arbutus. Here is a flower that is naturally tribal,—bound together by
common root-stalks, trailing shrubby plants that seem free to possess
the earth. They were doubtless here in the soil before the Pilgrim
came. The angels planted them, I am sure, for they smell of a celestial
garden. The paths of heaven are carpeted with them, not paved with
gold. But something is the matter with this earthly soil. They grow
just where they were originally planted and nowhere else. There was a
patch set in the woods three quarters of a mile, as the crow flies,
from my front door. That was several millenniums ago. It is there
still, a patch as big as my hat. There are other scattered bits of it
beyond, but none any nearer to me, yet the soil seems the same, and
there are woods all the way between.
Were it as common as the violet, perhaps some of its sweetness would
be lost upon us. After all, the heavenly streets may be paved with
gold, and instead of a carpet of arbutus, we shall find patches of
it only, hidden away under the fallen leaves of the Elysian groves.
For we shall need to get out of even the celestial city into the open
fields and woods, and I can think of nothing so likely to draw us away
from our mansions and beyond the pearly gates as the chance to go
“May-flowering.”
And, even here below, among the unransomed souls of Boston, when
Mayflower-time arrives, you may see young men and maidens, children
and grandfathers, trooping out to the woods for a handful of the
flowers. And up from the Cape, to those who cannot go into the woods,
the flowers, themselves, come,—tight, naked bunches, stripped of
all but the pink of their faces and the sweet of their souls. They
possess every quarter of the city. Jew and Gentile sell them, Greek and
Barbarian buy them, as they buy and sell no other wild flower.
Why, then, is it not the arbutus, instead of the shad-bush, that spells
for me the spring? I don’t know; unless it is because the shad-bush
takes deeper hold upon my imagination. It certainly is not its form,
or color, or fragrance,—though it has grace,—an airy, misty,
half-substantial shape, a wraith in the leafless woods; it has odor,
too, and color. But it is something more than all of these that the
soft blowing shad-bush means to me. Perhaps the something is in its
name,—because it links my inland round with the round of the sea; and
because it links this present narrowing round with the wide-winging
round of the past.
At the sign of the shad-bush I know the fish are running,—the sturgeon
up the Delaware; the shad into Cohansey Creek; and through Five-Forks
Sluice, these soft, stirring nights, I know the catfish are slipping.
Is there any boy now in Lupton’s Meadows to watch them come? to listen
in the moonlit quiet for the _splash_, _splash_, as the fish pass up
through the main ditch toward the dam?
At the sign of the shad-bush how swiftly the tides of life rise!
how mysteriously their currents run! drifting, flying, flowing,
creeping—colors, perfumes, forms, and voices—across the heavens, over
the earth, and down the deep, dim aisles of the sea! and down the deep,
dim aisles of our memories.
[Illustration]
VIII
The Nature Movement
I WAS hurrying across Boston Common. Two or three hundred others were
hurrying with me. But ahead, at the union of several paths, was a
crowd, standing still. I kept hurrying on, not to join the crowd, but
simply to keep up the hurry. The crowd was not standing still, it was
a-hurrying, too, scattering as fast as it gathered, and as it scattered
I noticed that it wore a smile. I hastened up, pushed in, as I had done
a score of times on the Common, and got my glimpse of the show. It was
not a Mormon preaching, not a single-taxer, not a dog fight. It was
Billy, a gray squirrel, taking peanuts out of a bootblack’s pocket. And
every age, sex, sort, and condition of Bostonian came around to watch
the little beast shuck the nuts and bury them singly in the grass of
the Common.
“Ain’t he a cute little cuss, mister?” said the boy of the brush,
feeling the bottom of his empty pocket, and looking up into the
prosperous face of Calumet and Hecla at his side. C. and H. smiled,
slipped something into the boy’s hand with which to buy another
pocketful of peanuts for Billy, and hurried down to State Street.
This crowd on the Common is nothing exceptional. It happens every day,
and everywhere, the wide country over. We are all stopping to watch,
to feed, and—to smile. The longest, most far-reaching pause in our
hurrying American life to-day is this halt to look at the out-of-doors,
this attempt to share its life; and nothing more significant is being
added to our American character than the resulting thoughtfulness,
sympathy, and simplicity,—the smile on the faces of the crowd hurrying
over the Common.
