and are freshly in flower. How blue they are! And how much handsomer
a few stalks of them look now than a full acre did two months ago.
So acceptable is scarcity. There is nothing to equal it for the
heightening of values. It is only the poor who know what money is
worth. It is only in October and November that we feel all the charm
of _Aster lævis_. I think of Bridget Elia’s lament over the “good old
times” when she and her cousin were “not quite so rich.” Then the
spending of a few shillings had a zest about it. A purchase was an
event, a kind of festival. I believe in Bridget’s philosophy; for the
asters teach the same; yes, and the goldenrods also. They, too, have
come up in the wake of the scythe, and still dwarfed, having no time to
attain their natural growth, as if they knew that winter was upon them,
are already topped with yellow. I carry home a scanty half handful of
the two, asters and goldenrods, as treasure-trove. They are sure to be
welcome. When all the fields were bright with such things, they seemed
hardly worth house-room. This late harvest of blossoms is one small
compensation for all the ugliness inflicted upon the landscape by the
habit--inveterate with highway “commissioners”--of mowing back-country
roadsides. As if stubble were prettier than a hedge!
Now I pass two long-armed white oaks, which I never come near without
thinking of a friend of mine and of theirs who used to walk hereabouts
with me; a real tree lover, who loves not species, not white oaks
and red oaks, but individual trees, and goes to see them as one
goes to see a man or a woman. This pair he always called the twins.
They have summered and wintered each other for a hundred years. Who
knows--putting the matter on grounds of pure science--whether they do
not enjoy each other’s companionship? Who knows that trees have no kind
of sentience? Not I. We take a world of things for granted; and if all
our neighbors chance to do the same, we let the general assumption pass
for certainty. If trees _do_ know anything, I would wager that it is
something worth knowing, something quite as good as is to be found in
any newspaper.
Here are red maples as bare as December, and yonder is one that is
almost in full leaf; and by some freak of originality every leaf is
bright yellow. Three days more and it will be naked also. Under it
are white-alder bushes (_Clethra_) clothed in dark purple, and tall
blueberry bushes all in red, with yellow shadings by way of contrast.
This is in a swampy spot, where a lonesome hyla is peeping. Just
beyond, the drier ground is reddened--under the trees--with huckleberry
and dangleberry. Nobody who has not attended to the matter would
imagine how much of the brightness of our New England autumn--one
of the pageants of the world--is due to these lowly bushes, which
most people think of solely as useful in the production of pies and
puddings. Without being mown, the huckleberry bears a second crop--a
crop of color. It is twice blest; it blesses him that eats and him
that looks. In many parts of New England, at least, the autumnal
landscape could better spare the maples than the blueberries and the
huckleberries. Rum-cherry trees and shrubs--more shrubs than trees--are
dressed in lovely shades of yellow and salmon. Spicebushes wear plain
yellow of a peculiarly delicate cast. I roll a leaf in my hand and
find it still spicy. A bush looks handsomer, I believe, if it is known
to smell good. The same thought came to me a week ago while I was
admiring the sassafras leaves. They were then just at the point of
ripeness. Now they have turned to a dead brown. The maple’s way is in
better taste--to shed its leaves while they are still bright and fresh.
They are under my feet now, a carpet of red and yellow.
One of the oddest bits of fall coloration (I cannot profess greatly
to like it) is the ghostly white--greenish white--of Roxbury waxwork
leaves. It is unique in these parts, so far as I can recall, but is
almost identical with the pallor of striped maple foliage (_Acer
Pennsylvanicum_) as one sees it in the White Mountains. Waxwork
pigments all go to the berries, it appears. These are showy enough to
suit the most barbaric taste, and are among the things that speak to me
strongest of far-away times, when my childish feet were just beginning
to wander in nature’s garden. The sight of them reminds me of what a
long time I have lived.
