poverty weed which are more prevalent than grass on the sands
beneath these trees spire slender scapes of Spiranthes gracilis,
the tiny orchid that someone named ladies’ tresses, not because
the flower looks like them but reminds of them, being wayward
and fragrant and lovingly blown by all winds. Here is goldenrod,
and wee asters are just opening their baby-blue eyes to the
approaching autumn. Wood warblers trill in the absurd forest, and
the rich aroma of its leaves subtends the lighter fragrance of the
blossoming wild flowers. In feathery glades among these Truro trees
one might forget that winter is to come and bring bleakness and
desolation unspeakable to the land with him. But if winter does
not always warn, the sea does. Not so deep in any witch hollow
can you hide, not so far may you wander in enchanted forests, as
to escape its call. The trees murmur continually the song of the
surf, and the crash of its breakers echoes continually in the air
overhead. The wind song in the trees is not menacing, it is
simply a minor melody, full of melancholy, as if it knew sad things
and could but let them tinge its music. But even on quiet days when
the south wind drifts gently in over the bay there sounds from the
air above these mellow glades the growl of white-faced breakers
that are never still on the northern shore. Out of the northeast
they roll over gray-green leagues of cold sea, and as they bite
deep into the sand of the shore behind Peaked Hill Bar, and drag
it and all that is on it down into their maw and hurl it all back
again, beating it on the beach and snatching it and beating it
again, it roars inarticulate threats that make the onlooker draw
back glad of a space of summer-dried sand between him and its
depths. If this threatening undertone lingers in the ear even on a
summer day with the wind warm and fragrant from the south, how must
it have sounded to the Pilgrim explorers in a November northeaster?
And yet, for all the November bleakness to come, for all the
ever-warning growl of the sea, I wonder, had the Pilgrims arrived
at Provincetown in late August, if they would not have stayed.
Nowhere in New England would they have found the late summer
huckleberries sweeter or more plentiful, nowhere the beach plums
rounder or more prolific. Here was to be gathered in handfuls
bayberry wax for their candles, and its aromatic incense floats
over the Provincetown hills to-day as rich and enticing as then.
There is little hope of fertility in the sand banks, to be sure,
yet in the cosy hollows between these the homesteaders of to-day
plant corn and beans, pumpkins and peas, and their gardens seem as
luxuriant and productive as any that one might find in Plymouth
County. The native trees of the place seem dwarfed, as I have said.
But in the town itself are willows and silver-leafed poplars,
planted by later pilgrims, which have reached great size, a willow
in particular in the older part of the town being at least five
feet--I would readily believe it is six--in diameter. There must be
fertility somewhere to grow an immigrant to such girth.
Here too, rioting through the old-time flower gardens and out
of them, dancing and gossiping by the roadside and in the
field, sending rich perfume across lots as a dare to us all, is
Bouncing-Bet. I cannot think of this amorous, buxom beauty as
having been allowed to come with a shipload of serious, praying
Pilgrims or any later expedition of stern-visaged Puritans. I
believe she was a stow-away and when she did reach New England
danced blithely across the gang plank and took up her abode
wherever she saw fit. Thus she does to-day. All over the Cape she
strays, a common roadside weed and a beauty of the gardens at once.
Out of this point where the Pilgrim epic first touches our shores
she comes, with the memory of the visitor, a welcome garnish to the
long sandy trail once trod by Myles Standish and his armor-clad
scouts.
VII
IN OLD CONCORD
_The Unspoiled Haunts of Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau_
One may seek in vain in Concord the reason for Concord. “It is an
odd jealousy,” says Emerson, “but the poet finds himself not near
enough to his object. The pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers
before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere.
This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the
triumph that has passed by, and is now in its glancing splendor and
heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or if you stand in the
field, then in the adjacent wood.”
