I wonder, if I died to-night,
And you should hear to-morrow,
You'd mourn to think this one dear friend
Had bid good-bye to sorrow.
I wonder, if you saw a bird,
The hunter's dart outflying,
You'd lure it back with loving word
To danger, pain, and dying.
I wonder, if you saw a rose,
Plucked quick in June's surrender,
You'd wish it back upon the bough,
To wither in November.
I wonder, if you watched the moon,
The tempest's rack outstripping,
You'd grieve to see its silver prow
In cloudless ether dipping.
I wonder, if you heard a thrush
Laugh out amid the clover,
You'd weep because its cage door oped--
Its captive days were over.
I wonder, if, some happy day,
When you have found your haven,
You'll mourn to find this one dear friend
Had been so long in heaven.
* * * * *
When I die bury me by the sea. Let my first hundred years in the spirit
be spent on a sunny sand-bank watching the sapphire tides break over a
bluff of lifted rocks. What is any earthly trouble but a dissolving
dream, when one may bury the face in golden moss and sniff the salt
spume of the sea! Over the blue verge of the horizon lies Spain, and I
build its castles hourly here in my heart. A distant echo rings in my
ears of trucks driven over stony streets, of the crack of the cabman's
whip and the shout of profane teamsters, but the only semblance to cruel
driver and jaded beast of burden seen in the seaside paradise of which I
write is a fat huckster and a still fatter donkey who draws the large
man where he (the donkey) listeth. Here on this lifted moorland, if one
wishes to go anywhere he rises up and goes forth on a carpet of crimson
moss and yellow grass and is driven by a chariot of untired winds.
Behind us are miles of purple moss swept by ragged shreds of September
fog, and musical, here and there, with bells of grazing herds; while
before us, behind us, and all around us stretches the boundless,
unfathomable and mysterious sea.
* * * * *
Did you ever hear of the island of Avilion? That enchanted place where
"falls not hail, or rain, nor ever wind blows loudly," whose orchard
lands and bowery hollows lie lapsed in summer seas? I found it one day
when I was sailing on Casco bay in a boat hardly bigger than a peanut
shell. Tennyson found it long ago in a dream, and to it he sent the good
King Arthur that he might "heal him of his grievous wound" within the
balm of its heavenly peace. But I found it in reality, and to it I took
a care-worn lady and a work-weary brain, that I might perchance renew
under its sunny spell a strength that was well-nigh spent. I found my
island under another name, to be sure, but I rechristened it within the
first hour of my landing. It is not the place, my dear, for featherheads
and butterflies, this island of Avilion. It is not the place for the
descendants of Flora McFlimsy to go with their new gowns and their
French heels. All such would vote my little island a bore, and run up a
flag for the first inland-bound steamer to put into port and carry them
away. It has no ball-room, no promenade-hall under cover, no brass band,
no merry-go-round, but instead it has meadow-lands that are brimful of
bird songs; it has wild strawberries that bring their ruby wine to the
very lips of the laughing sea; it has such sunsets as visit the dreams
of poets and the skies of Italy; it has great rocks that are woven all
over with webs of wild convolvulus vine, whose airy goblets of pink and
blue hold nectar for the booming bee to sip; and it has marguerite
daisies by the tens of thousands, and wild roses that carry the tint of
your baby's palm and the honey of sugar-sweet dew within the inclosure
of their small curled cup. It is hardly bigger than a Cunarder, this
little Chebeague island, whose name I changed to Avilion, and from
wave-washed keel to flowery bowsprit the eye never lights upon a
defilement or a stain. It is the only place in all my wanderings where I
never found a peanut shell nor a tin can thrown out to defile nature's
beauty.
