How perfect an invention is glass! The sun rises with a salute, and
leaves the world with a farewell to our windows. To have instead of
opaque shutters, or dull horn or paper, a material like solidified
air, which reflects the sun thus brightly!—THOREAU.
TO-DAY a slaty sky, accompanied by vaporous clouds throughout the
afternoon, is succeeded by a pale sunset, a vivid primrose band
extending far, and lingering late along the southern horizon.
I hear an angry wind at night, first tongued by the distant trees.
Rising close to the edge of the river, the copse catches the least
breath of the west, transmitting its voice through the trees. Each tree
thus becomes a harp or viol played upon by the air in motion, producing
a varied music according to the character of its spray. How different
the sound of the summer wind! the whispering and rustling of trillions
of living leaves; one might distinguish the season by the sense of
hearing alone. Now that vegetation is devoid of foliage, there is so
much less to obstruct the current of the air brought pure and undefiled
from the Western plains. This air, additionally sifted and clarified by
its passage through countless woods and primeval forests, I inhale in
full draughts within my comfortable room. Gathered by the cold
air-boxes, this oxygen and nitrogen is tempered and warmed by a single
pound of steam below, before rising fresh and delicious through the
registers above. Thus even in midwinter do I receive the essence of the
meadows and the woods.
Not less comfort and delight do I owe to glass than to coal. It
retains the heat and excludes the frost. Scarcely the space of a foot
separates my easy chair and summer warmth from falling flakes and
wintry cold. It lets in the balm of the sky and the grace of the
leafless trees; it serves to simulate summer. Transparent to light and
to outward forms, glass is merely translucent to sounds. I look out
and see the trees rock and toss beneath the gale; I listen, and hear
the wind rejoicing in his strength. Light and sunshine stream through
my window-pane as though it were a part of the atmosphere. It is
almost like the atmosphere—transparent, invisible, inodorous. No
material used in the construction of the house imparts such an air of
richness from without as polished plate-glass. Is it not equally
desirable within, to look out through? Let the carpets, if necessary,
have less depth of pile; but let in the landscape and the light as
clearly as we may. To look at exterior objects through vitreous waves
is to cheat the sight and rob pleasant surroundings of their charm.
Again, the glass that brings the landscape into my room shuts out the
external world as readily as it lets it in—in the form of stained glass
it passes from transparent to translucent, but still retains its life
through color. I would have in my hall above the landing a wheel-window
of ancient stained glass to render daylight doubly beautiful and
refined—a flood of violet like that concentrated and diffused by the
windows of the tall clere-story of Tours. But the gorgeous stained glass
of mediæval days, such as still blazes in the old cathedrals, is an art
of the past, and my ship contained it not amid her precious stores.
Yet once more is glass transformed, and from transparent and translucent
is changed to opaque—opaque, yet not opaque. Neither clear nor colored,
it possesses still more life in this its other form. For my mirrors not
only receive light and color, but stamp them indelibly upon their
surface. Placed in certain positions, they even enable me to see through
opaque surfaces. By a glance into the hall through the door of the room
where I sit I may discern what transpires in the adjoining room, though
divided from it by a solid wall. Without my mirrors I could not even
recognize my outward self. They double the objects in my house; they
double the number of my guests; they possess a double life. They take
the place of a Daubigny, for do they not reflect the Daubigny? And
lovely woman, how could she look so sweet without her second self—her
mirror!
The primroses in my garden are harbingers of spring; the primrose band
in the south was the precursor of storm. All night the wind raved,
bringing snow and still more wind with returning day. The weather-cock
creaks ominously in its socket, pointing alternately west and northwest.
I note a drop of twenty degrees in the temperature, and hereafter I
shall distrust the primrose band.
