TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
LITERARY PILGRIMAGES
OF A NATURALIST
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
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| THE WORKS OF WINTHROP PACKARD |
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| WOODLAND PATHS |
| WILD PASTURES |
| WOOD WANDERINGS |
| WILDWOOD WAYS |
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| _Each illustrated by Charles Copeland_ |
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| FLORIDA TRAILS |
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| As seen from Jacksonville to Key West, and from November to |
| April, inclusive |
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| _Illustrated from photographs by the author and others_ |
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| LITERARY PILGRIMAGES OF A NATURALIST |
| |
| Visits to the haunts of Whittier, Emerson, Hawthorne, Celia |
| Thaxter, Webster, Aldrich, and others |
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| _Illustrated from photographs by the author and others_ |
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[Illustration: “No wonder Daniel Webster, wandering
southward over the hills in search of a country home, chose
this as his abiding place.”
_See page 2_ ]
LITERARY PILGRIMAGES
OF
A NATURALIST
BY
WINTHROP PACKARD
_Author of “Florida Trails,” “Wild Pastures,”
“Wood Wanderings,” etc._
ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE
AUTHOR AND OTHERS
[Illustration: (colophon)]
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD, AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1911_
BY SMALL, MAYNARD, AND COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
Entered at Stationers’ Hall
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
TO THE MEMORY
OF
CLARENCE H. BERRY
_A Schoolmaster of Long Ago_
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
The author wishes to express his thanks to the editors of
the “Boston Evening Transcript” for permission to reprint
in this volume matter which was originally contributed to
its columns.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. IN OLD MARSHFIELD 1
II. AT WHITTIER’S BIRTHPLACE 15
III. IN OLD PONKAPOAG 30
IV. AT THE ISLES OF SHOALS 44
V. THOREAU’S WALDEN 60
VI. ON THE FIRST TRAIL OF THE PILGRIMS 75
VII. IN OLD CONCORD 90
VIII. THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET 104
IX. IN OLD NEWBURYPORT 118
X. PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS 135
XI. OLD SALEM TOWN 148
XII. VERMONT MAPLE SUGAR 164
XIII. NATURE’S MEMORIAL DAY 183
XIV. BIRDS OF CHOCORUA 197
INDEX 213
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
“No wonder Daniel Webster, wandering southward over the
hills in search of a country home, chose this as his
abiding-place.” _See page 2_ _Frontispiece_
“Telling the pearls on this rosary of a path one is led
beyond the homestead.” 12
“Within this wide circle, with the house its core, and
the hearth its shrine, revolved the homely, cheerful,
whole-hearted life of the farm.” 22
“Watching the crane and pendant trammels grow black
against the blaze.” _See page 18_ 28
A corner of the room in which Whittier was born 28
“The study where Aldrich wrote some of his daintiest
verse looks forth upon a sweet valley.” 30
“The study window in what was ‘The Bemis Place’ of the
elder days of Ponkapoag.” _See page 35_ 36
Celia Thaxter’s home at the Isles of Shoals 44
“Chasms down which you may walk to the tide between sheer
cliffs.” 50
“Up to the smooth turf on this knoll crowd all the
pasture shrubs that she loved.” 58
“Here is the cairn erected to his memory, to which with
doffed hat you may well add a stone.” _See page 65_ 66
“Walden is Walden still, very much as Thoreau painted
it.” 70
“Pilgrim Lake,” where that first washing was done by the
Pilgrim mothers 78
“That little creek that blocked the way of doughty Myles
Standish and his men, sending them inland on a detour.”
_See page 85_ 86
“Here in a volley was the summing up of the nature of the
heroes that had grown up, quite literally, in the Concord
soil.” _See page 93_ 92
“Hither, too, came Hawthorne, to tramp the woods as did
the others, and feel as did they, the divine afflatus.” 98
“The water from the old well cooled the throat of his
memory, and sparkled to the eye of it as he recalled the
dripping bucket.” 114
The Newburyport home of Joshua Coffin, the early friend
and teacher of Whittier 126
“Down river to the old chain bridge the rough rocks of
the New Hampshire hills come to get a taste of salt.”
_See page 129_ 130
One angle of “The House of the Seven Gables.” 150
“A Salem dock of the old sea-faring days.” 150
“The only sound was the crunch of soft snow and the
splash of sap within the barrel.” _See page 171_ 172
“But here is a sweetness that the tree almost bursts to
deliver.” 178
“The farmhouse where Bolles lived and loved the woods and
all that therein lived with him.” _See page 197_ 198
Nightfall on Chocorua Lake 208
LITERARY PILGRIMAGES
OF A NATURALIST
LITERARY PILGRIMAGES OF A NATURALIST
I
IN OLD MARSHFIELD
_Glimpses of the Country about the Daniel Webster Place_
Down in Marshfield early morning brings to the roadside troops of
blue-eyed chicory blooms, shy memories of fair Pilgrim children
who once trod these ways. They do not stay long with the wanderer,
these early morning blooms. The turmoil and heat of the mid-summer
day close them, but the dreams they bring ramble with the roads in
happy freedom from all care among drumlins and kames, vanishing in
the flooding heat of some wood-enclosed pasture corner to spring
laughingly back again as the way tops a hill and gives a glimpse
of the purple velvet of the sea. No wonder Peregrine White, the
first fair-skinned child born in New England, strayed from the
boundaries of Plymouth and chose his home here. No wonder Daniel
Webster, New England’s most vivid great man, wandering southward
over the hills in search of a country home two centuries later,
fixed upon the spot just below Black Mount, looking down upon Green
Harbor marshes and the sea, and chose this for his abiding-place.
