bringing with him the very gold of the sunlight. Colias philodice
has many changes. Sometimes the black margins of his wings are
missing and his gold melts into the sunshine and vanishes before
your eyes. Another may come that is white instead of gold, a wan
ghost of a colias that seems born of the mist instead of the
sunshine and to vanish into nothing when he flies away, as mist
does. Sometimes the colias flies up into the wood and lights, and
as I come to the spot where I think I saw him stop I find nothing
but a single bloom of the golden gerardia which now slips from
glade to glade all along where the hardwood growth comes down to
meet the meadow grasses. The gerardia might very well explain all
this if it would, but it is born close-mouthed. If you will look at
the yellow buds which later open into the golden bells into which
the bumble-bees love to scramble, bumbling as they go, you will
see how tightly their lips are pressed together. No word can you
get from these by the most insistent questioning, and even when
they open it is easy to see that they have learned that silence is
golden.
The Baltimore butterfly, wearing Lord Baltimore’s colors of orange
and black, is a common visitant to these meadows, too. He loves to
tipple the lees of the milkweed blooms, but he does not frequent
the meadow for that. It is because along its shoreward edges where
the cool water oozes from black mud grows his home plant, the
turtle-head. On this he was born and to it he goes for the housing
and feeding of his children. Like Gerardia flava, Chelone glabra
is close-mouthed, but its silence is a wan white one which only
blushes pink with embarrassment when questioned, but yields no
reply. You cannot learn any mysteries of the meadow from these.
Palest and most ghostlike of all flowers that one finds as he
climbs from the meadow to the woods beyond is that of the Monotropa
uniflora, or Indian pipe. Round about it its cousins, the pyrola
and the pipsissewa, grow green leaves and show waxy white or
flesh-pink blossoms. The only color in the Indian pipe is that
of the yellow stamens, which shrink in a close circle within the
wax-white bloom that stands on a scaly, wax-white stem. A very
ghost of a flower is this, nor may we account for its ghostliness.
When, long ago, Miantowonah fled to drown her grief in the lake and
later rise from it the spirit of a flower which is the regal white
pond lily that scatters incense all along the borders of Ponkapoag
Pond, her Indian lover followed, too late to prevent the sacrifice.
Did he drop his peace pipe in the race through the wood, and did
this ghost flower spring from the spot, a faintly fragrant, almost
transparent ghostly reminder of it? If so, it has passed into no
legend.
Coming back through the meadow, with its butterfly sprites of fancy
dancing among the flowers, I find one which always seems a reminder
of the poet’s work at its daintiest and best. That is the bloom of
the wild caraway. Here is a mist of delicate thought which speaks
to you with lace-like beauty. Nor does the closest inspection
reveal any fault. The bloom appeals as a delightful bit of
sentiment, at first glance. It is only as you examine it minutely
that you marvel at its exquisite workmanship. However carefully you
pick it to pieces you find each part perfect and as admirable in
its ingenuity as in its appeal to the imagination. And after you
have done this you pass on, touched with the white purity of it and
bearing far a gentle, aromatic pungency which is the essence of the
parent stem that bore the bloom.
IV
AT THE ISLES OF SHOALS
_The Island and the Garden which Celia Thaxter Loved_
The poppies that grow in Celia Thaxter’s garden nod bright heads in
welcome to all who come. It is as if the sunny presence of their
mistress dwelt always in the spot, finding voice in these blooms
which are so delicate, yet so regnant in spirit. To these all the
other flowers which speak of the homely virtues, marigolds and red
geraniums, coreopsis and pinks and love-in-a-mist, seem subordinate
at first approach, though they occupy the bulk of the garden,
which seems to epitomize the life of the mistress who tended it
so long. There is no square of it without its rich aroma of love
and womanliness, yet it is the vivid personality of the poppies,
flowers for dreams, which touches first the comer from the outside
world.
[Illustration: Celia Thaxter’s home at the Isles of Shoals]
Round about the garden lies Appledore, the largest of the Isles
of Shoals, rocked gently on the bosom of blue seas, its margin
flashing with beryl and pearl where rocks and breakers touch, its
rounded ridges white and green again with the granite of which it
is built and the verdure with which it is clothed. Over it all
bends the blue of the summer sky, and as you look up to this from
the little garden it seems to lean lovingly upon the hill which is
the island’s highest part, heaven so near that the scent of the
flowers may easily pass to it by way of the little winding path.