Whether one will or not, he is caught up by this nature movement and
set adrift in the fields. It may, indeed, be “adrift” for him until he
gets thankfully back to the city. “It was a raw November day,” wrote
one of these new nature students, who happened also to be a college
student, “and we went for our usual Saturday’s birding into the woods.
The chestnuts were ripe, and we gathered a peck between us. On our way
home, we discovered a small bird perched upon a cedar tree with a worm
in its beak. It was a hummingbird, and after a little searching we
found its tiny nest close up against the trunk of the cedar, full of
tiny nestlings just ready to fly.”
This is what they find, many of these who are caught up by the movement
toward the fields; but not all of them. A little five-year-old from the
village came out to see me recently, and while playing in the orchard
she brought me five flowers, called them by their right names, and
told me how they grew. Down in the loneliest marshes of Delaware Bay
I know a lighthouse keeper and his solitary neighbor, a farmer: both
have been touched by this nature spirit; both are interested, informed,
and observant. The farmer there, on the old Zane’s Place, is no man
of books, like the rector of Selborne, but he is a man of birds and
beasts, of limitless marsh and bay and sky, of everlasting silence and
wideness and largeness and eternal solitude. He could write a Natural
History of the Maurice River Marshes.
These are not rare cases. The nature books, the nature magazines, the
nature teachers, are directing us all to the out-of-doors. I subscribe
to a farm journal (club rates, twenty-five cents a year!) in which an
entire page is devoted to “nature studies,” while the whole paper is
remarkably fresh and odorous of the real fields. In the city, on my
way to and from the station, I pass three large bookstores, and from
March until July each of these shops has a big window given over almost
continuously to “nature books.” I have before me from one of these
shops a little catalogue of nature books—“a select list”—for 1907,
containing 233 titles, varying in kind all the way from “The Tramp’s
Handbook” to one (to a dozen) on the very stable subject of “The
Farmstead.” These are all distinctively “nature books,” books with an
appeal to sentiment as well as to sense, and very unlike the earlier
desiccated, unimaginative treatises.
There are a multitude of other signs that show as clearly as the nature
books how full and strong is this tide that sets toward the open fields
and woods. There are as many and as good evidences, too, of the
genuineness of this interest in the out-of-doors. It may be a fad just
now to adopt abandoned farms, to attend parlor lectures on birds, and
to possess a how-to-know library. It is pathetic to see “nature study”
taught by schoolma’ams who never did and who never will climb a rail
fence; it is sad, to speak softly, to have the makers of certain animal
books preface the stories with a declaration of their absolute truth;
it is passing sad that the unnatural natural history, the impossible
out-of-doors, of some of the recent nature books, should have been
created. But fibs and failures and impossibilities aside, there still
remains the thing itself,—the widespread turning to nature, and the
deep, vital need to turn.
The note of sincerity is clear, however, in most of our nature writers;
the faith is real in most of our nature teachers; and the love,—who
can doubt the love of the tens of thousands of those whose feet feel
the earth nowadays, whose lives share in the existence of some pond or
wood or field? And who can doubt the rest, the health, the sanity, and
the satisfaction that these get from the companionship of their field
or wood or pond?
There is no way of accounting for the movement that reflects in
the least upon its reality and genuineness. It may be only the
appropriation by the common people of the world that the scientists
have discovered to us; it may be a popular reaction against the
conventionality of the eighteenth century; or the result of our growing
wealth and leisure; or a fashion set by Thoreau and Burroughs,—one
or all of these may account for its origin; but nothing can explain
the movement away, or hinder us from being borne by it out, at least
a little way, under the open of heaven, to the great good of body and
soul.
Among the cultural influences of our times that have developed the
proportions of a movement, this so-called nature movement is peculiarly
American. No such general, widespread turning to the out-of-doors is
seen anywhere else; no other such body of nature literature as ours; no
other people so close to nature in sympathy and understanding, because
there is no other people of the same degree of culture living so close
to the real, wild out-of-doors.