A gust of wind strikes a tall willow just as I approach it. See the
leaves tumble! Thick and fast they come, a leafy shower, with none of
those pretty, hesitating, parachute-like reluctances which we noticed
the rounder and lighter birch leaves practicing half an hour ago. The
willow leaves, narrow and pointed, fall more like arrows. I am put in
mind, I cannot tell why, of an early morning hour, years ago, when I
happened to cross a city garden after the first killing frost, and
stopped near a Kentucky coffee-tree. Its foliage had been struck with
death. Not a breath was stirring, but the leaves, already blackened
and curled, dropped in one continuous rain. The tree was out of its
latitude, and had been caught with its year’s work half done. The frost
was a tragedy. This breeze among the willow branches is nothing so bad
as that. Its errand is all in the order of nature. It calls those who
are ready.
My meditations are still running with the season, still playing with
mortality, when a blue jay quits a branch near by (I had not seen
him) and flies off in silence. The jay is a knowing bird. No need to
tell _him_ that there is a time for everything under the sun. He has
proverbial philosophy to spare. Hark! he has found his voice; like a
saucy schoolboy, who waits till he is at a safe distance and then puts
his thumb to his nose, and cries “Yaah, yaah!”
Well, the reader may thank him for one thing. He has made an end of my
autumnal sermon, the text of which, if any one cares to look for it,
may be found in the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, at the sixth verse.
A TEXT FROM THOREAU
“There is no more tempting novelty than this new November. No going
to Europe or to another world is to be named with it. Give me the old
familiar walk, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this
infinite expectation and faith which does not know when it is beaten.
We’ll go nutting once more. We’ll pluck the nut of the world and crack
it in the winter evenings. Theatres and all other sight-seeing are
puppet shows in comparison. I will take another walk to the cliff,
another row on the river, another skate on the meadow, be out in the
first snow, and associate with the winter birds. Here I am at home. In
the bare and bleached crust of the earth, I recognize my friend.”
Thus bravely did Thoreau enter upon the gray month. It was in 1858,
when he was forty-one years old. He wants nothing new, he assures
himself. He will “take the shortest way round and stay at home.” “Think
of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from _here_,” he says,
underscoring the final word. As if whatever place a man might move
to would not be “here” to him! As if he could run away from his own
shadow! So I interpret the italics.
His protestations, characteristically unqualified and emphatic, imply
that thoughts of travel have beset him. Probably they beset every
outdoor philosopher at this short-day season. They are part of the
autumnal crop. Our northern world begins to look--in cloudy moods--like
a place to escape from. The birds have gone, the leaves have fallen,
the year is done. “Let us arise and go also,” an inward voice seems to
whisper. Not unlikely there is in us all the dormant remainder of an
outworn migratory instinct. Civilization has caged us and tamed us;
“hungry generations” have trodden us down; but below consciousness and
memory there still persists the blind stirring of ancestral impulse.
The fathers were nomads, and the children’s feet are still not quite
content with day’s work in a treadmill.
Let our preferences be what they may, however, the greater number of
us must stay where we are put, and play the hand that is dealt to
us, happy if we can face the dark side of the year with a measure of
philosophy. If there is a new self, as Thoreau says, there will be a
new world and a new season. If we carry the tropics within us, we need
not dream of Florida. And even if there is no constraint upon our going
and coming, we need not be in haste to run away. We may safely wait
a week or two, at least. November is often not half so bad as it is
painted--not half so bad, indeed, as Thoreau himself sometimes painted
it. For the eleventh month was not one of his favorites. “November
Eat-Heart,” he is more than once moved to call it. The experience of
it puts his equanimity to the proof. Even his bravest words about
it sound rather like a defiance than a welcome,--a little as if he
were whistling to keep up his courage. With the month at its worst,
he confesses, he has almost to drive himself afield. He can hardly
decide upon any route; “all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking
and fronting the cold wind.” “Surface-walking.” How excellent that is!
Every contemplative outdoor man knows what is meant, but only Thoreau
could have hit it off to such perfection in a word.
I must admit that I am not sorry to find the Walden stoic once in a
long while overtaken by such a comparatively unheroic mood. He boasted
so often and so well (with all the rest he boasted of his boasting)
that it pleases me to hear him complain. So the weather could be too
much even for him, I say to myself, with something like a chuckle. He
was mortal, after all; and the day was sometimes dark, even in Concord.