The statesman and orator, whose words still ring across the years
to us, with the trumpet sounding in them even from the printed
page, may well have breathed inspiration for them from the winds
that come from seaward across the aromatic marshes. There is cool
truthfulness in these winds, and understanding of the depths, and
the salty, wild flavor of the untamed marsh gives them a tang of
primal vitality. Breasting them at mid-day from under the wilt of
summer heat you seem to drink air rather than to breathe it, and
find intoxication in the draught. I never heard a robin sing in
mid-flight, soaring upward like a skylark, till I came to this bit
of sweet New England country. The east wind drifted in to him as
he sat on a treetop caroling, and he spread his wings to it and
fluttered upward, pouring out round notes of melody as he went.
Webster’s most famous speeches were composed while he tramped these
hills and marshes and sailed the blue velvet of the outlying sea,
and their richest phrases soar as they sing, even as did the robin.
You may come to Black Mount with its panoramic view of the Webster
farm, the surrounding pastures and marshes and the little Pilgrim
cemetery where he lies buried, from either the Marshfield railway
station or that of Green Harbor, both a mile or more away by road.
A better route lay for me through the woods by paths flecked
with sunlight and dappled with shadow, paths which the Pilgrims’
descendants first sought out and which are as fair to-day to our
feet as they were to theirs. One can easily fancy Peregrine and his
wife picking berries along here on days when the farm work allowed
them freedom, the children frolicking about with them and eating or
spilling half they picked, as the children do on these hills now.
Voices and laughter rang through the woods as I passed, and there
is small blame to the pickers if they do eat the berries as fast
as they pick them. They never taste quite so good as on this direct
route from producer to consumer. Along this path you may have your
choice of varieties as you go, from the pale blue ones that grow
so very near the earth on their tiny bushes that they seem the
salt of it, giving the day its zest, through the low-bush-blacks,
crisp with seeds and aromatic in flavor as if smoked with the
incense of the sweet-fern, to those other black ones that grow
on the high bushes and rightfully take the name of huckleberry.
The soil of these sandy hills may be thin and not worth farming,
but it produces fruit whose quality puts to shame the product
of well-cultivated gardens. The good bishop of England who once
said, “Doubtless God could have produced a better berry than the
strawberry, but doubtless He never did,” never ate blueberries from
the bush in a New England pasture.
From the summit of Black Mount the grassy hill slopes sharply
beneath your feet to the road and beyond this to the home acres
of the Webster place, the roof tree far below you and the house
snuggling among the trees that the great statesman loved, many
of which he planted. A little farther on stands a great barn with
huge mows and the big hay doors front and rear always hospitably
open to the scores of barn swallows that build on the beams up next
the roof. In no barn have I found quite so many swallows at home.
At every vantage point on a beam, wherever a corner of a timber or
a locking pin protrudes to give a support, nests have been built,
generation following generation till some of the structures are
curious, deep, inverted mud pyramids, topped with straw and grass
and lined with feathers, downy beds for the clamorous young. I
can think of no finer picture of rural peace than such a barn as
this, the cool wind sighing gently through the wide doors, the
beams stretching across the cavernous space above dotted with the
gray nests, the air full of the friendly, homey twittering of the
birds, some resting and preening their feathers on the beams,
others swinging in amazing flight down and out through the doors
to skim the grass of the neighboring fields and marshes for food,
then flashing back again to the hungry nestlings. Such barns
grow fewer year by year here in eastern Massachusetts, and the
pleasant intimacy of the barn swallows is but a happy recollection
in the mind of many of us, more is the pity. It is worth a trip to
Marshfield just to foregather with such a colony.
Eastward again the eye passes over wide mowing fields, rough
pastures and hills clad with short, brown grass and red cedars,
the thousand-tree orchard of Baldwin apples which Webster planted,
the tiny Pilgrim cemetery on a little hillock where he lies buried
among the pioneers of the place, the brown-green marshes flecked
with the silver of the full tide, to the deep, velvety blue rim
of the sea, which sweeps in its splendid curve uninterrupted from
north to south. Behind your back is the rich green of Massachusetts
woodland, beneath your feet this landscape of pasture, field and
marsh, scarcely changed since Webster’s day, changed but little
indeed since the days of Peregrine White and his pioneer neighbors,
and rimming it round the deep sapphire romance of the sea. Across
this blue romance of sea the winds of the world, fresh and vital
with brine, come to woo you on your way. They croon in your ears
the strange sagas that the blood of no wanderer can resist, and you
know something of the lure that led the vikings of old ever onward
to new shores as you plunge down the grassy slope to meet them.
The stately beauty of the home place may thrall you for a while
beneath the trees and the friendly great barn try to lull you to
contentment with the cradle songs of the swallows, but the marsh
adds its wild, free tang to the muted trumpets which these east
winds blow in your ears, and so you fare onward through a country
of enchantment, toward the ocean.
