FAR ALTARS
[Illustration]
Guarded by treacherous green marshes whose murmuring rushes will close
without a change of cadence over the despair of the unwarned, in August
there lives a scene of tender and appealing beauty. The languid creek,
turned the color of iron rust with its plunder--spoil of the wild and
impractical fertility of the roots of bog and bracken--pauses in a pool
that shows now brown, now sorrel, now satiny green as the clouds wait or
hasten above and the supple rushes lean back and forth. This is the
tourney field of gorgeous dragonflies. Emerald, gold, and amethyst, they
hold resplendent play, sparkling above the water like magnets of light,
causing the placid depths to shimmer, and drawing the minnows from their
sunlit rest. Even the bird-dog does not know this pool. No messenger
more personal than a prowling shot comes there from man.
It is a sturdy conceit that wonders why Nature should spend her freshest
art on treasure scenes she decrees invisible, as if the mother of
mountains, tempests, deserts, toiled anxiously for the approval of a
particular generation, keeping one eye on Mr. Gray and the other on Mr.
Emerson in the hope that they will justify her flower blushing unseen
and her excusable rhodora. Nature is far too unmoral to bother about
rendering economists an account for her spendthrift loveliness. She
willfully deserts the imitation Sicilian garden, though she would be
well paid to stay, and rollicks in the jungle, clothing magnificently
the useless snake and leopard, dressing their breakfast in paradise
plumes, puzzling Victorian poets, and badly scaring the urban
manicurist, who returns after her first country vacation with decided
views concerning the cheerful humanity of streets compared with lodges
in the wilderness.
Were Nature careworn and personal, where should we turn for consolation
or rest? Hers is the tonic gift of a strength that, underlying all life,
does not pity or praise. As in the Cave of the Winds the most restless
spirit surely might find peace, so in the eternal changefulness of the
forest under the touch of forces fierce or serene we find the soul of
quiet because the powers at work are beyond our control, control us
utterly, hold us in an immense and soothing grasp where thought and
energy are fused and contend no more. So those who live upon the ocean
come to possess that which they will not barter for ease, and so the
timber cruiser shortens his visit to town. They would not tell what they
gain who relinquish readily the things for which others pour out their
years upon the ground that commerce may grow. It is because words are
not fashioned to speak what shapes the wind takes, the motion whereby
mists climb after the sun out of ravines, or how the tropic orchids lift
at daybreak among their fragrant shadows wings of ivory and fawn that
drooped against ferny trunks.
Many days must bloom and fade between you and the sound of human voices
before, in the wilderness, there can be surrender to the giant arms that
forever hold the body, and to the spirit, supreme and unemotional, that
has sped beyond the utmost outposts the mind ever reached. But after the
homecoming--when the confused echoes of a swarming, blind humanity are
lost in the exalted quiet of wide spaces--the vast impersonality of woods
and plains, swamps, hills, and sea, takes on a tenderness more deep than
lies in human gift and a glorious hostility that calls to combat without
grudge or motive, ennobling because it gives no mercy; challenges alike
the craft of man and the strength of the hills.
The exuberant fancy of a less earnest day made air and fire the
dwellings of creatures formed like ourselves, and, though immortal, shod
with lightning, guarded from common sight, they were afflicted with our
own vexations, our loves and hates. Nymph and naiad, faun and satyr,
were always plotting and gossiping, and little better were the
subsequent gnomes and fairies--more personal and cantankerous than
persons; resorting upon occasion to divorce; tangling skeins, and
teasing kind old horses. These were not the earth deities.
Earth deities wear no human shape. No one has looked upon the sky fire's
face, the pinions of the gale. Enormously they have wrought, without
regard for man and sharing no passion, yet yielding sometimes their
limitless force to the mind that soared with them. In the age of winged
serpents, in the days when Assyria was mistress, they were the same,
holding an equal welcome for the boy and sage, unchanging and unresting,
free from mortal attributes of good and evil, mighty and healing as no
half-human god could be. Therefore that lavish scattering of beauty
without regard to man. Therefore the wonder given to all who dare call
to them when far from other men.
The disrepute of the pathetic fallacy has come from making the forest
sentimental. Sentient beyond all doubt its lovers know it is. Even as
water visibly rebels, warring with headlands and leaping after the wind,
and as it slumbers dimpling and caresses the swimmer, so the woodlands
are solemn and aloof, or breathe to give the open-hearted their vast
serenity. The nymph or fairy rises at the bidding of imagination, but
the everlasting deities of the elements, past our reckoning elder than
they, need no fiction. They are presences, and accord communion. They
can be gentle as the twilight call of quail. They can be indifferent and
gigantic as the prairie fire and typhoon. But they brood to-day as
yesterday over cities that they will not enter, but which sometimes they
destroy. They march above mountain ridges and loiter among flowered
laurel, impartial as nothing else is, and in their dispassionate
companionship supremely consoling, offering for playthings the ripple
and the gleam.
THE END