Again the strange light in the south, shining brightly throughout the
afternoon. This band appears most vividly through a vista of the grounds
which focuses a distant slope crowned with deciduous trees and isolated
pines. I notice it, at times, during late autumn and early spring, or on
mild winter days when the moisture of the atmosphere may be perceptibly
felt. The weather-vane always points to it, though no air be
stirring—indeed, it only occurs during a calm. Glowing through the
skeleton trees, a lustrous primrose or lively crocus, it illumines and
transfigures the entire horizon of the south, as if inviting to follow
it to a blander clime. It seems almost more beautiful than sunlight; it
is colored sunlight screened from glare. When I attempt to trace it to
the range of the southern hills it keeps receding to the hills and trees
beyond—always present, ever out of reach. An observer standing there, in
turn, would see it farther on, and these farther hills and trees would
yield its luminousness to the landscape more southward still.
Is it typical of life—man grasping at an object only to see it
disappear, seizing a pleasure to find it evanescent, relinquishing a
hope for one yet more ephemeral; ever reaching for happiness to meet
with disappointment at the goal?
Whence its origin? in what distant sky does it first appear? The swift
wings of the hawk might trace it to its source; for me it is intangible.
Doubtless with a word the meteorologists would dispel the charm it
holds. I prefer to regard it as an occult force, a mysterious
weather-sign to flash upon the wintry gloom and foretell the coming
storm. In the present instance it brought yet more moisture, and was
succeeded the following day by fog and driving mist, changing in the
evening to sudden cold and wind.
A windy moonlight night, with clouds chasing each other like crests of
advancing waves. The moon rides high in the west; the strong wind sweeps
from the west. Æolus and all his retinue are abroad. The hillside trees
toss and boom like the sea—it is high tide in the air. The air becomes a
sea, the clouds its surge, the trees the shingle upon which it beats. It
fascinates like the sea! When the moon appears between the rifts it
seems stationary; when partly concealed under a white cloud, it appears
coursing rapidly westward, while the clouds seem traveling slowly
eastward. The moon then becomes the voyager, and the squadrons of the
sky the loiterers. Its luminousness is but slightly masked by the silver
clouds, their translucency making them seemingly a source of light.
Every now and then it disappears beneath a mass of inky breakers,
gilding their outer crests ere taking its sudden plunge; it looks as if
it were dropping from the sky. Almost immediately it reappears, so fast
the clouds are moving. Anon it dips beneath a snowy surge, to re-emerge
and sink below a Cimmerian roller, just as a swimmer dives into and is
lost in the surf. Meanwhile, the wind roars like an angry sea. This
glory of the wintry night my glass brings into my room. But the silver
lining and life of the moonlit clouds can not be traced in written
words, nor the varied voices of the wind be rendered into musical bars.
The moon and the sun shine so that all may see. The wind blows so that
all may hear.
I hear a new creak in my neighbor’s weather-vane amid the moaning of the
wind; or is it the repeated far-off blowing of a horn? Twice on my going
to the door the sound suddenly ceases, to continue fitfully on my
return. I discover it is produced merely by the side-light above my
writing-table. Do we not thus frequently attribute ulterior motives to
causes which exist only in imagination, or whose source originates with
ourselves? Often is the humming in our ear.
At times the small black fly upon the pane
May seem the black ox of the distant plain.
How deceptive is sound! The leaf-cricket’s chant on hot summer nights
seems to proceed from the lawn, rods away; he is singing in the
honeysuckle vine a few feet overhead. Not unfrequently, when sitting
within doors, am I obliged to consider whether the monotonous humming I
hear is the planing-mill far remote or the purring of the cat—my pet
Maltese, who looks at me with her beryl-like eyes and arches her back to
be stroked. But though she pricks up her ears when I scratch the under
surface of the table, she does not long mistake the counterfeit for the
wainscot mouse.
Little sounds, like the petty annoyances of life, are frequently the
most unpleasant. A great annoyance one meets forcibly, knowing it to be
a necessary evil that must be put out of the way. The snake is killed or
evaded; the fly remains to harass. The roaring of the gale, the downpour
from the sky—sounds loud and violent—are soothing rather than the
reverse; the rattling of a window-blind is far more annoying. Who but
the man that is filing it can hear without a shudder the filing of a
saw, and who but the katydid himself can passively endure the katydid’s
stridulation?
