which one may sometimes note in little running brooks. "I see stretched
from side to side of this smooth brook where it is three or four feet
wide what seems to indicate an invisible waving line, like a cobweb
against which the water is heaped up a very little. This line is
constantly swayed to and fro, as if by the current or wind, bellying
forward here and there. I try repeatedly to catch and break it with my
hand and let the water run free, but still to my surprise I clutch
nothing but fluid, and the imaginary line keeps its place."
A little closer scrutiny would have shown him that this waving water
line was probably caused in some way by the meeting of two volumes or
currents of water.
The most novel and interesting observation I can now recall is his
discovery of how the wild apple-tree in the pastures triumphs over the
browsing cattle, namely, by hedging itself about by a dense thorny
growth, keeping the cows at arm's length as it were, and then sending
up a central shoot beyond their reach.
One of the most acute observations Thoreau's Journals contain is not
upon nature at all, but upon the difference between men and women "in
respect to the adornment of their heads:" "Do you ever see an old or
jammed bonnet on the head of a woman at a public meeting? But look at
any assembly of men with their hats on; how large a proportion of the
hats will be old, weather-beaten, and indented; but, I think, so much
more picturesque and interesting. One farmer rides by my door in a hat
which it does me good to see, there is so much character in it, so much
independence, to begin with, and then affection for his old friends,
etc., etc. I should not wonder if there were lichens on it. . . . Men
wear their hats for use, women theirs for ornament. I have seen the
greatest philosopher in the town with what the traders would call a
'shocking bad hat' on, but the woman whose bonnet does not come up to
the mark is at best a blue-stocking."
So clever an observation upon anything in nature as that is hard to
find in the Journals.
To observe is to discriminate and take note of all the factors.
One day while walking in my vineyard, lamenting the damage the storm
of yesterday had wrought in it, my ear caught, amid the medley of
other sounds and songs, an unfamiliar bird-note from the air overhead.
Gradually it dawned upon my consciousness that this was not the call
of any of our native birds, but of a stranger. Looking steadily in
the direction the sound came, after some moments I made out the form
of a bird flying round and round in a large circle high in air, and
momentarily uttering its loud sharp call. The size, the shape, the
manner, and the voice of the bird were all strange. In a moment I knew
it to be an English skylark, apparently adrift and undecided which way
to go. Finally it seemed to make up its mind, and then bore away to the
north. My ear had been true to its charge.
The man who told me that some of our birds took an earth bath, and some
of them a water bath, and a few of them took both, had looked closer
into this matter than I had. The sparrows usually earth their plumage,
but the English sparrow does both. The farm boy who told a naturalist a
piece of news about the turtles, namely, that the reason why we never
see any small turtles about the fields is because for two or three
years the young turtles bury themselves in the ground and keep quite
hidden from sight, had used his eyes to some purpose. This was a real
observation.
Just as a skilled physician, in diagnosing a case, picks out the
significant symptoms and separates them from the rest, so the real
observer, with eye and ear, seizes what is novel and characteristic
in the scenes about him. His attention goes through the play at the
surface and reaches the rarer incidents beneath or beyond.
Richard Jefferies was not strictly an observer; he was a living and
sympathetic spectator of the nature about him, a poet, if you please,
but he tells us little that is memorable or suggestive. His best books
are such as the "Gamekeeper at Home," and the "Amateur Poacher," where
the human element is brought in, and the descriptions of nature are
relieved by racy bits of character drawing. By far the best thing of
all is a paper which he wrote shortly before his death, called "My Old
Village." It is very beautiful and pathetic, and reveals the heart and
soul of the man as nothing else he has written does. I must permit
myself to transcribe one paragraph of it. It shows how he, too, was
under the spell of the past, and such a recent past, too:—
"I think I have heard that the oaks are down. They may be standing or
down, it matters nothing to me; the leaves I last saw upon them are
gone for evermore, nor shall I ever see them come there again, ruddy
in spring. I would not see them again, even if I could; they could
never look again as they used to do. There are too many memories there.
The happiest days become the saddest afterward; let us never go back,
lest we, too, die. There are no such oaks anywhere else, none so tall
and straight, and with such massive heads, on which the sun used to
shine as if on the globe of the earth, one side in shadow, the other
in bright light. How often I have looked at oaks since, and yet have
never been able to get the same effect from them! Like an old author
printed in another type, the words are the same, but the sentiment is
different. The brooks have ceased to run. There is no music now at the
old hatch where we used to sit, in danger of our lives, happy as kings,
on the narrow bar over the deep water. The barred pike that used to
come up in such numbers are no more among the flags. The perch used to
drift down the stream and then bring up again. The sun shone there for
a very long time, and the water rippled and sang, and it always seemed
to me that I could feel the rippling and the singing and the sparkling
back through the centuries. The brook is dead, for where man goes,
nature ends. I dare say there is water there still, but it is not the
brook; the brook is gone, like John Brown's soul [not our John Brown].
