PLACES OF RETIREMENT
“Good God, how sweet are all things here!
How beautiful the fields appear!
How cleanly do we feed and lie!
Lord, what good hours do we keep!
How quietly we sleep!”
CHARLES COTTON (a friend of Izaak Walton)
_April 29th_.
I have been spending a Sunday of retirement in the woods. I came out
with a strange, deep sense of depression, and though I knew it was
myself and not the world that was sad, yet I could not put it away from
me. ... As I write, the wood seems full of voices, the little rustling
of leaves, the minute sounds of twigs chafing together, the cry of
frogs from the swamp so steady and monotonous that it scarcely arrests
attention. Of odours, a-plenty! Just behind me, so that by turning my
head I can see into their cool green depths, are a number of hemlock
trees, the breath of which is incalculably sweet. All the earth the
very earth itself has a good rich growing odour, pleasant to smell.
These things have been here a thousand years a million years and yet
they are not stale, but are ever fresh, ever serene, ever here to
loosen one’s crabbed spirit and make one quietly happy. It seems to me
I could not live if it were not possible often to come thus alone to
the woods.
...On later walking I discover that here and there on warm southern
slopes the dog-tooth violet is really in bloom, and worlds of hepatica,
both lavender and white, among the brown leaves. One of the notable
sights of the hillsides at this time of the year is the striped maple,
the long wands rising straight and chaste among thickets of
less-striking young birches and chestnuts, and having a bud of a
delicate pink—a marvel of minute beauty. A little trailing arbutus I
found and renewed my joy with one of the most exquisite odours of all
the spring; Solomon’s seal thrusting up vivid green cornucopias from
the lifeless earth, and often near a root or stone the red partridge
berries among their bright leaves. The laurel on the hills is sharply
visible, especially when among deciduous trees, and along the old brown
roads are patches of fresh wintergreen. In a cleft of the hills near
the top of Norwottuck, though the day is warm, I found a huge
snowbank—the last held trench of old winter, the last guerilla of the
cold, driven to the fastnesses of the hills.... I have enjoyed this day
without trying. After the first hour or so of it all the worries
dropped away, all the ambitions, all the twisted thoughts—
It is strange how much thrilling joy there is in the discovery of the
ages-old miracle of returning life in the woods: each green adventurer,
each fragrant joy, each bird-call—and the feel of the soft, warm
sunshine upon one’s back after months of winter. On any terms life is
good. The only woe, the only Great Woe, is the woe of never having been
born. Sorrow, yes; failure, yes; weakness, yes the sad loss of dear
friends—yes! But oh, the good God: I still live!
Being alone without feeling alone is one of the great experiences of
life, and he who practises it has acquired an infinitely valuable
possession. People fly to crowds for happinesss not knowing that all
the happiness they find there they must take with them. Thus they
divert and distract that within them which creates power and joy, until
by flying always away from themselves, seeking satisfaction from
without rather than from within, they become infinitely boresome to
themselves, so that they can scarcely bear a moment of their own
society.
But if once a man have a taste of true and happy retirement, though it
be but a short hour, or day, now and then, he has found, or is
beginning to find, a sure place of refuge, of blessed renewal, toward
which in the busiest hours he will find his thoughts wistfully
stealing. How stoutly will he meet the buffets of the world if he knows
he has such a place of retirement where all is well-ordered and full of
beauty, and right counsels prevail, and true things are noted.
As a man grows older, if he cultivate the art of retirement, not indeed
as an end in itself, but as a means of developing a richer and freer
life, he will find his reward growing surer and greater until in time
none of the storms or shocks of life any longer disturbs him. He might
in time even reach the height attained by Diogenes, of whom Epictetus
said, “It was not possible for any man to approach him, nor had any man
the means of laying hold upon him to enslave him. He had everything
easily loosed, everything only hanging to him. If you laid hold of his
property, he would rather have let it go and be yours than he would
have followed you for it; if you laid hold of his leg he would have let
go his leg: if all of his body, all his poor body; his intimates,
friends, country, just the same. For he knew from whence he had them,
and from whom and on what conditions.”
The best partners of solitude are books. I like to take a book with me
in my pocket, although I find the world so full of interesting
things—sights, sounds, odours—that often I never read a word in it. It
is like having a valued friend with you, though you walk for miles
without saying a word to him or he to you: but if you really know your
friend, it is a curious thing how, subconsciously, you are aware of
what he is thinking and feeling about this hillside or that distant
view. And so it is with books. It is enough to have this writer in your
pocket, for the very thought of him and what he would say to these old
fields and pleasant trees is ever freshly delightful. And he never
interrupts at inconvenient moments, nor intrudes his thoughts upon
yours unless you desire it.
I do not want long books and least of all story books in the
woods—these are for the library—but rather scraps and extracts and
condensations from which thoughts can be plucked like flowers and
carried for a while in the buttonhole. So it is that I am fond of all
kinds of anthologies. I have one entitled “Traveller’s Joy,” another,
“Songs of Nature,” and I have lately found the best one I know called
“The Spirit of Man” by Robert Bridges, the English laureate. Other
little books that fit well in the pocket on a tramp, because they are
truly companionable, are Ben Jonson’s “Timber,” one of the very best,
and William Penn’s “Fruits of Solitude.” An anthology of Elizabethan
verse, given me by a friend, is also a good companion.
It is not a discourse or a narrative we want as we walk abroad, but
conversation. Neither do we want people or facts or stories, but a
person. So I open one of these little books and read therein the
thoughtful remark of a wise companion. This I may reply to, or merely
enjoy, as I please. I am in no hurry, as I might be with a living
companion, for my book friend, being long dead, is not impatient and
gives me time to reply, and is not resentful if I make no reply at all.
Submitted to such a test as this few writers, old or new, give
continued profit or delight. To be considered in the presence of the
great and simple things of nature, or worn long in the warm places of
the spirit, a writer must have supreme qualities of sense or humour, a
great sensitiveness to beauty, or a genuine love of goodness—but above
all he must somehow give us the flavour of personality. He must be a
true companion of the spirit.
There is an exercise given to young soldiers which consists in raising
the hands slowly above the head, taking in a full breath at the same
time, and then letting them down in such a way as to square the
shoulders. This leaves the body erect, the head high, the eyes straight
ahead, the lungs full of good air. It is the attitude that every man at
arms should wish to take, After a day in the woods I feel some such
erectness of spirit, a life of the head, and a clearer and calmer
vision, for I have raised up my hands to the heavens, and drawn in the
odours and sights and sounds of the good earth.
One of the great joys of such times of retirement perhaps the greatest
of the joys is the return, freshened and sweetened, to the common life.
How good then appear the things of the garden and farm, the house and
shop, that weariness had staled; how good the faces of friends.
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