Webster’s well house, where still the ancient spring flows, cool
and clear, gave me a drink as I went by. The dyke which borders
his cranberry bog and separates it from a tiny pond where white
pond lilies floated and perfumed the air, gave further progress
eastward, and soon I passed naturally into an old, old path which
led me purposefully in the desired direction. Without looking for
it I had found the footpath way which rambles from the farm across
country to Green Harbor, where the statesman kept his boats, a path
without doubt often trodden by his feet in seaward excursions.
He could have found no pleasanter way. The pastures which lie
between upland and marsh in this region are covered with a wild,
free growth of shrub and vine which no herds, however ravenous,
can keep down. The best that the cattle can do with them is to
beat paths through the lush tangle along which wild grasses find
room to work upward toward the light and add to the browse. Here
the greenbrier grows greener and more briery than anywhere else
that I know, and the staghorn sumac emulates it in vigor of growth
if not in convolutions. In places these reach almost the dignity
of young trees, and the pinnate leaves spread a wide, fern-like
shade as I walked beneath the antler-like branches. The staghorn
sumac is surely rightly named. Its antlers are covered now with an
exquisite, deep, soft velvet which clothes them to the leafbud tips
and along the very petioles of the leaves. Now it is a clear green
which with later growth will become purple and pass into brown,
the promise of autumn showing now in a slight purple tinge on the
sun-ripened petioles of the older leaves. This soft fuzz clothes
the crowded, conical heads of bloom also, heads that are of the
same sweet pink as the petals of the wild roses which grow near by
as you may see if you will hold one up against the other. But the
pink of the wild rose seems flat against that of the sumac, for it
has only a smooth surface on which to show itself, while that of
the sumac is full of soft, shadowy withdrawals and shows a yellow
background in the interstices of the blossom spike.
Skirting this jungle so aromatic with scent of sassafras and
bayberry, perfumed with wild rose and azalea, pulsing with the
flight of unseen birds in its cool depth and echoing with their
song, the path crosses a brook that gently chuckles to itself
over its escape from the monotony of a big mowing field to the
salt freedom of the marsh, then suddenly breasts the steep
northern side of a drumlin. Here the press of toiling feet has
been supplemented by the wash of torrential rains till the narrow
way becomes a miniature chasm in places, worn down in the gravel
among great red cedars, hoary with age and lichens. To know the
slow growth of a red cedar and to calculate the age of these by
dividing their present bulk with the slight increase that each
year brings is to place the birth of these trees far back in the
centuries. Not one hundred years will account for it, nor two, and
I am quite sure that these trees were growing where they now stand
when Peregrine White’s mother first embarked on the Mayflower at
Southampton. Webster’s path may have gone through them then, and
no one knows how long before, for it is worn deep not only on the
steep hillsides where the rains have helped it but in level reaches
beyond where only the passing and re-passing of feet through
centuries would have done it. It was as direct a route from the
hills to the mouth of Cut River at Green Harbor before the white
man’s time as after, and if I am not mistaken the red men trod it
long before the first ship’s keel furrowed Plymouth Bay.
As I topped the rise I found myself in a hilltop pasture a
half-mile long which covers the rest of the hill. Once it was a
cultivated field, and the corn-hills of the last planter still show
in spots, these, like the rest of it, now overgrown with close-set
grass and crisp reindeer lichen. The patriarchal cedars I had
left behind, old men of their tribe sitting solemn and motionless
in council. Here I had come upon a vast but scattered concourse of
young people, lithe and slender folk who seemed to stroll gayly
all about the place. Here were plumed youths and debonair maidens
regarding one another, family groups, mothers with children at the
knee and other little folk in the very attitude of playing romping
games. But there were tinier folk than these, too small to be real
cedars, gamboling among the others, as if underworld sprites also
in cedar guise had come forth to join the festivities. Nowhere else
have I seen such a merry concourse of cedars as on the long top of
this hill that some Pilgrim father first cleared for a cornfield
two centuries and a half ago. Here and there little groups of wee
wild rose shrubs seemed to dance up and scatter perfume about their
feet in tribute, then stand motionless like diffident children,
finger in mouth, stolid and uncommunicative. Hilltops are often
lonely, but this one could never be. It gladdens with its quaint
fancies. Through a veritable picnic of young cedars I tramped down
the eastward slope to the dusty road that leads on to Green Harbor
and the slumbrous uproar of the surf.
[Illustration: “Telling the pearls on this rosary of a path one is
led beyond the homestead.”]
