smothered pride and sense of
benefaction, as if he were the phosphor, or light-bringer, to these
dusky realms, or some sister moon, blessing the spaces with her light.
The waters, for a rod or two on either hand and several feet in depth,
are lit up with more than noonday distinctness, and he enjoys the
opportunity which so many have desired, for the roofs of a city are
indeed raised, and he surveys the midnight economy of the fishes. There
they lie in every variety of posture; some on their backs, with their
white bellies uppermost, some suspended in midwater, some sculling
gently along with a dreamy motion of the fins, and others quite active
and wide awake,—a scene not unlike what the human city would present.
Occasionally he will encounter a turtle selecting the choicest morsels,
or a musk-rat resting on a tussuck. He may exercise his dexterity, if
he sees fit, on the more distant and active fish, or fork the nearer
into his boat, as potatoes out of a pot, or even take the sound
sleepers with his hands. But these last accomplishments he will soon
learn to dispense with, distinguishing the real object of his pursuit,
and find compensation in the beauty and never-ending novelty of his
position. The pines growing down to the water’s edge will show newly as
in the glare of a conflagration; and as he floats under the willows
with his light, the song-sparrow will often wake on her perch, and sing
that strain at midnight, which she had meditated for the morning. And
when he has done, he may have to steer his way home through the dark by
the north star, and he will feel himself some degrees nearer to it for
having lost his way on the earth.

The fishes commonly taken in this way are pickerel, suckers, perch,
eels, pouts, breams, and shiners,—from thirty to sixty weight in a
night. Some are hard to be recognized in the unnatural light,
especially the perch, which, his dark bands being exaggerated, acquires
a ferocious aspect. The number of these transverse bands, which the
Report states to be seven, is, however, very variable, for in some of
our ponds they have nine and ten even.

It appears that we have eight kinds of tortoises, twelve snakes,—but
one of which is venomous,—nine frogs and toads, nine salamanders, and
one lizard, for our neighbors.

I am particularly attracted by the motions of the serpent tribe. They
make our hands and feet, the wings of the bird, and the fins of the
fish seems very superfluous, as if nature had only indulged her fancy
in making them. The black snake will dart into a bush when pursued, and
circle round and round with an easy and graceful motion, amid the thin
and bare twigs, five or six feet from the ground, as a bird flits from
bough to bough, or hang in festoons between the forks. Elasticity and
flexibleness in the simpler forms of animal life are equivalent to a
complex system of limbs in the higher; and we have only to be as wise
and wily as the serpent, to perform as difficult feats without the
vulgar assistance of hands and feet.

In May, the snapping turtle, _Emysaurus serpentina,_ is frequently
taken on the meadows and in the river. The fisherman, taking sight over
the calm surface, discovers its snout projecting above the water, at
the distance of many rods, and easily secures his prey through its
unwillingness to disturb the water by swimming hastily away, for,
gradually drawing its head under, it remains resting on some limb or
clump of grass. Its eggs, which are buried at a distance from the
water, in some soft place, as a pigeon-bed, are frequently devoured by
the skunk. It will catch fish by daylight, as a toad catches flies, and
is said to emit a transparent fluid from its mouth to attract them.

Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education
and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which
flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in
the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor
has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified
there. I am struck with the pleasing friendships and unanimities of
nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes the form of their leaves.
In the most stupendous scenes you will see delicate and fragile
features, as slight wreaths of vapor, dewlines, feathery sprays, which
suggest a high refinement, a noble blood and breeding, as it were. It
is not hard to account for elves and fairies; they represent this light
grace, this ethereal gentility. Bring a spray from the wood, or a
crystal from the brook, and place it on your mantel, and your household
ornaments will seem plebeian beside its nobler fashion and bearing. It
will wave superior there, as if used to a more refined and polished
circle. It has a salute and a response to all your enthusiasm and
heroism.

In the winter, I stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow up
without forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances. They do
not wait as man does, but now is the golden age of the sapling. Earth,
air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough; they were no better in
primeval centuries. The “winter of _their_ discontent” never comes.
Witness the buds of the native poplar standing gayly out to the frost
on the sides of its bare switches. They express a naked confidence.
With cheerful heart one could be a sojourner in the wilderness, if he
were sure to find there the catkins of the willow or the alder. When I
read of them in the accounts of northern adventurers, by Baffin’s Bay
or Mackenzie’s river, I see how even there too I could dwell. They are
our little vegetable redeemers. Methinks our virtue will hold out till
they come again. They are worthy to have had a greater than Minerva or
Ceres for their inventor. Who was the benignant goddess that bestowed
them on mankind?

Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and
extravagance of genius. She has her luxurious and florid style as well
as art. Having a pilgrim’s cup to make, she gives to the whole, stem,
bowl, handle, and nose, some fantastic shape, as if it were to be the
car of some fabulous marine deity, a Nereus or Triton.

In the winter, the botanist needs not confine himself to his books and
herbarium, and give over his out-door pursuits, but may study a new
department of vegetable physiology, what may be called crystalline
botany, then. The winter of 1837 was unusually favorable for this. In
December of that year, the Genius of vegetation seemed to hover by
night over its summer haunts with unusual persistency. Such a
hoarfrost, as is very uncommon here or anywhere, and whose full effects
can never be witnessed after sunrise, occurred several times. As I went
forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy
creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together
with their gray hairs streaming in a secluded valley, which the sun had
not penetrated; on that hurrying off in Indian file along some
watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of
the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow. The
river, viewed from the high bank, appeared of a yellowish green color,
though all the landscape was white. Every tree, shrub, and spire of
grass, that could raise its head above the snow, was covered with a
dense ice-foliage, answering, as it were, leaf for leaf to its summer
dress. Even the fences had put forth leaves in the night. The centre,
diverging, and more minute fibres were perfectly distinct, and the
edges regularly indented. These leaves were on the side of the twig or
stubble opposite to the sun, meeting it for the most part at right
angles, and there were others standing out at all possible angles upon
these and upon one another, with no twig or stubble supporting them.
When the first rays of the sun slanted over the scene, the grasses
seemed hung with innumerable jewels, which jingled merrily as they were
brushed by the foot of the traveller, and reflected all the hues of the
rainbow as he moved from side to side. It struck me that these ghost
leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were the creatures
of but one law; that in obedience to the same law the vegetable juices
swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one hand, and the
crystalline particles troop to their standard in the same order, on the
other. As if the material were indifferent, but the law one and
invariable, and every plant in the spring but pushed up into and filled
a permanent and eternal mould, which, summer and winter forever, is
waiting to be filled.

This foliate structure is common to the coral and the plumage of birds,
and to how large a part of animate and inanimate nature. The same
independence of law on matter is observable in many other instances, as
in the natural rhymes, when some animal form, color, or odor, has its
counterpart in some vegetable. As, indeed, all rhymes imply an eternal
melody, independent of any particular sense.

As confirmation of the fact, that vegetation is but a kind of
crystallization, every one may observe how, upon the edge of the
melting frost on the window, the needle-shaped particles are bundled
together so as to resemble fields waving with grain, or shocks rising
here and there from the stubble; on one side the vegetation of the
torrid zone, high-towering palms and widespread banyans, such as are
seen in pictures of oriental scenery; on the other, arctic pines stiff
frozen, with downcast branches.

Vegetation has been made the type of all growth; but as in crystals the
law is more obvious, their material being more simple, and for the most
part more transient and fleeting, would it not be as philosophical as
convenient to consider all growth, all filling up within the limits of
nature, but a crystallization more or less rapid?

On this occasion, in the side of the high bank of the river, wherever
the water or other cause had formed a cavity, its throat and outer
edge, like the entrance to a citadel, bristled with a glistening
ice-armor. In one place you might see minute ostrich-feathers, which
seemed the waving plumes of the warriors filing into the fortress; in
another, the glancing, fan-shaped banners of the Lilliputian host; and
in another, the needle-shaped particles collected into bundles,
resembling the plumes of the pine, might pass for a phalanx of spears.
From the under side of the ice in the brooks, where there was a thicker
ice below, depended a mass of crystallization, four or five inches
deep, in the form of prisms, with their lower ends open, which, when
the ice was laid on its smooth side, resembled the roofs and steeples
of a Gothic city, or the vessels of a crowded haven under a press of
canvas. The very mud in the road, where the ice had melted, was
crystallized with deep rectilinear fissures, and the crystalline masses
in the sides of the ruts resembled exactly asbestos in the disposition
of their needles. Around the roots of the stubble and flower-stalks,
the frost was gathered into the form of irregular conical shells, or
fairy rings. In some places the ice-crystals were lying upon granite
rocks, directly over crystals of quartz, the frost-work of a longer
night, crystals of a longer period, but to some eye unprejudiced by the
short term of human life, melting as fast as the former.

In the Report on the Invertebrate Animals, this singular fact is
recorded, which teaches us to put a new value on time and space. “The
distribution of the marine shells is well worthy of notice as a
geological fact. Cape Cod, the right arm of the Commonwealth, reaches
out into the ocean, some fifty or sixty miles. It is nowhere many miles
wide; but this narrow point of land has hitherto proved a barrier to
the migrations of many species of Mollusca. Several genera and numerous
species, which are separated by the intervention of only a few miles of
land, are effectually prevented from mingling by the Cape, and do not
pass from one side to the other…. Of the one hundred and ninety-seven
marine species, eighty-three do not pass to the south shore, and fifty
are not found on the north shore of the Cape.”

That common muscle, the _Unio complanalus_, or more properly
_fluviatilis_, left in the spring by the musk-rat upon rocks and
stumps, appears to have been an important article of food with the
Indians. In one place, where they are said to have feasted, they are
found in large quantities, at an elevation of thirty feet above the
river, filling the soil to the depth of a foot, and mingled with ashes
and Indian remains.

The works we have placed at the head of our chapter, with as much
license, as the preacher selects his text, are such as imply more labor
than enthusiasm. The State wanted complete catalogues of its natural
riches, with such additional facts merely as would be directly useful.

The reports on Fishes, Reptiles, Insects, and Invertebrate Animals,
however, indicate labor and research, and have a value independent of
the object of the legislature.

Those on Herbaceous Plants and Birds cannot be of much value, as long
as Bigelow and Nuttall are accessible. They serve but to indicate, with
more or less exactness, what species are found in the State. We detect
several errors ourselves, and a more practised eye would no doubt
expand the list.

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

These volumes deal much in measurements and minute descriptions, not
interesting to the general reader, with only here and there a colored
sentence to allure him, like those plants growing in dark forests,
which bear only leaves without blossoms. But the ground was
comparatively unbroken, and we will not complain of the pioneer, if he
raises no flowers with his first crop. Let us not underrate the value
of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few
facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of
any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually
written. Men are knowing enough after their fashion. Every countryman
and dairymaid knows that the coats of the fourth stomach of the calf
will curdle milk, and what particular mushroom is a safe and nutritious
diet. You cannot go into any field or wood, but it will seem as if
every stone had been turned, and the bark on every tree ripped up. But,
after all, it is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is
off! It has been well said that “the attitude of inspection is prone.”
Wisdom does not inspect, but behold. We must look a long time before we
can see. Slow are the beginnings of philosophy. He has something
demoniacal in him, who can discern a law or couple two facts. We can
imagine a time when,—“Water runs down hill,”—may have been taught in
the schools. The true man of science will know nature better by his
finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than
other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn
by inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics to
philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science
as with ethics,—we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the
Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery
and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and
friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom.