To climb this path yourself is to find the sky not so near after
all. Standing on the summit, you realize first the depth of its
great dome and the wide sweep of sea that rims the islands round.
Here are but gray ledges that rise out of an immensity which dwarfs
them. Far to the north and west is a thin, blue line of land that
lifts in the farthest distance the peaks of the White Mountains.
All else is but a vast expanse of sea that seems as if it might
rise in a storm and overwhelm these rocks that it has washed so
white and smooth. Somewhere to the eastward of our coast lies, they
tell us, the lost Atlantis, submerged beneath this great sweep of
blue that smiles beryl and laughs pearl-white in wave crests. Who
knows but this granite dome of Appledore on which we seem to loom
so high in air is the westernmost peak of the vanished continent?
We are but seventy-five feet above the sea’s surface. It must be
the thought of its depths that gives us the feeling of being upon
a mountain peak. For all that, this height and distance so make us
dominate the other islands that they seem but ledges, wave-washed
reefs in comparison, and one wonders how such of them as have
buildings on them hold them during the sweep of winter gales and
full-moon tides.
In the smile of summer it is easy to forget this. It is but a
step from the rough rocks of the island to the dense verdure of
its shrubbery. At first one wonders where the soil came from that
nourishes herb and shrub in such profusion. Here among the gray
granite grow most of the beauties of any shore-sheltered New
England pasture. Here is elder showing white, lace-like blooms,
bayberry and staghorn sumac each striving to overtop the other,
wild cherry and shadbush, and beneath and around these low-bush
black huckleberries, raspberries and blackberries, the last two
blessing the tangle with fruit. Among the grasses grow yarrow, St.
John’s-wort, mullein, toad-flax, cranes-bill, evening primrose
and other herbs, while Virginia creeper and fragrant clematis
make many a spot a bower of climbing vines. Not only do all these
familiar pasture folk grow here, but in many instances they seem
to grow with a luxuriance that exceeds that of their favorite
shore locations. Their tangle makes passage difficult except by
established paths, and the road which circumnavigates the island
is cut almost as much through the compacted shrubbery as through
the rough rocks along the tops of the cliffs. Rainfall collects
in the hollows of the granite in some places and makes miniature
marshes, and in one spot a tiny pond which is big enough to supply
ice to the islanders, filling to the brim with the winter rains and
in some winters freezing pretty nearly solid. In August this pond,
which is high in the middle of the island, is dry, its bottom green
with rushes and its sides rampant with the spears of the blue flag.
Often in the tiny valleys in the heart of the island, surrounded
by its dense shrubbery, you lose sight of the sea, but you cannot
forget it. However still the day, you can hear the deep breathing
of the tides, sighing as they sleep, and a mystical murmur running
through the swish of the breakers, that is the song of the deep sea
waves, riding steadily in shore, ruffled but in no wise impeded by
the west winds that vainly press them in the contrary direction.
However rich the perfume of the clematis the wind brings with it
the cool, soothing odor that is born of wild gardens deep in the
brine and loosed with nascent oxygen as the curling wave crushes
to a smother of white foam. It may be that the breathing of this
nascent oxygen and the unknown life-giving principles in this deep
sea odor gives the plants of Appledore their vigor and luxuriance
of growth. Certainly it would not seem to be the soil that does
it. Down on the westward shore of the island, in an angle of the
white granite, where there was but a thin crevice for its roots
and no sign of humus, I found a single yarrow growing. Its leaves
were so luxuriant, yet delicate, so fern-like and beautiful, such
feathery fronds of soft, rich green as to make one, though knowing
it but yarrow, yet half believe it a tropic fern by some strange
chance transplanted to the rugged ledges of the lonely island. With
something in the air, and perhaps in the granite, that makes this
common roadside plant develop such luxuriance, it is no wonder that
other common pasture folk, goldenrod and aster, morning glory and
wild parsnip, and a dozen others, growing in abundant soil in the
tiny levels and hollows, are taller and fuller of leaf and petal
than elsewhere. In the richness and beauty of the yarrow leaves
growing in the very hollow of the granite’s hand, as in the height
and splendor of the Shirley poppies in the little garden, one seems
to find a parallel to Celia Thaxter, whose own character, nurtured
on the same sea air, sheltered in the hollow hand of the same
granite, grew equally rich and beautiful.