Telling the pearls on this rosary of a path in the homeward
direction one is led beyond the homestead and on, by a slenderer,
less trodden way to the old Pilgrim cemetery where the great man
lies buried among the pioneers of the neighborhood, Peregrine
White, the Winslows, and a host of others whose fame has not
gone so far perhaps, but those names may be written in the final
domesday book in letters as large as his. Nor does any storied
monument recite the deeds of the statesman or bear his name higher
than that of his fellows. A simple slab with the name only stands
above the mound beneath which he lies, and in the side of this
mound a woodchuck has his burrow, seeming to emphasize by his
presence the cosy friendliness of the little spot. It is a hillock,
just a little way from the house, just a little way from the big
orchard which Webster loved so well, surrounded by pasture and
cranberry bog and with the marsh drawing lovingly up to it on one
side. Over this marsh comes the free salt air of the sea, but a
little more gently to the lowly hillock than to the summit of Black
Mount. Because of this loitering gentleness it has time to drop
among the lingerers there all the wild aromas and soft perfumes of
the marsh and pasture and bring all the soothing sounds of life to
ears that for all I know hear them dreamily and approve. Quail,
the first I have heard in New England for a long time, whistled
cheerily one to another from nearby thickets. Nor did these seem
fearful of man. One whistled as a wagon rattled by his hiding place
on the dusty winding road, and held his perch beneath a berry bush
till I approached so near that I could hear the full inflection of
the soft note with which he prefixed his “bob white,” see the swell
of his white throat and the tilt of his head as he sent forth the
call. A pair of mourning doves crooned in the old apple orchard
and flew on whistling wings as I approached too near. I have heard
heartache in the tones of these birds, but here their mourning
seemed only the gentle sorrow of a mother’s tones as she soothes a
weary child, a mourning that voiced love and sympathy rather than
pain. On a tree nearby a great-crested flycatcher sat and seemed
to say to himself, “grief, grief.” These were the only notes of
sorrow that the place held. All else in sky and field, marsh and
hillside, seemed to thrill with a gentle optimism, and the hillock
itself rested amidst this in a patriarchal peace and simplicity
that became it well. Memory of this gentle peace and simplicity
lingers long and runs like a tender refrain through the harmony
of fragrant, vivid life that marks this lovely section of old
Marshfield.
II
AT WHITTIER’S BIRTHPLACE
_The Homestead two Centuries Old and the Unspoiled Country about it_
They lighted a fire for me in Whittier’s fireplace. The day had
been one of wilting July heat and sun glare till storm clouds
from the New Hampshire hills brought sudden cool winds and black
shadows. Twilight settled down in the wide, ancient living-room,
bringing brooding darkness and mystery. The little light that came
through the tiny, lilac-shaded windows seemed to half reveal ghosts
of legends and romance, wrapped in darkness, slipping indistinctly
from the black cavern of the fireplace, standing close before it
and hiding it, and gathering in formless groups in the corners
of the room. They whispered and the leaves on the trees outside
rustled the tale, while echoes of warlock warfare rumbled in the
sky above and witch fires flared. A witches’ twilight had come
down the Merrimac and brought under its blanket shades of all the
mountain legends that had in times past trooped to the mind of the
poet as he sat there with sensitive soul a-quiver to their touch,
photographing them in black and white for the minds of all men
forever. From the fireplace stalked Mogg Megone and the powwows of
his tribe, bringing with them all the dusky people of the weird
stories of his day. The wind wailed their lone songs outside, and
in its deep throat the aged chimney mumbled to itself old, old
tales of night and darkness.
Then a slender flame slipped upward from the hearth, showing the
form of the caretaker faintly shadowed and edged with light against
the black background, and if I saw not her but the outline of
Whittier’s mother bending to light the fire and drive from the
minds of the children the fancies of the dusk it must have been
because the witches’ twilight still held the room under its spell.
Between the fore and back logs the brush of hemlock and of pine
crackled and sent incense across the gloom to me, and with the leap
of the flame all the weird shadows wavered into the corner and
vanished. In their stead trooped up-river the cheery hearthside
stories of the English settlers, sturdy tales and rough perhaps
but with the glow of the hearth log flickering gleefully through
them. The gusts drew whirling sparks upward, and in its deep throat
the chimney, no longer aged but stout and strong with vigorous
work to do, guffawed in cheerful content. The dancing firelight
sent gleams of quiet laughter over the face of Whittier himself,
that before had looked so grimly from the frame over his ancient
desk, and the room glowed with homey hospitality. If there were
shades there they were golden ones of gentle maids and rollicking
boys that we knew and loved so well, and though without the window
opposite the fireplace and right through the shading lilac bushes
a ghostly replica of the fireplace with its flickering flames
appeared and vanished and reappeared, there was nothing sinister in
its uncanniness, for
“under the tree
When fire outside burns merrily,
There the witches are making tea.”
Stormbound if not snowbound I sat for an hour by the hearth that
was the heart of a home for two hundred years, watching the
crane and pendent trammels show black against the blaze, seeing
the Turk’s heads on the andirons glow, reading by the firelight
verses which the poet wrote in that same home room, and when the
storm passed and I could go forth to his brook and his fields
and hills it could not fail to be with something of his love
for them in my heart. Some critic, whose visit must have been
shortened by homesick memories of a steam-heated flat, has said
that Whittier’s birthplace is lonely and that its loneliness had
its effect on his life and work. But how could such a place be
lonely to a man who was born there? Here was the great living-room
with its hearth, where the life of the home centered. Without
was the wonderful rolling country with all its majesty of hill,
whence he saw the crystal mountains to north and the blue lure
of the sea to eastward, with all its gentle delights of ravines
where brooks laughed, and meadows and swamps where they slipped
peacefully along, mirroring the sky, watering all wild flowers and
offering refuge to all wild creatures. Within this wide circle,
with the house its core and the hearth its shrine, revolved the
homely, cheerful, whole-hearted life of the farm. What chance for
loneliness was there?
