We hear the sound of wood-chopping at the farmers' doors, far over the

frozen earth, the baying of the house-dog, and the distant clarion of

the cock,--though the thin and frosty air conveys only the finer

particles of sound to our ears, with short and sweet vibrations, as

the waves subside soonest on the purest and lightest liquids, in which

gross substances sink to the bottom. They come clear and bell-like,

and from a greater distance in the horizon, as if there were fewer

impediments than in summer to make them faint and ragged. The ground

is sonorous, like seasoned wood, and even the ordinary rural sounds

are melodious, and the jingling of the ice on the trees is sweet and

liquid. There is the least possible moisture in the atmosphere, all

being dried up or congealed, and it is of such extreme tenuity and

elasticity that it becomes a source of delight. The withdrawn and

tense sky seems groined like the aisles of a cathedral, and the

polished air sparkles as if there were crystals of ice floating in it.

As they who have resided in Greenland tell us that when it freezes

"the sea smokes like burning turf-land, and a fog or mist arises,

called frost-smoke," which "cutting smoke frequently raises blisters

on the face and hands, and is very pernicious to the health." But this

pure, stinging cold is an elixir to the lungs, and not so much a

frozen mist as a crystallized midsummer haze, refined and purified by

cold.

The sun at length rises through the distant woods, as if with the

faint clashing, swinging sound of cymbals, melting the air with his

beams, and with such rapid steps the morning travels, that already his

rays are gilding the distant western mountains. Meanwhile we step

hastily along through the powdery snow, warmed by an inward heat,

enjoying an Indian summer still, in the increased glow of thought and

feeling. Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we

should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but

find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.

If our bodies were fed with pure and simple elements, and not with a

stimulating and heating diet, they would afford no more pasture for

cold than a leafless twig, but thrive like the trees, which find even

winter genial to their expansion.

The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact.

Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves

of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow. In the bare fields

and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and

bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. A

cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can

withstand it but what has a virtue in it, and accordingly, whatever we

meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we

respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness. All

things beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out

must be part of the original frame of the universe, and of such valor

as God himself. It is invigorating to breathe the cleansed air. Its

greater fineness and purity are visible to the eye, and we would fain

stay out long and late, that the gales may sigh through us, too, as

through the leafless trees, and fit us for the winter,--as if we hoped

so to borrow some pure and steadfast virtue, which will stead us in

all seasons.

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes

out, and which no cold can chill. It finally melts the great snow,

and in January or July is only buried under a thicker or thinner

covering. In the coldest day it flows somewhere, and the snow melts

around every tree. This field of winter rye, which sprouted late in

the fall, and now speedily dissolves the snow, is where the fire is

very thinly covered. We feel warmed by it. In the winter, warmth

stands for all virtue, and we resort in thought to a trickling rill,

with its bare stones shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the

woods, with as much eagerness as rabbits and robins. The steam which

rises from swamps and pools is as dear and domestic as that of our own

kettle. What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day,

when the meadow mice come out by the wall-sides, and the chickadee

lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly from the

sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer; and when we

feel his beams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we are

grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has

followed us into that by-place.

This subterranean fire has its altar in each man's breast; for in the

coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer

fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A

healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter,

summer is in his heart. There is the south. Thither have all birds and

insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are

gathered the robin and the lark.

At length, having reached the edge of the woods, and shut out the

gadding town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of

a cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with

snow. They are glad and warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter

as in summer. As we stand in the midst of the pines in the flickering

and checkered light which straggles but little way into their maze, we

wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple story. It seems to us

that no traveler has ever explored them, and notwithstanding the

wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every day, who would not

like to hear their annals? Our humble villages in the plain are their

contribution. We borrow from the forest the boards which shelter and

the sticks which warm us. How important is their evergreen to the

winter, that portion of the summer which does not fade, the permanent

year, the unwithered grass! Thus simply, and with little expense of

altitude, is the surface of the earth diversified. What would human

life be without forests, those natural cities? From the tops of

mountains they appear like smooth-shaven lawns, yet whither shall we

walk but in this taller grass?

In this glade covered with bushes of a year's growth, see how the

silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such

infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the

absence of color. Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem,

and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs

over all, as if the impurities of the summer sky, refined and shrunk

by the chaste winter's cold, had been winnowed from the heavens upon

the earth.

Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens

seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and

distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a

Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.

How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life

which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and

woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise!

"The foodless wilds

Pour forth their brown inhabitants."

The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and playful in the remote

glens, even on the morning of the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and

Labrador, and for our Esquimaux and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed Indians,

Novazemblaites, and Spitzbergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and

woodchopper, the fox, muskrat, and mink?

Still, in the midst of the arctic day, we may trace the summer to its

retreats, and sympathize with some contemporary life. Stretched over

the brooks, in the midst of the frost-bound meadows, we may observe

the submarine cottages of the caddis-worms, the larvæ of the

Plicipennes; their small cylindrical cases built around themselves,

composed of flags, sticks, grass, and withered leaves, shells, and

pebbles, in form and color like the wrecks which strew the

bottom,--now drifting along over the pebbly bottom, now whirling in

tiny eddies and dashing down steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along

with the current, or else swaying to and fro at the end of some

grass-blade or root. Anon they will leave their sunken habitations,

and, crawling up the stems of plants, or to the surface, like gnats,

as perfect insects henceforth, flutter over the surface of the water,

or sacrifice their short lives in the flame of our candles at evening.

Down yonder little glen the shrubs are drooping under their burden,

and the red alderberries contrast with the white ground. Here are the

marks of a myriad feet which have already been abroad. The sun rises

as proudly over such a glen as over the valley of the Seine or the

Tiber, and it seems the residence of a pure and self-subsistent valor,

such as they never witnessed,--which never knew defeat nor fear. Here

reign the simplicity and purity of a primitive age, and a health and

hope far remote from towns and cities. Standing quite alone, far in

the forest, while the wind is shaking down snow from the trees, and

leaving the only human tracks behind us, we find our reflections of a

richer variety than the life of cities. The chickadee and nuthatch are

more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall

return to these last as to more vulgar companions. In this lonely

glen, with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals

of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side,

and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are

more serene and worthy to contemplate.

As the day advances, the heat of the sun is reflected by the

hillsides, and we hear a faint but sweet music, where flows the rill

released from its fetters, and the icicles are melting on the trees;

and the nuthatch and partridge are heard and seen. The south wind

melts the snow at noon, and the bare ground appears with its withered

grass and leaves, and we are invigorated by the perfume which exhales

from it, as by the scent of strong meats.

Let us go into this deserted woodman's hut, and see how he has passed

the long winter nights and the short and stormy days. For here man has

lived under this south hillside, and it seems a civilized and public

spot. We have such associations as when the traveler stands by the

ruins of Palmyra or Hecatompolis. Singing birds and flowers perchance

have begun to appear here, for flowers as well as weeds follow in the

footsteps of man. These hemlocks whispered over his head, these

hickory logs were his fuel, and these pitch pine roots kindled his

fire; yonder fuming rill in the hollow, whose thin and airy vapor

still ascends as busily as ever, though he is far off now, was his

well. These hemlock boughs, and the straw upon this raised platform,

were his bed, and this broken dish held his drink. But he has not been

here this season, for the phœbes built their nest upon this shelf

last summer. I find some embers left as if he had but just gone out,

where he baked his pot of beans; and while at evening he smoked his

pipe, whose stemless bowl lies in the ashes, chatted with his only

companion, if perchance he had any, about the depth of the snow on the

morrow, already falling fast and thick without, or disputed whether

the last sound was the screech of an owl, or the creak of a bough, or

imagination only; and through his broad chimney-throat, in the late

winter evening, ere he stretched himself upon the straw, he looked up

to learn the progress of the storm, and, seeing the bright stars of

Cassiopeia's Chair shining brightly down upon him, fell contentedly

asleep.