There used to be clouds over the fields, white clouds in blue summer
skies. I have lived a good deal on clouds; they have been meat to me
often; they bring something to the spirit which even the trees do not.
I see clouds now sometimes when the iron gripe of hell permits for a
minute or two; they are very different clouds and speak differently. I
long for some of the old clouds that had no memories. There were nights
in those times over those fields, not darkness, but Night, full of
glowing suns and glowing richness of life that sprang up to meet them.
The nights are there still; they are everywhere, nothing local in the
night; but it is not the Night to me seen through the window."
In the literature of nature I know of no page so pathetic and human.
Moralizing about nature or through nature is tedious enough, and yet,
unless the piece has some moral or emotional background, it does not
touch us. In other words, to describe a thing for the mere sake of
describing it, to make a dead set at it like a reporter, whatever may
be the case in painting, it will not do in literature. The object must
be informed with meaning, and to do this the creative touch of the
imagination is required. Take this passage from Whitman on the night,
and see if there is not more than mere description there:—
"A large part of the sky seemed just laid in great splashes of
phosphorus. You could look deeper in, farther through, than usual; the
orbs thick as heads of wheat in a field. Not that there was any special
brilliancy either—nothing near as sharp as I have seen of keen winter
nights, but a curious general luminousness throughout to sight, sense,
and soul. The latter had much to do with it. . . . Now, indeed, if never
before, the heavens declared the glory of God. It was to the full the
sky of the Bible, of Arabia, of the prophets, and of the oldest poems."
Or this touch of a January night on the Delaware River:—
"Overhead, the splendor indescribable; yet something haughty, almost
supercilious, in the night; never did I realize more latent sentiment,
almost _passion_, in the silent interminable stars up there. One can
understand on such a night why, from the days of the Pharaohs or Job,
the dome of heaven, sprinkled with planets, has supplied the subtlest,
deepest criticism on human pride, glory, ambition."
Matthew Arnold quotes this passage from Obermann as showing a rare
feeling for nature:—
"My path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. Feeling inclined to
muse, and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship in being
all night out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise. I descended a
steep bank, and got upon the shore of the lake where its ripple came
up and expired. The air was calm; every one was at rest; I remained
there for hours. Toward morning the moon shed over the earth and waters
the ineffable melancholy of her last gleams. Nature seems unspeakably
grand, when, plunged, in a long reverie, one hears the rippling of the
waters upon a solitary strand, in the calm of a night still enkindled
and luminous with the setting moon.
"Sensibility beyond utterance, charm and torment of our vain years;
vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and
everywhere impenetrable; all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom,
delicious self-abandonment—everything that a mortal heart can contain
of life-weariness and yearning, I felt it all. I experienced it all,
in this memorable night. I have made a grave step toward the age of
decline. I have swallowed up ten years of life at once. Happy the
simple whose heart is always young!"
The moral element is behind this also, and is the source of its value
and charm. In literature never nature for her own sake, but for the
sake of the soul which is over and above all.
II
One of the most desirable things in life is a fresh impression of an
old fact or scene. One's love of nature may be a constant factor, yet
it is only now and then that he gets a fresh impression of the charm
and meaning of nature; only now and then that the objects without and
the mood within so fit together that we have a vivid and original
sense of the beauty and significance that surround us. How often do we
really see the stars? Probably a great many people never see them at
all—that is, never look upon them with any thrill of emotion. If I
see them a few times a year, I think myself in luck. If I deliberately
go out to see them, I am quite sure to miss them; but occasionally,
as one glances up to them in his lonely night walk, the mind opens,
or the heaven opens—which is it?—and he has a momentary glimpse
of their ineffable splendor and significance. How overwhelming, how
awe-inspiring! His thought goes like a lightning flash into that
serene abyss, and then the veil is drawn again. One's science, one's
understanding, tells him he is a voyager on the celestial deep, that
the earth beneath his feet is a star among stars, that we can never be
any more in the heavens than we are now, or any more within reach of
the celestial laws and forces; but how rare the mood in which we can
realize this astounding fact, in which we can get a fresh and vivid
impression of it! To have it ever present with one in all its naked
grandeur would perhaps be more than we could bear.
The common and the familiar—how soon they cease to impress us! The
great service of genius, speaking through art and literature, is to
pierce through our callousness and indifference and give us fresh
impressions of things as they really are; to present things in new
combinations, or from new points of view, so that they shall surprise
and delight us like a new revelation. When poetry does this, or when
art does it, or when science does it, it recreates the world for us,
and for the moment we are again Adam in paradise.