After the shower had passed I climbed the gentle slope of the hill
back of the house, traversing the old garden where grow the plants
that came over with pioneers from England, hollyhocks and sweet
william, old-time poppies, marjoram and London pride, dear to every
housewife’s heart in the good old days when to wrest a farm from
the forest and build a home on it was still an ambition for which
a free-born New Englander need feel no shame. The witchery of
the hour had not been for the hearthside alone. The sooth of the
rain had been for the hearts of these also, and the joy of their
answering delight made all the fresh air sweet and kindly so far as
the gentle winds blew. The perfume of an old-time garden after rain
is made up of gracious memories. Wherever chance has taken their
seeds or care has transported their roots a thousand generations
of sweet-hearted, home-keeping mothers have tended these plants
and loved their flowers and the very leaves and stalks on which
they grew. The caress of the rain brings from each leaf and petal
but the aromatic essence of such lives, welling within and flowing
forth again through the unnumbered years.
Out of homely love of the hearth, out of wild Indian legends that
flowed down the Merrimac and English folk lore that flowered over
seas and blew westward with a sniff of the brine in it, Whittier
made his poems. But not out of these was born their greatness. That
was distilled from his own fiber where it grew out of the rugged,
honest, fearless life of generations whose home shrine had been
that glowing hearth, whose love and tenderness welled within and
overflowed like the scent of the old-time garden. To such a house
and such a hearth sweetness climbs and nestles. To stand on the
old door stone was to be greeted with dreams of meadows and lush
fields, for wild mint has left the brookside and come shyly to the
very door sill to toss its aroma to all comers. A spirit of the
meadows that the barefoot boy loved thus dwells ever by his door
and none may enter without its benediction. There is something
Quakerlike in the wild mint, that dwells apart, unnoticed and
wearing no flaunting colors, yet is so dearly fragrant and yields
its sweetness most when bruised.
A stone’s toss from the door I found his brook, its music muted
by the summer drought so that you must bend the ear close to hear
its song. With the foam brimming on its lip in spring the brook
roars good fellowship, a stein song in which its brothers over
nearby ridges join, filled with the potency which March brews from
snow-steeped woods. Now, its March madness long passed, repentant
and shriven by the kindly sun, it slips, a pure-souled hermit,
from pool to pool, each pool so clear that in it the sky rests
content, while water striders mark changing constellations on its
surface. The pools are silent, only beneath the stones the passing
water chirps to itself a little cheerful song which the vireos in
the trees overhead faintly imitate. The trees love the brook’s
version best, for they bend their heads low to listen to it, beech
and maple, white oak and red, yellow birch and white birch and
black birch, hemlock and pine, dappling the pools with shade and
interlocking arms across the glen in which the brook flows. In the
dapple of shadow and sunlight beneath them ferns of high and low
degree, royal and lady, cinnamon, interrupted and hay-scented, wade
in the shallows and caress the deeps with their arching fronds.
The blue flags that waved beside the water a month ago are gone,
leaving only green pennants to mark their camp site for another
year; and it is well that it is thus marked, else it were lost, for
in the very brook bottom where the March flood crashed along have
come to usurp it those tender annuals, the jewel weeds. Their stems
almost transparent, their oval leaves so dark a green that it seems
as if some of the dancing shadows found rest in them, they press in
close groups into all shallow places and lean over the edges of the
clear pools to admire the gold pendants that tinkle in their ears.
[Illustration: “Within this wide circle, with the house its
core and the hearth its shrine, revolved the homely, cheerful,
whole-hearted life of the farm.”]
With these through the grassy shallows climb true forget-me-nots,
slenderest of brookside wanderers, each blue bloom a tiny turquoise
for the setting of the jewel-weeds’ gold. Thus shaded and carpeted
the little ravine wanders down from the hills, and the brook goes
with it, as if hand in hand, bringing to its side all sprightly
life, a place filled with boyhood fancies and echoes of boyhood
laughter. A chewink, singing on a treetop up the slope, voiced
this feeling. Someone has called the chewink the tambourine bird.
His song makes the name a deserved one. It consists of one clear,
melodious call and then an ecstatic tinkling as of a tambourine
skillfully shaken and dripping joyous notes. Always before the
chewink’s song has been without words to me. This one sang so
clearly “Whittier; ting-a-ling-a-ling” that I knew the bird and his
ancestors had made the glen home since the boyhood of the poet,
learning to sing the name that rang oftenest through the tinkle of
the brook.
You begin to climb Job’s Hill right from the glen, passing from
beneath its trees to stone-walled mowing fields where rudbeckias
dance in the morning wind, their yellow sunbonnets flapping and
flaring about homely black faces. I fancy these fields were white
with ox-eye daisies in the spring. They are yellow now with the
sunbonnets of these jolly wenches. It is like getting from Alabama
to New England to step over the last wall which divides the fields
of the hill’s shoulder from its summit, which is a close-cropped
cow pasture. Here the winds of all the world blow keen and free and
you may look north to the crystal hills of New Hampshire whence
come their strength. Eastward under the sun lies the pale rim of
the sea. Kenoza Lake opens two wide blue eyes at your feet, and
all along beneath you roll bare, round-topped hills sloping down
to dark woods and scattered fields, as unspoiled by man as in
Whittier’s days. The making of farms does not spoil the beauty of
a country; it adds to it. It is the making of cities that spells
havoc and desolation. Through the pasture, up the steep slopes to
the summit of Job’s Hill, that seems so bare at first glimpse,
climb all the lovely pasture things to revel in the free winds.