See how many traces from which we may learn the chopper's history!

From this stump we may guess the sharpness of his axe, and from the

slope of the stroke, on which side he stood, and whether he cut down

the tree without going round it or changing hands; and, from the

flexure of the splinters, we may know which way it fell. This one chip

contains inscribed on it the whole history of the woodchopper and of

the world. On this scrap of paper, which held his sugar or salt,

perchance, or was the wadding of his gun, sitting on a log in the

forest, with what interest we read the tattle of cities, of those

larger huts, empty and to let, like this, in High Streets and

Broadways. The eaves are dripping on the south side of this simple

roof, while the titmouse lisps in the pine and the genial warmth of

the sun around the door is somewhat kind and human.

After two seasons, this rude dwelling does not deform the scene.

Already the birds resort to it, to build their nests, and you may

track to its door the feet of many quadrupeds. Thus, for a long time,

nature overlooks the encroachment and profanity of man. The wood still

cheerfully and unsuspiciously echoes the strokes of the axe that fells

it, and while they are few and seldom, they enhance its wildness, and

all the elements strive to naturalize the sound.

Now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill,

from whose precipitous south side we can look over the broad country

of forest and field and river, to the distant snowy mountains. See

yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some

invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead.

There must be a warmer and more genial spot there below, as where we

detect the vapor from a spring forming a cloud above the trees. What

fine relations are established between the traveler who discovers this

airy column from some eminence in the forest and him who sits below!

Up goes the smoke as silently and naturally as the vapor exhales from

the leaves, and as busy disposing itself in wreaths as the housewife

on the hearth below. It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests

more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where

its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human

life has planted itself,--and such is the beginning of Rome, the

establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on

the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia.

And now we descend again, to the brink of this woodland lake, which

lies in a hollow of the hills, as if it were their expressed juice,

and that of the leaves which are annually steeped in it. Without

outlet or inlet to the eye, it has still its history, in the lapse of

its waves, in the rounded pebbles on its shore, and in the pines which

grow down to its brink. It has not been idle, though sedentary, but,

like Abu Musa, teaches that "sitting still at home is the heavenly

way; the going out is the way of the world." Yet in its evaporation it

travels as far as any. In summer it is the earth's liquid eye, a

mirror in the breast of nature. The sins of the wood are washed out

in it. See how the woods form an amphitheatre about it, and it is an

arena for all the genialness of nature. All trees direct the traveler

to its brink, all paths seek it out, birds fly to it, quadrupeds flee

to it, and the very ground inclines toward it. It is nature's saloon,

where she has sat down to her toilet. Consider her silent economy and

tidiness; how the sun comes with his evaporation to sweep the dust

from its surface each morning, and a fresh surface is constantly

welling up; and annually, after whatever impurities have accumulated

herein, its liquid transparency appears again in the spring. In summer

a hushed music seems to sweep across its surface. But now a plain

sheet of snow conceals it from our eyes, except where the wind has

swept the ice bare, and the sere leaves are gliding from side to side,

tacking and veering on their tiny voyages. Here is one just keeled up

against a pebble on shore, a dry beech leaf, rocking still, as if it

would start again. A skillful engineer, methinks, might project its

course since it fell from the parent stem. Here are all the elements

for such a calculation. Its present position, the direction of the

wind, the level of the pond, and how much more is given. In its

scarred edges and veins is its log rolled up.

We fancy ourselves in the interior of a larger house. The surface of

the pond is our deal table or sanded floor, and the woods rise

abruptly from its edge, like the walls of a cottage. The lines set to

catch pickerel through the ice look like a larger culinary

preparation, and the men stand about on the white ground like pieces

of forest furniture. The actions of these men, at the distance of

half a mile over the ice and snow, impress us as when we read the

exploits of Alexander in history. They seem not unworthy of the

scenery, and as momentous as the conquest of kingdoms.

Again we have wandered through the arches of the wood, until from its

skirts we hear the distant booming of ice from yonder bay of the

river, as if it were moved by some other and subtler tide than oceans

know. To me it has a strange sound of home, thrilling as the voice of

one's distant and noble kindred. A mild summer sun shines over forest

and lake, and though there is but one green leaf for many rods, yet

nature enjoys a serene health. Every sound is fraught with the same

mysterious assurance of health, as well now the creaking of the boughs

in January, as the soft sough of the wind in July.

When Winter fringes every bough

With his fantastic wreath,

And puts the seal of silence now

Upon the leaves beneath;

When every stream in its penthouse

Goes gurgling on its way,

And in his gallery the mouse

Nibbleth the meadow hay;

Methinks the summer still is nigh,

And lurketh underneath,

As that same meadow mouse doth lie

Snug in that last year's heath.

And if perchance the chickadee

Lisp a faint note anon,

The snow is summer's canopy,

Which she herself put on.

Fair blossoms deck the cheerful trees,

And dazzling fruits depend;

The north wind sighs a summer breeze,

The nipping frosts to fend,

Bringing glad tidings unto me,

The while I stand all ear,

Of a serene eternity,

Which need not winter fear.

Out on the silent pond straightway

The restless ice doth crack,

And pond sprites merry gambols play

Amid the deafening rack.

Eager I hasten to the vale,

As if I heard brave news,

How nature held high festival,

Which it were hard to lose.

I gambol with my neighbor ice,

And sympathizing quake,

As each new crack darts in a trice

Across the gladsome lake.

One with the cricket in the ground,

And fagot on the hearth,

Resounds the rare domestic sound

Along the forest path.

Before night we will take a journey on skates along the course of this

meandering river, as full of novelty to one who sits by the cottage

fire all the winter's day, as if it were over the polar ice, with

Captain Parry or Franklin; following the winding of the stream, now

flowing amid hills, now spreading out into fair meadows, and forming a

myriad coves and bays where the pine and hemlock overarch. The river

flows in the rear of the towns, and we see all things from a new and

wilder side. The fields and gardens come down to it with a frankness,

and freedom from pretension, which they do not wear on the highway. It

is the outside and edge of the earth. Our eyes are not offended by

violent contrasts. The last rail of the farmer's fence is some swaying

willow bough, which still preserves its freshness, and here at length

all fences stop, and we no longer cross any road. We may go far up

within the country now by the most retired and level road, never

climbing a hill, but by broad levels ascending to the upland meadows.

It is a beautiful illustration of the law of obedience, the flow of a

river; the path for a sick man, a highway down which an acorn cup may

float secure with its freight. Its slight occasional falls, whose

precipices would not diversify the landscape, are celebrated by mist

and spray, and attract the traveler from far and near. From the remote

interior, its current conducts him by broad and easy steps, or by one

gentler inclined plane, to the sea. Thus by an early and constant

yielding to the inequalities of the ground it secures itself the

easiest passage.

No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times, and now we

draw near to the empire of the fishes. Our feet glide swiftly over

unfathomed depths, where in summer our line tempted the pout and

perch, and where the stately pickerel lurked in the long corridors

formed by the bulrushes. The deep, impenetrable marsh, where the heron

waded and bittern squatted, is made pervious to our swift shoes, as if

a thousand railroads had been made into it. With one impulse we are

carried to the cabin of the muskrat, that earliest settler, and see

him dart away under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to his

hole in the bank; and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately "the

mower whet his scythe," through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with

meadow-grass. We skate near to where the blackbird, the pewee, and the

kingbird hung their nests over the water, and the hornets builded from

the maple in the swamp. How many gay warblers, following the sun, have

radiated from this nest of silver birch and thistle-down! On the

swamp's outer edge was hung the supermarine village, where no foot

penetrated. In this hollow tree the wood duck reared her brood, and

slid away each day to forage in yonder fen.