Herein lies one compensation to the lover of nature who is an enforced
dweller in the town: the indifference which familiarity breeds is not
his. His weekly or monthly sallies into the country yield him a rare
delight. To his fresh, eager senses the charm of novelty is over all.
Country people look with a kind of pitying amusement upon the delight
of their newly arrived city friends; but would we not, after all, give
something if we could exchange eyes with them for a little while?
We who write about nature pick out, I suspect, only the rare moments
when we have had glimpses of her, and make much of them. Our lives
are dull, and our minds crusted over with rubbish like those of other
people. Then writing about nature, as about most other subjects, is an
expansive process; we are under the law of evolution; we grow the germ
into the tree; a little original observation goes a good way. Life is a
compendium. The record in our minds and hearts is in shorthand. When we
come to write it out, we are surprised at its length and significance.
What we feel in a twinkling it takes a long time to tell to another.
When I pass along by a meadow in June, where the bobolinks are singing
and the daisies dancing in the wind, and the scent of the clover is in
the air, and where the boys and girls are looking for wild strawberries
in the grass, I take it all in in a glance, it enters swiftly through
all my senses; but if I set about writing an account of my experience
for my reader, how long and tedious the process, how I must beat about
the bush! And then, if I would have him see and feel it, I must avoid
a point-blank description and bring it to him, or him to it, by a kind
of indirection, so as to surprise him and give him more than I at first
seemed to promise.
To a countryman like myself the presence of natural objects, the
open face of the country, sheds a cheering and soothing influence at
all times; but it is only at rare intervals that he experiences the
thrill of a fresh impression. I find that a kind of preoccupation,
as the farmer with his work, the angler with his rod, the sportsman
with his gun, the walker with his friend, the lounger with his book,
affords conditions that are not to be neglected. So much will steal
in at the corners of your eyes; the unpremeditated glance, when the
mind is passive and receptive, often stirs the soul. Upon whom does
the brook make such an impression as upon the angler? How he comes to
know its character! how he studies its every phase! how he feels it
through that rod and line as if they were a part of himself! I pity
the person who does not get at least one or two fresh impressions of
the charm and sweetness of nature in the spring. Later in the season
it gets to be more of an old story; but in March, when the season is
early, and in April, when the season is late, there occasionally come
days which awaken a new joy in the heart. Every recurring spring one
experiences this fresh delight. There is nothing very tangible yet in
awakening nature, but there is something in the air, some sentiment in
the sunshine and in the look of things, a prophecy of life and renewal,
that sends a thrill through the frame. The first sparrow's song, the
first robin's call, the first bluebird's warble, the first phœbe's
note—who can hear it without emotion? Or the first flock of migrating
geese or ducks—how much they bring north with them! When the
red-shouldered starlings begin to gurgle in the elms or golden willows
along the marshes and watercourses, you will feel spring then; and
if you look closely upon the ground beneath them, you will find that
sturdy advanced guard of our floral army, the skunk cabbage, thrusting
his spear-point up through the ooze, and spring will again quicken your
pulse.
One seems to get nearer to nature in the early spring days: all
screens are removed, the earth everywhere speaks directly to you; she
is not hidden by verdure and foliage; there is a peculiar delight in
walking over the brown turf of the fields that one cannot feel later
on. How welcome the smell of it, warmed by the sun; the first breath
of the reviving earth. How welcome the full, sparkling watercourses,
too, everywhere drawing the eye; by and by they will be veiled by the
verdure and shrunken by the heat. When March is kind, for how much her
slightest favors count! The other evening, as I stood on the slope of
a hill in the twilight, I heard a whistling of approaching wings, and
presently a woodcock flying low passed near me. I could see his form
and his long curved wings dimly against the horizon; his whistling
slowly vanished in the gathering night, but his passage made something
stir and respond within me. March was on the wing, she was abroad in
the soft still twilight searching out the moist, springy places where
the worms first come to the surface and where the grass first starts;
and her course was up the valley from the south. A day or two later
I sat on a hillside in the woods late in the day, amid the pines
and hemlocks, and heard the soft, elusive spring call of the little
owl—a curious musical undertone hardly separable from the silence; a
bell, muffled in feathers, tolling in the twilight of the woods and
discernible only to the most alert ear. But it was the voice of spring,
the voice of the same impulse that sent the woodcock winging his way
through the dusk, that was just beginning to make the pussy-willows
swell and the grass to freshen in the spring runs.
Occasionally, of a bright, warm, still day in March, such as we have
had the present season, the little flying spider is abroad. It is the
most delicate of all March tokens, but very suggestive. Its long,
waving threads of gossamer, invisible except when the sunlight falls
upon them at a particular angle, stream out here and there upon the
air, a filament of life, reaching and reaching as if to catch and
detain the most subtle of the skyey influences.