Foremost of these is the steeplebush, prim Puritan of the open
wold, erect, trying to be just drab and green and precise, but
blushing to the top of his steeple because the pink wild roses have
insisted on dancing with him up the hill, their cheeks rosy with
the wind, their arms twined round one another at first, then round
him as well. Somehow this bachelor bush which would be so austere
reminds one of the Quaker youth at the academy, surrounded by
those rosy maidens of the world’s people, one of whom we suspect
he loved, yet could no more tell it than can the steeplebush
acknowledge how sweet is the companionship of the wild rose and how
he hopes it may go on forever. Stray red cedars stroll about the
lower slopes and climb gravely, while juniper, in close-set prickly
clumps, seems to follow their leadership. The canny, chancy thistle
holds its rosy pompons up to the bumble-bees, that fairly burrow
in them for their Scotch honey, and the mullein would be even more
erect and more Quakerly drab than the steeplebush if it could.
It is erect and gray, but just as it means to look its grimmest
dancing whorls of yellow sunshine blossom up its stalk in spirals,
the last one fairly taking flight from the tip. Among all these
strays the yarrow, whose aroma is as much a New England odor as
that of sweet-fern or bayberry. The aromatic incense of this herb
follows you up the hill and seems to bring the pungent presence of
the poet himself.
Job’s steepest hillside drops you in one long swoop to the road
which leads through woodland windings to the haunted bridge over
Country Brook. The way itself is haunted by woodland fragrance and
chant of birds innumerable, and in the freshness of the morning
after the shower it seemed as if built new. The world is apt to be
this way after rain. Yet if the vivid morning sun and exhilarating
north wind had driven all ghosts away there had been necromancy at
work. All the day before the blossoms on the staghorn sumac had
been of that velvety pink that rivals the wild rose. Over night
they had turned a warm, rich red. Autumn brings this richer, more
stable color to the sumac blooms as they ripen toward seed time,
but it does not do it in July, over night. The pukwudgies had been
at work, painting with the rain, filling the sumac heads with it
till they hung heavy. The water had massed the tiny pubescence of
the blooms till pink had deepened into red and autumn had seemed
to come for the sumacs in a night. It took the sun and the wind
all day to dry them out and bring back the witchery of pink that
the necromancy of the rain had banished. But the spell was not
altogether broken, nor will it be till autumn has worked its will
with the world about Country Brook. Out of the birches the fresh
wind threshed here and there yellow leaves that fluttered like
colias butterflies before it. There and here among the sumacs hung
a crimson leaf, more vivid in its color than the blossoms or the
berries could ever be, and as in the woodland all news flashes from
shrub to shrub and from creature to creature, so it seemed as in
the hint of autumn, first born, a simulacrum merely, in the wet
sumac heads, had gone by birch leaf messengers to all distances.
Along the way flashed out of invisibility the yellow of tall
goldenrod heads and the blue and white of the earliest asters and,
once materialized, remained.
August may bring vivid heat and wilting humidity if it will. The
witches’ twilight had brought down the Merrimac from the far north
the flavor of autumn which is later to follow in full force, nor
will it wholly leave us again. The ghostliest thing about Country
Brook was a sound which seemed to come up it from the cool depths
of the woods into which it flows, a soft breathing sigh, now
regular, now intermittent, as if a spirit of the woodland slept
peacefully for a little, then gasped with troubled dreams. Seeking
to discover this ghost I found a little way along the road from
the bridge a broad grassy avenue that led with a certain majesty
in its sweep as if to some woodland castle whose people were so
light-footed that they wore no paths in their broad green avenue.
Yet after all it led me only to a wide meadow where the sighing
I had heard was that of the grass going to sleep under the magic
passes of a mower’s scythe. No clatter of mowing machine was here,
just the swish of a scythe such as the meadow has heard yearly
since the pioneers came. There were deer tracks here along the
margin of Country Brook, and all the gentle wild life of woods and
meadows seemed to pass freely, without care or fear.
[Illustration: “Watching the crane and pendant trammels grow black
against the blaze.”
_See page 18_ ]
[Illustration: A corner of the room in which Whittier was born]
And so I found all the country about the Whittier homestead an
epitome of the free, cheerful, country life of the New England
of a century ago. They lighted a fire for me in Whittier’s
fireplace--and as the rose glow on the walls of the old living-room
brought back the hearth-cheer of bygone years, as the witches,
daintily making tea without under the lilac bush, brought the
romance and legend of the olden time to the threshold, so the
crackling draft of the fire up the deep throat of the chimney
seemed to draw in to the place the free, hearty, farming,
wood-loving life of the men of the earlier centuries out of
which the poet drew what was best in him, to be given out in
unforgettable verse to us all. If such a place was ever lonely it
was that gentle and desirable loneliness which great souls love.