In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried

specimens, in their natural order and position. The meadows and

forests are a _hortus siccus_. The leaves and grasses stand perfectly

pressed by the air without screw or gum, and the birds' nests are not

hung on an artificial twig, but where they builded them. We go about

dry-shod to inspect the summer's work in the rank swamp, and see what

a growth have got the alders, the willows, and the maples; testifying

to how many warm suns, and fertilizing dews and showers. See what

strides their boughs took in the luxuriant summer,--and anon these

dormant buds will carry them onward and upward another span into the

heavens.

Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the

river is lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left,

where we least expected; still holding on its way underneath, with a

faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot,

it too had hibernated, and we had followed its faint summer trail to

where it earthed itself in snow and ice. At first we should have

thought that rivers would be empty and dry in midwinter, or else

frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but their volume is not

diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surfaces.

The thousand springs which feed the lakes and streams are flowing

still. The issues of a few surface springs only are closed, and they

go to swell the deep reservoirs. Nature's wells are below the frost.

The summer brooks are not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower

quench his thirst with that alone. The streams are swollen when the

snow melts in the spring, because nature's work has been delayed, the

water being turned into ice and snow, whose particles are less smooth

and round, and do not find their level so soon.

Far over the ice, between the hemlock woods and snow-clad hills,

stands the pickerel-fisher, his lines set in some retired cove, like a

Finlander, with his arms thrust into the pouches of his dreadnaught;

with dull, snowy, fishy thoughts, himself a finless fish, separated a

few inches from his race; dumb, erect, and made to be enveloped in

clouds and snows, like the pines on shore. In these wild scenes, men

stand about in the scenery, or move deliberately and heavily, having

sacrificed the sprightliness and vivacity of towns to the dumb

sobriety of nature. He does not make the scenery less wild, more than

the jays and muskrats, but stands there as a part of it, as the

natives are represented in the voyages of early navigators, at Nootka

Sound, and on the Northwest coast, with their furs about them, before

they were tempted to loquacity by a scrap of iron. He belongs to the

natural family of man, and is planted deeper in nature and has more

root than the inhabitants of towns. Go to him, ask what luck, and you

will learn that he too is a worshiper of the unseen. Hear with what

sincere deference and waving gesture in his tone he speaks of the lake

pickerel, which he has never seen, his primitive and ideal race of

pickerel. He is connected with the shore still, as by a fish-line, and

yet remembers the season when he took fish through the ice on the

pond, while the peas were up in his garden at home.

But now, while we have loitered, the clouds have gathered again, and a

few straggling snowflakes are beginning to descend. Faster and faster

they fall, shutting out the distant objects from sight. The snow falls

on every wood and field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river and

the pond, on the hill and in the valley. Quadrupeds are confined to

their coverts and the birds sit upon their perches this peaceful hour.

There is not so much sound as in fair weather, but silently and

gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences, and the polished

ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are concealed,

and the tracks of men and beasts are lost. With so little effort does

nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men. Hear how

Homer has described the same: "The snowflakes fall thick and fast on a

winter's day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant,

covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains

where the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are

falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently

dissolved by the waves." The snow levels all things, and infolds them

deeper in the bosom of nature, as, in the slow summer, vegetation

creeps up to the entablature of the temple, and the turrets of the

castle, and helps her to prevail over art.

The surly night-wind rustles through the wood, and warns us to retrace

our steps, while the sun goes down behind the thickening storm, and

birds seek their roosts, and cattle their stalls.

"Drooping the lab'rer ox

Stands covered o'er with snow, and _now_ demands

The fruit of all his toil."

Though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the

wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of

him as a merry woodchopper, and warm-blooded youth, as blithe as

summer. The unexplored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of

the traveler. It does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness.

In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery,

like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half

concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The

imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house

affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth

and see the sky through the chimney-top, enjoying the quiet and serene

life that may be had in a warm corner by the chimney-side, or feeling

our pulse by listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the

sound of the flail in distant barns all the long afternoon. No doubt a

skillful physician could determine our health by observing how these

simple and natural sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an Oriental,

but a Boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the

shadow of motes in the sunbeams.

Sometimes our fate grows too homely and familiarly serious ever to be

cruel. Consider how for three months the human destiny is wrapped in

furs. The good Hebrew Revelation takes no cognizance of all this

cheerful snow. Is there no religion for the temperate and frigid

zones? We know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the

gods on a New England winter night. Their praises have never been

sung, only their wrath deprecated. The best scripture, after all,

records but a meagre faith. Its saints live reserved and austere. Let

a brave, devout man spend the year in the woods of Maine or Labrador,

and see if the Hebrew Scriptures speak adequately to his condition and

experience, from the setting in of winter to the breaking up of the

ice.

Now commences the long winter evening around the farmer's hearth, when

the thoughts of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are by

nature and necessity charitable and liberal to all creatures. Now is

the happy resistance to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and

thinks of his preparedness for winter, and, through the glittering

panes, sees with equanimity "the mansion of the northern bear," for

now the storm is over,--

"The full ethereal round,

Infinite worlds disclosing to the view,

Shines out intensely keen; and all one cope

Of starry glitter glows from pole to pole."

THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES[6]

Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a

transcendentalist; and for my part I am more interested in the men

than in the cattle. I wish to see once more those old familiar faces,

whose names I do not know, which for me represent the Middlesex

country, and come as near being indigenous to the soil as a white man

can; the men who are not above their business, whose coats are not too

black, whose shoes do not shine very much, who never wear gloves to

conceal their hands. It is true, there are some queer specimens of

humanity attracted to our festival, but all are welcome. I am pretty

sure to meet once more that weak-minded and whimsical fellow,

generally weak-bodied too, who prefers a crooked stick for a cane;

perfectly useless, you would say, only _bizarre_, fit for a cabinet,

like a petrified snake. A ram's horn would be as convenient, and is

yet more curiously twisted. He brings that much indulged bit of the

country with him, from some town's end or other, and introduces it to

Concord groves, as if he had promised it so much sometime. So some, it

seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think

that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best

ruler. Or why choose a man to do plain work who is distinguished for

his oddity? However, I do not know but you will think that they have

committed this mistake who invited me to speak to you to-day.

In my capacity of surveyor, I have often talked with some of you, my

employers, at your dinner-tables, after having gone round and round

and behind your farming, and ascertained exactly what its limits were.

Moreover, taking a surveyor's and a naturalist's liberty, I have been

in the habit of going across your lots much oftener than is usual, as

many of you, perhaps to your sorrow, are aware. Yet many of you, to my

relief, have seemed not to be aware of it; and, when I came across you

in some out-of-the-way nook of your farms, have inquired, with an air

of surprise, if I were not lost, since you had never seen me in that

part of the town or county before; when, if the truth were known, and

it had not been for betraying my secret, I might with more propriety

have inquired if _you_ were not lost, since I had never seen _you_

there before. I have several times shown the proprietor the shortest

way out of his wood-lot.

Therefore, it would seem that I have some title to speak to you

to-day; and considering what that title is, and the occasion that has

called us together, I need offer no apology if I invite your

attention, for the few moments that are allotted me, to a purely

scientific subject.

At those dinner-tables referred to, I have often been asked, as many

of you have been, if I could tell how it happened, that when a pine

wood was cut down an oak one commonly sprang up, and _vice versa_. To

which I have answered, and now answer, that I can tell,--that it is no

mystery to me. As I am not aware that this has been clearly shown by

any one, I shall lay the more stress on this point. Let me lead you

back into your wood-lots again.

When, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a forest springs up

naturally where none of its kind grew before, I do not hesitate to

say, though in some quarters still it may sound paradoxical, that it

came from a seed. Of the various ways by which trees are _known_ to be

propagated,--by transplanting, cuttings, and the like,--this is the

only supposable one under these circumstances. No such tree has ever

been known to spring from anything else. If any one asserts that it

sprang from something else, or from nothing, the burden of proof lies

with him.

It remains, then, only to show how the seed is transported from where

it grows to where it is planted. This is done chiefly by the agency of

the wind, water, and animals. The lighter seeds, as those of pines and

maples, are transported chiefly by wind and water; the heavier, as

acorns and nuts, by animals.

In all the pines, a very thin membrane, in appearance much like an

insect's wing, grows over and around the seed, and independent of it,

while the latter is being developed within its base. Indeed this is

often perfectly developed, though the seed is abortive; nature being,

you would say, more sure to provide the means of transporting the

seed, than to provide the seed to be transported. In other words, a

beautiful thin sack is woven around the seed, with a handle to it such

as the wind can take hold of, and it is then committed to the wind,

expressly that it may transport the seed and extend the range of the

species; and this it does, as effectually as when seeds are sent by

mail in a different kind of sack from the Patent Office. There is a

patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose

managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody

at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more

extensive and regular.

There is, then, no necessity for supposing that the pines have sprung

up from nothing, and I am aware that I am not at all peculiar in

asserting that they come from seeds, though the mode of their

propagation _by nature_ has been but little attended to. They are very

extensively raised from the seed in Europe, and are beginning to be

here.

When you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood will not _at once_ spring

up there unless there are, or have been quite recently, seed-bearing

pines near enough for the seeds to be blown from them. But, adjacent

to a forest of pines, if you prevent other crops from growing there,

you will surely have an extension of your pine forest, provided the

soil is suitable.

As for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not furnished with wings,

the notion is still a very common one that, when the trees which bear

these spring up where none of their kind were noticed before, they

have come from seeds or other principles spontaneously generated there

in an unusual manner, or which have lain dormant in the soil for

centuries, or perhaps been called into activity by the heat of a

burning. I do not believe these assertions, and I will state some of

the ways in which, according to my observation, such forests are

planted and raised.

Every one of these seeds, too, will be found to be winged or legged in

another fashion. Surely it is not wonderful that cherry trees of all

kinds are widely dispersed, since their fruit is well known to be the

favorite food of various birds. Many kinds are called bird cherries,

and they appropriate many more kinds, which are not so called. Eating

cherries is a bird-like employment, and unless we disperse the seeds

occasionally, as they do, I shall think that the birds have the best

right to them. See how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in

order that a bird may be compelled to transport it,--in the very midst

of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour this

must commonly take the stone also into its mouth or bill. If you ever

ate a cherry, and did not make two bites of it, you must have

perceived it,--right in the centre of the luscious morsel, a large

earthy residuum left on the tongue. We thus take into our mouths

cherry-stones as big as peas, a dozen at once, for Nature can persuade

us to do almost anything when she would compass her ends. Some wild

men and children instinctively swallow these, as the birds do when in

a hurry, it being the shortest way to get rid of them. Thus, though

these seeds are not provided with vegetable wings, Nature has impelled

the thrush tribe to take them into their bills and fly away with them;

and they are winged in another sense, and more effectually than the

seeds of pines, for these are carried even against the wind. The

consequence is, that cherry trees grow not only here but there. The

same is true of a great many other seeds.

But to come to the observation which suggested these remarks. As I

have said, I suspect that I can throw some light on the fact that when

hereabouts a dense pine wood is cut down, oaks and other hard woods

may at once take its place. I have got only to show that the acorns

and nuts, provided they are grown in the neighborhood, are regularly

planted in such woods; for I assert that if an oak tree has not grown

within ten miles, and man has not carried acorns thither, then an oak

wood will not spring up _at once_, when a pine wood is cut down.

Apparently, there were only pines there before. They are cut off, and

after a year or two you see oaks and other hard woods springing up

there, with scarcely a pine amid them, and the wonder commonly is, how

the seed could have lain in the ground so long without decaying. But

the truth is, that it has not lain in the ground so long, but is

regularly planted each year by various quadrupeds and birds.

In this neighborhood, where oaks and pines are about equally

dispersed, if you look through the thickest pine wood, even the

seemingly unmixed pitch pine ones, you will commonly detect many

little oaks, birches, and other hard woods, sprung from seeds carried

into the thicket by squirrels and other animals, and also blown

thither, but which are overshadowed and choked by the pines. The

denser the evergreen wood, the more likely it is to be well planted

with these seeds, because the planters incline to resort with their

forage to the closest covert. They also carry it into birch and other

woods. This planting is carried on annually, and the oldest seedlings

annually die; but when the pines are cleared off, the oaks, having got

just the start they want, and now secured favorable conditions,

immediately spring up to trees.

The shade of a dense pine wood is more unfavorable to the springing up

of pines of the same species than of oaks within it, though the former

may come up abundantly when the pines are cut, if there chance to be

sound seed in the ground.

But when you cut off a lot of hard wood, very often the little pines

mixed with it have a similar start, for the squirrels have carried off

the nuts to the pines, and not to the more open wood, and they

commonly make pretty clean work of it; and moreover, if the wood was

old, the sprouts will be feeble or entirely fail; to say nothing about

the soil being, in a measure, exhausted for this kind of crop.

If a pine wood is surrounded by a white oak one chiefly, white oaks

may be expected to succeed when the pines are cut. If it is surrounded

instead by an edging of shrub oaks, then you will probably have a

dense shrub oak thicket.

I have no time to go into details, but will say, in a word, that while

the wind is conveying the seeds of pines into hard woods and open

lands, the squirrels and other animals are conveying the seeds of oaks

and walnuts into the pine woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept

up.

I affirmed this confidently many years ago, and an occasional

examination of dense pine woods confirmed me in my opinion. It has

long been known to observers that squirrels bury nuts in the ground,

but I am not aware that any one has thus accounted for the regular

succession of forests.

On the 24th of September, in 1857, as I was paddling down the Assabet,

in this town, I saw a red squirrel run along the bank under some

herbage, with something large in its mouth. It stopped near the foot

of a hemlock, within a couple of rods of me, and, hastily pawing a

hole with its fore feet, dropped its booty into it, covered it up, and

retreated part way up the trunk of the tree. As I approached the shore

to examine the deposit, the squirrel, descending part way, betrayed no

little anxiety about its treasure, and made two or three motions to

recover it before it finally retreated. Digging there, I found two

green pignuts joined together, with the thick husks on, buried about

an inch and a half under the reddish soil of decayed hemlock

leaves,--just the right depth to plant it. In short, this squirrel was

then engaged in accomplishing two objects, to wit, laying up a store

of winter food for itself, and planting a hickory wood for all

creation. If the squirrel was killed, or neglected its deposit, a

hickory would spring up. The nearest hickory tree was twenty rods

distant. These nuts were there still just fourteen days later, but

were gone when I looked again, November 21st, or six weeks later

still.