 [2] A white robin, and a white quail have occasionally been seen. It
 is mentioned in Audubon as remarkable that the nest of a robin should
 be found on the ground; but this bird seems to be less particular than
 most in the choice of a building spot. I have seen its nest placed
 under the thatched roof of a deserted barn, and in one instance, where
 the adjacent country was nearly destitute of trees, together with two
 of the phoebe, upon the end of a board in the loft of a saw-mill, but
 a few feet from the saw, which vibrated several inches with the motion
 of the machinery.


 [3] This bird, which is so well described by Nuttall, but is
 apparently unknown by the author of the Report, is one of the most
 common in the woods in this vicinity, and in Cambridge I have heard
 the college yard ring with its trill. The boys call it “_yorrick_,”
 from the sound of its querulous and chiding note, as it flits near the
 traveller through the underwood. The cowbird’s egg is occasionally
 found in its nest, as mentioned by Audubon.


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




A WALK TO WACHUSETT.


[1843.]

The needles of the pine
All to the west incline.

CONCORD, _July_ 19, 1842.

Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the
mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a
grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all
the allusions of poets and travellers; whether with Homer, on a spring
morning, we sat down on the many-peaked Olympus, or, with Virgil and
his compeers, roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with
Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe. Thus we spoke
our mind to them, standing on the Concord cliffs.—

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

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

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

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


At length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we
resolved to scale the blue wall which bound the western horizon, though
not without misgivings, that thereafter no visible fairy land would
exist for us. But we will not leap at once to our journey’s end, though
near, but imitate Homer, who conducts his reader over the plain, and
along the resounding sea, though it be but to the tent of Achilles. In
the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go
and come. The landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest
thinker is the farthest travelled.

At a cool and early hour on a pleasant morning in July, my companion
and I passed rapidly through Acton and Stow, stopping to rest and
refresh us on the bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Assabet,
in the latter town. As we traversed the cool woods of Acton, with stout
staves in our hands, we were cheered by the song of the red-eye, the
thrushes, the phoebe, and the cuckoo; and as we passed through the open
country, we inhaled the fresh scent of every field, and all nature lay
passive, to be viewed and travelled. Every rail, every farm-house, seen
dimly in the twilight, every tinkling sound told of peace and purity,
and we moved happily along the dank roads, enjoying not such privacy as
the day leaves when it withdraws, but such as it has not profaned. It
was solitude with light; which is better than darkness. But anon, the
sound of the mower’s rifle was heard in the fields, and this, too,
mingled with the lowing kine.

This part of our route lay through the country of hops, which plant
perhaps supplies the want of the vine in American scenery, and may
remind the traveller of Italy, and the South of France, whether he
traverses the country when the hop-fields, as then, present solid and
regular masses of verdure, hanging in graceful festoons from pole to
pole; the cool coverts where lurk the gales which refresh the wayfarer;
or in September, when the women and children, and the neighbors from
far and near, are gathered to pick the hops into long troughs; or later
still, when the poles stand piled in vast pyramids in the yards, or lie
in heaps by the roadside.

The culture of the hop, with the processes of picking, drying in the
kiln, and packing for the market, as well as the uses to which it is
applied, so analogous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford
a theme for future poets.

The mower in the adjacent meadow could not tell us the name of the
brook on whose banks we had rested, or whether it had any, but his
younger companion, perhaps his brother, knew that it was Great Brook.
Though they stood very near together in the field, the things they knew
were very far apart; nor did they suspect each other’s reserved
knowledge, till the stranger came by. In Bolton, while we rested on the
rails of a cottage fence, the strains of music which issued from
within, probably in compliment to us, sojourners, reminded us that thus
far men were fed by the accustomed pleasures. So soon did we,
wayfarers, begin to learn that man’s life is rounded with the same few
facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel
to find it new. The flowers grow more various ways than he. But coming
soon to higher land, which afforded a prospect of the mountains, we
thought we had not travelled in vain, if it were only to hear a truer
and wilder pronunciation of their names, from the lips of the
inhabitants; not _Way_-tatic, _Way_-chusett, but _Wor_-tatic,
_Wor_-chusett. It made us ashamed of our tame and civil pronunciation,
and we looked upon them as born and bred farther west than we. Their
tongues had a more generous accent than ours, as if breath was cheaper
where they wagged. A countryman, who speaks but seldom, talks
copiously, as it were, as his wife sets cream and cheese before you
without stint. Before noon we had reached the highlands overlooking the
valley of Lancaster, (affording the first fair and open prospect into
the west,) and there, on the top of a hill, in the shade of some oaks,
near to where a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we rested during
the heat of the day, reading Virgil, and enjoying the scenery. It was
such a place as one feels to be on the outside of the earth, for from
it we could, in some measure, see the form and structure of the globe.
There lay Wachusett, the object of our journey, lowering upon us with
unchanged proportions, though with a less ethereal aspect than had
greeted our morning gaze, while further north, in successive order,
slumbered its sister mountains along the horizon.

We could get no further into the Aeneid than

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


before we were constrained to reflect by what myriad tests a work of
genius has to be tried; that Virgil, away in Rome, two thousand years
off, should have to unfold his meaning, the inspiration of Italian
vales, to the pilgrim on New England hills. This life so raw and
modern, that so civil and ancient; and yet we read Virgil, mainly to be
reminded of the identity of human nature in all ages, and, by the
poet’s own account, we are both the children of a late age, and live
equally under the reign of Jupiter.

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


The old world stands serenely behind the new, as one mountain yonder
towers behind another, more dim and distant. Rome imposes her story
still upon this late generation. The very children in the school we had
that morning passed, had gone through her wars, and recited her alarms,
ere they had heard of the wars of neighboring Lancaster. The roving eye
still rests inevitably on her hills, and she still holds up the skirts
of the sky on that side, and makes the past remote.

The lay of the land hereabouts is well worthy the attention of the
traveller. The hill on which we were resting made part of an extensive
range, running from southwest to northeast, across the country, and
separating the waters of the Nashua from those of the Concord, whose
banks we had left in the morning; and by bearing in mind this fact, we
could easily determine whither each brook was bound that crossed our
path. Parallel to this, and fifteen miles further west, beyond the deep
and broad valley in which lie Groton, Shirley, Lancaster, and Boylston,
runs the Wachusett range, in the same general direction. The descent
into the valley on the Nashua side, is by far the most sudden; and a
couple of miles brought us to the southern branch of the Nashua, a
shallow but rapid stream, flowing between high and gravelly banks. But
we soon learned that there were no _gelidae valles_ into which we had
descended, and missing the coolness of the morning air, feared it had
become the sun’s turn to try his power upon us.

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


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

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


The air lay lifeless between the hills, as in a seething caldron, with
no leaf stirring, and instead of the fresh odor of grass and clover,
with which we had before been regaled, the dry scent of every herb
seemed merely medicinal. Yielding, therefore, to the heat, we strolled
into the woods, and along the course of a rivulet, on whose banks we
loitered, observing at our leisure the products of these new fields. He
who traverses the woodland paths, at this season, will have occasion to
remember the small drooping bell-like flowers and slender red stem of
the dogs-bane, and the coarser stem and berry of the poke, which are
both common in remoter and wilder scenes; and if “the sun casts such a
reflecting heat from the sweet fern,” as makes him faint, when he is
climbing the bare hills, as they complained who first penetrated into
these parts, the cool fragrance of the swamp pink restores him again,
when traversing the valleys between.

As we went on our way late in the afternoon, we refreshed ourselves by
bathing our feet in every rill that crossed the road, and anon, as we
were able to walk in the shadows of the hills, recovered our morning
elasticity. Passing through Sterling, we reached the banks of the
Stillwater, in the western part of the town, at evening, where is a
small village collected. We fancied that there was already a certain
western look about this place, a smell of pines and roar of water,
recently confined by dams, belying its name, which were exceedingly
grateful. When the first inroad has been made, a few acres levelled,
and a few houses erected, the forest looks wilder than ever. Left to
herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a
certain refinement; but where the axe has

encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of
the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are
exposed to sight. This village had, as yet, no post-office, nor any
settled name. In the small villages which we entered, the villagers
gazed after us, with a complacent, almost compassionate look, as if we
were just making our _debut_ in the world at a late hour.
“Nevertheless,” did they seem to say, “come and study us, and learn men
and manners.” So is each one’s world but a clearing in the forest, so
much open and inclosed ground. The landlord had not yet returned from
the field with his men, and the cows had yet to be milked. But we
remembered the inscription on the wall of the Swedish inn, “You will
find at Trolhate excellent bread, meat, and wine, provided you bring
them with you,” and were contented. But I must confess it did somewhat
disturb our pleasure, in this withdrawn spot, to have our own village
newspaper handed us by our host, as if the greatest charm the country
offered to the traveller was the facility of communication with the
town. Let it recline on its own everlasting hills, and not be looking
out from their summits for some petty Boston or New York in the
horizon.

At intervals we heard the murmuring of water, and the slumberous
breathing of crickets throughout the night; and left the inn the next
morning in the gray twilight, after it had been hallowed by the night
air, and when only the innocent cows were stirring, with a kind of
regret. It was only four miles to the base of the mountain, and the
scenery was already more picturesque. Our road lay along the course of
the Stillwater, which was brawling at the bottom of a deep ravine,
filled with pines and rocks, tumbling fresh from the mountains, so
soon, alas! to commence its career of usefulness. At first, a cloud
hung between us and the summit, but it was soon blown away. As we
gathered the raspberries, which grew abundantly by the roadside, we
fancied that that action was consistent with a lofty prudence, as if
the traveller who ascends into a mountainous region should fortify
himself by eating of such light ambrosial fruits as grow there; and,
drinking of the springs which gush out from the mountain sides, as he
gradually inhales the subtler and purer atmosphere of those elevated
places, thus propitiating the mountain gods, by a sacrifice of their
own fruits. The gross products of the plains and valleys are for such
as dwell therein; but it seemed to us that the juices of this berry had
relation to the thin air of the mountain-tops.

In due time we began to ascend the mountain, passing, first, through a
grand sugar maple wood, which bore the marks of the augur, then a
denser forest, which gradually became dwarfed, till there were no trees
whatever. We at length pitched our tent on the summit. It is but
nineteen hundred feet above the village of Princeton, and three
thousand above the level of the sea; but by this slight elevation it is
infinitely removed from the plain, and when we reached it, we felt a
sense of remoteness, as if we had travelled into distant regions, to
Arabia Petrea, or the farthest east. A robin upon a staff, was the
highest object in sight. Swallows were flying about us, and the chewink
and cuckoo were heard near at hand. The summit consists of a few acres,
destitute of trees, covered with bare rocks, interspersed with
blueberry bushes, raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, moss, and a
fine wiry grass. The common yellow lily, and dwarf-cornel, grow
abundantly in the crevices of the rocks. This clear space, which is
gently rounded, is bounded a few feet lower by a thick shrubbery of
oaks, with maples, aspens, beeches, cherries, and occasionally a
mountain-ash intermingled, among which we found the bright blueberries
of the Solomon’s Seal, and the fruit of the pyrola. From the foundation
of a wooden observatory, which was formerly erected on the highest
point, forming a rude, hollow structure of stone, a dozen feet in
diameter, and five or six in height, we could see Monadnock, in simple
grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thousand feet higher, still
the “far blue mountain,” though with an altered profile. The first day
the weather was so hazy that it was in vain we endeavored to unravel
the obscurity. It was like looking into the sky again, and the patches
of forest here and there seemed to flit like clouds over a lower
heaven. As to voyagers of an aërial Polynesia, the earth seemed like a
larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, the sky
shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it, a blue Pacific
island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail near its
shores we see the waving of trees, and hear the lowing of kine.

