"Very desolation dwells
By grots and caverns shagg'd with horrid shade."
Shakespeare refers to the "ruthless, vast, and horrid wood,"--a fit
place for robbery, rapine, and murder. Indeed, English poetry is pretty
well colored with the memory of the time when the woods were the
hiding-places of robbers and outlaws, and were the scenes of all manner
of dark deeds. The only thing I recall in Shakespeare that gives a faint
whiff of our forest life occurs in "All's Well That Ends Well," where
the clown says to Lafeu, "I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always loved
a great fire." That great fire is American; wood is too scarce in
Europe. Francis Higginson wrote in 1630: "New England may boast of the
element of fire more than all the rest; for all Europe is not able to
afford to make so great fires as New England. A poor servant, that is
to possess but fifty acres, may afford to give more wood for fire, as
good as the world yields, than many noblemen in England." In many parts
of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, the same royal fires may
still be indulged in. In the chief nature-poet of England, Wordsworth,
there is no line that has the subtle aroma of the deep woods. After
seeing his country, one can recognize its features, its spirit, all
through his poems--its impressive solitudes, its lonely tarns, its
silent fells, its green dales, its voiceful waterfalls; but there are no
woods there to speak of; the mountains appear to have always been
treeless, and the poet's muse has never felt the spell of this phase of
nature--the mystery and attraction of the indoors of aboriginal
wildness. Likewise in Tennyson there is the breath of the wold, but not
of the woods.
Among our own poets, two at least of the more eminent have listened to
the siren of our primitive woods. I refer to Bryant and Emerson. Though
so different, there is an Indian's love of forests and forest-solitudes
in them both. Neither Bryant's "Forest Hymn" nor Emerson's "Woodnotes"
could have been written by an English poet. The "Woodnotes" savor of our
vast Northern pine forests, amid which one walks with distended pupil,
and a boding, alert sense.
"In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers' gang,
Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang;
He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone;
Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.
He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born heads,
And blessed the monument of the man of flowers,
Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers.
He heard, when in the grove, at intervals,
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls,--
One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green century."
Emerson's muse is urbane, but it is that wise urbanity that is at home
in the woods as well as in the town, and can make a garden of a forest.
"My garden is a forest ledge,
Which older forests bound;
The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,
Then plunge to depths profound."
On the other hand, we have no pastoral poetry in the English sense,
because we have no pastoral nature as overpowering as the English have.
When the muse of our poetry is not imitative, it often has a piny,
woodsy flavor, that is unknown in the older literatures. The gentle muse
of Longfellow, so civil, so cultivated; yet how it delighted in all
legends and echoes and Arcadian dreams, that date from the forest
primeval. Thoreau was a wood-genius--the spirit of some Indian poet or
prophet, graduated at Harvard College, but never losing his taste for
the wild. The shy, mystical genius of Hawthorne was never more at home
than when in the woods. Read the forest-scenes in the "Scarlet Letter."
They are among the most suggestive in the book.