I have since examined more carefully several dense woods, which are

said to be, and are apparently, exclusively pine, and always with the

same result. For instance, I walked the same day to a small but very

dense and handsome white pine grove, about fifteen rods square, in the

east part of this town. The trees are large for Concord, being from

ten to twenty inches in diameter, and as exclusively pine as any wood

that I know. Indeed, I selected this wood because I thought it the

least likely to contain anything else. It stands on an open plain or

pasture, except that it adjoins another small pine wood, which has a

few little oaks in it, on the southeast side. On every other side, it

was at least thirty rods from the nearest woods. Standing on the edge

of this grove and looking through it, for it is quite level and free

from underwood, for the most part bare, red-carpeted ground, you would

have said that there was not a hardwood tree in it, young or old. But

on looking carefully along over its floor I discovered, though it was

not till my eye had got used to the search, that, alternating with

thin ferns, and small blueberry bushes, there was, not merely here and

there, but as often as every five feet and with a degree of

regularity, a little oak, from three to twelve inches high, and in one

place I found a green acorn dropped by the base of a pine.

I confess I was surprised to find my theory so perfectly proved in

this case. One of the principal agents in this planting, the red

squirrels, were all the while curiously inspecting me, while I was

inspecting their plantation. Some of the little oaks had been browsed

by cows, which resorted to this wood for shade.

After seven or eight years, the hard woods evidently find such a

locality unfavorable to their growth, the pines being allowed to

stand. As an evidence of this, I observed a diseased red maple

twenty-five feet long, which had been recently prostrated, though it

was still covered with green leaves, the only maple in any position in

the wood.

But although these oaks almost invariably die if the pines are not cut

down, it is probable that they do better for a few years under their

shelter than they would anywhere else.

The very extensive and thorough experiments of the English have at

length led them to adopt a method of raising oaks almost precisely

like this which somewhat earlier had been adopted by Nature and her

squirrels here; they have simply rediscovered the value of pines as

nurses for oaks. The English experimenters seem, early and generally,

to have found out the importance of using trees of some kind as

nurse-plants for the young oaks. I quote from Loudon what he describes

as "the ultimatum on the subject of planting and sheltering

oaks,"--"an abstract of the practice adopted by the government

officers in the national forests" of England, prepared by Alexander

Milne.

At first some oaks had been planted by themselves, and others mixed

with Scotch pines; "but in all cases," says Mr. Milne, "where oaks

were planted actually among the pines and surrounded by them [though

the soil might be inferior], the oaks were found to be much the best."

"For several years past, the plan pursued has been to plant the

inclosures with Scotch pines only [a tree very similar to our pitch

pine], and when the pines have got to the height of five or six feet,

then to put in good strong oak plants of about four or five years'

growth among the pines,--not cutting away any pines at first, unless

they happen to be so strong and thick as to overshadow the oaks. In

about two years it becomes necessary to shred the branches of the

pines, to give light and air to the oaks, and in about two or three

more years to begin gradually to remove the pines altogether, taking

out a certain number each year, so that, at the end of twenty or

twenty-five years, not a single Scotch pine shall be left; although,

for the first ten or twelve years, the plantation may have appeared to

contain nothing else but pine. The advantage of this mode of planting

has been found to be that the pines dry and ameliorate the soil,

destroying the coarse grass and brambles which frequently choke and

injure oaks; and that no mending over is necessary, as scarcely an oak

so planted is found to fail."

Thus much the English planters have discovered by patient experiment,

and, for aught I know, they have taken out a patent for it; but they

appear not to have discovered that it was discovered before, and that

they are merely adopting the method of Nature, which she long ago made

patent to all. She is all the while planting the oaks amid the pines

without our knowledge, and at last, instead of government officers, we

send a party of woodchoppers to cut down the pines, and so rescue an

oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped from the skies.

As I walk amid hickories, even in August, I hear the sound of green

pignuts falling from time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my

head. In the fall, I notice on the ground, either within or in the

neighborhood of oak woods, on all sides of the town, stout oak twigs

three or four inches long, bearing half a dozen empty acorn-cups,

which twigs have been gnawed off by squirrels, on both sides of the

nuts, in order to make them more portable. The jays scream and the red

squirrels scold while you are clubbing and shaking the chestnut trees,

for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree.

I frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut

bur, as I am going through the woods, and I used to think, sometimes,

that they were cast at me. In fact, they are so busy about it, in the

midst of the chestnut season, that you cannot stand long in the woods

without hearing one fall. A sportsman told me that he had, the day

before,--that was in the middle of October,--seen a green chestnut bur

dropped on our great river meadow, fifty rods from the nearest wood,

and much further from the nearest chestnut tree, and he could not tell

how it came there. Occasionally, when chestnutting in midwinter, I

find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just under

the leaves, by the common wood mouse (_Mus leucopus_).

But especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation

and planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. In

almost every wood, you will see where the red or gray squirrels have

pawed down through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet

deep, and almost always directly to a nut or a pine cone, as directly

as if they had started from it and bored upward,--which you and I

could not have done. It would be difficult for us to find one before

the snow falls. Commonly, no doubt, they had deposited them there in

the fall. You wonder if they remember the localities, or discover them

by the scent. The red squirrel commonly has its winter abode in the

earth under a thicket of evergreens, frequently under a small clump of

evergreens in the midst of a deciduous wood. If there are any nut

trees which still retain their nuts standing at a distance without the

wood, their paths often lead directly to and from them. We therefore

need not suppose an oak standing here and there _in_ the wood in order

to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or thirty rods of it, it

is sufficient.

I think that I may venture to say that every white pine cone that

falls to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing

its seeds, and almost every pitch pine one that falls at all, is cut

off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them long before they are

ripe, so that when the crop of white pine cones is a small one, as it

commonly is, they cut off thus almost every one of these before it

fairly ripens. I think, moreover, that their design, if I may so

speak, in cutting them off green, is, partly, to prevent their opening

and losing their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig

through the snow, and the only white pine cones which contain anything

then. I have counted in one heap, within a diameter of four feet, the

cores of 239 pitch pine cones which had been cut off and stripped by

the red squirrel the previous winter.

The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are

placed in the most favorable circumstances for germinating. I have

sometimes wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the

earth got planted; but, by the end of December, I find the chestnut of

the same year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the

decaying and mouldy leaves, where there is all the moisture and manure

they want, for the nuts fall fast. In a plentiful year, a large

proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are,

of course, somewhat concealed from squirrels. One winter, when the

crop had been abundant, I got, with the aid of a rake, many quarts of

these nuts as late as the tenth of January, and though some bought at

the store the same day were more than half of them mouldy, I did not

find a single mouldy one among these which I picked from under the wet

and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed on once or twice. Nature

knows how to pack them best. They were still plump and tender.

Apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. In the spring they

were all sprouting.

Loudon says that "when the nut [of the common walnut of Europe] is to

be preserved through the winter for the purpose of planting in the

following spring, it should be laid in a rot-heap, as soon as

gathered, with the husk on, and the heap should be turned over

frequently in the course of the winter."

Here, again, he is stealing Nature's "thunder." How can a poor mortal

do otherwise? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and the

treasure to be stolen. In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the

best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know

it. Generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate,

and succeed best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a

spade, and then covered with leaves or straw. These results to which

planters have arrived remind us of the experience of Kane and his

companions at the north, who, when learning to live in that climate,

were surprised to find themselves steadily adopting the customs of the

natives, simply becoming Esquimaux. So, when we experiment in planting

forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does. Would it not

be well to consult with Nature in the outset? for she is the most

extensive and experienced planter of us all, not excepting the Dukes

of Athol.

In short, they who have not attended particularly to this subject are

but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed,

especially in the fall, in collecting, and so disseminating and

planting, the seeds of trees. It is the almost constant employment of

the squirrels at that season, and you rarely meet with one that has

not a nut in its mouth, or is not just going to get one. One

squirrel-hunter of this town told me that he knew of a walnut tree

which bore particularly good nuts, but that on going to gather them

one fall, he found that he had been anticipated by a family of a dozen

red squirrels. He took out of the tree, which was hollow, one bushel

and three pecks by measurement, without the husks, and they supplied

him and his family for the winter. It would be easy to multiply

instances of this kind. How commonly in the fall you see the

cheek-pouches of the striped squirrel distended by a quantity of nuts!

