Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860
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Yet Nature never grows outworn,--is unwearied in the bounty which she
bestows on the seeker. I said a strip of sandy beach, just now. For that
I beg leave to refer the reader to Mr. Kingsley's fascinating "Glaucus,"
and to the delightful papers which appeared in "Blackwood" a year or two
ago. My business is with the woods and fields. Certainly some who read
my pages will have leisure to climb a stone wall now and then, and for
them the following sketches of New England wood-walks may serve to show
how much enjoyment may be got with but little outlay of appliances. Of
course the most tempting thing to seek is sport. But the gun and the
fishing-rod are useless in many towns, from the disappearance of all
worthy objects for their exercise. The birds are wild and shy; the trout
have been _coculus-indicused_ out of the mountain-brooks to supply
metropolitan hotel-tables and Delmonican larders. Let us go after more
attainable things. And first, being a true nemophilist, I protest
against botany. A flower worth a five-mile walk and a wet foot is worthy
of something better than dissection with the Linnaean classification,
afterward adding insult to injury. The botanist is not a discoverer; he
is only a pedant. He finds out nothing about the plant; he serves it
as we might fancy a monster doing, who should take this number of the
"Atlantic" and sit down, not to read it, not to inhale the delicate
fragrance of its thought, but to count its articles, examine their
titles, and, having compared them with the newspaper advertisement,
sweep the whole contentedly into the dust-heap. To study the plant, to
see how it gets its living, why it will grow on one side of a brook in
profusion, and yet refuse to seek the other bank, is not his care. It
is simply to see whether he can abuse its honest English or New-English
simplicity by calling it by one set or another of barbarous Latin and
Greek titles. Pray, my good Sir, does a man go to see the elephant only
to call him a pachydermatous quadruped?
But we are wasting time and shall never get into the woods. In the
winter wild you will hardly get far into them, except at the Christmas
season for greenery. Gathering this by deputy is poor business. It is
all very well, if you can do no better, to engage Mr. Brown to engage
some one else to bring in the needed spruce, fir, and hemlock with which
to obscure the fresco deformities of St. Boniface's; but it is far
better to hunt for them yourself. There is something intensely
delightful in the changes of the search; for it begins dull enough. You
start in the drear December weather, with a gray sky and leaden clouds
softly shaded in regular billows, like an India-ink ocean, overhead,
and a somewhat muddy lane before you. Then to pick one's way across the
plashy meadows, and, after a ticklish pass of jumping from one reedy
tussock to another, to get once more upon the firm soil, while the
grass, dry and crisp under your feet, gives a pleasant _whish, whish_,
as it does the duty of street-door-mat to your mud-beclogged sandals.
Now for the stone wall. On the other side are thick set the thorny
stalks of last summer's "high-bush" blackberries. A plunge and a
scramble take you through in comparative safety; and stopping only to
disengage your skirts from a too-fond bramble, you are in the woodland.
Thick-strewn the dead leaves lie under foot. What music there is in the
rustling murmur with which they greet your invading step! On, deeper and
deeper into the wood,--now dodging under the green and snaky cat-briers,
with their retractile thorns and vicious clinging grasp,--now dashing
along the woodman's paths,--now struggling among the opposing
underwood. At last a little sprig of feathery green catches the eye.
It is a tuft of moss. No,--it is the running ground-pine; and clearing
away, with both eager hands, leaves, sticks, moss, and all the fallen
_exuciae_ of the summertime, you tear up long wreaths of that most
graceful of evergreens. Then, in another quarter of the woodland, where
the underbrush has been killed by the denser shade, there rise the
exquisite fan-shaped plumes of the feather-pine, of deepest green, or
brown-golden with the pencil of the frost;--for cross or star or thick
festoon, there is nothing so beautiful. And again you are attracted
into the thickets of laurel, and wage fierce war upon the sturdy and
tenacious, yet brittle branches, till you are transformed into a walking
jack-o'-the-green. The holly of the English Christmas, all-besprent with
crimson drops, is hard to be found in New England, and you will have to
thread the courses of the brooks to seek the swamp-loving black alder,
which will furnish as brilliant a berry, but without the beautiful
thorny leaf. Only in one patch of woodland do I know of the holly. In
the southeastern corner of Massachusetts,--if you will take the trouble
to follow up a railroad-track for a couple of miles and then plunge
into the pine woods, you will come upon a few lonely, stunted scraps of
it. The warmer airs which the Gulf Stream sends upon that coast have,
it is said, something to do therewith. Of course, if I am wrong, the
botanists will take vengeance upon me; but I can only say what has been
said to me. We nemophilists are apt to be careless of solemn science and
go upon all sorts of uncertain tradition.
But "Christmas comes but once a year." After chancel and nave have been
duly adorned, and again disrobed against the coming sobrieties of Lent,
there are other temptations to the woods. Before the snow has wholly
vanished from the shelter of the wood-lots, the warm, hazy, wooing days
of April come upon us. On such a day,--how well in this snow-season I
remember it!--I have been lured out by the hope of the Mayflower, the
delicate _epigae repens_, miscalled the trailing arbutus. Up the rocky
hill-side, from whose top you catch glimpses of the far-off sparkling
sea, with a blue haze of island ranges belting it,--up among the rocks,
into warm, sheltered, sunny nooks, you go upon your quest. For the
Mayflower, though found in almost every township in New England, has
secret and unaccountable whims of its own,--will persist in blooming
in just one spot, where you ought not to expect it, and in avoiding all
likely places. Yet when you come to its traditionary habitat, it is not
there. Round and round we pace, hoping and despairing, till a faint,
most delicate odor, indescribably suggestive of woodland freshness,
catches the roused sense; or else one silvery star peeps out from under
an upturned birch-leaf. Then down on hands and knees; tear up brush to
right and left, the brown skeletons of the withered foliage. The ground
is white with stars. Some are touched with delicate pink, some creamy
white,--but all breathing out the evanescent secret of the early spring.