Not that he ever whimpered. And had he done so, in any moment of
weakness, it should never have been for me to lay a public finger upon
the fact. Nobody shall be more loyal to Thoreau than I am, though
others may understand him better and praise him more adequately.
If he complained, he did it “man-fashion,” and was within a man’s
right. To say that the worst of Massachusetts weather is never to be
spoken against is to say too much; it is stretching the doctrine of
non-resistance to the point of absurdity. As well forbid us to carry
umbrellas, or to put up lightning-rods. There is plenty of weather that
deserves to be spoken against.
Only let it be done, as I say, “man-fashion;” and having said our say,
let us go about our business again, making the best of things as they
are--as Thoreau did. For, having owned his disrelish for what the gods
provided, he quickly recovered himself, and proceeded to finish his
entry in a cheerier strain. Matters are not so desperate with him,
after all. He has to force himself out-of-doors, it is true, but once
in the woods he often finds himself “unexpectedly compensated.” “The
thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than
any wine they tell of.” He meets with something that interests him, and
immediately the day is as warm as July--as if the wind had shifted from
northwest to south. There is the secret, in November as in May--to be
interested. Then there is no longer a question of “surface-walking.”
The soul is concerned, and life has begun anew.
Thus far, the present November (I write on the 4th) has been unusually
mild; some days have been really summer-like, too warm for comfort;
but the sun has shone only by minutes--now and then an hour, at the
most. Deciduous trees are nearly bare, the oaks excepted; flowers are
few and mostly out of condition, though it would be easy to make a
pretty high-sounding list of names; and birds are getting to be almost
as scarce as in winter. There is no longer any quiet strolling in the
woods. If you wish to listen for small sounds you must stand still. The
ground is so thick with crackling leaves that it is impossible to go
silently. Everything prophesies of the death of the year. It is almost
time for the snow to fall and bury what remains of it.
Yet in warm days one may still see dragon-flies on the wing. Yesterday
meadow larks were singing with the greatest abandon and in something
like a chorus. I must have seen a dozen, and most if not all of them
were in tune. On the 1st of the month a grouse drummed again and
again; an unseasonable piece of lyrical enthusiasm, one might think;
but I doubt if it was anything so very exceptional. Once, indeed,
a few years ago, I heard a grouse drum repeatedly in January, on a
cloudy day, when the ground in the woods was deep under snow. That,
I believe, was an event much out of the common, though by no means
without precedent. I wish Thoreau could have been there; he would have
improved the occasion so admirably. So long as the partridge can keep
his spirits up to the drumming point, why should the rest of us outdoor
people pull a long face over hard times and short rations? Shall we be
less manly than a bird?
The partridge will neither migrate nor hibernate, but looks winter in
the eye and bids the wind whistle. It is too bad if we who command the
services of coal dealers and plumbers, tailors and butchers, doctors
and clergymen, cannot stand our ground with a creature that knows
neither house nor fuel, and has nothing for it, summer and winter,
but to live by his wits. To the partridge man must look like a weak
brother, a coddler of himself, ruined by civilization and “modern
improvements;” a lubber who would freeze to death where a chickadee
bubbles over with the very joy of living.
With weather-braving souls like these Thoreau would associate; and so
will I. It is true, what all the moralists have told us, that it is
good for a man to keep company with his superiors. Not that in my own
case I look for their example and tuition to make me inherently better;
it is getting late for that; “nothing that happens after we are twelve
counts for very much;” I shall be content if they make me happier.
And so much I surely depend upon. Good spirits are contagious. It is
the great advantage of keeping a dog, that he has happiness to spare,
and gives to his master. So a flock of chickadees, or snowbirds, or
kinglets, or tree sparrows, or goldfinches brighten a man’s day. He
comes away smiling. I will go out now and prove it.