This species gets its scientific name, _Tamias_, or the steward, from

its habit of storing up nuts and other seeds. Look under a nut tree a

month after the nuts have fallen, and see what proportion of sound

nuts to the abortive ones and shells you will find ordinarily. They

have been already eaten, or dispersed far and wide. The ground looks

like a platform before a grocery, where the gossips of the village sit

to crack nuts and less savory jokes. You have come, you would say,

after the feast was over, and are presented with the shells only.

Occasionally, when threading the woods in the fall, you will hear a

sound as if some one had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay

pecking at an acorn, or you will see a flock of them at once about it,

in the top of an oak, and hear them break them off. They then fly to a

suitable limb, and placing the acorn under one foot, hammer away at it

busily, making a sound like a woodpecker's tapping, looking round from

time to time to see if any foe is approaching, and soon reach the

meat, and nibble at it, holding up their heads to swallow, while they

hold the remainder very firmly with their claws. Nevertheless it often

drops to the ground before the bird has done with it. I can confirm

what William Bartram wrote to Wilson, the ornithologist, that "the jay

is one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature, for

disseminating forest trees and other nuciferous and hard-seeded

vegetables on which they feed. Their chief employment during the

autumnal season is foraging to supply their winter stores. In

performing this necessary duty they drop abundance of seed in their

flight over fields, hedges, and by fences, where they alight to

deposit them in the post-holes, etc. It is remarkable what numbers of

young trees rise up in fields and pastures after a wet winter and

spring. These birds alone are capable, in a few years' time, to

replant all the cleared lands."

I have noticed that squirrels also frequently drop their nuts in open

land, which will still further account for the oaks and walnuts which

spring up in pastures, for, depend on it, every new tree comes from a

seed. When I examine the little oaks, one or two years old, in such

places, I invariably find the empty acorn from which they sprung.

So far from the seed having lain dormant in the soil since oaks grew

there before, as many believe, it is well known that it is difficult

to preserve the vitality of acorns long enough to transport them to

Europe; and it is recommended in Loudon's "Arboretum," as the safest

course, to sprout them in pots on the voyage. The same authority

states that "very few acorns of any species will germinate after

having been kept a year," that beech mast "only retains its vital

properties one year," and the black walnut "seldom more than six

months after it has ripened." I have frequently found that in November

almost every acorn left on the ground had sprouted or decayed. What

with frost, drouth, moisture, and worms, the greater part are soon

destroyed. Yet it is stated by one botanical writer that "acorns that

have lain for centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon vegetated."

Mr. George B. Emerson, in his valuable Report on the Trees and Shrubs

of this State, says of the pines: "The tenacity of life of the seeds

is remarkable. They will remain for many years unchanged in the

ground, protected by the coolness and deep shade of the forest above

them. But when the forest is removed, and the warmth of the sun

admitted, they immediately vegetate." Since he does not tell us on

what observation his remark is founded, I must doubt its truth.

Besides, the experience of nursery-men makes it the more questionable.

The stories of wheat raised from seed buried with an ancient Egyptian,

and of raspberries raised from seed found in the stomach of a man in

England, who is supposed to have died sixteen or seventeen hundred

years ago, are generally discredited, simply because the evidence is

not conclusive.

Several men of science, Dr. Carpenter among them, have used the

statement that beach plums sprang up in sand which was dug up forty

miles inland in Maine, to prove that the seed had lain there a very

long time, and some have inferred that the coast has receded so far.

But it seems to me necessary to their argument to show, first, that

beach plums grow only on a beach. They are not uncommon here, which is

about half that distance from the shore; and I remember a dense patch

a few miles north of us, twenty-five miles inland, from which the

fruit was annually carried to market. How much further inland they

grow, I know not. Dr. Charles T. Jackson speaks of finding "beach

plums" (perhaps they were this kind) more than one hundred miles

inland in Maine.

It chances that similar objections lie against all the more notorious

instances of the kind on record.

Yet I am prepared to believe that some seeds, especially small ones,

may retain their vitality for centuries under favorable circumstances.

In the spring of 1859, the old Hunt house, so called, in this town,

whose chimney bore the date 1703, was taken down. This stood on land

which belonged to John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts,

and a part of the house was evidently much older than the above date,

and belonged to the Winthrop family. For many years I have ransacked

this neighborhood for plants, and I consider myself familiar with its

productions. Thinking of the seeds which are said to be sometimes dug

up at an unusual depth in the earth, and thus to reproduce long

extinct plants, it occurred to me last fall that some new or rare

plants might have sprung up in the cellar of this house, which had

been covered from the light so long. Searching there on the 22d of

September, I found, among other rank weeds, a species of nettle

(_Urtica urens_) which I had not found before; dill, which I had not

seen growing spontaneously; the Jerusalem oak (_Chenopodium Botrys_),

which I had seen wild in but one place; black nightshade (_Solanum

nigrum_), which is quite rare hereabouts, and common tobacco, which,

though it was often cultivated here in the last century, has for fifty

years been an unknown plant in this town, and a few months before this

not even I had heard that one man, in the north part of the town, was

cultivating a few plants for his own use. I have no doubt that some or

all of these plants sprang from seeds which had long been buried under

or about that house, and that that tobacco is an additional evidence

that the plant was formerly cultivated here. The cellar has been

filled up this year, and four of those plants, including the tobacco,

are now again extinct in that locality.

It is true, I have shown that the animals consume a great part of the

seeds of trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent their becoming

trees; but in all these cases, as I have said, the consumer is

compelled to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and this

is the tax which he pays to Nature. I think it is Linnæus who says

that while the swine is rooting for acorns he is planting acorns.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has

been, I have great faith in a seed,--a, to me, equally mysterious

origin for it. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am

prepared to expect wonders. I shall even believe that the millennium

is at hand, and that the reign of justice is about to commence, when

the Patent Office, or Government, begins to distribute, and the people

to plant, the seeds of these things.

In the spring of 1857 I planted six seeds sent to me from the Patent

Office, and labeled, I think, _Poitrine jaune grosse_, large yellow

squash. Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighed 123½ pounds,

the other bore four, weighing together 186¼ pounds. Who would have

believed that there was 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ in that

corner of my garden? These seeds were the bait I used to catch it, my

ferrets which I sent into its burrow, my brace of terriers which

unearthed it. A little mysterious hoeing and manuring was all the

_abracadabra presto-change_ that I used, and lo! true to the label,

they found for me 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ there, where

it never was known to be, nor was before. These talismans had

perchance sprung from America at first, and returned to it with

unabated force. The big squash took a premium at your fair that fall,

and I understood that the man who bought it, intended to sell the

seeds for ten cents apiece. (Were they not cheap at that?) But I have

more hounds of the same breed. I learn that one which I despatched to

a distant town, true to its instincts, points to the large yellow

squash there, too, where no hound ever found it before, as its

ancestors did here and in France.

Other seeds I have which will find other things in that corner of my

garden, in like fashion, almost any fruit you wish, every year for

ages, until the crop more than fills the whole garden. You have but

little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these

American days. Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances

without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible

treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold

merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it. Yet farmers'

sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his

throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love

darkness rather than light.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] An Address read to the Middlesex Agricultural Society in Concord,

September, 1860.

WALKING

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,

as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man

as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member

of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an

emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the

minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care

of that.