There was not a single bad odor on my island during the whole ten days
of my tarrying, and I am told by those who are old inhabitants that
such a thing never was known to it. A soft wind is always blowing, but
the only merchandise it carries is wild thyme perfume and the fragrant
airs that waft from meadow-lands and old-fashioned gardens full of spice
pinks and cinnamon roses. Now and then a hunter's fog slips the leash of
its viewless hounds and with noiseless "halloo" scours the island for
the prey it tracks but seems never to corral. Now and then a sudden
tumult seizes the tides that climb and fall on the shiny rocks and the
air is full of the throb of soft drums and the music of flutes that are
beat and blown a moment, then die away as quickly as they came, like a
strolling band that marches through a village street, then over the
hills and far away. Now and then a troop of crows rise silently from out
the shadow of the pines and go sailing between the lazy eyes that follow
and the sun, until, settling down upon some meadow stacked with new-cut
hay, they break into clamorous laughter that taunts you with its shrill
derision. Always, from dawn to dewfall, the world about little Chebeague
is full of swallows that dart and soar and flit like shadows. They
seldom sing, and yet the few notes they thread upon the air sparkle like
diamonds where they fall. Some strange bird, with a low, sleepy song
like the crooning of a child that is half asleep, or like a shepherd
boy's pipe idly blown beneath the noonday willows, is always haunting
the groves of Avilion with an undiscovered presence. I have spent hours
looking for him, yet never found him. Sometimes I have been led to half
believe the fellow exists only in the fancy of a spellbound idler like
you and me.
Just at sunset a little feathered violinist of the island whips out his
fiddle and draws the bow so delicately across its vibrant strings, while
the golden sun slips tranquilly beneath the tinted waters of Casco bay,
that the soul of the listener is fairly attenuated like a high C
diminuendo with the spell of so much beauty. I don't know the name of
the bird either, but he is going to sing for us all in heaven later on.
Such performers do not end all here any more than Beethoven did.
It was my custom during the time I spent at Little Chebeague to devote
the entire day to strolling or lying at length upon the rocks--
Nothing but me 'twixt earth and sky;
An emerald and an amethyst stone,
Hung and hollowed for me alone.
I grew to love the solitude with all my heart, and the thought of
returning to the mainland with its jargon and its bustle was like the
thought of tophet to the poor little peri for whom the gate of paradise
had swung. Sometimes I would board the small boat that two or three
times a day threads in and out of the blue water-way and visit adjacent
islands hardly less beautiful than my chosen home.
There is Long Island, far more beautiful by reason of its East End,
where as yet the tide of a full-fledged summer resort has not come.
There is an old-fashioned country roadhouse, such as we knew before the
landscape gardener and the boulevard fiend were turned loose upon our
rural towns. To follow their windings is heaven enough for me. A fringe
of buttercups to fence the way, thickets of underbrush to darken the
near distance, constant little ups and downs where the road slips into
hollow to follow the call of a romping brook or climb a hill to watch
for the sea. Wintergreen berries and russet patches everywhere, and the
snow of blackberry bushes in bloom far as the eye can travel.
"There is an old-time rail fence!" cried a visitor from the booming west
one day; "my God, let me get out and touch it! I haven't seen anything
but barbed wire since I left New England!" And he did get out of the
buckboard in which he was driving and chipped away a big brown fence
sliver as a memento. These roads I am talking about lead nowhere in
particular. They, as often as not, end in a fisherman's back dooryard,
but they are sweet as a young girl's caprice while they last.
One day we strolled across one of the islands and found a battlement of
rocks on the seaside that it would have taken a solid month to explore.
Oh, there was enough on the bar at ebb tide at Avilion to while away an
age of idle time.
Sometimes we took it into our heads to ride. Then the choice lay between
Charlie the Christian--so named for his good behavior and gentle
ways--and the one roadster the island produced, a nag in the rough, who
held his head high and cavorted with the stride of a jamboreeing boy.