A monotonous sound, providing it be not a rasping sound, the ear becomes
accustomed to, and misses when it ceases. The ticking of a clock, in
itself unmusical, is, nevertheless, soothing; you awaken when it
suddenly stops. The nocturnal cricket’s reiterated cry is a somnolent
sound—a voice of the darkness and the dew. The grasshoppers’ jubilant
chorus sings away the fleeting summer hour, and by its rising and
falling pulsation marks the waxing and waning of the year. Even when
immelodious, most sounds of external Nature are not irritating. The
rattling of the window-pane exasperates—one intuitively anathematizes
the carpenter; the angry creaking of the boughs has a meaning, and one
accepts it as a fitting and necessary accompaniment of the gale. The
harsh barking of a dog rouses one from slumber; it is plainly in most
cases an annoyance which has no just reason for existence—the
neighborhood were better off without it.
The railroad whistles, scarcely farther removed and far more plainly
heard, are not annoying. At once they are accepted by the mind as
possessing a reason. For behind the whistle are the vast driving-wheels,
the passengers, the mails, and the merchandise. When I hear the
locomotive’s whistle I feel the locomotive’s power, and the significance
of its strength. It is the voice of might and speed; the exultant neigh
of the great iron charger. It sounds the hours for me. Day after
day—night, morning, and afternoon—with the same exactitude, scarcely a
minute after the engineer has opened the sounding-valve, do the cars,
arriving and departing, pass along the opposite shore of the river. Far
off among the distant valleys resounds the clatter of the oncoming
train; now lost for a moment, now more distinctly heard. A mile and a
half away on the still night air the whistle sounds, and the awakened
echoes respond. I hear the roar through the gap of the hills, the crash
across the bridge, the reverberating flight along the bank, the gradual
receding and absorption of the sound. Nightly, expectantly, I listen for
it, and miss it when the train is late.
How much does not the arrival of the night express signify! how much of
pain or pleasure to those it bears! Friends who have parted, and friends
who are waiting; news sad and joyous; regrets and hopes; hatred and
love; laughter and tears; all the emotions and passions harbored in
human hearts are present in the rapid flight of the train. The engineer
at the throttle, the fireman who supplies the fuel—calm, watchful,
serene at their posts amid the deafening roar and jar—I think of them
when the whistle sounds, plunging onward through the darkness and the
storm.
What a fascination exists in the flight of a train—an exhilaration to
those on board, an ever-recurring marvel to those who witness it pass
by! A speck in the distance, it momentarily enlarges till, thundering
past, it instantly recedes, as swiftly lost as it was swift to appear.
Onward it flies, annihilating space, outspeeding time, flinging the
mile-posts behind, bearing its burden to remote destinations. A moment
it pauses to slake its thirst, or to deposit a portion of its burden,
replacing it with fresh freight in waiting. Still onward it flies,
linking villages and towns, spanning streams, connecting valleys,
tunneling hills, joining States. Ever the crash and the roar, the great
trail of smoke and steam, the engineer at the throttle—calm, watchful,
serene—plunging through the darkness and the storm! This the whistle
means for me.
Instantly I detect the whistles of the different roads, some more
musical, some more acute, some deeper, more sonorous in tone. Varying in
resonance according to the state of the atmosphere, they apprise me of
the temperature without, like the audible vibration of the rails
themselves when passed over by the cars. Clear and musical in the early
summer mornings, during cold weather they are more sibilant and
piercing. They are a weather-vane to the ear, blown by heat or cold,
responsive to the moisture or the dryness of the air. I observe similar
acoustic effects in the tones of the distant bells. So that I may often
prognosticate the weather as surely by external sounds as by the
shifting barometer of the hills.