* * * * *

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who

understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a

genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_, which word is beautifully

derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle

Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going _à la Sainte Terre_,"

to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a

_Sainte-Terrer_," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the

Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and

vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense,

such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from _sans

terre_, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense,

will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.

For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in

a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the

saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering

river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course

to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most

probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by

some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land

from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers,

nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our

expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old

hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our

steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the

spirit of undying adventure, never to return,--prepared to send back

our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you

are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife

and child and friends, and never see them again,--if you have paid

your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are

a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes

have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a

new, or rather an old, order,--not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not

Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable

class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to

the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into,

the Walker,--not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of

fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble

art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are

to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I

do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom,

and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes

only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from

Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the

Walkers. _Ambulator nascitur, non fit._ Some of my townsmen, it is

true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took

ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for

half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have

confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions

they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were

elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of

existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.

"When he came to grene wode,

In a mery mornynge,

There he herde the notes small

Of byrdes mery syngynge.

"It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,

That I was last here;

Me lyste a lytell for to shote

At the donne dere."

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend

four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than

that--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,

absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A

penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am

reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not

only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed

legs, so many of them,--as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not

to stand or walk upon,--I think that they deserve some credit for not

having all committed suicide long ago.

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring

some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the

eleventh hour, or four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem

the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled

with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be

atoned for,--I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance,

to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine

themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months,

aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they

are of,--sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it

were three o'clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the

three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage

which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over

against one's self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out

a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I

wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o'clock in

the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the

evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the

street, scattering a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and

whims to the four winds for an airing,--and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men,

stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them

do not _stand_ it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have

been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments,

making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts,

which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers

that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed.

Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture,

which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping

watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with

it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor

occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the

evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just

before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an

hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking

exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated

hours,--as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs; but is itself the

enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in

search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumbbells for

his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures

unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only

beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's

servant to show him her master's study, she answered, "Here is his

library, but his study is out of doors."

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a

certain roughness of character,--will cause a thicker cuticle to grow

over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and

hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their

delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may

produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin,

accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions.

Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to

our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind

blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to

proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a

scurf that will fall off fast enough,--that the natural remedy is to

be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the

winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the

more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the

laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism,

whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.

That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself

white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would

become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some

sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods

to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "They planted

groves and walks of Platanes," where they took _subdiales

ambulationes_ in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use

to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I

am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods

bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would

fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.

The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my

body is,--I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my

senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of

something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a

shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good

works,--for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I

have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together,

I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great

happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours'

walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.

A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as

the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of

harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within

a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and

the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become

quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of

houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees,

simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest

stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle

of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after

his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not

see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole

in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the

middle of a boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found

his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had

been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was

his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles,

commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without

crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by

the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside.

There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From

many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The

farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and

their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade

and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the

most alarming of them all,--I am pleased to see how little space they

occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that

still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the

traveler thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the

great road,--follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and

it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely,

and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field

into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off

to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from

one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not,

for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion

of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads

are the arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the

thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers. The word is from the Latin

_villa_, which together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and

_vella_, Varro derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the

place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living

by teaming were said _vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, the Latin word

_vilis_ and our vile, also _villain_. This suggests what kind of

degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel

that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk

across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not

travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get

to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they

lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The

landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not

make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old

prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may

name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius,

nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a

truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so

called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as

if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is

the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now,

methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the

bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or

two such roads in every town.

[Illustration: _The Old Marlborough Road_]

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD

Where they once dug for money,

But never found any;

Where sometimes Martial Miles

Singly files,

And Elijah Wood,

I fear for no good:

No other man,

Save Elisha Dugan,--

O man of wild habits,

Partridges and rabbits,

Who hast no cares

Only to set snares,

Who liv'st all alone,

Close to the bone,

And where life is sweetest

Constantly eatest.

When the spring stirs my blood

With the instinct to travel,

I can get enough gravel

On the Old Marlborough Road.

Nobody repairs it,

For nobody wears it;

It is a living way,

As the Christians say.

Not many there be

Who enter therein,

Only the guests of the

Irishman Quin.

What is it, what is it,

But a direction out there,

And the bare possibility

Of going somewhere?

Great guide-boards of stone,

But travelers none;

Cenotaphs of the towns

Named on their crowns.

It is worth going to see

Where you _might_ be.

What king

Did the thing,

I am still wondering;

Set up how or when,

By what selectmen,

Gourgas or Lee,

Clark or Darby?

They're a great endeavor

To be something forever;

Blank tablets of stone,

Where a traveler might groan,

And in one sentence

Grave all that is known;

Which another might read,

In his extreme need.

I know one or two

Lines that would do,

Literature that might stand

All over the land,

Which a man could remember

Till next December,

And read again in the spring,

After the thawing.

If with fancy unfurled

You leave your abode,

You may go round the world

By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private

property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys

comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be

partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will

take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,--when fences shall be

multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to

the _public_ road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall

be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy

a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true

enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the

evil days come.

* * * * *

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we

will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature,

which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is

not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we

are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one.

We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this

actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love

to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we

find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet

exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will

bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I

find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and

inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or

deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to

settle,--varies a few degrees, and does not always point due

southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation,

but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future

lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer

on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a

circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits

which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case

opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I

turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour,

until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the

southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go

free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that

I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind

the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk

thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western

horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there

are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me.

Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the

wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and

withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on

this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the

prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and

not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say

that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have

witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the

settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement,

and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first

generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment.

The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet.

"The world ends there," say they; "beyond there is nothing but a

shoreless sea." It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and

literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into

the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is

a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity

to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed

this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before

it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the

Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of

singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest

walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something

akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,--which, in

some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe,

impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they

were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its

particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging

narrower streams with their dead,--that something like the _furor_

which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred

to a worm in their tails, affects both nations and individuals, either

perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles

over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real

estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that

disturbance into account.

"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a

West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He

appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is

the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night

of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor

only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and

the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial

paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients,

enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when

looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the

foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He

obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men

in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.

"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,

And now was dropped into the western bay;

At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;

To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with

that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and

varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the

European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that

"the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America

than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred

and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there

are but thirty that attain this size." Later botanists more than

confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his

youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its

greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most

gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently

described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes

farther,--farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says:

"As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made

for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World....

The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands

of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of

his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding,

by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses

on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not,

and turns upon his footprints for an instant." When he has exhausted

the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences

his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages." So far

Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the

Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The

younger Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,"

says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From

what part of the world have you come?' As if these vast and fertile

regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of

all the inhabitants of the globe."

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, _Ex Oriente lux; ex

Occidente_ FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of

Canada, tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres

of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger

scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly

colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old

World.... The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is

bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks

larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning

is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains

are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains

broader." This statement will do at least to set against Buffon's

account of this part of the world and its productions.

Linnæus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies _laeta_, _glabra_ plantis

Americanis" (I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the

aspect of American plants); and I think that in this country there are

no, or at most very few, _Africanae bestiae_, African beasts, as the

Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly

fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles

of the centre of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the

inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveler can

lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America

without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than

in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of

America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that

these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and

poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length,

perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the

American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For

I believe that climate does thus react on man,--as there is something

in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man

grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under

these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are

in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our

thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our

sky,--our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our

plains,--our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder

and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests,--and our hearts

shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland

seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveler something, he knows

not what, of _laeta_ and _glabra_, of joyous and serene, in our very

faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America

discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say,--

"Westward the star of empire takes its way."