The choice made, the hour must be watched to catch the low tide over to
Big Chebeague, for there are no wagon roads in Avilion. Six hours of
safety, as to the low water mark, is the limit of one day's riding, and
much can be done in the way of riding in a half-dozen hours' time. A
spin across the bar, the climbing of a rocky road, a sweep of
seaward-facing pike, with dips into ferny hollows and ascents to
pine-crowned bluffs, make the trip worth recording, and if to the
exhilaration of the ride you add a dismount now and then to gather
wintergreen and pick roses, with a loiter through a church-yard where
many Hamiltons, both pre-Adamite and ante-historic, are sleeping the
sleep of the just, you have the whole meaning of an afternoon outing on
Big Chebeague.
Every evening after supper there was a pilgrimage to the west side of
the island, not to be dispensed with by descendants of those remnant
tribes that once worshiped the sun. Ranging from north to south as far
as the eye can sweep, from westward, fronting little Chebeague, lies
Casco bay, the loveliest bit of water in all the world. I say
unhesitatingly the loveliest, because I do not believe that Naples, nor
Sorrento, nor any far-famed Italian watering-place can match the coast
of Maine for beauty. Into this bay, like petals from a wind-shaken
blossom tree, are dropped hundreds of islands. Far to the west the White
mountains melt upon the horizon in airy outline of blue, and over all
each day is repeated the ancient miracle of the sun's decline. Sometimes
a single cloud, like a tomb, receives the bright embodiment of day and
hides it from our sight behind such draperies as orient never wrought
nor monarch dreamed. Sometimes this fair god lies at length upon a bier
of purple porphyry, while flakes of crushed gems strew his couch with
rainbow dust, and all the air is full of rose-red censers, edged with
gold. Sometimes he drops below the verge, holding to the last a wine cup
brimmed with sparkling vintage that spills and trickles down the hills.
Sometimes he returns in an afterglow, as the dead come back to us in
dreams, the tenderer and the sweeter for their second coming. However
the sun may set in Avilion, each setting is the most beautiful and best
to be desired.
* * * * *
I heard someone bewailing the death of a friend the other day. The staff
on which he had leaned, the bread which had ministered to his needs, the
very light that had filled his eyes seemed caught away, and he mourned
as one for whom there was no comfort possible. I saw a mother leaning
above an empty crib, whose dainty pillow no nestling head should ever
press again. I marked the terrible yet voiceless grief that ate at a
bereaved father's self-control, until no wind-blown reed was ever so
shorn of self-reliant strength. I saw a wife whose love had sunk within
the grave where her young husband was laid, as the sun sets within a
cloud of stormy night. I saw an old man bow his snowy head because the
faithful one whose hand had lain in his for more than fifty years had
vanished from his sight forever. I heard a little child lamenting at
bed-time the lullaby song which its dead mother's tender lips should
never sing again. But sadder than all these things, more tragical than
any death which merely picks the blossom of life and bears it onward to
heaven, as the gardener plucks the choicest rose to grace some festival
of joy, is the scene when a trusted friendship dies; when faith which
has endured the test of years gives up the breath of loyal life and
sinks to hopeless unawakened death. Never think that you have shed your
bitterest tears until you have stood at such a death-bed. Think not the
measurement of any mortal grief has been found until you have sunk the
plummet-line of such a sorrow. That grave shall never burst its sheath
to let the soul of friendship's betrayal free, like a lily on the Easter
air. That door shall never swing like the bars of a cage to let a
murdered faith flash forth like the plume of a singing bird to seek the
stars. Over the grave of a dead and buried trust no resurrection-note
can ever sound like a bugle-call across the dewy hills to rouse the
sleeper from his couch. God pity all who linger by the heaped-up mound
where love's forgotten dreams lie buried, and grant oblivion as the only
surcease for their bitter sorrow.
* * * * *
The days and nights swing equally upon the golden balance of time. The
year is whitening with its crop of frost-blossoms from which no
harvest-home has ever yet been called. Like an unwritten page, the new
year lies before us in untrodden fields of shining snow. God grant the
footsteps of Death be not the first to track the unbroken path that lies
before us. May joy and peace and love, like the roots of the violets
under the snow, quicken and blossom for all of us as the year advances,
and may our progress be, like January's, right steadily onward unto
June!