Even through my windows I like to analyze the sentiment of animate
sounds. “The nature of Sounds in general,” remarks the author of Sylva
Sylvarum, “hath been imperfectly observed; it is one of the subtellest
Peeces of Nature.” During a ramble through the woods and fields I am
impressed by the various emotions conveyed by bird voices alone. Through
them the woods and fields acquire an added meaning; they are the
interpreters of Nature. Thus, the voice of the jay is a signal to inform
his companions of danger; the scream of the hawk, a note of menace to
intimidate his prey and cause it to reveal its whereabouts. The
woodpecker’s tap is a sound of industry. The mourning-dove’s notes
express sorrow; the hermit-thrush’s, ecstasy; the veery’s, solitude; the
white-throated sparrow’s, content. The voices of the bluebird and
song-sparrow are sounds of welcome, an exordium of spring. The plaintive
whistle of the wood-pewee, the liquid warble of the purple finch, and
the refrain of many a companion songster, it would require the fine ear
and fancy of the poet to interpret aright. Perhaps Frederick Tennyson
well defines the sentiment they express in his melodious rendering of
the blackbird’s song:
The blackbird sings along the sunny breeze
His ancient song of leaves and summer boon;
Rich breath of hayfields streams through whispering trees;
And birds of morning trim their bustling wings,
And listen fondly, while the blackbird sings.
And how deliciously one of the sweet old Swabian singers has also voiced
the blackbird of Europe, and interpreted his rippling strain:
Vög’le im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell—
Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein, wo wird mein Schätzle sein?
Vög’le im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell.
Songster in pine-wood whistleth so clear—
Whistleth the wood out and in, where hath my sweetheart been?
Songster in pine-wood whistleth so clear.
Is it a Minnesinger? I wonder; for I can not place the poet who hymned
the feathered minstrel so sweetly. My German friend the professor, who
improvises in music as deftly as Heine improvised in verse, and to whom
I repeated the lines the other day, was struck anew by their haunting
melody. Seating himself at the piano, he immediately set them to this
exquisite accompaniment. The music has been ringing in my ears ever
since—a very echo of the songster, rising clear and jubilant from the
shade of the wood. The words have been set to music before, a version
being included in that melodious collection of national, student, and
hunting songs entitled Deutscher Liederschatz. But this is commonplace
compared to the rendition of my German friend. Try it those of you who
have a voice to try; or let your sweetheart try it for you. You will
then appreciate the consummate art of the music—the ascending scale of
the second bar felicitously phrasing the whistle of the bird, and the
falling inflection of the third happily portraying the cool, shadowy
depths of the wood. And how like a silvery bird note of June the upper
“g” in the seventh bar sounds the close of the refrain!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Music:
_Allegro mf._ —— H. GANZEL.
Vögle im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell,
Songster in pine-wood whistleth so clear,
Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein;
Whistleth the wood out and in;
Wo wird mein Schätzle sein, wo wird es sein?
Where hath my sweetheart been, where hath she been?
Wo wird mein Schätzle sein, wo wird es sein?
Where hath my sweetheart been, where hath she been?
]
No poet or prosatist, however, comes so near to the bird as the great
prose-poet of the Wiltshire Downs:
“The bird upon the tree utters the meaning of the wind—a voice of the
grass and wild flower, words of the green leaf; they speak through that
slender tone. Sweetness of dew and rifts of sunshine, the dark hawthorn
touched with breadths of open bud, the odor of the air, the color of the
daffodil—all that is delicious and beloved of spring-time are expressed
in his song. Genius is nature, and his lay, like the sap in the bough
from which he sings, rises without thought. Nor is it necessary that it
should be a song; a few short notes in the sharp spring morning are
sufficient to stir the heart. But yesterday the least of them all came
to a bough by my window, and in his call I heard the sweet-brier wind
rushing over the young grass.”[10]
Footnote 10:
Richard Jefferies. Field and Hedgerow.
Just what emotion the caw of the crow conveys I am at a loss to
determine, unless it be self-complacency—a harsh way of expressing it,
it would seem. His notes sound more like anger; and in the woods he
certainly does quarrel with the owls, the song-birds, and his own
kindred. But his apparent anger may be only feigned, and his voice belie
his real character. Assuredly, there was never a more self-complacent
tread than the crow’s on a grain field. The farmer and the scarecrow at
once become secondary to him, and pilfering becomes almost a virtue, he
pilfers with such grace. His tread is as majestic as the soaring of the
hawk, and though black as night and evil, his plumage glistens as
brightly as light and purity. He seems a true autochthon of the soil. It
is much in the way things are done, after all; boldness often passes for
innocence, and self-confidence begets security.