The extraordinary interest in the out-of-doors is not altogether a
recent acquirement. We inherited it. Nature study is an American
habit. What else had the pioneers and colonists to study but the
out-of-doors? and what else was half as wonderful? They came from an
old urban world into this new country world, where all was strange,
unnamed, and unexplored. Their chief business was observing nature, not
as dull savages, nor as children born to a dead familiarity with their
surroundings, but as interested men and women, with a need and a desire
to know. Their coming was the real beginning of our nature movement;
their observing has developed into our nature study habit.
Our nature literature also began with them. There is scarcely a
journal, a diary, or a set of letters of this early time in which
we do not find that careful seeing, and often that imaginative
interpretation, so characteristic of the present day. Even the modern
animal romancer is represented among these early writers in John
Josselyn and his delicious book, “New England’s Rarities Discovered.”
It was not until the time of Emerson and Bryant and Thoreau, however,
that our interest in nature became general and grew into something
deeper than mere curiosity. There had been naturalists such as Audubon
(he was a poet, also), but they went off into the deep woods alone.
They were after new facts, new species. Emerson and Bryant and Thoreau
went into the woods, too, but not for facts, nor did they go far, and
they invited us to go along. We went, because they got no farther than
the back-pasture fence. It was not to the woods they took us, but to
nature; not a-hunting after new species in the name of science, but for
new inspirations, new estimates of life, new health for mind and spirit.
But we were slow to get as far even as their back-pasture fence, slow
to find nature in the fields and woods. It was fifty years ago that
Emerson tried to take us to nature; but fifty years ago, how few
there were who could make sense out of his invitation, to say nothing
of accepting it! And of Thoreau’s first nature book, “A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” there were sold, in four years after
publication, two hundred and twenty copies. But two hundred and twenty
of such books at work in the mind of the country could leaven, in time,
a big lump of it. And they did. The out-of-doors, our attitude toward
it, and our literature about it have never been the same since.
Even yet, however, it is the few only who respond to Thoreau, Emerson,
and Burroughs, who can find nature, as well as birds and trees, who
can think and feel as well as wonder and look. Before we can think and
feel we must get over our wondering, and we must get entirely used
to looking. This we are slowly doing,—slowly, I say, for it is the
monstrous, the marvelous, the unreal that most of us still go out into
the wilderness for to see,—bears and wolves, foxes, eagles, orioles,
salmon, mustangs, porcupines of extraordinary parts and powers.
There came to my desk, tied up with the same string, not long since,
three nature books of a sort to make Thoreau turn over in his
grave,—accounts of beasts and birds such as old Thetbaldus gave us
in his “Physiologus,” that pious and marvelous bestiary of the dark
ages. These three volumes that I refer to are modern and about American
animals, but they, too, might have been written during the dark ages.
All three have the same solemn preface, declaring the absolute truth
of the observations that follow (as if we might doubt?), and piously
pointing out their high moral purpose; all three likewise start out
with the same wonderful story,—an animal biography: one, of a slum
cat, born in a cracker box. Among the kittens of the cracker box was
an extraordinary kitten of “pronounced color,” who survives and comes
to glory. The next book tells the biography of a fox, born in a hole
among the Canadian hills. Among the pups born in this hole was one
extraordinary pup “more finely colored” than the others, who survives
and comes to glory. The third book tells the biography of a wolf, born
in a cave among the rocks, still farther north. Among the cubs born
in this cave was one extraordinary cub, “larger than the others,” who
survives and, as is to be expected of a wolf, comes to more glory than
the cracker-box kitten or the fox pup of the hills.
Such are the stories that are made into texts and readers for our
public schools; such are the animals that go roaming through the woods
of the American child’s imagination. But no such kittens or cubs or
pups lurk in my eight-acre woodlot. I have seen several (six, to be
exact) fox pups, but never did I see this overworked, extraordinary,
_cum laude_ pup of the recent nature books.
So long as we continue to read and believe such accounts, just so
long shall we find it impossible to go with Audubon and Thoreau and
Burroughs, for they have no place to take us, nothing to show us when
we arrive. Their real world does not exist.
