_Down in the Woods, July 2d, 1882_.-If I do it at all I must delay no
longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of
diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862-'65, Nature-notes of 1877-'81,
with Western and Canadian observations afterwards, all bundled up and
tied by a big string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this
day, this hour,--(and what a day! What an hour just passing! the luxury
of riant grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and
perfect temperature, never before so filling me, body and soul),--to
go home, untie the bundle, reel out diary-scraps and memoranda, just as
they are, large or small, one after another, into print-pages,[1]
and let the melange's lackings and wants of connection take care of
themselves. It will illustrate one phase of humanity anyhow; how few of
life's days and hours (and they not by relative value or proportion, but
by chance) are ever noted. Probably another point, too, how we give long
preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and
then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite
unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness
tell the story better than fine work. At any rate I obey my happy
hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May be, if I don't
do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous,
fragmentary book ever printed.
Note:
[1] The pages from 1 to 15 are nearly verbatim an off-hand letter of
mine in January, 1882, to an insisting friend. Following, I give some
gloomy experiences. The war of attempted secession has, of course, been
the distinguishing event of my time. I commenced at the close of 1862,
and continued steadily through '63, '64 and '65, to visit the sick
and wounded of the army, both on the field and in the hospitals in and
around Washington city. From the first I kept little note-books
for impromptu jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and
circumstances, and what was specially wanted, &c. In these, I brief'd
cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bed-side, and
not seldom by the corpses of the dead. Some were scratch'd down from
narratives I heard and itemized while watching, or waiting, or tending
somebody amid those scenes. I have dozens of such little note-books
left, forming a special history of those years, for myself alone, full
of associations never to be possibly said or sung. I wish I could convey
to the reader the associations that attach to these soil'd and creas'd
livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to
carry in the pocket, and fasten'd with a pin. I leave them just as I
threw them by after the war, blotch'd here and there with more than one
blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom
amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting
ready for it, or a march. Most of the pages from 20 to 75 are verbatim
copies of those lurid and blood-smuch'd little notebooks.
Very different are most of the memoranda that follow. Some time after
the war ended I had a paralytic stroke, which prostrated me for several
years. In 1876 I began to get over the worst of it. From this date,
portions of several seasons, especially summers, I spent at a secluded
haunt down in Camden county, New Jersey--Timber creek, quite a little
river (it enters from the great Delaware, twelve miles away)--with
primitive solitudes, winding stream, recluse and woody banks,
sweet-feeding springs, and all the charms that birds, grass,
wild-flowers, rabbits and squirrels, old oaks, walnut trees, &c., can
bring. Through these times, and on these spots, the diary from page 76
onward was mostly written.
The COLLECT afterwards gathers up the odds and ends of whatever pieces
I can now lay hands on, written at various times past, and swoops all
together like fish in a net.
I suppose I publish and leave the whole gathering, first, from that
eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all Nature,
authors included; second, to symbolize two or three specimen interiors,
personal and other, out of the myriads of my time, the middle range of
the Nineteenth century in the New World; a strange, unloosen'd, wondrous
time. But the book is probably without any definite purpose that can be
told in a statement.