III
IN OLD PONKAPOAG
_Glimpses from a Study Window of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_
The study where Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote some of his daintiest
verse looks forth upon a sweet valley. Down this valley prattle
clear-eyed brooks that meet and grow, and water lush meadows filled
with all lovely things of summer, while low woods beyond set a dark
green line against the sunsets. Looking toward these of a day when
rosy mists tangle the sun’s rays and anon let them slip in arrow
flight earthward, we have pictured for us how
“We knew it would rain, for all the morn,
A spirit on slender ropes of mist
Was lowering its golden buckets down
Into the vapory amethyst.”
[Illustration: “The study where Aldrich wrote some of his daintiest
verse looks forth upon a sweet valley.”]
Wherever written, this and a hundred other dainty things seem to
flock into the tiny valley upon which he looked from the study
window of his later life in what was then the quaint old village
of Ponkapoag, as if the flowers of fancy to which he gave wings
still hovered there. At nightfall it is easy along these meadows to
“See where at intervals the firefly’s spark
Glimmers and melts into the fragrant dark;
Gilds a leaf’s edge one happy instant, then
Leaves darkness all a mystery again.”
The quaint old Ponkapoag of not so very many years ago is changing
fast. The trolley car passes and re-passes in what was once its
one street. The real estate man has come and modern houses grow up
over night, almost, in the empty spaces over the old stone walls,
while in the surrounding pastures and woodland appear the mansions
of those who seek large estates not too far from the city. Suburban
life begins to crowd Ponkapoag and the little self-centered country
village of the genuine New England type passes. Most, however, of
the sturdy old houses of a century or more ago remain and much
of the beauty of the country round about them. On Sundays and
holidays Ponkapoag Pond teems with an uproarious holiday crowd, but
on weekdays one may still enjoy its beauty unmolested, hear the
blackbird’s music tinkle along the bogs, and see the pond lily, the
pure white spirit of Miantowonah, sit on the water. On such days
Ponkapoag Pond, “the spring bubbling from red earth,” seems still
to belong as much to the Indians, whose favorite fishing ground it
was, as to us latter-day usurpers, and the outlook across it to the
dusky loom of Blue Hill is as wild now as it was in their day.
From the north-facing window of the poet’s study you may see the
hill again, with all its beauty of color which changes with the
whim of the day. At dawn of a clear morning it looms blue-black
against the rosy deep of the sky. At noon it looms still but
friendly and green, so near that the eye may pick out the shape of
each tree that feathers the jutting crags. At noon of such a day
Ponkapoag hill with its houses bowered in green seems a part of
it, the half mile of intervening space making no impression on the
eye. As the sun sinks a haze rises from the rich farming land which
lies level between the two hills. The spirit on slender ropes of
mist is at work, and through this vapory amethyst the larger hill
withdraws into soft colors of blue that grow violet purple with
the coming of dusk below and the rosy afterglow of reflected sunset
in the sky above. Captain John Smith named the range “The Cheviot
Hills” in recollection of old England, but all the countryside
named it Blue Hill because of the changing wonder of its coloring,
which is a constant delight to the eye. On stormy days when gray
northeasters send torn clouds, fragrant with the tonic smell of the
brine, whirling over it, the hill looms misty and vague, as if it
might well be a mountain scores of miles distant, instead of the
single mile it is along the straight road. On such days all the
wild sea myths and northland sagas seem to be blown in over the
hill barrier and trail down from the skirts of the clouds into the
secluded peace of Ponkapoag valley. Hence, to those who dream, come
sea longings.
“The first world-sound that fell upon my ear
Was that of the great winds along the coast
Crushing the deep-sea beryl on the rocks--
The distant breakers’ sullen cannonade.
Against the spires and gables of the town
The white fog drifted, catching here and there
At over-leaning cornice or peaked roof,
And hung--weird gonfalons. The garden walks
Were choked with leaves, and on their ragged biers
Lay dead the sweets of summer--damask rose,
Clove pink, old-fashioned, loved New England flowers.
Only keen, salt-sea odors filled the air.
Sea-sounds, sea-odors--these were all my world.
Hence it is that life languishes with me inland.”
Infinite variance of changing moods has the hill which lifts such
abrupt crags above the Ponkapoag plain. At times the poet may have
seen it as it was one day not long ago, when a great thunderstorm,
born of the sweltering, blue haze of a fiercely hot July day,
swept across it. On that day the hill withdrew itself into the
menacing black sky, looming against it, then vanishing, becoming
part of a night like that of the apocalypse, in which hung the
observatory and the higher houses of Ponkapoag hill “as glaring as
our sins on judgment day.” The storm in which the miracle of “The
Legend of Ara-Cœli” was wrought could not have been blacker than
the sky, nor the face of the monk, when he saw the toes of the
bambino beneath the door, whiter than gleamed those houses. The
weirder, greater things of nature loom often through the poems of
the man who looked upon such scenes from the study window in what
was “The Bemis Place” of the elder days of Ponkapoag village. It
seems as if all the lighter, sweeter fancies that laugh or slip,
tear in eye, through his verse, whirled like rose petals on summer
winds or danced like butterflies into the little valley on which
the westward study windows looked. Through this, right in the
foreground, flows Ponkapoag brook, and on it falls slowly into
decay an ancient mill, a relic of the early days of the village.