We read Virgil and Wordsworth in our tent, with new pleasure there,
while, waiting for a clearer atmosphere, nor did the weather prevent
our appreciating the simple truth and beauty of Peter Bell:

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

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


Who knows but this hill may one day be a Helvellyn, or even a
Parnassus, and the Muses haunt here, and other Homers frequent the
neighboring plains,

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


The blue-berries which the mountain afforded, added to the milk we had
brought, made our frugal supper, while for entertainment the evensong
of the wood-thrush rung along the ridge. Our eyes rested on no painted
ceiling nor carpeted hall, but on skies of nature’s painting, and hills
and forests of her embroidery. Before sunset, we rambled along the
ridge to the north, while a hawk soared still above us. It was a place
where gods might wander, so solemn and solitary, and removed from all
contagion with the plain. As the evening came on, the haze was
condensed in vapor, and the landscape became more distinctly visible,
and numerous sheets of water were brought to light.

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


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


As we stood on the stone tower while the sun was setting, we saw the
shades of night creep gradually over the valleys of the east, and the
inhabitants went into their houses, and shut their doors, while the
moon silently rose up, and took possession of that part. And then the
same scene was repeated on the west side, as far as the Connecticut and
the Green Mountains, and the sun’s rays fell on us two alone, of all
New England men.

It was the night but one before the full of the moon, so bright that we
could see to read distinctly by moonlight, and in the evening strolled
over the summit without danger. There was, by chance, a fire blazing on
Monadnock that night, which lighted up the whole western horizon, and
by making us aware of a community of mountains, made our position seem
less solitary. But at length the wind drove us to the shelter of our
tent, and we closed its door for the night, and fell asleep.

It was thrilling to hear the wind roar over the rocks, at intervals
when we waked, for it had grown quite cold and windy. The night was in
its elements, simple even to majesty in that bleak place,—a bright
moonlight and a piercing wind. It was at no time darker than twilight
within the tent, and we could easily see the moon through its
transparent roof as we lay; for there was the moon still above us, with
Jupiter and Saturn on either hand, looking down on Wachusett, and it
was a satisfaction to know that they were our fellow-travellers still,
as high and out of our reach as our own destiny. Truly the stars were
given for a consolation to man. We should not know but our life were
fated to be always grovelling, but it is permitted to behold them, and
surely they are deserving of a fair destiny. We see laws which never
fail, of whose failure we never conceived; and their lamps burn all the
night, too, as well as all day,— so rich and lavish is that nature
which can afford this superfluity of light.

The morning twilight began as soon as the moon had set, and we arose
and kindled our fire, whose blaze might have been seen for thirty miles
around. As the daylight increased, it was remarkable how rapidly the
wind went down. There was no dew on the summit, but coldness supplied
its place. When the dawn had reached its prime, we enjoyed the view of
a distinct horizon line, and could fancy ourselves at sea, and the
distant hills the waves in the horizon, as seen from the deck of a
vessel. The cherry-birds flitted around us, the nuthatch and flicker
were heard among the bushes, the titmouse perched within a few feet,
and the song of the wood-thrush again rung along the ridge. At length
we saw the sun rise up out of the sea, and shine on Massachusetts; and
from this moment the atmosphere grew more and more transparent till the
time of our departure, and we began to realize the extent of the view,
and how the earth, in some degree, answered to the heavens in breadth,
the white villages to the constellations in the sky. There was little
of the sublimity and grandeur which belong to mountain scenery, but an
immense landscape to ponder on a summer’s day. We could see how ample
and roomy is nature. As far as the eye could reach, there was little
life in the landscape; the few birds that flitted past did not crowd.
The travellers on the remote highways, which intersect the country on
every side, had no fellow-travellers for miles, before or behind. On
every side, the eye ranged over successive circles of towns, rising one
above another, like the terraces of a vineyard, till they were lost in
the horizon. Wachusett is, in fact, the observatory of the State. There
lay Massachusetts, spread out before us in its length and breadth, like
a map. There was the level horizon, which told of the sea on the east
and south, the well-known hills of New Hampshire on the north, and the
misty summits of the Hoosac and Green Mountains, first made visible to
us the evening before, blue and unsubstantial, like some bank of clouds
which the morning wind would dissipate, on the northwest and west.
These last distant ranges, on which the eye rests unwearied, commence
with an abrupt boulder in the north, beyond the Connecticut, and travel
southward, with three or four peaks dimly seen. But Monadnock, rearing
its masculine front in the northwest, is the grandest feature. As we
beheld it, we knew that it was the height of land between the two
rivers, on this side the valley of the Merrimack, or that of the
Connecticut, fluctuating with their blue seas of air,—these rival
vales, already teeming with Yankee men along their respective streams,
born to what destiny who shall tell? Watatic, and the neighboring hills
in this State and in New Hampshire, are a continuation of the same
elevated range on which we were standing. But that New Hampshire
bluff,—that promontory of a State,—lowering day and night on this our
State of Massachusetts, will longest haunt our dreams.

We could, at length, realize the place mountains occupy on the land,
and how they come into the general scheme of the universe. When first
we climb their summits and observe their lesser irregularities, we do
not give credit to the comprehensive intelligence which shaped them;
but when afterward we behold their outlines in the horizon, we confess
that the hand which moulded their opposite slopes, making one to
balance the other, worked round a deep centre, and was privy to the
plan of the universe. So is the least part of nature in its bearings
referred to all space. These lesser mountain ranges, as well as the
Alleghanies, run from northeast to southwest, and parallel with these
mountain streams are the more fluent rivers, answering to the general
direction of the coast, the bank of the great ocean stream itself. Even
the clouds, with their thin bars, fall into the same direction by
preference, and such even is the course of the prevailing winds, and
the migration of men and birds. A mountain-chain determines many things
for the statesman and philosopher. The improvements of civilization
rather creep along its sides than cross its summit. How often is it a
barrier to prejudice and fanaticism? In passing over these heights of
land, through their thin atmosphere, the follies of the plain are
refined and purified; and as many species of plants do not scale their
summits, so many species of folly no doubt do not cross the
Alleghanies; it is only the hardy mountain plant that creeps quite over
the ridge, and descends into the valley beyond.

We get a dim notion of the flight of birds, especially of such as fly
high in the air, by having ascended a mountain. We can now see what
landmarks mountains are to their migrations; how the Catskills and
Highlands have hardly sunk to them, when Wachusett and Monadnock open a
passage to the northeast; how they are guided, too, in their course by
the rivers and valleys; and who knows but by the stars, as well as the
mountain ranges, and not by the petty landmarks which we use. The bird
whose eye takes in the Green Mountains on the one side, and the ocean
on the other, need not be at a loss to find its way.

At noon we descended the mountain, and having returned to the abodes of
men, turned our faces to the east again; measuring our progress, from
time to time, by the more ethereal hues which the mountain assumed.
Passing swiftly through Stillwater and Sterling, as with a downward
impetus, we found ourselves almost at home again in the green meadows
of Lancaster, so like our own Concord, for both are watered by two
streams which unite near their centres, and have many other features in
common. There is an unexpected refinement about this scenery; level
prairies of great extent, interspersed with elms and hop-fields and
groves of trees, give it almost a classic appearance. This, it will be
remembered, was the scene of Mrs. Kowlandson’s capture, and of other
events in the Indian wars, but from this July afternoon, and under that
mild exterior, those times seemed as remote as the irruption of the
Goths. They were the dark age of New England. On beholding a picture of
a New England village as it then appeared, with a fair open prospect,
and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, we find we
had not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad
daylight then. We do not imagine the sun shining on hill and valley
during Philip’s war, nor on the war-path of Paugus, or Standish, or
Church, or Lovell, with serene summer weather, but a dim twilight or
night did those events transpire in. They must have fought in the shade
of their own dusky deeds.

At length, as we plodded along the dusty roads, our thoughts became as
dusty as they; all thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or
proceeded only passively in a sort of rhythmical cadence of the
confused material of thought, and we found ourselves mechanically
repeating some familiar measure which timed with our tread; some verse
of the Robin Hood ballads, for instance, which one can recommend to
travel by.

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


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

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


There is, however, this consolation to the most way-worn traveller,
upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly
symbolical of human life,—now climbing the hills, now descending into
the vales. From the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon,
from the vales he looks up to the heights again. He is treading his old
lessons still, and though he may be very weary and travel-worn, it is
yet sincere experience.

Leaving the Nashua, we changed our route a little, and arrived at
Stillriver Village, in the western part of Harvard, just as the sun was
setting. From this place, which lies to the northward, upon the western
slope of the same range of hills on which we had spent the noon before,
in the adjacent town, the prospect is beautiful, and the grandeur of
the mountain outlines unsurpassed. There was such a repose and quiet
here at this hour, as if the very hill-sides were enjoying the scene,
and we passed slowly along, looking back over the country we had
traversed, and listening to the evening song of the robin, we could not
help contrasting the equanimity of nature with the bustle and
impatience of man. His words and actions presume always a crisis near
at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.

And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let
us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur into it. We
will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level
life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest
valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour, as
no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from,
and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an
uninterrupted horizon.

We rested that night at Harvard, and the next morning, while one bent
his steps to the nearer village of Groton, the other took his separate
and solitary way to the peaceful meadows of Concord; but let him not
forget to record the brave hospitality of a farmer and his wife, who
generously entertained him at their board, though the poor wayfarer
could only congratulate the one on the continuance of hayweather, and
silently accept the kindness of the other. Refreshed by this instance
of generosity, no less than by the substantial viands set before him,
he pushed forward with new vigor, and reached the banks of the Concord
before the sun had climbed many degrees into the heavens.




THE LANDLORD.


[1843.]

Under the one word, house, are included the school-house, the
alms-house, the jail, the tavern, the dwelling-house; and the meanest
shed or cave in which men live contains the elements of all these. But
nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house. The
Parthenon, St. Peter’s, the Gothic minster, the palace, the hovel, are
but imperfect executions of an imperfect idea. Who would dwell in them?
Perhaps to the eye of the gods, the cottage is more holy than the
Parthenon, for they look down with no especial favor upon the shrines
formally dedicated to them, and that should be the most sacred roof
which shelters most of humanity. Surely, then, the gods who are most
interested in the human race preside over the Tavern, where especially
men congregate. Methinks I see the thousand shrines erected to
Hospitality shining afar in all countries, as well Mahometan and
Jewish, as Christian, khans, and caravansaries, and inns, whither all
pilgrims without distinction resort.

Likewise we look in vain, east or west over the earth, to find the
perfect man; but each represents only some particular excellence. The
Landlord is a man of more open and general sympathies, who possesses a
spirit of hospitality which is its own reward, and feeds and shelters
men from pure love of the creatures. To be sure, this profession is as
often filled by imperfect characters, and such as have sought it from
unworthy motives, as any other, but so much the more should we prize
the true and honest Landlord when we meet with him.