* * * * *
As I write there is a sudden break in the hush of night, and faint and
clear and sweet upon the listening ear falls the sound of "taps" from
the camp in Fort Sheridan woods. I drop my pencil and listen to it, as I
always do, with almost a spirit of reverent awe. The hard day's work is
done, the time for rest has come, and over all the busy camp silence
falls like the shadow of a brooding wing. The new moon, half hidden by
drifting clouds sends a rippling play of silver through the woodbine
leaves, and from the top of the maple tree, a thrush dreams forth a bar
of liquid music in its sleep. All the world is going to sleep, and God
grant, say I, that when the time for the final good-night has come for
you and for me the call for "taps," blown from some celestial bugle the
other side the mystic gate may fall as sweetly upon our ears and find us
as ready to sink to slumber.
* * * * *
Did you ever hunt for eggs in a haymow? If you did you can remember just
how, with bated breath, you crept through the fragrant glooms of the old
barn and searched the dusty place for nests. You can recall, perhaps,
the shaft of sunlight that broke through the crevice of the door and
showed you old speckle-top in her corner. You can hear again her furious
cackle when you dislodged her from her nest and gathered the warm eggs
she had hovered under her wings. You remember the excitement of the
search and the perfection of content which settled within your soul as
you gathered the basketful of milk-white eggs upon your arm and picked
your way down the steep ladder which led to the main floor and "all out
doors." Scarcely any excitement or exhilaration of later years can
compare with the joy of hen's-nest hunting when you were young.
Did you ever go berrying? With a tin pail swinging from your wrist and
your oldest gown upon your back, have you climbed the hill, jumped the
fences and sought the side-hill pasture where the blackberries grew
purple in the shade? Can you recall much, in all the years that thread
between that happy time and this, which can transcend the pleasure of
those wildwood tramps? Even now I seem to fix my eyes upon a clump of
bushes by the old rail fence. They are domed high with verdure and show
dusky hollows underneath, where, my skilled eye tells me, lurk spoils
fit for Bacchus and all his nymphs. I part the leaves, a snowy moth
flutters out of the green dusk and wavers like a snowflake in the warm,
sweet air. I carefully reach my hand away inside the fairy bower of
crumpled leaf and twisted vine and draw it forth purple with the juice
of overripe berries that dissolve at a touch. With these I fill my pail,
and all too often, I blush to own it, my mouth also, until twilight
sends me home saturated with sunshine, late clover blooms and berry
juice.
Ah, my dear, all this was fun while it lasted, but there is a more
exciting quest than hunting eggs or finding berries, in which we all of
us engage as the years of our mortal pilgrimage go hurrying by. It is
the search for happiness--a search we never give up nor grow too old to
maintain. Forgetting the disappointments and the satieties of the dead
years, we look forward to the new as the hidden nestfull of unchipped
shells of fresh experience and untried delights. God bless us all, and
prosper us to find the eggs and the berries before we die. Perhaps the
service of love we do others shall prove the bush that bears the
sweetest and the ripest clusters, and the nestfull that shall develop
the whitest store of all life's opportunities.
* * * * *
A genuine mother could no more raise a bad boy into a bad man than a
robin could raise a hawk. When I say "genuine mother" I mean something
more than a mother who prays with her boy, and teaches him Bible texts,
and sends him to Sunday-school. All those things are good and
indispensable as far as they go, but there is a lot more to do to train
a boy besides praying with him, just as there are things necessary to
the cultivation of a garden besides reading a manual. To succeed with
roses and corn one must prune, weed and hoe a great deal. To make a boy
into a pure man, a mother must do more than pray. She must live with him
in the sense of comrade and closest friend. She must stand by him in
time of temptation as the pilot sticks to the wheel when rapids are
ahead. She must never desert him to go off to superintend outside duties
any more than the engineer deserts his post and goes into the baggage
car to read up on engineering, when his train is pounding across the
country at forty miles an hour.
* * * * *