But we know that a real, ordinary, yet a marvelous world does exist,
and right at hand. The present great nature movement is an outgoing
to discover it,—its trees, birds, flowers, its myriad forms. This is
the meaning of the countless manuals, the “how-to-know” books, and the
nature study of the public schools. And this desire to know Nature
is the reasonable, natural preparation for the deeper insight that
leads to communion with her,—a desire to be traced more directly to
Agassiz, and the hosts of teachers he inspired, perhaps, than to the
poet-essayists like Emerson and Thoreau and Burroughs.
Let us learn to see and name first. The inexperienced, the unknowing,
the unthinking, cannot love. One must live until tired, and think
until baffled, before he can know his need of Nature; and then he will
not know how to approach her unless already acquainted. To expect
anything more than curiosity and animal delight in a child is foolish,
and the attempt to teach him anything more at first than to know the
out-of-doors is equally foolish. Poets are born, but not until they are
old.
But if one got no farther than his how-to-know book would lead him, he
still would get into the fields,—the best place for him this side of
heaven,—he would get ozone for his lungs, red blood, sound sleep, and
health. As a nation, we had just begun to get away from the farm and
out of touch with the soil. The nature movement is sending us back in
time. A new wave of physical soundness is to roll in upon us as the
result, accompanied with a newness of mind and of morals.
For, next to bodily health, the influence of the fields makes for the
health of the spirit. It is easier to be good in a good body and an
environment of largeness, beauty, and peace,—easier here than anywhere
else to be sane, sincere, and “in little thyng have suffisaunce.” If
it means anything to think upon whatsoever things are good and lovely,
then it means much to own a how-to-know book and to make use of it.
This is hardly more than a beginning, however, merely satisfying an
instinct of the mind. It is good if done afield, even though such
classifying of the out-of-doors is only scraping an acquaintance with
nature. The best good, the deep healing, come when one, no longer
a stranger, breaks away from his getting and spending, from his
thinking with men, and camps under the open sky, where he knows without
thinking, and worships without priest or chant or prayer.
The world’s work must be done, and only a small part of it can be done
in the woods and fields. The merchants may not all turn ploughmen
and wood-choppers. Nor is it necessary. What we need to do, and
are learning to do, is to go to nature for our rest and health and
recreation.
[Illustration]
IX
June
A REFERENCE to one of my notebooks shows that in June, 1895, there were
thirty-six species of birds nesting within singing distance of my study
windows; in 1907 there were thirty-two, the most distant nest being
less than five minutes’ walk from my door.
This is not a modern natural history story,—an extraordinary discovery
that only I am capable of making. Start your own June list, and I
warrant you will find as many. For there is nothing peculiarly birdy
about my small farm. Any place as uncongenial to English sparrows and
one that offers a fair chance to the native birds will keep you busy
counting nests in June.
In the chimney built the swifts (three or four families of them); in
the barn loft a small colony of barn swallows; and under the roof of
the pig-pen a pair of phœbes, my earliest spring birds and often the
latest with a brood.
A bushy hillside drops from the porch to the old orchard, and along
this steep southern slope nested a pair of indigo buntings and a
pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks (my rarest neighbors); also, here in
the thick underbrush were found chewinks, thrashers, black and white
warblers, song sparrows, and a pair of partridges.
In the orchard there were half a dozen chippies’ nests, even more
robins’, two nests of bluebirds, and one each of the tree swallow,
flicker, yellow warbler, chebec, downy woodpecker, kingbird, great
crested flycatcher, redstart, and screech owl.
Baltimore orioles nested in the elms along the road; close to the
little river were the nests of catbirds and red-winged blackbirds; a
nest of swamp sparrows and of Maryland yellow-throats in the meadow,
and in the woodlot a pewee’s nest, a crow’s nest, and three nests of
ovenbirds.
All these I found; but besides these I know that a pair of
yellow-billed cuckoos built somewhere near the house, as did a pair of
blue jays, wood thrushes, and chestnut-sided warblers. These I am still
waiting for. I need another June.
Not one of all these birds is rare or even shy, unless it be the swamp
sparrow; none of them that the veriest beginner should not come to know
in the course of one June. For these are almost domesticated, our near
neighbors and friends, who desire and who will return our friendly,
neighborly calls.
There are other birds, like the hawks, the owls, the herons, the rarer
thrushes, sparrows, warblers, and marsh birds, that require time and
tramping for their discovery. I know the very log in which I could find
young turkey buzzards in June; the clump of dog-roses where a least
bittern will build; the old gum that for years has harbored a pair of
barred owls; the little cove where, spring after spring, a black duck
nests. But I should need a vacation to visit these.