[Illustration: “Chasms down which you may walk to the tide between
sheer cliffs.”]
All Appledore, indeed all the Isles of Shoals are built of this
rock, which is white in the distance, but which near to shows
silver fleckings of mica that flash in the sun. Through the granite
run narrow veins of quartz that is as hard as flint, but that
has scattered among its crystals also a silvering of these mica
flecks which are in strange contrast to the tiny pin points of a
softer, darker rock which one finds evenly sprinkled through the
white. This dark rock softens to wind and weather first and leaves
these white cliffs honeycombed with the tiniest of fissures, so
that they are as rough to the hand as sandpaper. Dykes of trap run
through the island, and as this rock too is softer than its casing
the winds and waves of centuries have worn it away, leaving chasms
down which you may walk to the tide, between the sheer cliffs. One
such chasm runs quite across Appledore from east to west near the
northern end of the island, almost cutting off a round dome of
granite from its fellow rock. The soil lies rich in this narrow
hollow between ledges, and many things grow in it, lush with leaves
and beautiful with bloom. Here the shadbush had already ripened its
fruit. Here the island’s one apple tree grows vigorously, though
it dares not lift its head above the level of the rocks against
which it snuggles, lest the zero gales of winter nip it off.
Crowding round it grow wild cherry and wild rose, elder and sumac
and huckleberry and chokeberry, all eager to fend it from rough
winds in that friendliness which seems, like foliage, to flourish
in the place. Here is a soft turf of grass in which grow violets
and dandelions, both spring and fall, and plantain, cinquefoil and
evening primrose have come to make the place homelike. If rough
winds blow here rougher rocks fend them off, and though they may
whistle over the tops of these in the little valley between there
is quiet, and floods of sunshine gather and well up till the place
is full.
This tiny valley dips toward the sea at the west and broadens
to a meadow where I fancy the islanders have at some time grown
cranberries, for a few plants remain. For the most part, however,
this meadow is set thick with the green spears of the bog rushes
which grow so close together that there is little room for anything
else. To crush your way in among these is to pass through a very
forest of dark green lances whose tips stretch upward to stab
your chin, yet burst into bloom from the sides near these tips,
as if the full life within them which could not be restrained yet
which finds no outlet in leaves, exploded in a lance pennant of
olive-brown beauty. A Maryland yellow-throat whose nest stands
empty in the grass on the borders of this little, lance-serried
marsh fluttered and chirped and clung among these rushes and from
the top of a near-by bayberry shrub a song sparrow trilled a note
or two, despite the fact that it is moulting time and few birds
have the heart to sing in dishabille. Nightfall brought no sound
of frog voices from this little marsh, yet I cannot fancy it in
spring without a hyla or two to pipe flute notes from its margin.
Near this I found the one ophidian of the island, a beautiful,
slender, graceful green snake, little more than a foot long. This
lovely little creature feeds on crickets and insect larvæ and is
the very gentlest snake that ever crawled. Jarred by my footfall
in the grass he glided away among the tangle, trusting to his
coloration, which is a perfect grass green, to hide him, which it
soon did. If Appledore must have its serpent no sweeter-natured nor
lovelier variety could be found. If modern Eves sit upon the rocks
of moonlight nights and listen to this one’s promptings one can
scarcely blame them.
