One time I thought of naming this collection "Cedar-Plums Like" (which I
still fancy wouldn't have been a bad name nor inappropriate.) A melange
of loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling--a little thinking
thrown in for salt, but very little--not only summer but all
seasons--not only days but nights--some literary meditations--books,
authors examined, Carlyle, Poe, Emerson tried, (always under my
cedar-tree, in the open air, and never in the library)--mostly the
scenes everybody sees, but some of my own caprices, meditations,
egotism--truly an open air and mainly summer formation--singly, or in
clusters--wild and free and somewhat acrid--indeed more like cedar-plums
than you might guess at first glance.
But do you know what they are? (To city man, or some sweet parlor lady,
I now talk.) As you go along roads, or barrens, or across country,
anywhere through these States, middle, eastern, western, or southern,
you will see, certain seasons of the year, the thick woolly tufts of
the cedar mottled with bunches of china-blue berries, about as big as
fox-grapes. But first a special word for the tree itself: everybody
knows that the cedar is a healthy, cheap, democratic wood, streak'd red
and white--an evergreen--that it is not a _cultivated_ tree--that it
keeps away moths--that it grows inland or seaboard, all climates, hot
or cold, any soil--in fact rather prefers sand and bleak side
spots--content if the plough, the fertilizer and the trimming-axe, will
but keep away and let it alone. After a long rain, when everything looks
bright, often have I stopt in my wood-saunters, south or north, or far
west, to take in its dusky green, wash'd clean and sweet, and speck'd
copiously with its fruit of clear, hardy blue. The wood of the cedar
is of use--but what profit on earth are those sprigs of acrid plums?
A question impossible to answer satisfactorily. True, some of the herb
doctors give them for stomachic affections, but the remedy is as bad as
the disease. Then in my rambles down in Camden county I once found an
old crazy woman gathering the clusters with zeal and joy. She show'd,
as I was told afterward, a sort of infatuation for them, and every year
placed and kept profuse bunches high and low about her room. They had a
strange charm on her uneasy head, and effected docility and peace. (She
was harmless, and lived near by with her well-off married daughter.)
Whether there is any connection between those bunches, and being out of
one's wits, I cannot say, but I myself entertain a weakness for them.
Indeed, I love the cedar, anyhow--its naked ruggedness, its just
palpable odor, (so different from the perfumer's best,) its silence,
its equable acceptance of winter's cold and summer's heat, of rain or
drouth--its shelter to me from those, at times--its associations--(well,
I never could explain _why_ I love anybody, or anything.) The service I
now specially owe to the cedar is, while I cast around for a name for my
proposed collection, hesitating, puzzled--after rejecting a long, long
string, I lift my eyes, and lo! the very term I want. At any rate, I go
no further--I tire in the search. I take what some invisible kind spirit
has put before me. Besides, who shall say there is not affinity enough
between (at least the bundle of sticks that produced) many of these
pieces, or granulations, and those blue berries? their uselessness
growing wild--a certain aroma of Nature I would so like to have in
my pages--the thin soil whence they come--their content in being let
alone--their stolid and deaf repugnance to answering questions, (this
latter the nearest, dearest trait affinity of all.)
Then reader dear, in conclusion, as to the point of the name for the
present collection, let us be satisfied to _have_ a name--something to
identify and bind it together, to concrete all its vegetable, mineral,
personal memoranda, abrupt raids of criticism, crude gossip of
philosophy, varied sands and clumps--without bothering ourselves because
certain pages do not present themselves to you or me as coming under
their own name with entire fitness or amiability. (It is a profound,
vexatious never-explicable matter--this of names. I have been exercised
deeply about it my whole life.[11])
After all of which the name "Cedar-Plums Like" got its nose put out of
joint; but I cannot afford to throw away what I pencill'd down the
lane there, under the shelter of my old friend, one warm October noon.
Besides, it wouldn't be civil to the cedar tree.
Note:
[11] In the pocket of my receptacle-book I find a list of suggested and
rejected names for this volume, or parts of it--such as the following:
_As the wild bee hums in May,
& August mulleins grow,
& Winter snow-flakes fall,
& stars in the sky roll round._
_Away from Books--away from Art,
Now for the Day and Night--the lessons done,
Now for the Sun and Stars._
_Notes of a Half-Paralytic, As Voices in the Dusk, from
Week in and Week out, Speakers far or hid,
Embers of Ending Days, Autochthons....Embryons,
Ducks and Drakes, Wing-and-Wing,
Flood Tide and Ebb, Notes and Recalles.
Gossip at Early Candle-light, Only Mulleins and Bumble-Bees,
Echoes and Escapades, Pond-Babble....Tête-a-Têtes,
Such as I....Evening Dews, Echoes of a Life in the 19th
Notes and Writing a Book, Century in the New World,
Far and Near at 63, Flanges of Fifty Years,
Drifts and Cumulus, Abandons....Hurry Notes,
Maize-Tassels....Kindlings, A Life-Mosaic....Native Moments,
Fore and Aft....Vestibules, Types and Semi-Tones,
Scintilla at 60 and after, Oddments....Sand-Drifts,
Sands on the Shores of 64, Again and Again._