Who has not imagined to himself a country inn, where the traveller
shall really feel _in_, and at home, and at his public-house, who was
before at his private house; whose host is indeed a _host_, and a
_lord_ of the _land_, a self-appointed brother of his race; called to
his place, beside, by all the winds of heaven and his good genius, as
truly as the preacher is called to preach; a man of such universal
sympathies, and so broad and genial a human nature, that he would fain
sacrifice the tender but narrow ties of private friendship, to a broad,
sunshiny, fair-weather-and-foul friendship for his race; who loves men,
not as a philosopher, with philanthropy, nor as an overseer of the
poor, with charity, but by a necessity of his nature, as he loves dogs
and horses; and standing at his open door from morning till night,
would fain see more and more of them come along the highway, and is
never satiated. To him the sun and moon are but travellers, the one by
day and the other by night; and they too patronize his house. To his
imagination all things travel save his sign-post and himself; and
though you may be his neighbor for years, he will show you only the
civilities of the road. But on the other hand, while nations and
individuals are alike selfish and exclusive, he loves all men equally;
and if he treats his nearest neighbor as a stranger, since he has
invited all nations to share his hospitality, the farthest travelled is
in some measure kindred to him who takes him into the bosom of his
family.

He keeps a house of entertainment at the sign of the Black Horse or the
Spread Eagle, and is known far and wide, and his fame travels with
increasing radius every year. All the neighborhood is in his interest,
and if the traveller ask how far to a tavern, he receives some such
answer as this: “Well, sir, there’s a house about three miles from
here, where they haven’t taken down their sign yet; but it’s only ten
miles to Slocum’s, and that’s a capital house, both for man and beast.”
At three miles he passes a cheerless barrack, standing desolate behind
its sign-post, neither public nor private, and has glimpses of a
discontented couple who have mistaken their calling. At ten miles see
where the Tavern stands,—really an _entertaining_ prospect,—so public
and inviting that only the rain and snow do not enter. It is no gay
pavilion, made of bright stuffs, and furnished with nuts and
gingerbread, but as plain and sincere as a caravansary; located in no
Tarrytown, where you receive only the civilities of commerce, but far
in the fields it exercises a primitive hospitality, amid the fresh
scent of new hay and raspberries, if it be summer time, and the
tinkling of cow-bells from invisible pastures; for it is a land flowing
with milk and honey, and the newest milk courses in a broad, deep
stream across the premises.

In these retired places the tavern is first of all a house—elsewhere,
last of all, or never,—and warms and shelters its inhabitants. It is as
simple and sincere in its essentials as the caves in which the first
men dwelt, but it is also as open and public. The traveller steps
across the threshold, and lo! he too is master, for he only can be
called proprietor of the house here who behaves with most propriety in
it. The Landlord stands clear back in nature, to my imagination, with
his axe and spade felling trees and raising potatoes with the vigor of
a pioneer; with Promethean energy making nature yield her increase to
supply the wants of so many; and he is not so exhausted, nor of so
short a stride, but that he comes forward even to the highway to this
wide hospitality and publicity. Surely, he has solved some of the
problems of life. He comes in at his backdoor, holding a log fresh cut
for the hearth upon his shoulder with one hand, while he greets the
newly arrived traveller with the other.

Here at length we have free range, as not in palaces, nor cottages, nor
temples, and intrude nowhere. All the secrets of housekeeping are
exhibited to the eyes of men, above and below, before and behind. This
is the necessary way to live, men have confessed, in these days, and
shall he skulk and hide? And why should we have any serious disgust at
kitchens? Perhaps they are the holiest recess of the house. There is
the hearth, after all,—and the settle, and the fagots, and the kettle,
and the crickets. We have pleasant reminiscences of these. They are the
heart, the left ventricle, the very vital part of the house. Here the
real and sincere life which we meet in the streets was actually fed and
sheltered. Here burns the taper that cheers the lonely traveller by
night, and from this hearth ascend the smokes that populate the valley
to his eyes by day. On the whole, a man may not be so little ashamed of
any other part of his house, for here is his sincerity and earnest, at
least. It may not be here that the besoms are plied most,—it is not
here that they need to be, for dust will not settle on the kitchen
floor more than in nature.

Hence it will not do for the Landlord to possess too fine a nature. He
must have health above the common accidents of life, subject to no
modern fashionable diseases; but no taste, rather a vast relish or
appetite. His sentiments on all subjects will be delivered as freely as
the wind blows; there is nothing private or individual in them, though
still original, but they are public, and of the hue of the heavens over
his house,—a certain out-of-door obviousness and transparency not to be
disputed. What he does, his manners are not to be complained of, though
abstractly offensive, for it is what man does, and in him the race is
exhibited. When he eats, he is liver and bowels, and the whole
digestive apparatus to the company, and so all admit the thing is done.
He must have no idiosyncrasies, no particular bents or tendencies to
this or that, but a general, uniform, and healthy development, such as
his portly person indicates, offering himself equally on all sides to
men. He is not one of your peaked and inhospitable men of genius, with
particular tastes, but, as we said before, has one uniform relish, and
taste which never aspires higher than a tavern-sign, or the cut of a
weather-cock. The man of genius, like a dog with a bone, or the slave
who has swallowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, sits afar
and retired, off the road, hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and
beast, but says, by all possible hints and signs, I wish to be
alone—good-by—farewell. But the landlord can afford to live without
privacy. He entertains no private thought, he cherishes no solitary
hour, no Sabbath day, but thinks,—enough to assert the dignity of
reason,—and talks, and reads the newspaper. What he does not tell to
one traveller, he tells to another. He never wants to be alone, but
sleeps, wakes, eats, drinks, sociably, still remembering his race. He
walks abroad through the thoughts of men, and the Iliad and Shakspeare
are tame to him, who hears the rude but homely incidents of the road
from every traveller. The mail might drive through his brain in the
midst of his most lonely soliloquy, without disturbing his equanimity,
provided it brought plenty of news and passengers. There can be no
_pro_-fanity where there is no fane behind, and the whole world may see
quite round him. Perchance his lines have fallen to him in dustier
places, and he has heroically sat down where two roads meet, or at the
Four Corners, or the Five Points, and his life is sublimely trivial for
the good of men. The dust of travel blows ever in his eyes, and they
preserve their clear, complacent look. The hourlies and half-hourlies,
the dailies and weeklies, whirl on well-worn tracks, round and round
his house, as if it were the goal in the stadium, and still he sits
within in unruffled serenity, with no show of retreat. His neighbor
dwells timidly behind a screen of poplars and willows, and a fence with
sheaves of spears at regular intervals, or defended against the tender
palms of visitors by sharp spikes,—but the traveller’s wheels rattle
over the door-step of the tavern, and he cracks his whip in the entry.
He is truly glad to see you, and sincere as the bull’s-eye over his
door. The traveller seeks to find, wherever he goes, some one who will
stand in this broad and catholic relation to him, who will be an
inhabitant of the land to him a stranger, and represent its human
nature, as the rock stands for its inanimate nature; and this is he. As
his crib furnishes provender for the traveller’s horse, and his larder
provisions for his appetite, so his conversation furnishes the
necessary aliment to his spirits. He knows very well what a man wants,
for he is a man himself, and as it were the farthest travelled, though
he has never stirred from his door. He understands his needs and
destiny. He would be well fed and lodged, there can be no doubt, and
have the transient sympathy of a cheerful companion, and of a heart
which always prophesies fair weather. And after all the greatest men,
even, want much more the sympathy which every honest fellow can give,
than that which the great only can impart. If he is not the most
upright, let us allow him this praise, that he is the most downright of
men. He has a hand to shake and to be shaken, and takes a sturdy and
unquestionable interest in you, as if he had assumed the care of you,
but if you will break your neck, he will even give you the best advice
as to the method.

The great poets have not been ungrateful to their landlords. Mine host
of the Tabard Inn, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, was an
honor to his profession:—

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


He is the true house-band, and centre of the company—of greater
fellowship and practical social talent than any. He it is that proposes
that each shall tell a tale to while away the time to Canterbury, and
leads them himself, and concludes with his own tale:—

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


If we do not look up to the Landlord, we look round for him on all
emergencies, for he is a man of infinite experience, who unites hands
with wit. He is a more public character than a statesman,—a publican,
and not consequently a sinner; and surely, he, if any, should be
exempted from taxation and military duty.

Talking with our host is next best and instructive to talking with
one’s self. It is a more conscious soliloquy; as it were, to speak
generally, and try what we would say provided we had an audience. He
has indulgent and open ears, and does not require petty and particular
statements. “Heigho!” exclaims the traveller. Them’s my sentiments,
thinks mine host, and stands ready for what may come next, expressing
the purest sympathy by his demeanor. “Hot as blazes!” says the
other,—“Hard weather, sir,—not much stirring nowadays,” says he. He is
wiser than to contradict his guest in any case; he lets him go on, he
lets him travel.

The latest sitter leaves him standing far in the night, prepared to
live right on, while suns rise and set, and his “good night” has as
brisk a sound as his “good morning;” and the earliest riser finds him
tasting his liquors in the bar ere flies begin to buzz, with a
countenance fresh as the morning star over the sanded floor,—and not as
one who had watched all night for travellers. And yet, if beds be the
subject of conversation, it will appear that no man has been a sounder
sleeper in his time.

Finally, as for his moral character, we do not hesitate to say, that he
has no grain of vice or meanness in him, but represents just that
degree of virtue which all men relish without being obliged to respect.
He is a good man, as his bitters are good,—an unquestionable goodness.
Not what is called a good man,—good to be considered, as a work of art
in galleries and museums,—but a good fellow, that is, good to be
associated with. Who ever thought of the religion of an
innkeeper—whether he was joined to the Church, partook of the
sacrament, said his prayers, feared God, or the like? No doubt he has
had his experiences, has felt a change, and is a firm believer in the
perseverance of the saints. In this last, we suspect, does the
peculiarity of his religion consist. But he keeps an inn, and not a
conscience. How many fragrant charities and sincere social virtues are
implied in this, daily offering of himself to the public. He cherishes
good will to all, and gives the wayfarer as good and honest advice to
direct him on his road as the priest.

To conclude, the tavern will compare favorably with the church. The
church is the place where prayers and sermons are delivered, but the
tavern is where they are to take effect, and if the former are good,
the latter cannot be bad.




A WINTER WALK.


[1843.]

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with
feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a
summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The
meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat
in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel,
and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the
hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth
itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when
some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge,
cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work,—the only sound awake
twixt Venus and Mars,—advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a
divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it
is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all
the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some
northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the
fields.

We sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning.
The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window-sill; the
broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light, which
enhances the snug cheer within. The stillness of the morning is
impressive. The floor creaks under our feet as we move toward the
window to look abroad through some clear space over the fields. We see
the roofs stand under their snow burden. From the eaves and fences hang
stalactites of snow, and in the yard stand stalagmites covering some
concealed core. The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on
every side; and where were walls and fences, we see fantastic forms
stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if nature
had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for
man’s art.

Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step
abroad to face the cutting air. Already the stars have lost some of
their sparkle, and a dull, leaden mist skirts the horizon. A lurid
brazen light in the east proclaims the approach of day, while the
western landscape is dim and spectral still, and clothed in a sombre
Tartarian light, like the shadowy realms. They are Infernal sounds only
that you hear,—the crowing of cocks, the barking of dogs, the chopping
of wood, the lowing of kine, all seem to come from Pluto’s barn-yard
and beyond the Styx;—not for any melancholy they suggest, but their
twilight bustle is too solemn and mysterious for earth. The recent
tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of
the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still
working and making tracks in the snow. Opening the gate, we tread
briskly along the lone country road, crunching the dry and crisped snow
under our feet, or aroused by the sharp clear creak of the wood-sled,
just starting for the distant market, from the early farmer’s door,
where it has lain the summer long, dreaming amid the chips and stubble;
while far through the drifts and powdered windows we see the farmer’s
early candle, like a paled star, emitting a lonely beam, as if some
severe virtue were at its matins there. And one by one the smokes begin
to ascend from the chimneys amidst the trees and snows.

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


We hear the sound of wood-chopping at the farmers’ doors, far over the
frozen earth, the baying of the house-dog, and the distant clarion of
the cock. Though the thin and frosty air conveys only the finer
particles of sound to our ears, with short and sweet vibrations, as the
waves subside soonest on the purest and lightest liquids, in which
gross substances sink to the bottom. They come clear and bell-like, and
from a greater distance in the horizon, as if there were fewer
impediments than in summer to make them faint and ragged. The ground is
sonorous, like seasoned wood, and even the ordinary rural sounds are
melodious, and the jingling of the ice on the trees is sweet and
liquid. There is the least possible moisture in the atmosphere, all
being dried up, or congealed, and it is of such extreme tenuity and
elasticity, that it becomes a source of delight. The withdrawn and
tense sky seems groined like the aisles of a cathedral, and the
polished air sparkles as if there were crystals of ice floating in it.
As they who have resided in Greenland tell us, that, when it freezes,
“the sea smokes like burning turf-land, and a fog or mist arises,
called frost-smoke,” which “cutting smoke frequently raises blisters on
the face and hands, and is very pernicious to the health.” But this
pure stinging cold is an elixir to the lungs, and not so much a frozen
mist, as a crystallized midsummer haze, refined and purified by cold.

The sun at length rises through the distant woods, as if with the faint
clashing swinging sound of cymbals, melting the air with his beams, and
with such rapid steps the morning travels, that already his rays are
gilding the distant western mountains. Meanwhile we step hastily along
through the powdery snow, warmed by an inward heat, enjoying an Indian
summer still, in the increased glow of thought and feeling. Probably if
our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend
ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse
and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds. If our bodies were fed with
pure and simple elements, and not with a stimulating and heating diet,
they would afford no more pasture for cold than a leafless twig, but
thrive like the trees, which find even winter genial to their
expansion.

The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact.
Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves
of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow. In the bare fields
and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and
bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. A
cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can
withstand it but what has a virtue in it; and accordingly, whatever we
meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we
respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness. All things
beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out must be
part of the original frame of the universe, and of such valor as God
himself. It is invigorating to breathe the cleansed air. Its greater
fineness and purity are visible to the eye, and we would fain stay out
long and late, that the-gales may sigh through us, too, as through the
leafless trees, and fit us for the winter:—as if we hoped so to borrow
some pure and steadfast virtue, which will stead us in all seasons.

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out,
and which no cold can chill. It finally melts the great snow, and in
January or July is only buried under a thicker or thinner covering. In
the coldest day it flows somewhere, and the snow melts around every
tree. This field of winter rye, which sprouted late in the fall, and
now speedily dissolves the snow, is where the fire is very thinly
covered. We feel warmed by it. In the winter, warmth stands for all
virtue, and we resort in thought to a trickling rill, with its bare
stones shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the woods, with as
much eagerness as rabbits and robins. The steam which rises from swamps
and pools, is as dear and domestic as that of our own kettle. What fire
could ever equal the sunshine of a winter’s day, when the meadow mice
come out by the wallsides, and the chicadee lisps in the defiles of the
wood? The warmth comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from
the earth, as in summer; and when we feel his beams on our backs as we
are treading some snowy dell, we are grateful as for a special
kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place.

This subterranean fire has its altar in each man’s breast, for in the
coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveller cherishes a warmer
fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A
healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter,
summer is in his heart. There is the south. Thither have all birds and
insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are
gathered the robin and the lark.

At length, having reached the edge of the woods, and shut out the
gadding town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of a
cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with snow.
They are glad and warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in
summer. As we stand in the midst of the pines, in the nickering and
checkered light which straggles but little way into their maze, we
wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple story. It seems to us
that no traveller has ever explored them, and notwithstanding the
wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every day, who would not
like to hear their annals? Our humble villages in the plain are their
contribution. We borrow from the forest the boards which shelter, and
the sticks which warm us. How important is their evergreen to the
winter, that portion of the summer which does not fade, the permanent
year, the unwithered grass. Thus simply, and with little expense of
altitude, is the surface of the earth diversified. What would human
life be without forests, those natural cities? From the tops of
mountains they appear like smooth shaven lawns, yet whither shall we
walk but in this taller grass?

In this glade covered with bushes of a year’s growth, see how the
silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such
infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the
absence of color. Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem,
and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs
over all, as if the impurities of the summer sky, refined and shrunk by
the chaste winter’s cold, had been winnowed from the heavens upon the
earth.

Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens
seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and
distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a
Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.

How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life
which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and
woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise.

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


The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and playful in the remote glens,
even on the morning of the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and
Labrador, and for our Esquimaux and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed Indians,
Novazemblaites, and Spitzbergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and
wood-chopper, the fox, musk-rat, and mink?

Still, in the midst of the arctic day, we may trace the summer to its
retreats, and sympathize with some contemporary life. Stretched over
the brooks, in the midst of the frost-bound meadows, we may observe the
submarine cottages of the caddice-worms, the larvae of the Plicipennes.
Their small cylindrical cases built around themselves, composed of
flags, sticks, grass, and withered leaves, shells, and pebbles, in form
and color like the wrecks which strew the bottom,—now drifting along
over the pebbly bottom, now whirling in tiny eddies and dashing down
steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along with the current, or else
swaying to and fro at the end of some grass-blade or root. Anon they
will leave their sunken habitations, and, crawling up the stems of
plants, or to the surface, like gnats, as perfect insects henceforth,
flutter over the surface of the water, or sacrifice their short lives
in the flame of our candles at evening. Down yonder little glen the
shrubs are drooping under their burden, and the red alder-berries
contrast with the white ground. Here are the marks of a myriad feet
which have already been abroad. The sun rises as proudly over such a
glen, as over the valley of the Seine or the Tiber, and it seems the
residence of a pure and self-subsistent valor, such as they never
witnessed; which never knew defeat nor fear. Here reign the simplicity
and purity of a primitive age, and a health and hope far remote from
towns and cities. Standing quite alone, far in the forest, while the
wind is shaking down snow from the trees, and leaving the only human
tracks behind us, we find our reflections of a richer variety than the
life of cities. The chicadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society
than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last, as
to more vulgar companions. In this lonely glen, with its brook draining
the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces
and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats
in the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to
contemplate.

As the day advances, the heat of the sun is reflected by the
hill-sides, and we hear a faint but sweet music, where flows the rill
released from its fetters, and the icicles are melting on the trees;
and the nuthatch and partridge are heard and seen. The south wind melts
the snow at noon, and the bare ground appears with its withered grass
and leaves, and we are invigorated by the perfume which exhales from
it, as by the scent of strong meats.

Let us go into this deserted woodman’s hut, and see how he has passed
the long winter nights and the short and stormy days. For here man has
lived under this south hill-side, and it seems a civilized and public
spot. We have such associations as when the traveller stands by the
ruins of Palmyra or Hecatompolis. Singing birds and flowers perchance
have begun to appear here, for flowers as well as weeds follow in the
footsteps of man. These hemlocks whispered over his head, these hickory
logs were his fuel, and these pitch-pine roots kindled his fire; yonder
fuming rill in the hollow, whose thin and airy vapor still ascends as
busily as ever, though he is far off now, was his well. These hemlock
boughs, and the straw upon this raised platform, were his bed, and this
broken dish held his drink. But he has not been here this season, for
the phoebes built their nest upon this shelf last summer. I find some
embers left, as if he had but just gone out, where he baked his pot of
beans; and while at evening he smoked his pipe, whose stemless bowl
lies in the ashes, chatted with his only companion, if perchance he had
any, about the depth of the snow on the morrow, already falling fast
and thick without, or disputed whether the last sound was the screech
of an owl, or the creak of a bough, or imagination only; and through
this broad chimney throat, in the late winter evening, ere he stretched
himself upon the straw, he looked up to learn the progress of the
storm, and, seeing the bright stars of Cassiopeia’s chair shining
brightly down upon him, fell contentedly asleep. See how many traces
from which we may learn the chopper’s history. From this stump we may
guess the sharpness of his axe, and, from the slope of the stroke, on
which side he stood, and whether he cut down the tree without going
round it or changing hands; and, from the flexure of the splinters, we
may know which way it fell. This one chip contains inscribed on it the
whole history of the wood-chopper and of the world. On this scrap of
paper, which held his sugar or salt, perchance, or was the wadding of
his gun, sitting on a log in the forest, with what interest we read the
tattle of cities, of those larger huts, empty and to let, like this, in
High Streets and Broadways. The eaves are dripping on the south side of
this simple roof, while the titmouse lisps in the pine, and the genial
warmth of the sun around the door is somewhat kind and human.

After two seasons, this rude dwelling does not deform the scene.
Already the birds resort to it, to build their nests, and you may track
to its door the feet of many quadrupeds. Thus, for a long time, nature
overlooks the encroachment and profanity of-man. The wood still
cheerfully and unsuspiciously echoes the strokes of the axe that fells
it, and while they are few and seldom, they enhance its wildness, and
all the elements strive to naturalize the sound.

Now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill,
from whose precipitous south side we can look over the broad country,
of forest and field and river, to the distant snowy mountains. See
yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some
invisible farm-house; the standard raised over some rural homestead.
There must be a warmer and more genial spot there below, as where we
detect the vapor from a spring forming a cloud above the trees. What
fine relations are established between the traveller who discovers this
airy column from some eminence in the forest, and him who sits below.
Up goes the smoke as silently and naturally as the vapor exhales from
the leaves, and as busy disposing itself in wreathes as the housewife
on the hearth below. It is a hieroglyphic of man’s life, and suggests
more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its
fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has
planted itself,—and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of
the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of
America, or the steppes of Asia.