Under the eaves and under the verandas of the houses are the
nests of barn swallows, gray mud stippled up against a rafter,
the fast-growing young almost crowding one another out. So gently
familiar are these birds, and so little afraid of people, that one
has built a nest under the frequented piazza of the big hotel,
and the parent birds flit back and forth unconcerned by the rows
of guests that often take chairs and watch the nestlings for long
periods. Not only do the parents feed their young while thus
watched by crowds but a few feet away, but they fly in under the
veranda and capture food right over the heads of the promenaders
with equal freedom from fear. Barn swallows are usually friendly,
confiding birds. They seem here to have caught the sense of
protection and safety which comes to all on the little island, and
become even more fearless. It is much the same way with the tree
swallows, which, having no hollow trees, build in bird boxes all
about. These already have young in flight. Standing on the cliffs
you see their steel blue backs as they swirl with the little waves
in and out among the rockweed at low tide, seeking their food
very close to land or water. Often the young sit on some safe
pinnacle and are fed there, the old bird flashing up, twittering,
delivering a message and a mouthful at the same time, then flashing
away again, whirling and wheeling, never beyond call of the eager
fledgling. Often the fledgling soars into space, hardly to be
distinguished then from the older bird, and twitters back and
forth near the parent. Then when the latter comes with a mouthful
the former simply poises fluttering while the old bird dashes up,
twitters and feeds, and is off again in the flash of an eye, so
fleet of motion, so agile of turn, that it puzzles the watcher to
follow the course of flight.
At the bottom of the tide the rocks over which the tree swallows
swirl with the waves are a golden olive with the sun-touched tips
of the carrageen. Higher up the boulders lift their heads with the
air-celled rockweed falling all about them like wet hair. Some of
these tresses hang down in golden luxuriance, others are dark,
almost black, as if blondes and brunettes were to be found among
tide rocks as among men. Between these rocks are still pools of
brine where mussels and crabs wait the deliverance of the full sea
and kelp waves its long, dark-olive, ruffle-margined banners. Down
among these with the ear close to the smooth, undulating surface
you may catch the eerie plaint of the whistling buoy off the
channel some miles to landward, telling its loneliness in recurrent
moans.
Up on the rocks again in the bright sunlight, one finds the land
birds numerous, chief among which are the song sparrows. In the
secluded peace of the place these also, evidently making their
summer home here and nesting in the shrubbery that is all about,
have lost most of their fear of man and will approach very near to
gather crumbs about your feet. A small flock of robins goes by,
stopping a moment to feed, then taking wing again as if practising
for that southward migration which will begin before very long.
Olive-sided flycatchers, already working toward the sun, flit to
catch flies and light alternately almost as if playing leapfrog
from bush to bush. So far as I have observed, the olive-sided
flycatchers do most of their migrating thus, hippety-hop from perch
to perch, with a fly well caught at every hop and well swallowed
at every perch. A kingbird sat haughtily, as if mounted, on a
stub, monarch of all he surveyed, now and then giving his piercing
little cry and sailing out to the destruction of a moth or beetle,
then sailing leisurely back again. A lone gull fished and cried
lonesomely in the surf, and a few pairs of sandpipers slipped with
twinkling feet along the rocks, feeding in the moist path of the
receding wave and lifting on long, slender wings to safety at the
crash of the next one. These were the only day birds to be found of
a pleasant day at Appledore. Monarch butterflies were plentiful,
migrants these over the seven miles or more of sea between the
island and the mainland. A few cabbage butterflies fluttered white
wings over the Cruciferæ which grow in the vegetable gardens of
the place. The cabbage butterflies may well be natives, and so
might that other which danced away so rapidly that I could not be
sure of him, though I am confident that he was either a hunter’s
butterfly or an angle-wing. Yet these, too, may have come from
the mainland on a still day or with the wind right and not too
strong, such extraordinary distances do these seemingly frail and
impotent insects cover sometimes. Honey bees from hives ashore make
a regular business of flying to the islands and back laden with
honey. Students of bees ordinarily give them a range of two and a
half to four miles, yet these Appledore bees must come at least
seven miles and probably ten for their harvesting.
At nightfall three great blue herons came flapping out from the
mainland to fish among the kelp and rockweed of the outlying reefs.
All along the western horizon the soft blue line of land began to
melt into the steel blue of the sea that the sunset fire seemed
then to temper to a violet hardness. The southwest wind had blown
the sky full of blowsy cumulus clouds that were touched with fire
from the setting sun, yet in the main had the color of the steel
sea, as if they were the flaked dross from its melting. Then the
sun for a moment burned through the thin blue line of land and set
the sea ablaze with a gentle radiance of crimson and gold that
slipped along the level miles and wrapped the blessed isles in its
arms, radiant arms that unclasped themselves in a moment, lifted
above the islands in benediction and then passed. The poppies in
Celia Thaxter’s garden folded their two inner petals like slim
hands, clasped in prayer, lifted trustfully to the sky.