The old dam no longer restrains the water which gurgles along the
stones below it, humming to itself a quatrain which never was
meant for it, but which voices the fate of the shallow mill pond,
which has been empty for so many long years that it is no longer
a pond but a tiny meadow in which cattle cool their feet and feed
contentedly. Here the spendthrift brook sings contentedly:
“The fault’s not mine, you understand;
God shaped my palm, so I can hold
But little water in my hand
And not much gold.”
[Illustration: “The study window in what was ‘The Bemis Place’ of
the elder days of Ponkapoag.”
_See page 35_]
In the meadow and along the brookside blooms to-day the Habenaria
psycodes, the smaller purple-fringed orchid, its dainty petal-mist
rising like flower steam of an August noon, a shy child of woodland
bogs, which often runs away out into the open meadow to hear the
blackbirds sing. This year I have not found the larger fringed
orchid, the Habenaria fimbriata, which comes to the meadow less
often, a flower which one might fancy the mother of the other,
coming to lead the truant home again to the seclusion of the
woodland shadows. In all the fairy nooks of this valley ferns
spring up like vagrant, delicate fancies that are real while you
hold them in close contemplation, yet vanish into the green of the
surroundings, as the form of a poet’s thought fades when you take
your eye from the printed page, though the thought itself lingers
long in your memory. In the shallow meadow that was once the tiny
pond stands, shoulder high to the feeding cattle, a solid, serried
phalanx of the tall sagittaria, its heart-shaped, lanceolate,
pointed leaves aiming this way and that, as if to fend it with keen
tips from the eager browsers. These wade through it indeed, but do
not feed on it, plunging their heads deep amoung the spear points
to gather the tender herbage beneath. While I watched them two
of these, half-grown Holstein heifers, bounded friskily to the hard
turf of the cedar-guarded pasture above and raced in a satyr-like
romp over the close turf and among the cedars for a time. It was
as if they knew that Corydon had just vanished up that roadside in
Arcady in pursuit of the maiden that the Pilgrim described to him,
and the valley was free from all supervision for a time. The white
spikes of bloom on the water-plantain nodded to let them pass, and
nodded again as if they too knew why the satyrs frisked and on what
errand the shepherd had gone.
Daintiest of embodied thoughts which flit along this sequestered
valley are the butterflies. This is their feasting time of year,
for now the milkweed blooms hang crowded umbels of sticky sweetness
that no honey-loving insect can resist. Commonest of these by the
brookside is Asclepias cornuti with its large pale leaves and its
dull greenish-purplish flowers. It is rather odd that out of the
same brook water and the salts and humus in the black earth through
which it flows one plant should grow these dull, heavy, loutish
flowers, while just beside it, perhaps, the Habenaria psycodes
gets its misty delicacy of purple bloom from the same source. With
plants as with people it is not that on which we feed nor the spot
on which we stand that counts in the final moulding of character.
Some subtle essence, some fire of spirit within the orchid makes
its bloom. Some grosser ideal within the milkweed matures in the
dull, sticky umbels. Thus within the town, attending the same
schools, and fed by the same butcher and baker, one boy grows up a
poet and another a yokel. Even in the same family you may see it,
for the milkweeds are not all alike. Along the dry hillsides the
Asclepias tuberosa gives us bright orange flowers, exudes little
if any stickiness, and even gets a better name from the botanist,
being called the butterfly-weed.
But however gross and homely the milkweed blooms the butterflies
find rich pasturage there and sip and cling till they fairly
fall off in satiety. Winging to the milkweed out of the chestnut
and maple shade of the deep wood comes Papilio turnus, striped
tigerwise with rich yellow and black. Out of the long saw-edged
grass that grows long in the meadow and bows before the wind
as do fields of grain sails Argynnis cybele, the great spangled
fritillary, the fulvous glory of his broad wings spangled beneath
with silver, as if he carried his coin of a fairy realm with him
wherever he goes. Over the very pine tops soars the monarch, his
rich dark red and black borne on wings that are the strongest in
butterfly flight. These three, most conspicuous sprites in the
meadow tangle, give rich coloring and the poetry of motion as
they bear down upon the milkweed blooms, to leave them no more
save for short flights taken merely to secure a better strategic
position on the umbels, till they are cloyed with the rich nectar,
and smeared with the sticky exudation which the plant puts out on
the blooms for purposes of its own. I fancy the butterflies are
vexed and indignant at this stickiness which smears their legs and
makes yellow pollen masses cling to them when, satiated and lazy,
they next take flight. Yet the whole is cleverly arranged. On
the smeared legs as they sail away cling pollen masses which the
insect is not likely to get rid of till it lights on another head
of bloom, very likely one of some distant plant. There the sticky
masses cling closer to the quaint horns which each bloom protrudes
from behind the anthers, there to drop pollen grains on the stigma
and insure the cross-fertilization of the flower. Thus unwittingly
butterfly and bee as they sail about the sun-steeped meadow suffer
discomfort for their own good, insuring vigorous crops of milkweed
for another summer, for themselves or their descendants.