And now we descend again to the brink of this woodland lake, which lies
in a hollow of the hills, as if it were their expressed juice, and that
of the leaves, which are annually steeped in it. Without outlet or
inlet to the eye, it has still its history, in the lapse of its waves,
in the rounded pebbles on its shore, and in the pines which grow down
to its brink. It has not been idle, though sedentary, but, like Abu
Musa, teaches that “sitting still at home is the heavenly way; the
going out is the way of the world.” Yet in its evaporation it travels
as far as any. In summer it is the earth’s liquid eye; a mirror in the
breast of nature. The sins of the wood are washed out in it. See how
the woods form an amphitheatre about it, and it is an arena for all the
genialness of nature. All trees direct the traveller to its brink, all
paths seek it out, birds fly to it, quadrupeds flee to it, and the very
ground inclines toward it. It is nature’s saloon, where she has sat
down to her toilet. Consider her silent economy and tidiness; how the
sun comes with his evaporation to sweep the dust from its surface each
morning, and a fresh surface is constantly welling up; and annually,
after whatever impurities have accumulated herein, its liquid
transparency appears again in the spring. In summer a hushed music
seems to sweep across its surface. But now a plain sheet of snow
conceals it from our eyes, except where the wind has swept the ice
bare, and the sere leaves are gliding from side to side, tacking and
veering on their tiny voyages. Here is one just keeled up against a
pebble on shove, a dry beech-leaf, rocking still, as if it would start
again. A skilful engineer, methinks, might project its course since it
fell from the parent stem. Here are all the elements for such a
calculation. Its present position, the direction of the wind, the level
of the pond, and how much more is given. In its scarred edges and veins
is its log rolled up.

We fancy ourselves in the interior of a larger house. The surface of
the pond is our deal table or sanded floor, and the woods rise abruptly
from its edge, like the walls of a cottage. The lines set to catch
pickerel through the ice look like a larger culinary preparation, and
the men stand about on the white ground like pieces of forest
furniture. The actions of these men, at the distance of half a mile
over the ice and snow, impress us as when we read the exploits of
Alexander in history. They seem not unworthy of the scenery, and as
momentous as the conquest of kingdoms.

Again we have wandered through the arches of the wood, until from its
skirts we hear the distant booming of ice from yonder bay of the river,
as if it were moved by some other and subtler tide than oceans know. To
me it has a strange sound of home, thrilling as the voice of one’s
distant and noble kindred. A mild summer sun shines over forest and
lake, and though there is but one green leaf for many rods, yet nature
enjoys a serene health. Every sound is fraught with the same mysterious
assurance of health, as well now the creaking of the boughs in January,
as the soft sough of the wind in July.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Before night we will take a journey on skates along the course of this
meandering river, as full of novelty to one who sits by the cottage
fire all the winter’s day, as if it were over the polar ice, with
Captain Parry or Franklin; following the winding of the stream, now
flowing amid hills, now spreading out into fair meadows, and forming a
myriad coves and bays where the pine and hemlock overarch. The river
flows in the rear of the towns, and we see all things from a new and
wilder side. The fields and gardens come down to it with a frankness,
and freedom from pretension, which they do not wear on the highway. It
is the outside and edge of the earth. Our eyes are not offended by
violent contrasts. The last rail of the farmer’s fence is some swaying
willow bough, which still preserves its freshness, and here at length
all fences stop, and we no longer cross any road. We may go far up
within the country now by the most retired and level road, never
climbing a hill, but by broad levels ascending to the upland meadows.
It is a beautiful illustration of the law of obedience, the flow of a
river; the path for a sick man, a highway down which an acorn cup may
float secure with its freight. Its slight occasional falls, whose
precipices would not diversify the landscape, are celebrated by mist
and spray, and attract the traveller from far and near. From the remote
interior, its current conducts him by broad and easy steps, or by one
gentle inclined plane, to the sea. Thus by an early and constant
yielding to the inequalities of the ground, it secures itself the
easiest passage.

No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times, and now we
draw near to the empire of the fishes. Our feet glide swiftly over
unfathomed depths, where in summer our line tempted the pout and perch,
and where the stately pickerel lurked in the long corridors formed by
the bulrushes. The deep, impenetrable marsh, where the heron waded, and
bittern squatted, is made pervious to our swift shoes, as if a thousand
railroads had been made into it. With one impulse we are carried to the
cabin of the musk-rat, that earliest settler, and see him dart away
under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to his hole in the bank;
and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately “the mower whet his
scythe,” through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with meadow grass. We
skate near to where the blackbird, the pewee, and the kingbird hung
their nests over the water, and the hornets builded from the maple in
the swamp. How many gay warblers following the sun, have radiated from
this nest of silver-birch and thistledown. On the swamp’s outer edge
was hung the supermarine village, where no foot penetrated. In this
hollow tree the wood-duck reared her brood, and slid away each day to
forage in yonder fen.

In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens,
in their natural order and position. The meadows and forests are a
_hortus siccus_. The leaves and grasses stand perfectly pressed by the
air without screw or gum, and the birds’ nests are not hung on an
artificial twig, but where they builded them. We go about dryshod to
inspect the summer’s work in the rank swamp, and see what a growth have
got the alders, the willows, and the maples; testifying to how many
warm suns, and fertilizing dews and showers. See what strides their
boughs took in the luxuriant summer,—and anon these dormant buds will
carry them onward and upward another span into the heavens.

Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the
river is lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left,
where we least expected; still holding on its way underneath, with a
faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot, it
too had hibernated, and we had followed its faint summer-trail to where
it earthed itself in snow and ice. At first we should have thought that
rivers would be empty and dry in midwinter, or else frozen solid till
the spring thawed them; but their volume is not diminished even, for
only a superficial cold bridges their surface. The thousand springs
which feed the lakes and streams are flowing still. The issues of a few
surface springs only are closed, and they go to swell the deep
reservoirs. Nature’s wells are below the frost. The summer brooks are
not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower quench his thirst with
that alone. The streams are swollen when the snow melts in the spring,
because nature’s work has been delayed, the water being turned into ice
and snow, whose particles are less smooth and round, and do not find
their level so soon.

Far over the ice, between the hemlock woods and snow-clad hills, stands
the pickerel fisher, his lines set in some retired cove, like a
Finlander, with his arms thrust into the pouches of his dreadnought;
with dull, snowy, fishy thoughts, himself a finless fish, separated a
few inches from his race; dumb, erect, and made to be enveloped in
clouds and snows, like the pines on shore. In these wild scenes, men
stand about in the scenery, or move deliberately and heavily, having
sacrificed the sprightliness and vivacity of towns to the dumb sobriety
of nature. He does not make the scenery less wild, more than the jays
and musk-rats, but stands there as a part of it, as the natives are
represented in the voyages of early navigators, at Nootka Sound, and on
the Northwest coast, with their furs about them, before they were
tempted to loquacity by a scrap of iron. He belongs to the natural
family of man, and is planted deeper in nature and has more root than
the inhabitants of towns. Go to him, ask what luck, and you will learn
that he too is a worshipper of the unseen. Hear with what sincere
deference and waving gesture in his tone, he speaks of the lake
pickerel, which he has never seen, his primitive and ideal race of
pickerel. He is connected with the shore still, as by a fish-line, and
yet remembers the season when he took fish through the ice on the pond,
while the peas were up in his garden at home.

But now, while we have loitered, the clouds have gathered again, and a
few straggling snow-flakes are beginning to descend. Faster and faster
they fall, shutting out the distant objects from sight. The snow falls
on every wood and field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river and
the pond, on the hill and in the valley. Quadrupeds are confined to
their coverts, and the birds sit upon their perches this peaceful hour.
There is not so much sound as in fair weather, but silently and
gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences, and the polished
ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are concealed,
and the tracks of men and beasts are lost. With so little effort does
nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men. Hear how Homer
has described the same. “The snow-flakes fall thick and fast on a
winter’s day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant,
covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where
the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are falling
by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved
by the waves.” The snow levels all things, and infolds them deeper in
the bosom of nature, as, in the slow summer, vegetation creeps up to
the entablature of the temple, and the turrets of the castle, and helps
her to prevail over art.

The surly night-wind rustles through the wood, and warns us to retrace
our steps, while the sun goes down behind the thickening storm, and
birds seek their roosts, and cattle their stalls.

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


Though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the
wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of him
as a merry wood-chopper, and warm-blooded youth, as blithe as summer.
The unexplored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the
traveller. It does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness. In
winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like
cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but
from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The imprisoning
drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and in
the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky
through the chimney top, enjoying the quiet and serene life that may be
had in a warm corner by the chimney side, or feeling our pulse by
listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the sound of the flail
in distant barns all the long afternoon. No doubt a skilful physician
could determine our health by observing how these simple and natural
sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an oriental, but a boreal
leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of
motes in the sunbeams.

Sometimes our fate grows too homely and familiarly serious ever to be
cruel. Consider how for three months the human destiny is wrapped in
furs. The good Hebrew Revelation takes no cognizance of all this
cheerful snow. Is there no religion for the temperate and frigid zones?
We know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the gods on
a New England winter night. Their praises have never been sung, only
their wrath deprecated. The best scripture, after all, records but a
meagre faith. Its saints live reserved and austere. Let a brave devout
man spend the year in the woods of Maine or Labrador, and see if the
Hebrew Scriptures speak adequately to his condition and experience,
from the setting in of winter to the breaking up of the ice.

Now commences the long winter evening around the farmer’s hearth, when
the thoughts of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are by nature
and necessity charitable and liberal to all creatures. Now is the happy
resistance to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and thinks of his
preparedness for winter, and, through the glittering panes, sees with
equanimity “the mansion of the northern bear,” for now the storm is
over,

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




THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES.[4]


[1860.]

Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-show, even a transcendentalist;
and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle. I
wish to see once more those old familiar faces, whose names I do not
know, which for me represent the Middlesex country, and come as near
being indigenous to the soil as a white man can; the men who are not
above their business, whose coats are not too black, whose shoes do not
shine very much, who never wear gloves to conceal their hands. It is
true, there are some queer specimens of humanity attracted to our
festival, but all are welcome. I am pretty sure to meet once more that
weak-minded and whimsical fellow, generally weak-bodied too, who
prefers a crooked stick for a cane; perfectly useless, you would say,
only _bizarre_, fit for a cabinet, like a petrified snake. A ram’s horn
would be as convenient, and is yet more curiously twisted. He brings
that much indulged bit of the country with him, from some town’s end or
other, and introduces it to Concord groves, as if he had promised it so
much sometime. So some, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their
crookedness. But I think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and
an upright man the best ruler. Or why choose a man to do plain work who
is distinguished for his oddity? However, I do not know but you will
think that they have committed this mistake who invited me to speak to
you to-day.

In my capacity of surveyor, I have often talked with some of you, my
employers, at your dinner-tables, after having gone round and round and
behind your farming, and ascertained exactly what its limits were.
Moreover, taking a surveyor’s and a naturalist’s liberty, I have been
in the habit of going across your lots much oftener than is usual, as
many of you, perhaps to your sorrow, are aware. Yet many of you, to my
relief, have seemed not to be aware of it; and when I came across you
in some out-of-the-way nook of your farms, have inquired, with an air
of surprise, if I were not lost, since you had never seen me in that
part of the town or county before; when, if the truth were known, and
it had not been for betraying my secret, I might with more propriety
have inquired if _you_ were not lost, since I had never seen _you_
there before. I have several times shown the proprietor the shortest
way out of his wood-lot.

Therefore, it would seem that I have some title to speak to you to-day;
and considering what that title is, and the occasion that has called us
together, I need offer no apology if I invite your attention, for the
few moments that are allotted me, to a purely scientific subject.

