LOVE OF NATURE.
It is city-life, Boston-life, in fact, that forms the fitting frame of
any pen-picture one might draw of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and yet even
his prose writings are full of all a poet's love for country sights and
sounds. Listen, for instance, to this rich word-picture of the opening
spring: "A flock of wild geese wedging their way northward, with
strange, far-off clamor, are the heralds of April; the flowers are
opening fast; the leaves are springing bright green upon the currant
bushes; dark, almost livid, upon the lilacs; the grass is growing apace,
the plants are coming up in the garden beds, and the children are
thinking of May-day....
"The birds come pouring in with May. Wrens, brown thrushes, the various
kinds of swallows, orioles, cat-birds, golden robins, bobo'links,
whippoorwills, cuckoos, yellow-birds, hummingbirds, are busy in
establishing their new households. The bumble-bee comes in with his
'mellow, breezy bass,' to swell the song of the busy minstrels.
"And now June comes in with roses in her hand ... the azalea--wild
honeysuckle--is sweetening the road-sides; the laurels are beginning to
blow, the white lilies are getting ready to open, the fireflies are seen
now and then flitting across the darkness; the katydids, the
grasshoppers, the crickets, make themselves heard; the bull-frogs utter
their tremendous voices, and the full chorus of birds makes the air
vocal with melody."
How like Thoreau the following passage reads:
"O, for a huckleberry pasture to wander in, with labyrinths of taller
bushes, with bayberry leaves at hand to pluck and press and smell of,
and sweet fern, its fragrant rival, growing near!... I wonder if others
have noticed what an imitative fruit the blackberry is. I have tasted
the strawberry, the pine-apple, and I do not know how many other flavors
in it--if you think a little, and have read Darwin, and Huxley, perhaps
you will believe that it, and all the fruits it tastes of, may have
come from a common progenitor."
And there is the poet's beautiful picture of Indian summer.
"It is the time to be in the woods or on the seashore,--a sweet season
that should be given to lonely walks, to stumbling about in old
churchyards, plucking on the way the aromatic silvery herb everlasting,
and smelling at its dry flower until it etherizes the soul into aimless
reveries outside of space and time. There is little need of painting the
still, warm, misty, dreamy Indian summer in words; there are many states
that have no articulate vocabulary, and are only to be reproduced by
music, and the mood this season produces is of that nature. By and by,
when the white man is thoroughly Indianized (if he can bear the
process), some native Hayden will perhaps turn the Indian summer into
the loveliest _andante_ of the new 'Creation.'"
And again: "To those who know the Indian summer of our Northern States,
it is needless to describe the influence it exerts on the senses and the
soul. The stillness of the landscape in that beautiful time is as if the
planet were _sleeping_ like a top, before it begins to rock with the
storms of autumn. All natures seem to find themselves more truly in its
light; love grows more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees
farther back into the past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet
harvests the ripe thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verse by his
winter fireside."
At another time, when revisiting the scenes of his old schooldays at
Andover, he gives us the following vivid description of mountain
scenery:
"Far to the north and west the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their
summits in a long encircling ridge of pale-blue waves. The day was
clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline with perfect
definition against the sky.
I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea is constantly
busy with its own affairs, running here and there, listening to
what the winds have to say, and getting angry with them, always
indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to those
who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging
mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name recalls! and
the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments
of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her
bravest and hardiest children, I can never look at them without feeling
that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward
heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a
vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. How delightful all those
reminiscences, as he wanders, "the ghost of a boy" by his side, now by
the old elm that held, buried in it by growth, iron rings to keep the
Indians from destroying it with their tomahawks; and now through the old
playground sown with memories of the time when he was young.
"A kind of romance gilds for me," he says, "the sober tableland of that
cold New England hill where I came a slight, immature boy, in contact
with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and
lasting impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where
Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village
paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with _facilis
descensus_ on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating _sed revocare
gradum_. I wandered in the autumnal woods that crown the 'Indian Ridge,'
much wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers
believed with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less
curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial
agencies. The little Shawsheen was our swimming-school, and the great
Merrimac, the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a
morning stroll."
Nor does he forget to recall a visit to Haverhill with his room-mate,
when he saw the mighty bridge over the Merrimac that defied the
ice-rafts of the river, and the old meeting-house door with the
bullet-hole in it, through which the minister, Benjamin Rolfe, was shot
by the Indians. "What a vision it was," he exclaims, "when I awoke in
the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the
towers and spires of a great city! for such was my fancy, and whether it
was a mirage of youth, or a fantastic natural effect, I hate to inquire
too nicely."
Like all poets, Doctor Holmes had a passionate love for flowers, and
with a delight that is most heartily shared by the sympathetic reader,
he thus recalls the old garden belonging to the gambrel-roofed house in
Cambridge.
"There were old lilac bushes, at the right of the entrance, and in the
corner at the left that remarkable moral pear-tree, which gave me one of
my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened but always rotted at
the core just before it began to grow mellow. It was a vulgar plebeian
specimen, at best, and was set there, no doubt, only to preach its
annual sermon, a sort of 'Dudleian Lecture' by a country preacher of
small parts. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael
pear-tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to
heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly
cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like
those rich men's sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only
rusted, hardened and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and
sweet, white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those
days; we should hardly expect them now, and yet there is no obvious
change of climate. As for the garden-beds, they were cared for by the
Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rule, a
little old Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper.
Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them--hyacinths, pushing their
green beaks through as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier tulips,
coming up in the shape of sugar 'cockles,' or cornucopiae, one was almost
tempted to look to see whether nature had not packed one of those
two-line 'sentiments,' we remember so well in each of them; peonies,
butting their way bluntly through the loosened earth; flower-de-luces
(so I will call them, not otherwise); lilies; roses, damask, white,
blush, cinnamon (these names served us then); larkspurs, lupins, and
gorgeous holyhocks.
"With these upper-class plants were blended, in republican fellowship,
the useful vegetables of the working sort;--beets, handsome with
dark-red leaves; carrots, with their elegant filigree foliage, parsnips
that cling to the earth like mandrakes; radishes, illustrations of total
depravity, a prey to every evil underground emissary of the powers of
darkness; onions, never easy until they are out of bed, so to speak, a
communicative and companionable vegetable, with a real genius for soups;
squash vines with their generous fruits, the winter ones that will hang
up 'ag'in the chimbly' by and by--the summer ones, vase like, as
Hawthorne described them, with skins so white and delicate, when they
are yet new-born, that one thinks of little sucking pigs turned
vegetables, like Daphne into a laurel, and then of tender human infancy,
which Charles Lamb's favorite so calls to mind;--these, with melons,
promising as 'first scholars,' but apt to put off ripening until the
frost came and blasted their vines and leaves, as if it had been a
shower of boiling water, were among the customary growths of the
Garden."
Then follows, in these charming reminiscences, an account of the
reconstruction of the dear old Garden.
"Consuls Madisonius and Monrovious left the seat of office, and Consuls
Johannes Quincius, and Andreas, and Martinus, and the rest, followed in
their turn, until the good Abraham sat in the curule chair. In the
meantime changes had been going on under our old gambrel roof, and the
Garden had been suffered to relapse slowly into a state of wild nature.
The haughty flower-de-luces, the curled hyacinths, the perfumed roses,
had yielded their place to suckers from locust-trees, to milkweed,
burdock, plantain, sorrel, purslane; the gravel walks, which were to
nature as rents in her green garment, had been gradually darned over
with the million threaded needles of her grasses until nothing was left
to show that a garden had been there.
"But the Garden still existed in my memory; the walks were all mapped
out there, and the place of every herb and flower was laid down as if on
a chart.
"By that pattern I reconstructed the Garden, lost for a whole generation
as much as Pompeii was lost, and in the consulate of our good Abraham it
was once more as it had been in the days of my childhood. It was not
much to look upon for a stranger; but when the flowers came up in their
old places, the effect on me was something like what the widow of Nain
may have felt when her dead son rose on his bier and smiled upon her.
"Nature behaved admirably, and sent me back all the little tokens of her
affection she had kept so long. The same delegates from the underground
fauna ate up my early radishes; I think I should have been disappointed
if they had not. The same buff-colored bugs devoured my roses that I
remembered of old. The aphids and the caterpillar and the squash-bug
were cordial as ever; just as if nothing had happened to produce a
coolness or entire forgetfulness between us. But the butterflies came
back too, and the bees and the birds."
Says a well-known writer:
"Though born and reared beneath the shadow of the great city, yet Doctor
Holmes has ever found great delight in spending a portion of each year
in the country. The last few summers he has made his home at Beverly
Farms, but from 1849 to 1856, inclusive, his summer home was in
Pittsfield, in Berkshire County. His recollections of the scenes and
people in that charming town are pleasant and abundant. The villa which
he built was upon a round knoll, commanding a fine view of the whole
circle of Berkshire mountains, and of the Housatonic, winding in its
serpentine way through the fertile meadows and valleys to the sound of
Long Island. Yielding to his own good nature and the soft persuasion of
a committee of Pittsfield ladies, Doctor Holmes once contributed a
couple of poems to a fancy fair which was being held in the town during
his residence there. They do not appear in any of the published
collections, which is the one reason, above all others, why we print
them now. Each of the poems was inclosed in an envelope bearing a motto;
and the right to a second choice, guided by these, was disposed of in a
raffle, to the no small emolument of the objects of the fair. The two
pieces are even to this day represented by at least a square yard of the
quaint ecclesiastical heraldry which illuminates the gorgeous chancel
window of the St. Stephen's church in Pittsfield. The motto of the first
envelope ran thus:
Faith is the conquering angels' crown;
Who hopes for grace must ask it;
Look shrewdly ere you lay me down;
I'm Portia's leaden casket.
The following verses were found within:
Fair lady, whosoe'er thou art,
Turn this poor leaf with tenderest care,
And--hush, oh, hush thy beating heart;
The one thou lovest will be there.
Alas, not loved by thee alone,
Thine idol ever prone to range;
To-day all thine, to-morrow flown,
Frail thing, that every hour may change.
Yet, when that truant course is done,
If thy lost wanderer reappear,
Press to thy heart the only one
That nought can make more truly dear.
Within this paper was a smaller envelope containing a one dollar bill,
and this explanation of the poet's riddle:
Fair lady, lift thine eyes and tell
If this is not a truthful letter;
This is the (1) thou lovest well,
And nought (0) can make thee love it better (10)
Though fickle, do not think it strange
That such a friend is worth possessing;
For one that gold can never change
Is Heaven's own dearest earthly blessing.