With this same odd jealousy one may tramp the fields and woods,
the pleasant highways and the village green to-day and not quite
find Concord, for the Concord that one’s mind presaged has passed
on. This is but far-off reflection and echo of the triumph. Fuit
Ilium. Yet here is all that first gave the name to the town, and
more. Here are peaceful rivers meeting in rich meadows from which
spring with the rising ground fruitful fields. Here men dwell in
amity and keep singularly intact the beauty and thrift of a New
England village of a century ago, though even here one can see
wealth taking the place of prosperity and the pretentious ugliness
of the modern attempt at Queen Anne architecture shouldering the
quiet dignity of the old Colonial residences off the street. Here
and there a little of the husk of the Concord of the Revolution
remains, though somewhat sadly hemmed in. A simulacrum of the
Concord Bridge still spans the flood, done in resonant cement, but
here the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. Nor is
his jealousy an odd one, for the rude bridge that arched the flood
led somewhere. This echo of the triumph that has passed by drops
him who would tread in the footsteps of heroes within the narrow
bounds of an iron picket fence beyond which keep-off-the-grass
signs doubly defend the way. In the presence of these the Minute
Man seems superfluous. The British never would have got by this.
Fortunately it is easy to believe that the Minute Man has never
seen the barricade or the signs. In him at least Concord, the
Concord of the Revolution, holding in its calm heart sons born
of the soil and sturdy with its grit, is personified for all men
for all time. To turn one’s back upon the fence as he does and
look across the grassy Musketaquid vigilantly at those swaying
lines of British bayonets is to dwell for a little in the Concord
which, with a streak of yellow flame and a whizzing bullet, first
leapt skyrocket-like into the world’s eye. Many things have made
the beautiful village a Mecca whither journey pilgrims from all
over the world. All come eager to look upon the spot where the
farmers marched deliberately upon the king’s troops and dared
fling back into their faces the red gauntlet of murder. It is not
to be believed that curiosity merely is the spirit which informs
these pilgrims. One can but feel that they come to the bridge in
reverence for the principles involved in the fray, and in looking
upon the very spot hope to learn what went into the making of
the men who so boldly hazarded life and worldly comfort and
prosperity in the defense of these principles.
[Illustration: “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_ ]
For, after all, it was the men behind the principles that counted.
Here in a volley was the summing up of the nature of the heroes
that had grown up, quite literally, in the Concord soil. Did they
come of the fertility within it? One must say yes, in part. Down
stream a little, not far below the bridge, I found an old-time
path of their day, now long since disused, along which in the rich
bottom land the meadow thistles grew ten feet tall. Such virility
the Concord soil no doubt gave to the heroes who ceased delving in
it only to grasp their muskets for the fray. The Minute Man holds
to his plow still, the sculptor justly thus carving him. Out of the
good brown earth one can easily know that courage and self-reliance
thrilled through share and beam and handle into the bone of the
man himself. Till the earth is fluid such men do not run. Like it
they stand firm. Yet here is but the bony structure of the man in
the Concord fight. Something more must go in to the making of a
hero. It has been justly said that at the narrow bridge stood men
born in direct descent from heroes of a stubborn stand, a stricken
field, of seven hundred years before, and I dare say it is true.
Planted among the Concord meadows and fertile uplands, grown lusty
upon the richness of her soil, were men of Kent, that sturdiest
county in all England; men whose very forbears had stood with
Harold behind the wattled fence at Hastings, and died there with
Norman arrows in their necks. More than all else in the building of
men blood counts.
Yet, tramping the highways and fields of the old town, dreaming
within her woodlands and by her ponds and streams, it pleases me
to think there is more to it even than this. In Plymouth woods
grows the mayflower, as we love to call it, the trailing arbutus,
filling the spaces with rich scent in late April and early May, and
though it is eagerly sought by thousands and is sold in bunches on
all city streets in spring, yet it is not rooted out but retains
its hold on the soil there. In certain other eastern Massachusetts
towns the trailing arbutus never grew, and though I know of many
attempts to transplant it to these none have succeeded beyond a
slight growth that is hardly lusty or likely long to survive. Yet
among the Maine and New Hampshire hills again the mayflower grows
luxuriantly. So it is with the hepatica and the maidenhair fern.