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise

was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this

country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England;

though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the

West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the

Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too

late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even

the slang of to-day.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a

dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in

something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans,

and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names

were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend.

There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew

only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There

seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys

a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated

along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to

an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I

worked my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the

steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh

ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream,

and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and

the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's

Cliff,--still thinking more of the future than of the past or

present,--I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that

the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges

were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that _this was the

heroic age itself_, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly

the simplest and obscurest of men.

* * * * *

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I

have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of

the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild.

The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the

forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.

Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being

suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every

state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and

vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the

Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and

displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which

the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock spruce or arbor-vitæ

in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for

strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the

marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course.

Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic

reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the

antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have

stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to

feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and

slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance

no civilization can endure,--as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos

devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush,

to which I would migrate,--wild lands where no settler has squatted;

to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as

well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most

delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much

like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his

very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence,

and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel

no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odor

of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly

exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's garments. When I go into

their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy

plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty

merchants' exchanges and libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is

a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. "The

pale white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin

the naturalist says, "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian

was like a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine,

dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields."

Ben Jonson exclaims,--

"How near to good is what is fair!"

So I would say,--

How near to good is what is _wild_!

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet

subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward

incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made

infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country

or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be

climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not

in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When,

formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had

contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted

solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog,--a

natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me.

I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my

native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are

no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda

(_Cassandra calyculata_) which cover these tender places on the

earth's surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of

the shrubs which grow there,--the high blueberry, panicled andromeda,

lambkill, azalea, and rhodora,--all standing in the quaking sphagnum.

I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass

of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders,

transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks,--to have this

fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrowfuls of soil

only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why

not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that

meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and

Art, which I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make

a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though

done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most

tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to

me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops, or what not, soon

wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the

swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so

that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front yards are not

made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back

way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to

dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human

art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide

for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens,

for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.

Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure

air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The

traveler Burton says of it: "Your _morale_ improves; you become frank

and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert,

spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a

mere animal existence." They who have been traveling long on the

steppes of Tartary say, "On reëntering cultivated lands, the

agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and

suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as

if about to die of asphyxia." When I would recreate myself, I seek the

darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen,

most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a _sanctum

sanctorum_. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood

covers the virgin mould, and the same soil is good for men and for

trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect

as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which

he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by

the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive

forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,--such a

town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and

philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and

Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the

Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest

for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years

ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the

very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a

tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's

thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate

days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of

good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by

the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They

survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture!

little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is

exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its

fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous

fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin soil,"

and that "agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown

everywhere else." I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even

because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in

some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a

single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a

swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante

read over the entrance to the infernal regions, "Leave all hope, ye

that enter,"--that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I

saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in

his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp

which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under

water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did

_survey_ from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts,

that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of

the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling

ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it

by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories,

which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not

the sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the

spade, and the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and

begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds

blew the Indian's corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the way

which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with

which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer

is armed with plow and spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but

another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild

thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and

mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild

duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--the

mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the

fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly

and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the

prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light

which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which

perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper

lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light

of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake

Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,

included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It

is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and

Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There

is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself.

Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild

man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The

poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the

accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be

a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to

speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers

drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who

derived his words as often as he used them,--transplanted them to his

page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and

fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at

the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two

musty leaves in a library,--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after

their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with

surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this

yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is

tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or

modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I

am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no

Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no _culture_, in short, can give.

Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a

Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English

literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its

soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected

with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is

unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which

overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the

Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will

endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in

which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The

valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their

crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate,

the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.

Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a

fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the

present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American

mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though

they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common

among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that

recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild

clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are

reminiscent,--others merely _sensible_, as the phrase is,--others

prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health.

The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins,

flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have

their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct

before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy

knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindoos

dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a

tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an

unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state,

that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough

to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild

fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are

the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas,

but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a

strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human

voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for

instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me

of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so

much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and

neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a

faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native

rights,--any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original

wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her

pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray

tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It

is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some

dignity on the herd in my eyes,--already dignified. The seeds of

instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses,

like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a

dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport,

like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised

their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their

horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe.

But, alas! a sudden loud _Whoa!_ would have damped their ardor at

once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and

sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried "Whoa!" to

mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a

sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his

machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the

whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a

_side_ of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a _side_ of

beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be

made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats

still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.

Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization;

and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited

disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their

natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in

the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be

various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite

as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be

regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other

man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did.

Confucius says, "The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are

tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned." But it is

not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to

make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the

best use to which they can be put.

* * * * *

When looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of

military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular

subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The

name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more

human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the

Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they

had been named by the child's rigmarole, _Iery wiery ichery van,

tittle-tol-tan_. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming

over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous

sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap

and meaningless as _Bose_ and _Tray_, the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named

merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to

know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the

individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier

in a Roman army had a name of his own,--because we have not supposed

that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from

his peculiar energy, was called "Buster" by his playmates, and this

rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travelers tell us that an

Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was

his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new

exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely,

who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see

men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less

strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his

own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a

savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my

neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William or Edwin, takes it

off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in

anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear

pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in

some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

* * * * *

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all

around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the

leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to

that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,--a

sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English

nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a

certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are

already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from

the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating

manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,

both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very

late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman,

discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a

chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues

of metal "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of

sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would

soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the

agencies of the universe." But he observed that "those bodies which

underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of

restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of

night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it

has been inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the

inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic

kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to

darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any

more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be

tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only

serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant

future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus

invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and

dusky knowledge, _Gramática parda_, tawny grammar, a kind of

mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It

is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal

need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will

call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for

what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we

know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual

ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance;

ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry

and reading of the newspapers,--for what are the libraries of science

but files of newspapers?--a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them

up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters

abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass

like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would

say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,

sometimes,--Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring

has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their

country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one

unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all

the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of

Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,--while

his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides

being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,--he who knows nothing

about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows

nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he

knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head

in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest

that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more

definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the

insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,--a discovery that

there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our

philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot

_know_ in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely

and with impunity in the face of the sun: Ὡς τὶ νοῶν, οὐ κεῖνον νοήσεις,

"You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing," say the

Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which

we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our

convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate

discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not

know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist,--and

with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who

takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of

his relation to the lawmaker. "That is active duty," says the Vishnu

Purana, "which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for

our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other

knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist."

* * * * *

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories,

how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we

have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly,

though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,--though it be with

struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It

would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of

this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to have

been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a

kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not

contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a

good deal more to live for, aye, and to die for, than they have

commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is

walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his

hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and

the cars return.

"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,

And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,

Traveler of the windy glens,

Why hast thou left my ear so soon?"

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few

are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men

appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than

the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of

the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape

there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world

Κόσμος, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and

we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border

life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and

transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state

into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.

Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a

will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon

nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality

so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The

walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town

sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their

owners' deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the

actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the

word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have

myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still

as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade

from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter

painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are

commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

* * * * *

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the

setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its

golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble

hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and

shining family had settled there in that part of the land called

Concord, unknown to me,--to whom the sun was servant,--who had not

gone into society in the village,--who had not been called on. I saw

their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in

Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as

they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew

through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed

hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have

sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which

leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,

as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected

skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their

neighbor,--notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team

through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives.

Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines

and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no

politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they

were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and

hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of

a distant hive in May,--which perchance was the sound of their

thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see

their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences

embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of

my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and

recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to

recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their

cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I

should move out of Concord.

* * * * *