THE PLEASURES OF MELANCHOLY
This wintry November forenoon I was on a sea beach; the sky clouded,
the wind high and cold, cutting to the marrow; a bleak and comfortless
place. A boy, dragging a child’s cart, was gathering chips of driftwood
along the upper edge of the sand,--one human figure, such as painters
use to make a lonesome scene more lonesome. A loon, well offshore,
sat rocking upon the water, now lifted into sight for an instant, now
lost behind a wave. Distant sails and a steamship were barely visible
through the fog. So much for the world on its seaward side. There was
little to cheer a man’s soul in that quarter.
On the landward side were thickets of leafless rosebushes covered with
scarlet hips; groves of tall, tree-like, smooth-barked alders; swampy
tracts, wherein were ilex bushes bright with red Christmas berries,
and blueberry bushes scarcely less bright with red leaves. Sometimes
it was necessary to put up an opera-glass before I could tell one from
the other. Here was a marshy spot; dry, shivering sedges standing above
the ice, and among them four or five mud-built domes of muskrat houses.
Shrewd muskrats! They knew better than to be stirring abroad on a day
like this. “If you haven’t a house, why don’t you build one?” they
might have said to the man hurrying past, with his neck drawn down into
his coat collar. Here I skirted a purple cranberry bog, having tufts of
dwarfed, stubby bayberry bushes scattered over it, each with its winter
crop of pale-blue, densely packed, tightly held berry clusters.
Not a flower; not a bird. Not so much as a crow or a robin in one
of the stunted savin trees. I remembered winter days here, a dozen
years ago, when the alder clumps were lively with tree sparrows,
myrtle warblers, and goldfinches. Now the whole peninsula was a place
forsaken. I had better have stayed away myself. Here, as so often
elsewhere, memory was the better sight.
By a summer cottage upon the rocks was a ledge matted over with the
Japanese trailing white rose. There were no blossoms, of course, but
what with the leaves, still of a glossy green, and the bunches of
handsome, high-colored hips, the vine could hardly have been more
beautiful, I was ready to say, even when the roses were thickest upon
it. Beside another house a pink poppy still looked fresh. Frail,
belated child of summer! I could hardly believe my eyes. All its human
admirers were gone long since. Every cottage stood vacant. Nobody would
live here in this icy wind, if he could find another place to flee to.
I remembered Florida beaches, summery abodes, where every breath from
the sea brought a welcome coolness. Why should I not take the next
train southward? Shall a man be less sensible than a bird?
That was five or six hours ago. Now I am a dozen miles inland. The air
is so still that the sifting snowflakes fall straight downward. Even
the finest twigs of the gray-birches, so sensitive to the faintest
breath, can hardly be seen to stir. A narrow foot-path under the
window is a line of white running through the green grass. Beyond that
is the brown hillside, brightened with a few pitch-pines; and then a
veil shuts down upon the world, with a spray of bare treetops breaking
through. It is the gray month in its grayest mood.
Be it so. I will sit at my window and enjoy the world as it is. This
sombre day has a beauty and charm of its own--the charm of melancholy.
The wise course is to tune our thought to nature’s mood of soberness,
rather than to force a different note, profaning the hour, and
cheating ourselves with shallow talk and laughter. There is a time for
everything under the sun--L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso, each in its turn.
Now is a time to think of what has been and of what will be. Only the
other day the year was young; grass was greening, violets were budding,
birds were mating and singing. Now the birds are gone, the flowers are
dead, the year is ending as all the years have ended before it.
And as the year is, so are we. A few days ago we were children, just
venturing to run alone. We knew nothing, had seen nothing, looked
forward to nothing. Life for us was only a day in a house and a
dooryard, a span of playtime between two sleeps.
A few days ago, I say. Yet what a weary distance we have traveled since
then, and what an infinity of things we have seen and dealt with. How
many thoughts we have had, coming we know not whence, how many hopes,
one making way for the other, how many dreams. We have made friends;
friends that were to be friends forever; and long, long ago, with no
fault on either side, the currents of the world carrying us, they and
we have drifted apart. It is all we can do now to recall their names
and their manner of being. Some of them we should pass for strangers if
we met them face to face.