At those dinner-tables referred to, I have often been asked, as many of
you have been, if I could tell how it happened, that when a pine wood
was cut down an oak one commonly sprang up, and _vice versa_. To which
I have answered, and now answer, that I can tell,—that it is no mystery
to me. As I am not aware that this has been clearly shown by any one, I
shall lay the more stress on this point. Let me lead you back into your
wood-lots again.

When, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a forest springs up naturally
where none of its kind grew before, I do not hesitate to say, though in
some quarters still it may sound paradoxical, that it came from a seed.
Of the various ways by which trees are _known_ to be propagated,—by
transplanting, cuttings, and the like,—this is the only supposable one
under these circumstances. No such tree has ever been known to spring
from anything else. If any one asserts that it sprang from something
else, or from nothing, the burden of proof lies with him.

It remains, then, only to show how the seed is transported from where
it grows, to where it is planted. This is done chiefly by the agency of
the wind, water, and animals. The lighter seeds, as those of pines and
maples, are transported chiefly by wind and water; the heavier, as
acorns and nuts, by animals.

In all the pines, a very thin membrane, in appearance much like an
insect’s wing, grows over and around the seed, and independent of it,
while the latter is being developed within its base. Indeed this is
often perfectly developed, though the seed is abortive; nature being,
you would say, more sure to provide the means of transporting the seed,
than to provide the seed to be transported. In other words, a beautiful
thin sack is woven around the seed, with a handle to it such as the
wind can take hold of, and it is then committed to the wind, expressly
that it may transport the seed and extend the range of the species; and
this it does, as effectually, as when seeds are sent by mail in a
different kind of sack from the patent-office. There is a patent-office
at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much
interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be,
and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.

There is then no necessity for supposing that the pines have sprung up
from nothing, and I am aware that I am not at all peculiar in asserting
that they come from seeds, though the mode of their propagation _by
nature_ has been but little attended to. They are very extensively
raised from the seed in Europe, and are beginning to be here.

When you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood will not _at once_ spring up
there unless there are, or have been, quite recently, seed-bearing
pines near enough for the seeds to be blown from them. But, adjacent to
a forest of pines, if you prevent other crops from growing there, you
will surely have an extension of your pine forest, provided the soil is
suitable.

As for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not furnished with wings, the
notion is still a very common one that, when the trees which bear these
spring up where none of their kind were noticed before, they have come
from seeds or other principles spontaneously generated there in an
unusual manner, or which have lain dormant in the soil for centuries,
or perhaps been called into activity by the heat of a burning. I do not
believe these assertions, and I will state some of the ways in which,
according to my observation, such forests are planted and raised.

Every one of these seeds, too, will be found to be winged or legged in
another fashion. Surely it is not wonderful that cherry-trees of all
kinds are widely dispersed, since their fruit is well known to be the
favorite food of various birds. Many kinds are called bird-cherries,
and they appropriate many more kinds, which are not so called. Eating
cherries is a bird-like employment, and unless we disperse the seeds
occasionally, as they do, I shall think that the birds have the best
right to them. See how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in order
that a bird may be compelled to transport it—in the very midst of a
tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour this must
commonly take the stone also into its mouth or bill. If you ever ate a
cherry, and did not make two bites of it, you must have perceived
it—right in the centre of the luscious morsel, a large earthy residuum
left on the tongue. We thus take into our mouths cherry stones as big
as peas, a dozen at once, for Nature can persuade us to do almost
anything when she would compass her ends. Some wild men and children
instinctively swallow these, as the birds do when in a hurry, it being
the shortest way to get rid of them. Thus, though these seeds are not
provided with vegetable wings, Nature has impelled the thrush tribe to
take them into their bills and fly away with them; and they are winged
in another sense, and more effectually than the seeds of pines, for
these are carried even against the wind. The consequence is, that
cherry-trees grow not only here but there. The same is true of a great
many other seeds.

But to come to the observation which suggested these remarks. As I have
said, I suspect that I can throw some light on the fact, that when
hereabouts a dense pine wood is cut down, oaks and other hard woods may
at once take its place. I have got only to show that the acorns and
nuts, provided they are grown in the neighborhood, are regularly
planted in such woods; for I assert that if an oak-tree has not grown
within ten miles, and man has not carried acorns thither, then an oak
wood will not spring up _at once_, when a pine wood is cut down.

Apparently, there were only pines there before. They are cut off, and
after a year or two you see oaks and other hard woods springing up
there, with scarcely a pine amid them, and the wonder commonly is, how
the seed could have lain in the ground so long without decaying. But
the truth is, that it has not lain in the ground so long, but is
regularly planted each year by various quadrupeds and birds.

In this neighborhood, where oaks and pines are about equally dispersed,
if you look through the thickest pine wood, even the seemingly unmixed
pitch-pine ones, you will commonly detect many little oaks, birches,
and other hard woods, sprung from seeds carried into the thicket by
squirrels and other animals, and also blown thither, but which are
over-shadowed and choked by the pines. The denser the evergreen wood,
the more likely it is to be well planted with these seeds, because the
planters incline to resort with their forage to the closest covert.
They also carry it into birch and other woods. This planting is carried
on annually, and the oldest seedlings annually die; but when the pines
are cleared off, the oaks, having got just the start they want, and now
secured favorable conditions, immediately spring up to trees.

The shade of a dense pine wood, is more unfavorable to the springing up
of pines of the same species than of oaks within it, though the former
may come up abundantly when the pines are cut, if there chance to be
sound seed in the ground.

But when you cut off a lot of hard wood, very often the little pines
mixed with it have a similar start, for the squirrels have carried off
the nuts to the pines, and not to the more open wood, and they commonly
make pretty clean work of it; and moreover, if the wood was old, the
sprouts will be feeble or entirely fail; to say nothing about the soil
being, in a measure, exhausted for this kind of crop.

If a pine wood is surrounded by a white oak one chiefly, white oaks may
be expected to succeed when the pines are cut. If it is surrounded,
instead by an edging of shrub-oaks, then you will probably have a dense
shrub-oak thicket.

I have no time to go into details, but will say, in a word, that while
the wind is conveying the seeds of pines into hard woods and open
lands, the squirrels and other animals are conveying the seeds of oaks
and walnuts into the pine woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept
up.

I affirmed this confidently many years ago, and an occasional
examination of dense pine woods confirmed me in my opinion. It has long
been known to observers that squirrels bury nuts in the ground, but I
am not aware that any one has thus accounted for the regular succession
of forests.

On the 24th of September, in 1857, as I was paddling down the Assabet,
in this town, I saw a red squirrel run along the bank under some
herbage, with something large in its mouth. It stopped near the foot of
a hemlock, within a couple of rods of me, and, hastily pawing a hole
with its forefeet, dropped its booty into it, covered it up, and
retreated part way up the trunk of the tree. As I approached the shore
to examine the deposit, the squirrel, descending part way, betrayed no
little anxiety about its treasure, and made two or three motions to
recover it before it finally retreated. Digging there, I found two
green pig-nuts joined together, with the thick husks on, buried about
an inch and a half under the reddish soil of decayed hemlock
leaves,—just the right depth to plant it. In short, this squirrel was
then engaged in accomplishing two objects, to wit, laying up a store of
winter food for itself, and planting a hickory wood for all creation.
If the squirrel was killed, or neglected its deposit, a hickory would
spring up. The nearest hickory tree was twenty rods distant. These nuts
were there still just fourteen days later, but were gone when I looked
again, November 21, or six weeks later still.

I have since examined more carefully several dense woods, which are
said to be, and are apparently exclusively pine, and always with the
same result. For instance, I walked the same day to a small, but very
dense and handsome white-pine grove, about fifteen rods square, in the
east part of this town. The trees are large for Concord, being from ten
to twenty inches in diameter, and as exclusively pine as any wood that
I know. Indeed, I selected this wood because I thought it the least
likely to contain anything else. It stands on an open plain or pasture,
except that it adjoins another small pine wood, which has a few little
oaks in it, on the southeast side. On every other side, it was at least
thirty rods from the nearest woods. Standing on the edge of this grove
and looking through it, for it is quite level and free from underwood,
for the most part bare, red-carpeted ground, you would have said that
there was not a hard wood tree in it, young or old. But on looking
carefully along over its floor I discovered, though it was not till my
eye had got used to the search, that, alternating with thin ferns, and
small blueberry bushes, there was, not merely here and there, but as
often as every five feet and with a degree of regularity, a little oak,
from three to twelve inches high, and in one place I found a green
acorn dropped by the base of a pine.

I confess, I was surprised to find my theory so perfectly proved in
this case. One of the principal agents in this planting, the red
squirrels, were all the while curiously inspecting me, while I was
inspecting their plantation. Some of the little oaks had been browsed
by cows, which resorted to this wood for shade.

After seven or eight years, the hard woods evidently find such a
locality unfavorable to their growth, the pines being allowed to stand.
As an evidence of this, I observed a diseased red-maple twenty-five
feet long, which had been recently prostrated, though it was still
covered with green leaves, the only maple in any position in the wood.

But although these oaks almost invariably die if the pines are not cut
down, it is probable that they do better for a few years under their
shelter than they would anywhere else.

The very extensive and thorough experiments of the English, have at
length led them to adopt a method of raising oaks almost precisely like
this, which somewhat earlier had been adopted by nature and her
squirrels here; they have simply rediscovered the value of pines as
nurses for oaks. The English experimenters seem early and generally, to
have found out the importance of using trees of some kind, as
nurse-plants for the young oaks. I quote from Loudon what he describes
as “the ultimatum on the subject of planting and sheltering oaks,”—“an
abstract of the practice adopted by the government officers in the
national forests” of England, prepared by Alexander Milne.

At first some oaks had been planted by themselves, and others mixed
with Scotch pines; “but in all cases,” says Mr. Milne, “where oaks were
planted actually among the pines, and surrounded by them, [though the
soil might be inferior,] the oaks were found to be much the best.” “For
several years past, the plan pursued has been to plant the inclosures
with Scotch pines only, [a tree very similar to our pitch-pine,] and
when the pines have got to the height of five or six feet, then to put
in good strong oak plants of about four or five years’ growth among the
pines,—not cutting away any pines at first, unless they happen to be so
strong and thick as to overshadow the oaks. In about two years, it
becomes necessary to shred the branches of the pines, to give light and
air to the oaks, and in about two or three more years to begin
gradually to remove the pines altogether, taking out a certain number
each year, so that, at the end of twenty or twenty-five years, not a
single Scotch pine shall be left; although, for the first ten or twelve
years, the plantation may have appeared to contain nothing else but
pine. The advantage of this mode of planting has been found to be that
the pines dry and ameliorate the soil, destroying the coarse grass and
brambles which frequently choke and injure oaks; and that no mending
over is necessary, as scarcely an oak so planted is found to fail.”

Thus much the English planters have discovered by patient experiment,
and, for aught I know, they have taken out a patent for it; but they
appear not to have discovered that it was discovered before, and that
they are merely adopting the method of Nature, which she long ago made
patent to all. She is all the while planting the oaks amid the pines
without our knowledge, and at last, instead of government officers, we
send a party of wood-choppers to cut down the pines, and so rescue an
oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped from the skies.