I watch the others between times,—between five o’clock in the morning
and breakfast, between breakfast and train time and church time, and
on Saturdays to and from the garden. If you are your own gardener, you
can carry not only a hoe, but along with it a pair of field glasses. I
even combine the care of my pig and the study of the phœbes that share
his pen. Occasionally I drop everything and hunt for a nest, as if life
depended upon my finding it. But life doesn’t, the more’s the pity,
for me. Life depends on the finding of things that are very different
from birds’ nests, things that require a deal of hunting the whole year
around. Yet I take the time to hunt birds’ nests, too, for life is more
than meat (I raise a good many vegetables), and, after all, _my_ life
does depend, in no small measure, upon my finding a few birds’ nests in
June.
I remember a June when I tried to get life out of a grocery store, and
the sickness of it comes over me even yet at times. I sold kerosene
oil, brown sugar, coffee, salt mackerel, and plug tobacco. I breathed
the mingled breath of kerosene oil, brown sugar, coffee, salt mackerel,
and plug tobacco,—the odor of mere money,—when I knew the fox grapes
were in blossom, the magnolias and the azaleas; when I knew the
fields were green and the birds were in song! I have longed for many
things, but never as I longed that June for the farm, for the long,
long day, yes, and for the long, long row. It was that kerosened,
salt-mackereled, plug-tobaccoed—moneyed—June that took me back to
sweet poverty and the farm.
I do not wish to think of living where the birds and wild flowers do
not live with me. A city flat is convenient, and city life is exciting;
but convenience and excitement plus meat and raiment are not the sum
of life; neither, on the other hand, are pure air, sunshine, birds,
flowers, a garden, quiet, and time to think, the whole of life. No;
but when you consider the matter, there appears very little still
needing to make life whole that you cannot have along with your birds,
thoughts, and garden.
Whether you love the country or not, whether you know the difference
between a kingbird and a kingcrab or not, you owe it to your body and
your soul to get out into the open fields in June,—not to collect bird
skins or birds’ eggs or to make a herbarium or a nature diary, but to
live a while where the birds and flowers live. The city may be heaven
enough for you all the rest of the year; but God didn’t make the city.
There are seasons—March and February, usually—when it seems as if
some one else has a hand in making the country. In June, however, the
country is all and more than the poets say,—if it is poetry that you
come out into the country for to feel.
Take my meadow, for instance, all aglow in June with buttercups, as if
spread with a sheet of beaten gold! But now, if it is only hay that
I am after (alas, too often it is), then my gold turns all to brass,
and worse than brass, for buttercups, as my dairyman neighbor tells
me, make the poorest kind of hay. I should keep no cow, perhaps. She
gives nice milk, to be sure, but she eats up my beaten gold, she kills
my buttercup poetry. Maybe I am too rich, I own too much: one cow, one
horse, two pigs, thirty hens, fourteen acres of hills and trees. For
it is the truth that I do not enjoy the foxes now as I did before I
kept hens, nor the buttercups as I did before I got the cow. Suppose,
now, besides all of this, I had money,—a lot of it!—several thousand
dollars! You never get money along with a farm, and that is one reason
why a farm is such a safe and sure investment for the soul. It is not
the cow nor the chores, but money in or out of the bank, that robs life
of its June.
Nor is owning _one_ cow like having a dairy farm. The average man had
better keep his money in the bank than invest in more than one cow. A
single cow cannot eat all the gold out of one’s meadow. I am still glad
for the buttercups; and where the meadow passes into the upland, where
the buttercups give place to the daisies, my gold runs into silver;
which means certainly that I am not making the farm pay, for on a
paying farm a daisy—weed that it is, and not a native weed at that—is
more like a spot of leprosy than of silver. Our daisies are not even
those sung by the poets, I understand. What of it? A ten-acre field of
them lies snow-white in my memory, fresh with the freshness of early
June and the sweeter freshness of boyhood. And as for poetry, I have
my own for them,—the poetry of boyhood, of Commencement days at the
Institute, and of girls in white frocks.