Gladness, serene contentment, is most strongly expressed to me by the
bobolink, the “okalee” of the starling, and the singular medley of the
catbird. To be sure, the catbird frequently justifies his name, and is
anything but an agreeable songster; but to make amends for his
introductory discords he frequently gives us a delightful palinode.
Plaintiveness, sadness over the departed summer, is conveyed by the
blackbird’s warble fluted over fields of golden-rod; it is expressed in
the trembling notes of the yellow-bird, as he scatters the thistle’s
floss to the winds.
If we would carefully analyze the speech of external Nature, I doubt not
we could trace some well-defined sentiment in nearly all animate sounds;
assuredly in very many of the voices of birds, animals, and insects. For
Nature’s moods and tenses are conveyed as strongly through the tympanum
of the ear as through the retina of the eye. Their correct
interpretation depends upon our inner sight and hearing. I am not sure
that in man’s relation to Nature the sense of hearing does not
contribute almost as much enjoyment as the sense of seeing. Certainly,
Nature would seem but half complete without her characteristic voices.
Think of her wrapped in the winding-sheet of eternal silence, a mere
mummy, with no song of bird or whisper of wind to impart animation to
her scenes. Color and form are but half the landscape; it is sound that
gives it life, and renders it companionable. What is winter, in one
sense, but absence of sound, not merely the absence of bird and insect
voices, but the rustling of leaves and grasses, the murmur of waters,
the life and movement of growing vegetation!
Are not the first signs of spring conveyed through sound? Ere yet a
song-bird can find an utterance, or grass-blade impart a sense of
resurrected life I hear the cracking of the ice and the gurgling of the
frost-freed rills. The crow announces the change before the snowdrop
comes, and the wild geese proclaim it from the sky before the sallows
invite the precocious bee. No doubt the bee is already waiting for the
flower, and winnows it into bloom; for no sooner is the corolla ready to
expand than I hear his murmurous wings. High in the willow catkins; low
down in the horn of the skunk-cabbage; bending the yellow bloom of the
first dog-tooth violet, his hum of industry is heard. The bee is perhaps
the first constant spring musician, though his is not the earliest
vernal voice. The pushing daffodils of the perennial flower-border speak
to me of spring, the choir of the toads and _hylodes_ announces it even
more emphatically.
How we should miss the voice of Chanticleer were the domestic fowl to
become silent! It never occurred to me how important a role he plays
until the author of The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter makes him serve
as a matutinal alarm to Schaunard in lieu of the time-piece he has
pawned. And Herrick, too, in His Grange, or Private Wealth, has the
domestic fowl serve a similar purpose:
Though clock
To tell how night draws hence, I’ve none,
A cock
I have to sing how day draws on.
We might rise and retire, indeed, with the clock of the cock, and at all
times of day and at all seasons we would sadly miss his voice were he
subject to laryngeal troubles. It is a cheery and companionable sound,
the absence of which would cause an appreciable void. Many sounds not
strictly belonging to outward Nature become complementary to her through
familiarity, or through the surroundings amid which they are heard. Thus
the hills and valleys speak through the roar of the railroad train, and
the harvest fields find a fitting tongue in the thrashing machine. A
domestic voice rather than a voice of Nature, the cock’s crow is,
notwithstanding this, associated with Nature and rural scenes. It is
more a voice of the country and a pulsation of the rural landscape than
an expression of urban surroundings. The city hems it in; the country
expands it. Orpheus might pause to listen to it when sounded from an
autumnal upland, it is so resonant and sonorous. So much does the scene,
or the conditions amid which sounds are uttered, affect the sounds
themselves.
As a purely wild sound of Nature—the Nature of our own woods and
fields—the cry of the owl is, perhaps, unrivaled. The bark of the fox
has some analogy to it in point of wildness, except that his voice is
always further removed. I hear it on moonlight winter nights following
the undulations of the wooded hills—a short sharp bark thrice repeated
at rather prolonged intervals. It is an eerie sound, the cry of the
vulpine freebooter, ranging his native woods through the frosty winter
nights. I never look up at the fox’s pelt slung across the
_portière_-rod in the smoking-room without a feeling of regret for the
lissom life that was slain. The grand brush that steadied him in his
flight; the sharp pointed nose, once alive to every atom of the
atmosphere; the fine soft fur, beautiful still in death, appeal mutely
to me for a life wantonly sacrificed. I care not how many grouse and
ground-birds may have fallen victims to his cunning—they were his
rightful prey, the spoil of his domain.
