I was saying to myself, why do not all literary men go to the country
to do their work, where they can have health, peace, and solitude?
Then it occurred to me that there are many men of many minds, and that
many need to be in the thick of life; they get more stimulus out of
people than out of nature. The novelist especially needs to be in
touch with multitudes of men and women. But the poet and the
philosopher will usually prosper better in the country. A man like
myself, who is an observer and of a meditative cast, does better in
the country. Emerson, though city born and bred, finally settled in
the country. Whitman, on the other hand, loved "populous pavements."
But he was at home anywhere under the stars. He had no study, no
library, no club, other than the street, the beach, the hilltop, and
the marts of men. Mr. Howells was country-born, but came to the city
for employment and remained there. Does not one wish that he had gone
back to his Ohio boyhood home? It was easy for me to go back because I
came of generations of farmer folk. The love of the red soil was in my
blood. My native hills looked like the faces of my father and mother.
I could never permanently separate myself from them. I have always had
a kind of chronic homesickness. Two or three times a year I must
revisit the old scenes. I have had a land-surveyor make a map of the
home farm, and I have sketched in and colored all the different fields
as I knew them in my youth. I keep the map hung up in my room here in
California, and when I want to go home, I look at this map. I do not
see the paper. I see fields and woods and stone walls and paths and
roads and grazing cattle. In this field I used to help make hay; in
this one I wore my fingers sore picking up stones for these stone
walls; in this I planted corn and potatoes with my brothers. In these
maple woods I helped make sugar in the spring; in these I killed my
first ruffed grouse. In this field I did my first ploughing, with
thoughts of an academy in a neighboring town at the end of every
furrow. In this one I burned the dry and decayed stumps in the April
days, with my younger brother, and a spark set his cap on fire. In
this orchard I helped gather the apples in October. In this barn we
husked the corn in the November nights. In this one Father sheared the
sheep, and Mother picked the geese. My paternal grandfather cleared
these fields and planted this orchard. I recall the hired man who
worked for us during my time, and every dog my father had, and my
adventures with them, hunting wood-chucks and coons. All these things
and memories have been valuable assets in my life. But it is well that
not all men have my strong local attachments. The new countries would
never get settled. My forefathers would never have left Connecticut
for the wilderness of the Catskills.
As a rule, however, we are a drifting, cosmopolitan people. We are
easily transplanted; we do not strike our roots down into the geology
of long-gone time.
I often wonder how so many people of the Old World can pull
themselves up and migrate to America and never return. The Scots,
certainly a home-loving race, do it, and do not seem to suffer from
homesickness.