Some cool northern hillsides are beautiful with these, others with
equal shade, cool springs, moss and gravel have never known these
plants. No. More is necessary than that the blood of men should
fall and take root in fertile soil. There must be fluid, where seed
and fertility meet, some of that ichor which flows in the veins of
the immortals, and it must enter into the growth. Only thus does
Hodge become hero. Without it he holds both hands on the plow and
lets the British pass the bridge and go on. How many nations have
thus been stillborn and buried in the furrow no history can tell us.
Little by little nature gives us the secrets of these things, as
when after a time she taught the Australian planters why clover
would not produce seed there. It grew well in fertile soil when
seed was brought from England; it blossomed and made good fodder
for cattle, but never a seed. Then they imported bumble-bees from
the English meadows with probosces long enough to reach the nectar
in the bottom of the clover blooms and thus be pollen carriers
from plant to plant. Here was the solution of the problem, the
ichor of immortality that the clover needed. So with alfalfa and
most leguminous plants. Scientific investigation has shown that if
seeds of these are to grow well and thrive in new regions distant
from that of their cultivation more is needed than the right soil
and climate. Certain mysterious bacteria are present on the roots
of all plants of this genus, and in some obscure way take from the
soil and give to the plants the elements of vigor and success. Now
the scientific horticulturist steeps his seeds of alfalfa or other
leguminous plants in a culture of these bacteria, and knows that
if his planting is in fertile ground and the sun and rain do their
work well his harvest will be bountiful. Here again is the ichor of
the gods, Vishnu become fluid and incarnating himself in obscure
bacteria for the building of the plant world.
So, I can but fancy, has it been with Concord and her men. The
seed of the Kentish heroes of Harold’s time has grown since in many
soils. In Concord when time was ripe it found fluid there some of
the ichor of the immortals coursing through farming tools to the
making of fire for heroic deeds. The Concord fight did not happen;
it had to be. It was not that every Concord farmer’s barn was full
of munitions of war. Every Concord farmer’s blood was full of
powder. The shot had to be fired there.
For nearly three-quarters of a century this mysterious essence of
greatness that one feels must always be present in places where
great deeds have taken place seems to have flashed no spark to
the outer world. Grass waved on Concord farms and fell before the
scythe, and new generations of farmers grew up to take the places
of those which passed unmarked outside their community. For that
space of time Concord was, very much as Troy was, the scene of
a memorable fight. Then came Emerson to bring back to the place
something of the nobility of spirit and independence of thought
and action that must have come to it with his ancestor the Rev.
Peter Bulkeley. Here was the scholar and the preacher instead
of the farmer, but born of the same old sturdy stock and come
back to set roots in Concord soil. Here he walked daily in the
fields and woods with his veins open to that same ichor of the
gods which had not made patriots and heroes indeed, but had given
them tongues, which seems to have given power of expression to him
who was already poet and seer. Here with him, grown up out of the
same town, was Thoreau. Hither came Alcott to paint the bubbles
of his inchoate dreams in rainbow conversation. Hither too came
Hawthorne, to tramp the woods as did the others and feel as did
they the divine afflatus drumming in their veins and the impulse to
sturdy independence coming up to them out of the Concord soil as it
thrilled up to the Minute Man through his plow handle. It was not
so much that these men had within them the poetic fire, but that it
burned there on the hearth of freedom, independence, and intense
individuality.
[Illustration: “Hither too came Hawthorne, to tramp the woods as
did the others and feel as did they the divine afflatus.”]
With them Concord came again into the eye of the world, and because
they preached as well as wrought, the world’s eye is still upon it.
And, as after the Minute Man and his times passed the little
village slumbered, seeming to wait placidly for the next troubling
of the waters, so now Sleepy Hollow, where these four dreamers
lie, seems to be the real center of the town. The mystic dreams
of Hawthorne, the golden serenity of Emerson, the primal wisdom
of Thoreau, and the roseate fog of Alcott’s transcendentalism all
flow serenely forth over its rim and flood the green hills and
shadowy valleys of the region with peace and sweet content. Here,
almost side by side, rest the four, and such blood of the gods
as flowed in them is piped to all the world by way of what each
wrote. No wonder Concord is a place of pilgrimage and people come
by thousands to these graves as devout Mohammedans go to that of
the prophet. Red oaks set their roots deep in the knoll where these
lie, and white pines tower above them as if forming the first and
most fitting round in their ladder to the stars. Out of the tops
of these pines the harper wind should pluck harmonies beyond those
common to groves.