The drumming of the ruffed-grouse imparts a sense of life and
companionship to the woods such as few other sounds convey. _Bonasa
umbella!_ there is a whir of vigor in his very name. Every one should be
born a sportsman to appreciate his glorious _crescendo_; hunting is
given to man of the gods, Xenophon rightly said. The grouse is the
woodland guide, the alcaid who holds the keys to all its guarded
recesses, the courier who knows every lane and passage that thread the
forest depths. Accept his invitation, and you are conducted into hidden
nooks, and presented glimpses of sylvan beauty of whose existence you
would otherwise never have dreamed. His roll-call is a stimulus to
exercise, an excuse to explore the covers. Onward and onward and still
onward he leads; now amid a sun-flecked vista of tree-trunks, now
through a thicket of intertwining saplings, now to a woodland
antechamber frescoed with October colors, now up some lofty hillside
overlooking the empurpled valley. A taste of the bitter he also mixes
with the sweet, as when flushed for the third or fourth time, weary of
pursuit, he leads to an almost impenetrable thicket of bramble,
perchance to skim off unseen on hearing your approach, or to dive deep
down into a precipitous glen, only to mislead by suddenly wheeling up
the hillside in a long deceptive flight. Most noticeably in the spring,
and frequently in the autumn, and on tempered winter days do I hear the
music of his wings, far away in some sequestered glade, beating a sylvan
tattoo—most picturesque of all woodland sounds; it is as if the woods
themselves were speaking.
The squirrel’s bark is emphatically a sylvan expression. He knows its
effect upon the listener, and selects a bland, sunshiny day when he may
be distinctly heard. But only at a safe distance, for has not the fox
taught him caution, and the grouse the wile of placing a tree-trunk
between himself and the double-barrel? Were I to analyze the sentiment
of the squirrel’s bark, I should term it an utterance of derision. Not
altogether derision, however; for besides a snarling tone, it has a
perceptible sound of cracking and crunching, as of nuts and acorns being
husked and split by a rodent’s tooth.
An eery cry is the “ssh-p! ssh-p!” of the twisting snipe—two fifths a
whistle, two fifths a cry, while to the nervous sportsman the other
fifth is a jeer. A guttural cry, a strange raucous cry, a very voice of
the treacherous ooze and the rustling sedge. It can not be put into
words, and only the snipe himself can sound it. Most voices of the marsh
are characteristic; it has its distinctive gamut of sound. The cheerful
music of the woodlands is wanting; its speech is pitched in a graver
key, in keeping with its solitary haunts where Syrinx ever murmurs
through her murmuring reeds. How expressive its many-sounding
tongues—the boom of the bittern, the harsh quack of the heron, the
scream of hawk and kildeer, the multitudinous calls of water birds—
cries that might
Be echoes of a water-spirit’s song.
All through the spring and autumn nights countless wings are cleaving
the upper air, bearing the hurrying voyagers in search of distant
climes—flocks of plover and woodcock, skeins of snipe and shore-birds,
throngs of ducks and geese, voicing their way through the darkness,
league after league, hour after hour on their long journey of migration.
I look for drought and heat when the cicada shrills. The rhythm of the
cricket’s creak tells me if the night be hot or cold. I see the
gathering rain-clouds when the tree-toad croaks and the hair-bird
trills. The bluebird warbles, “it is spring”; a thousand throats
proclaim the summer. Sounds from the woods, sounds from the waters,
sounds from the fields, sounds from the air! The infinite beauty of
sound! Are not Nature’s voices one of her most endearing charms?
How the gas-burner and window-pane have led me to digress! But even from
my comfortable room it is sometimes pleasant to look out beyond the
storm and bask in the luminousness of the primrose band.
[Illustration]
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[Illustration]