As I walk amid hickories, even in August, I hear the sound of green
pig-nuts falling from time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my
head. In the fall, I notice on the ground, either within or in the
neighborhood of oak woods, on all sides of the town, stout oak twigs
three or four inches long, bearing half-a-dozen empty acorn-cups, which
twigs have been gnawed off by squirrels, on both sides of the nuts, in
order to make them more portable. The jays scream and the red squirrels
scold while you are clubbing and shaking the chestnut trees, for they
are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree. I
frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut bur,
as I am going through the woods, and I used to think, sometimes, that
they were cast at me. In fact, they are so busy about it, in the midst
of the chestnut season, that you cannot stand long in the woods without
hearing one fall. A sportsman told me that he had, the day before,—that
was in the middle of October,—seen a green chestnut bur dropt on our
great river meadow, fifty rods from the nearest wood, and much further
from the nearest chestnut-tree, and he could not tell how it came
there. Occasionally, when chestnutting in midwinter, I find thirty or
forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just under the leaves, by
the common wood-mouse (_mus leucopus_).

But especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation
and planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. In
almost every wood, you will see where the red or gray squirrels have
pawed down through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet
deep, and almost always directly to a nut or a pine-cone, as directly
as if they had started from it and bored upward,—which you and I could
not have done. It would be difficult for us to find one before the snow
falls. Commonly, no doubt, they had deposited them there in the fall.
You wonder if they remember the localities, or discover them by the
scent. The red squirrel commonly has its winter abode in the earth
under a thicket of evergreens, frequently under a small clump of
evergreens in the midst of a deciduous wood. If there are any
nut-trees, which still retain their nuts, standing at a distance
without the wood, their paths often lead directly to and from them. We,
therefore, need not suppose an oak standing here and there _in_ the
wood in order to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or thirty
rods of it, it is sufficient.

I think that I may venture to say that every white-pine cone that falls
to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing its
seeds, and almost every pitch-pine one that falls at all, is cut off by
a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them long before they are ripe, so
that when the crop of white-pine cones is a small one, as it commonly
is, they cut off thus almost every one of these before it fairly
ripens. I think, moreover, that their design, if I may so speak, in
cutting them off green, is, partly, to prevent their opening and losing
their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig through the
snow, and the only white-pine cones which contain anything then. I have
counted in one heap, within a diameter of four feet, the cores of 239
pitch-pine cones which had been cut off and stripped by the red
squirrel the previous winter.

The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are
placed in the most favorable circumstances for germinating. I have
sometimes wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the
earth got planted; but, by the end of December, I find the chestnut of
the same year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the
decaying and mouldy leaves, where there is all the moisture and manure
they want, for the nuts fall first. In a plentiful year, a large
proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are,
of course, somewhat concealed from squirrels. One winter, when the crop
had been abundant, I got, with the aid of a rake, many quarts of these
nuts as late as the tenth of January, and though some bought at the
store the same day were more than half of them mouldy, I did not find a
single mouldy one among these which I picked from under the wet and
mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed on once or twice. Nature
knows how to pack them best. They were still plump and tender.
Apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. In the spring they were
all sprouting.

Loudon says that “when the nut [of the common walnut of Europe] is to
be preserved through the winter for the purpose of planting in the
following spring, it should be laid in a rot-heap, as soon as gathered,
with the husk on; and the heap should be turned over frequently in the
course of the winter.”

Here, again, he is stealing Nature’s “thunder.” How can a poor mortal
do otherwise? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and the
treasure to be stolen. In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the
best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know
it. Generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate,
and succeed best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a
spade, and then covered with leaves or straw. These results to which
planters have arrived, remind us of the experience of Kane and his
companions at the North, who, when learning to live in that climate,
were surprised to find themselves steadily adopting the customs of the
natives, simply becoming Esquimaux. So, when we experiment in planting
forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does. Would it not
be well to consult with Nature in the outset? for she is the most
extensive and experienced planter of us all, not excepting the Dukes of
Athol.

In short, they who have not attended particularly to this subject are
but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed,
especially in the fall, in collecting, and so disseminating and
planting the seeds of trees. It is the almost constant employment of
the squirrels at that season and you rarely meet with one that has not
a nut in its mouth, or is not just going to get one. One
squirrel-hunter of this town told me that he knew of a walnut-tree
which bore particularly good nuts, but that on going to gather them one
fall, he found that he had been anticipated by a family of a dozen red
squirrels. He took out of the tree, which was hollow, one bushel and
three pecks by measurement, without the husks, and they supplied him
and his family for the winter. It would be easy to multiply instances
of this kind. How commonly in the fall you see the cheek-pouches of the
striped squirrel distended by a quantity of nuts! This species gets its
scientific name _Tamias_, or the steward, from its habit of storing up
nuts and other seeds. Look under a nut-tree a month after the nuts have
fallen, and see what proportion of sound nuts to the abortive ones and
shells you will find ordinarily. They have been already eaten, or
dispersed far and wide. The ground looks like a platform before a
grocery, where the gossips of the village sit to crack nuts and less
savory jokes. You have come, you would say, after the feast was over,
and are presented with the shells only.

Occasionally, when threading the woods in the fall, you will hear a
sound as if some one had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay
pecking at an acorn, or you will see a flock of them at once about it,
in the top of an oak, and hear them break them off. They then fly to a
suitable limb, and placing the acorn under one foot, hammer away at it
busily, making a sound like a woodpecker’s tapping, looking round from
time to time to see if any foe is approaching, and soon reach the meat,
and nibble at it, holding up their heads to swallow, while they hold
the remainder very firmly with their claws. Nevertheless, it often
drops to the ground before the bird has done with it. I can confirm
what Wm. Bartram wrote to Wilson, the Ornithologist, that “The jay is
one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature, for
disseminating forest trees and other nuciferous and hard-seeded
vegetables on which they feed. Their chief employment during the
autumnal season is foraging to supply their winter stores. In
performing this necessary duty they drop abundance of seed in their
flight over fields, hedges, and by fences, where they alight to deposit
them in the post-holes, &c. It is remarkable what numbers of young
trees rise up in fields and pastures after a wet winter and spring.
These birds alone are capable, in a few years’ time, to replant all the
cleared lands.”

I have noticed that squirrels also frequently drop their nuts in open
land, which will still further account for the oaks and walnuts which
spring up in pastures, for, depend on it, every new tree comes from a
seed. When I examine the little oaks, one or two years old, in such
places, I invariably find the empty acorn from which they sprung.

So far from the seed having lain dormant in the soil since oaks grew
there before, as many believe, it is well known that it is difficult to
preserve the vitality of acorns long enough to transport them to
Europe; and it is recommended in Loudon’s Arboretum, as the safest
course, to sprout them in pots on the voyage. The same authority states
that “very few acorns of any species will germinate after having been
kept a year,” that beechmast, “only retains its vital properties one
year,” and the black-walnut, “seldom more than six months after it has
ripened.” I have frequently found that in November, almost every acorn
left on the ground had sprouted or decayed. What with frost, drouth,
moisture, and worms, the greater part are soon destroyed. Yet it is
stated by one botanical writer that “acorns that have lain for
centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon vegetated.”

Mr. George B. Emerson, in his valuable Report on the Trees and Shrubs
of this State, says of the pines: “The tenacity of life of the seeds is
remarkable. They will remain for many years unchanged in the ground,
protected by the coolness and deep shade of the forest above them. But
when the forest is removed, and the warmth of the sun admitted, they
immediately vegetate.” Since he does not tell us on what observation
his remark is founded, I must doubt its truth. Besides, the experience
of nurserymen makes it the more questionable.

The stories of wheat raised from seed buried with an ancient Egyptian,
and of raspberries raised from seed found in the stomach of a man in
England, who is supposed to have died sixteen or seventeen hundred
years ago, are generally discredited, simply because the evidence is
not conclusive.

Several men of science, Dr. Carpenter among them, have used the
statement that beach-plums sprang up in sand which was dug up forty
miles inland in Maine, to prove that the seed had lain there a very
long time, and some have inferred that the coast has receded so far.
But it seems to me necessary to their argument to show, first, that
beach-plums grow only on a beach. They are not uncommon here, which is
about half that distance from the shore; and I remember a dense patch a
few miles north of us, twenty-five miles inland, from which the fruit
was annually carried to market. How much further inland they grow, I
know not. Dr. Chas. T. Jackson speaks of finding “beach-plums” (perhaps
they were this kind) more than one hundred miles inland in Maine.

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

Yet I am prepared to believe that some seeds, especially small ones,
may retain their vitality for centuries under favorable circumstances.
In the spring of 1859, the old Hunt House, so called, in this town,
whose chimney bore the date 1703, was taken down. This stood on land
which belonged to John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts,
and a part of the house was evidently much older than the above date,
and belonged to the Winthrop family. For many years, I have ransacked
this neighborhood for plants, and I consider myself familiar with its
productions. Thinking of the seeds which are said to be sometimes dug
up at an unusual depth in the earth, and thus to reproduce long extinct
plants, it occurred to me last fall that some new or rare plants might
have sprung up in the cellar of this house, which had been covered from
the light so long. Searching there on the 22d of September, I found,
among other rank weeds, a species of nettle (_Urtica urens_), which I
had not found before; dill, which I had not seen growing spontaneously;
the Jerusalem oak (_Chenopodium botrys_), which I had seen wild in but
one place; black nightshade (_Solanum nigrum_), which is quite rare
hereabouts, and common tobacco, which, though it was often cultivated
here in the last century, has for fifty years been an unknown plant in
this town, and a few months before this not even I had heard that one
man in the north part of the town, was cultivating a few plants for his
own use. I have no doubt that some or all of these plants sprang from
seeds which had long been buried under or about that house, and that
that tobacco is an additional evidence that the plant was formerly
cultivated here. The cellar has been filled up this year, and four of
those plants, including the tobacco, are now again extinct in that
locality.

It is true, I have shown that the animals consume a great part of the
seeds of trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent their becoming
trees; but in all these cases, as I have said, the consumer is
compelled to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and this is
the tax which he pays to nature. I think it is Linnaeus, who says, that
while the swine is rooting for acorns, he is planting acorns.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has
been, I have great faith in a seed—a, to me, equally mysterious origin
for it. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to
expect wonders. I shall even believe that the millennium is at hand,
and that the reign of justice is about to commence, when the Patent
Office, or Government, begins to distribute, and the people to plant
the seeds of these things.’

In the spring of 1857, I planted six seeds sent to me from the Patent
Office, and labelled, I think, “_Poitrine jaune grosse,_” large yellow
squash. Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighed 123-1/2
pounds, the other bore four, weighing together 186-1/4 pounds. Who
would have believed that there was 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune
grosse_ in that corner of my garden? These seeds were the bait I used
to catch it, my ferrets which I sent into its burrow, my brace of
terriers which unearthed it. A little mysterious hoeing and manuring
was all the _abra cadabra presto-change,_ that I used, and lo! true to
the label, they found for me 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_
there, where it never was known to be, nor was before. These talismen
had perchance sprung from America at first, and returned to it with
unabated force. The big squash took a premium at your fair that fall,
and I understood that the man who bought it, intended to sell the seeds
for ten cents a piece. (Were they not cheap at that?) But I have more
hounds of the same breed. I learn that one which I despatched to a
distant town, true to its instinct, points to the large yellow squash
there, too, where no hound ever found it before, as its ancestors did
here and in France.

Other seeds I have which will find other things in that corner of my
garden, in like fashion, almost any fruit you wish, e

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