ORCHARDS AND A LINE FROM VIRGIL
Orchards! We were walking to New York--through orchards. And we might
have gone by train! A country of orchards and gold-dust sunshine falling
through the quaint tapestry trees, falling dreamily on heaped-up gold,
and the grave backs of little pigs joyously at large in the apple
twilight. A drowsy, murmuring spell was on the land, the spell of fabled
orchards, and of old enchanted gardens--
_In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon_--
the country of King Alcinous. At intervals, as we walked on through the
cider-dreamy afternoon, thinking apples, smelling apples, munching
apples, there came a mellow sound like soft thunder through the trees. It
was the thunder of apples being poured into barrels, and, as in a sleep,
the fragrant wagons passed and repassed along the road--"the slow-moving
wagons of our lady of Eleusis."
That line of Virgil came to me, as lines will sometimes come in fortunate
moments, with the satisfaction of perfect fitness to the hour and the
mood, gathering into one sacred, tear-filled phrase the deep sense that
had been possessing me, as we passed the husbandmen busy with the various
harvest, of the long antiquity of these haunted industries of the earth.
So long, so long, has man pursued these ancient tasks; so long ago was
he urging the plowshare through the furrow, so long ago the sower went
forth to sow; so long ago have there been barns and byres, granaries and
threshing-floors, mills and vineyards; so long has there been milking of
cows, and herding of sheep and swine. Can one see a field of wheat
gathered into sheaves without thinking of the dream of Joseph, or be
around a farm at lambing time without smiling to recall the cunning of
Jacob? Already were all these things weary and old and romantic when
Virgil wrote and admonished the husbandman of times and seasons, of
plows and harrows, of mattocks and hurdles, and the mystical winnowing
fan of Iacchus.
To the meditative, romantic mind, the farmer and plowman, standing thus
in the foreground of the infinite perspective of time, take on a sacred
significance, as of traditional ministers of the ancient mysteries of
the earth.
Perhaps it is one's involuntary sense of this haunted antiquity that
gives its peculiar expressiveness to the solemn, almost religious quiet
of barns and stables, the, so to say, prehistoric hush of brooding,
sun-steeped rickyards; and gives, too, a homely, sacerdotal look to the
implements and vessels of the farm. A churn or a cheese-press gives one
the same deep, uncanny thrill of the terrible vista of time as Stonehenge
itself; and from such implements, too, there seems to breathe a sigh--a
sigh of the long travail and unbearable pathos of the race of men.
You will thus see the satisfaction, in moods of such meditation, of
carrying in one's knapsack a line from Virgil--"the slow-moving wagons of
our Lady of Eleusis"--and I congratulated myself on my forethought in
having included in our itinerant library a copy of Mr. Mackail's
beautiful translation of "The Georgics." Walt Whitman, talking to one of
his friends about his habit of carrying a book with him on his nature
rambles, said that nine times out of ten he would never open the book,
but that the tenth time he would need it very badly. So I needed "The
Georgics" very badly that afternoon, and the hour would have lost much of
its perfection had I not been able to take the book from my knapsack, and
corroborate my mood, while Colin was sketching an old barn, by reading
aloud from its consecrated pages:
"_I can repeat to thee many a counsel of them of old, if thou shrink not
back nor weary to learn of lowly cares. Above all must the
threshing-floor be levelled with the ponderous roller, and wrought by
hand and cemented with clinging potter's clay, that it may not gather
weeds nor crack in the reign of dust, and be playground withal for
manifold destroyers. Often the tiny mouse builds his house and makes his
granaries underground, or the eyeless mole scoops his cell; and in chinks
is found the toad, and all the swarming vermin that are bred in earth;
and the weevil, and the ant that fears a destitute old age, plunder the
great pile of spelt_."
Perhaps some reader had been disposed hastily to say: "What did you want
with hooks out of doors? Was not Nature enough?" No one who loves both
books and Nature would ask that question, or need to have explained why a
knapsack library is a necessary adjunct of a walking-tour.
For Nature and books react so intimately on each other, and, far more
than one realizes without thought, our enjoyment of Nature is a creation
of literature. For example, can any one sensitive to such considerations
deny that the meadows of the world are greener for the Twenty-third
Psalm, or the starry sky the gainer in our imagination by the solemn
cadences of the book of Job? All our experiences, new and personal as
they may seem to us, owe incalculably their depth and thrill to the
ancestral sentiment in our blood, and joy and sorrow are for us what they
are, no little because so many old, far-away generations of men and women
have joyed and sorrowed in the same way before us. Literature but
represents that concentrated sentiment, and satisfies through expression
our human need for some sympathetic participation with us in our human
experience.
That a long-dead poet walking in the Spring was moved as I am by the
unfolding leaf and the returning bird imparts an added significance to my
own feelings; and that some wise and beautiful old book knew and said it
all long ago, makes my life seem all the more mysteriously romantic for
me to-day. Besides, books are not only such good companions for what they
say, but for what they are. As with any other friend, you may go a whole
day with them, and not have a word to say to each other, yet be happily
conscious of a perfect companionship. The book we know and love--and, of
course, one would never risk taking a book we didn't know for a
companion--has long since become a symbol for us, a symbol of certain
moods and ways of feeling, a key to certain kingdoms of the spirit, of
which it is often sufficient just to hold the key in our hands. So, a
single flower in the hand is a key to Summer, a floating perfume the key
to the hidden gardens of remembrance. The wrong book in the hand, whether
opened or not, is as distracting a presence as an irrelevant person; and
therefore it was with great care that I chose my knapsack library. It
consisted of these nine books:
Mackail's "Georgics."
Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales.
Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Locke's "Beloved Vagabond."
Selections from R.L.S.
Pater's "Marius the Epicurean."
Alfred de Musset's "Premières Poésies."
Baedeker's "United States."
Road Map of New York State.
And, though my knapsack already weighed eighteen pounds, I could not
resist the call of a cheap edition of Wordsworth in a drug-store at
Warsaw, a charming little town embosomed among hills and orchards, where
we arrived, dreamy with country air, at the end of the day.