Hither come the pilgrims that have hastily viewed the Minute Man
and the bridge, puffing in rows up the hillside and standing,
breathless but voluble, before the stone they have sought.
Reverence in their hearts they have without doubt, yet little of
it gets to the surface as they, panting, recite one to another
the legend of the stone and pass on. It is a wonderful piece of
white quartz that marks Emerson’s grave. There is dignity in its
roughness, and something of the pure opacity of Emerson’s thought
seems to dwell in its white crystals, fittingly touched here and
there with a color which might be the matrix of all gems. One
thinks from what he sees of those who pass that Emerson is best
known, Hawthorne most loved, while Thoreau and the Alcotts have
each their own special worshipers. Now and then one sees much
reverence based upon a rather slender knowledge, as when a young
man balancing a year-old baby on his arm said to his wife, “This,
my dear, is the grave of Thorough, David Thorough, the man who
wrote ‘Zounds.’” One can fancy David, who was Henry to most of us,
being willing to be called thorough, yet hesitating to acknowledge
“Zounds,” except perhaps as an exclamation of astonishment. As an
offset for this I might cite the small boy who, having been shown
the stone which marks the grave of Louisa Alcott, gave it shyly a
little loving hug and a pat before he went away. In the highest
group of Concord immortals it is not customary to include the
talented daughter of the transcendentalist, yet of the worshipers
who pass not a few lay their fondest offering on the turf that
covers her.
For a few hours out of the twenty-four, visitors to Sleepy Hollow
come and go. Except for that the hollow indeed sleeps, steeped in
the gentle peace of all nature which seems to well up out of it and
encompass all the region round about in its golden haze. Surely
the lotos grows where the Assabet and the Sudbury join to make the
Concord, that sleeps on so gently that one may hardly know that
it is on its way. The lotos grows there and the land has eaten of
it, for the bustle of the world passes over it but does not change
nor wake it. The very farms of Revolutionary time linger on, and
if they are tilled now as they were then I do not know, but the
cattle graze on the hills in herds as great now as then, and as
broad cornfields toss their golden plumes toward the sky. The
houses where dwelt Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, still stand,
and into the fields round about them few others have crowded. The
fertile soil still yields crops to the husbandman, in whose breast
slumbers mayhap the same sturdy courage which made the Minute Men
and would make others should the need arise. Manufacturing, summer
hotel keeping, these things do not seem to have touched the town
much. I fancy it as lying fallow, waiting the flow of that ichor of
the immortals that shall some day again waken it to great things.
“The Sphinx is drowsy,
Her wings are furled;
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world,
Who’ll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept?
I awaited the seer
While they slumbered and slept.
“The fate of the man-child,
The meaning of man;
Known fruit of the unknown;
Dædalian plan;
Out of sleeping a waking;
Out of waking a sleep;
Life death overtaking;
Deep underneath deep.”
Thus we find Concord to-day an historical and literary Mecca, a
fine example of what has always been best in a New England town,
holding firmly to the old, choosing, one believes, the best in the
new, brooding the past in dreamy persistency, biding its time for
the good that the future is to bring. Some day out of its lush
meadows and the rich mold of its hillsides will flow again into
the veins of men that subtle fluid of flame that makes heroes and
poets. It is for this the fine old town lies fallow, and in this
shall be the justification for its patience.
VIII
“THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET”
_Its Home in an Unspoiled Corner of Pilgrim Land_
It is not often that the scenes of a man’s childhood remain
measurably intact when that childhood occurred something over a
century ago. Yet that is the case with Samuel Woodworth, whose
detached name I fancy not one man in a thousand would recall,
even among well-read people. Yet you have but to mention “The Old
Oaken Bucket” and you get an answering smile of recognition from
the veriest ignoramus. Even if he cannot recall the words he can
whistle the tune.
People given to moralizing are apt to take instances like this for
a topic and wind up with the familiar aphorism, “Such is fame!”