Nature is always new in the spring, and lucky are we if it finds us new
also.
XIII
A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS
How beautiful is fertility! A landscape of fruitful and well-cultivated
fields; an unbroken expanse of grass; a thick, uniform growth of
grain—how each of these fills and satisfies the eye! And it is not
because we are essentially utilitarian and see the rich loaf and
the fat beef as the outcome of it all, but because we read in it an
expression of the beneficence and good-will of the earth. We love to
see harmony between man and nature; we love peace and not war; we love
the adequate, the complete. A perfect issue of grass or grain is a
satisfaction to look upon, because it is a success. These things have
the beauty of an end exactly fulfilled, the beauty of perfect fitness
and proportion. The barren in nature is ugly and repels us, unless it
be on such a scale and convey such a suggestion of power as to awaken
the emotion of the sublime. What can be less inviting than a neglected
and exhausted Virginia farm, the thin red soil showing here and there
through the ragged and scanty turf? and what, on the other hand, can
please the eye of a countryman more than the unbroken verdancy and
fertility of a Kentucky blue-grass farm? I find I am very apt to take
a farmer's view of a country. That long line of toiling and thrifty
yeomen back of me seems to have bequeathed something to my blood that
makes me respond very quickly to a fertile and well-kept landscape,
and that, on the other hand, makes me equally discontented in a poor,
shabby one. All the way from Washington till I struck the heart of
Kentucky, the farmer in me was unhappy; he saw hardly a rood of land
that he would like to call his own. But that remnant of the wild man of
the woods, which most of us still carry, saw much that delighted him,
especially down the New River, where the rocks and the waters, and the
steep forest-clad mountains were as wild and as savage as anything he
had known in his early Darwinian ages. But when we emerged upon the
banks of the Great Kanawha, the man of the woods lost his interest and
the man of the fields saw little that was comforting.
When we cross the line into Kentucky, I said, we shall see a change.
But no, we did not. The farmer still groaned in spirit; no thrifty
farms, no substantial homes, no neat villages, no good roads anywhere,
but squalor and sterility on every hand. Nearly all the afternoon we
rode through a country like the poorer parts of New England, unredeemed
by anything like New England thrift. It was a country of coal, a very
new country, geologically speaking, and the top-soil did not seem to
have had time to become deepened and enriched by vegetable mould. Near
sundown, as I glanced out of the window, I thought I began to see a
change. Presently I was very sure I did. It began to appear in the
more grassy character of the woods. Then I caught sight of peculiarly
soft and uniform grassy patches here and there in the open. Then in
a few moments more the train had shot us fairly into the edge of the
blue-grass region, and the farmer in me began to be on the alert. We
had passed in a twinkling from a portion of the earth's surface which
is new, which is of yesterday, to a portion which is of the oldest,
from the carboniferous to the lower silurian. Here, upon this lower
silurian, the earth that saw and nourished the great monsters and
dragons was growing the delicate blue-grass. It had taken all these
millions upon millions of years to prepare the way for this little
plant to grow to perfection. I thought I had never seen fields and low
hills look so soft in the twilight; they seemed clad in greenish gray
fur. As we neared Mount Sterling, how fat and smooth the land looked;
what long, even, gently flowing lines against the fading western sky,
broken here and there by herds of slowly grazing or else reposing
and ruminating cattle! What peace and plenty it suggested! From a
land raw and crude and bitter like unripe fruit, we had suddenly been
transported into the midst of one ripe and mellow with the fullness of
time. It was sweet to look upon. I was seized with a strong desire to
go forth and taste it by a stroll through it in the twilight.
In the course of the ten days that followed, the last ten days of May,
I had an opportunity to taste it pretty well, and my mind has had a
grassy flavor ever since. I had an opportunity to see this restless and
fitful American nature of ours in a more equable and beneficent mood
than I had ever before seen it in; all its savageness and acridness
gone, no thought now but submission to the hand and wants of man. I
afterward saw the prairies of Illinois, and the vast level stretches
of farming country of northern Ohio and Indiana, but these lands were
nowhere quite so human, quite so beautiful, or quite so productive as
the blue-grass region. One likes to see the earth's surface lifted up
and undulating a little, as if it heaved and swelled with emotion; it
suggests more life, and at the same time that the sense of repose is
greater. There is no repose in a prairie; it is stagnation, it is a
_dead_ level. Those immense stretches of flat land pain the eye, as
if all life and expression had gone from the face of the earth. There
is just unevenness enough in the blue-grass region to give mobility
and variety to the landscape. From almost any given point one commands
broad and extensive views—of immense fields of wheat or barley, or
corn or hemp, or grass or clover, or of woodland pastures.