What a long procession of things and events have gone by us and been
forgotten. Almost we have forgotten our own childish names, it is so
many years since any one called us by them. Should we know ourselves,
even, if we met in the street the boy or girl of thirty or forty or
fifty years ago? Was it indeed we who lived then? who believed such
things, enjoyed such things, concerned ourselves with such things,
trembled with such fears, were lifted up by such hopes, felt ourselves
enriched by such havings? How shadowy and unreal they look now; and
once they were as substantial as life and death. Nay, it is some one
else whose past we are remembering. The boy and the man cannot be the
same.
Shall we rejoice or be sad that we have outgrown ourselves thus
completely? Something of both, perhaps. It matters not. The year is
ending, the night is falling. The past is as if it had never been; the
future is nothing; and the present is less than either of them. Life is
a vapor; nothing, and less than nothing, and vanity.
So we say to ourselves, not sadly, but with a kind of satisfaction
to have it so. Yet we love to live over the past, and, with less
assurance, to dream of the future.
“The flower that once has blown forever dies.”
Yes, we have heard that, and we will not dispute; this is not an hour
for disputing; but the flowers that bloomed forty years ago--the
iris and the four-o’clocks in a child’s garden--we can still see in
recollection’s magic glass. And they are brighter than any rose that
opened this morning. We have forgotten things without number; but other
things--we shall never forget them. A friend or two that died when they
and we were young; “the loveliest and the best;” we can see them more
plainly than most of those whose empty, conventionalized faces, each
like the other, each wearing its mask, we meet day by day in the common
round of business and pleasure. Death, which seemed to destroy them,
has but set them beyond the risk of alteration and forgetfulness.
After all, the past is our one sure possession. There is our miser’s
chest. With that, while memory holds for us the key, we shall still be
rich. There we will spend our gray hours, with friends that have kept
their youth; one of the best of them our own true self, not as we were,
nor as we are, but as we meant to be.
“These pleasures, Melancholy, give;
And I with thee will choose to live.”
IN THE OLD PATHS
For men who know how to bear themselves company there are few better
ways of improving a holiday, especially a home-keeping, home-coming,
family feast, like our autumnal Thanksgiving, than to walk in one’s
own childish steps--up through the old cattle pasture behind the old
homestead, into the old woods. Every jutting stone in the path--and
there are many--is just where it was. Your feet remember them perfectly
(as your hand remembers which way the door-knob turns, though you
yourself might be puzzled to tell), and of their own accord take
a zigzag course among them, coming down without fail in the clear
intermediary spaces. Or if, by chance, in some peculiarly awkward spot,
the toe of your boot forgets itself, the jar only helps you to feel
the more at home. You say with the poet, “I have been here before.”
Some things are unaltered, you are glad to find. The largest of the
trees have been felled, but nobody has dug out the protruding boulders
or blasted away the outcropping ledges. One good word we may say for
death. It lasts well. It is nothing like a vapor.
Not a rod of the way but talks to you of something. Here, on the left,
down in the hollow by the swamp, you used to set snares. Once--fateful
day!--you found a partridge in the noose. Then what a fury possessed
you! If you had shot your first elephant you could hardly have been
more completely beside yourself. It was a cruel sight; you felt it so;
but you had caught a partridge! With all your boyish unskillfulness you
had lured the unhappy bird to his death. A spray of red barberries had
been too bright for his resistance. He discovered his mistake when the
cord began to pull. “Oh, why was I such a fool!” he thought; just as
you have thought more than once since then, when you have run your own
neck into some snare of the fowler.
Yonder, on the right, grew little scattered patches of trailing
arbutus. Every spring you gathered a few blossoms, going thither day
after day, watching for them to open. And the patches are there still.
Some of them are no broader than a dinner plate, and the largest of
them would not cover the top of a bushel basket. For more than fifty
years--perhaps for more than five hundred--they have looked as they
do now; a few score of leaves and an annual crop of a dozen or two of
flowers. Their endurance, with so many greedy hands after them, is one
of the miracles. Probably they are older than any tree in the township.
It isn’t the tall things that live longest.