And such it seems to be, rightfully enough I dare say. Here was a
man of journalistic training and literary instincts who must have
figured fairly large in the New York journalistic world of his day.
He wrote novels, plays, operas and a vast amount of miscellaneous
matter. He founded one journal after another, among these the New
York Mirror, yet the world recalls him only by way of the little
song, sweated out of him by the heat of an August day in New York.
Those things that the poets “dash off” at one sitting are usually,
rightfully, the cause of editorial derision. Now and then, it
seems, something is wrung out of a man’s heart at a single twist
that taps the deep springs of immortality.
Governor Bradford, writing of Plymouth Colony, early regretted
that his Pilgrims were little content to stay within easy reach of
Plymouth Rock but remained Pilgrims still, migrating through the
woods and along shore to seek new and better farms. This was but
the further expression of that wanderlust which had brought so many
of the followers of the Pilgrims over seas. The spirit of adventure
manned many a ship that followed the Mayflower to Massachusetts
Bay, and the descendants of these adventurous migrants have since
explored and settled the country to the very tip of Alaska.
One of the first of these early impulses to move on took Pilgrims
to Scituate, and here in 1636 an ancestor of Woodworth dug and
stoned a well, thirty-six feet deep, in that little corner of the
present town now known as Greenbush. The Pilgrim settlers and
farmers marked their trails behind them with stones that stand
as their most lasting physical memorial to this day. One can but
fancy that the glaciers which built the land the Pilgrims were to
occupy, grinding, mixing, sifting soil from a thousand miles of
back country and dropping it in southeastern Massachusetts, moved
on ball-bearings, so numerous are the rounded boulders they dropped
behind them in this fertile mixture. The stronger and richer the
soil the more of these boulders are to be found in it, and the
Pilgrim farmers had a double task in the clearing of their farms.
They must not only fell the trees and remove the stumps, but they
must go deeper and get out the rocks before their plows could
furrow it. How well they set their stubborn wills to the grubbing
of these rocks we know as we look upon their fields, to this day
bound in neat parallelograms of gray granite, each round stone set
upon two others, as the Pilgrims taught their sons to place them,
little disturbed by stormy centuries that have merely served to
garland them with ivy, clematis and woodbine.
Wild things of the woods have come to know and love these old stone
walls. Chipmunks, woodchucks, foxes even, find refuge and make
their homes in the artificial galleries thus enduringly placed,
and the wild flowers of the field snuggle up to them to escape the
farmer’s scythe, paying for their shelter in beauty and fragrance.
Close to the walls, however well shorn the field, the winds of this
first day of October toss yellow curls of goldenrod blooms, while
the asters, children of the year’s late prime, open wide, roguish
blue eyes among them. Particularly do these wayside children love
to ramble along one of the old stone-walled lanes leading from the
pasture to the cow barn, as if they came up with the cows night
after night, and lingered outside only because the barn is closed
on them before they managed to loiter in.
“The cot of my father, the dairy house nigh it,
And e’en the rude bucket that hung in the well”
are gone, but the old barn still stands in its wonted place and
to it come the cattle by the same old lane, the cattle lane that
has been such since that pioneer set the gray stones as a fence on
either side of it nearly three hundred years ago. Up and down this
lane the farm boys of one generation after another have whistled
and dreamed dreams while the cattle went quickly forth to pasture
in the morning or loitered back at milking time, nor hardly has one
stone slipped from another in the passing of the centuries. Yet
they have been there a long time, those stones, the gray lichens
have grown black on their sides and they long ago seem to have
settled together with an air of finality. A newly built stone
wall does not look like this. It is an excrescence, an artificial
boundary. These stone walls are nothing like that. They look as if
the glacier had intended that they should rest there, a part of
the rock-ribbed arrangement of the earth as it left it. So with
all these gray stone walls that bound the farm and the road. They
long ago lost the air of having been put in place by man and have
lapsed into the primeval arrangement of valleys and moraines,
a logical result of first causes. There is a restful, old-home
feeling about the old barn and this old lane, and it is no wonder
the wild flowers that have strolled into it love to remain.