[Illustration: “Up to the smooth turf on this knoll crowd all the
pasture shrubs that she loved.”]
A little way from the garden that she loved and tended so long
is Celia Thaxter’s grave, on a knoll to which the sky bends so
gently that it seems as if you might step off into it. Up to the
smooth turf of this knoll crowd all the pasture shrubs that she
loved, sheltering it from the wind on three sides and letting the
sun smile in upon it all day long without hindrance. The sumacs
come nearest as if they were the very guard of honor, but close
behind them press the wild roses, the St. John’s-wort, the evening
primroses and even the shy white clover slipping in between the
others, very close to the ground, and tossing soft perfumes out
over the brown grass. On the grave itself someone in loving
remembrance scatters the petals of red geranium, which seems of
all things the home-loving, home-keeping flower. The poppies are
for poets’ dreams which write themselves in the dancing morning
wind, clasp hands in prayer at sunset, and flutter away. Red
geraniums seem born of the fireside where home has been since fire
first came down out of heaven. Dreams and hearthfire both were dear
to the sweet lady of Appledore, and both flowers commemorate her
there.
V
THOREAU’S WALDEN
_A Survey of the Pond and its Surroundings_
He who would know Thoreau’s Walden will do well to bathe in it. His
first plunge may well be in Thoreau’s story of the pond and his
life on its bank, and when he comes dripping from this and puts on
the garments of everyday life he still must feel a little of the
glow of the fire with which this alchemist of the woods transmuted
all things, showing us how rough granite, hard iron and base lead
are gold. Thoreau lived on the borders of the little clear pond but
two years. He knew it in the flesh for just his short life. But his
spirit had birth in something akin to its pure, profound waters and
dwells above them now for all centuries.
The next plunge should be in the waters themselves, and only thus
shall you learn to the full what a miracle the pond is. Here is a
crater of glacier-crushed granite, out of which never came smoke
nor lava, only a white fire from unexplored depths, a fire of cool
austerity which burns the dross out of all that may be put into it.
There is no inflowing stream. Its waters well up from a mysterious
source within the very earth. Their outflow is equally invisible.
In their going they leap spirit-like along the golden stairs which
the sun lets down to them and pass up for the building of rainbows,
their white light breaking in its mystical seven colors, a visible
ecstasy to all who watch the heavens. To plunge in these waters at
dawn is to feel this cool fire thrill through the marrow of your
bones, and only by total immersion shall you know to the full its
purity.
Coming to such a flight with Eos through the dusky solemnity of
the trees of the western bank, I saw the pond silvered beneath
its tense level with the frosty scintillations of the stars that
had shone into it all night. It was as if their radiance had but
penetrated the water-tension film of the surface and collected just
beneath it, making a white mirror which my plunge shattered into a
thousand prisms of scintillant light. The dancing night winds had
shaken all the rich odors from the white clethra blooms that grow
all about the pond’s rim and stored them along its surface, and to
swim out toward the center was to enter a sweetly perfumed bath.
The forest to eastward, full of black density, as it was, could not
bar out the rose of the morning from the sight. Instead it stood in
a silhouetted fretting against it and let its glow shine through a
million tiny windows of the day, blossoming again in the ripples
ahead. Here was a moving picture of the blooming and vanishing of
pink meadow-flowers, flashing a brief life upon the film, vanishing
and growing again. The cinematograph is nothing new. Walden has
operated it for those who will swim toward the dawn in its waters
since the centuries began. In our theaters we are but tawdry
imitators of its film productions.
Chin deep in its middle you begin to feel that you know the pond.
In a sense you are its eye and look upon the world as it does. Day
breaks for the swimmer as it does for Walden, and the flash of the
sun above the wood to eastward warms you both with the same sudden
sweep of its August fire. In the same sense you are the pond’s ear
and hear as it does. The morning rustle of the trees, shaking the
dusk from their boughs, comes to you as a clear ecstasy, and you
think you can hear the wan tinkling of the invisible feet of fairy
mists as they leap sunward from the surface and vanish in the day.
Over the wood comes the intermittent pulse of Concord waking, and
by fainter reverberations the pond knows that Lincoln and more
distant villages are astir. Then the first train of the day crashes
by the southern margin and stuns the tympanum with a vast avalanche
of uproar.