Such the children of Plymouth used to hang in garlands about the Pilgrim
stone, in honor of the never-to-be-forgotten name of the New England
Argo.
Later in the year come the beautiful blue violets, which are, I am sorry
to say, scentless. Yet their little white cousin, which delights in all
swampy places, is sometimes, in the first days of its appearing, more
regardful of the prime duty of all flowers. I have gathered tufts of
them which (botanists to the contrary notwithstanding) were wellnigh as
odorous as if reared in the sunniest Warwickshire lane; but, as with a
perfect specimen of the cast skin of a snake, such a boon is to be hoped
for only once in a lifetime. With the violets, the beautiful blush-bells
of the anemone come garlanded with their graceful leaves, plentifully
enough. But did the rambler ever find the sensitive fern, which resented
the intrusive hand with all Mimosa's coyness? I never did but once. I
have wooed many a delicate frond of all varieties of fern since, but
never one so conscious. Now, too, ere the trees come into leaf, is the
time to seek the boxwood, called, I hope improperly, by the ominous name
of the Southern dogwood. It is worth an afternoon's ramble to come upon
one of those trees, standing in an open glade of the forest, a pyramid
of white or cream-colored blossoms. Before a leaf is on the tree, it
clothes itself in this lovely livery, and at a little distance seems
like a snowy cloud rather than a shrub.
But with June comes the most exquisite of our New England wild-flowers,
the arethusa, or swamp-pink, as it is often styled, to the great
confusion of its delicate, high-born nature with the great, vulgar,
flaunting azalea. When June comes,--when the clethra is heaped with its
bee-beloved blossoms, and the grass is green and bright as never again
in the year, then the arethusa is to be sought. A most unaccountable
flower, of all shades, from pale pink to a deep purple, with a lovely
shape that I can liken to nothing so nearly as the _fleur-de-lis_ on
French escutcheons, it has a delicate, yet powerful, aromatic scent, as
if it were an estray from the tropics. One specimen, snowy white, I have
seen, and can tell you where to find another. You are to go out along
the President's highway, due northward from a certain seaport of
Massachusetts. Take the eastward turn at the little village which lies
at the head of its harbor, and so north again by the old Friends'
meeting-house, which looks in brown placidity away toward the distant
shipping and the wicked steeple-houses, into the which so many of its
lost lambs have been inveigled. Then be not tempted to strike off down
yonder lane, to see the curious old farm-house, relic of Colony times,
with its odd stone chimney, its projecting upper story and carved wooden
pendants, and its shingles all pierced into decorative hearts and
rounds. Its likeness is not in Barber's book,--no, nor its visible form,
I believe, (it is many a year since I went that way,) on earth. It
became a constellation long ago,--being translated to the stars. Keep on
with good heart along the highway ridge, whence you can look down on the
solemn, close-set, pine forest, which hides from you the windings of the
river, and the beautiful lakelet, where the water-lilies float in
the summer. Go on down the valley, past the old tavern,--relic
of stage-coaching days, the square, three-story, deserted-looking
tavern,--up again a couple of miles or so, till the river has dwindled
to a brook and then to a marsh. Here is the place of our seeking. For
under the shade of one of those huge granite rocks over which the thin
soil of ---- County is sprinkled, and which here and there have shaken
off the superincumbent dust in indignation at the presumption of man in
attempting to farm them,--under that rock--of course I shall not tell
you which--you will find the White Arethusa, if you are born under a
lucky star.
A little later, the crimson lady-slipper loves to spring up in pine
clearings, around the base of the wood-piles which the cutters have
stacked in the winter to season. To one born by the salt water there is
an especial forest delight in the pine woods. For that best-loved sound
of the ceaseless fall of plunging seas upon the beach comes to him
there. Many a time I have walked from Harvard's leafy shades and
cheerful halls out to the quiet of the Botanic Garden for the sake of
hearing the wind in the pine tree-tops. Shut your eyes, and the inward
vision sees once more the long line of sandy and shingly beaches, the
green curving-up of the surges tipped with dazzling foam,--sees the
motionless and blackened timbers of the wreck on the shore, the white
wings dipping and turning along the combing tops of the waves racing in
upon the sands,--sees the dry tufted beach-grass, and the wet, shining,
compact slope down which slides swiftly the under-tow. And what a
healthful exhilaration it is to breathe the balm-laden breath of the
pine forest, and to tread the elastic slippery-soft carpet of the fallen
spiny leaves! Here is the haunt of the lady-slipper, (_cypripedium_,)
a shy, rare flower, like a little sack delicately veined, with a faint
musky scent, and large-flapped leaves shading its flower.
In the hot July and August, the scarlet lobelia, the cardinal-flower, is
to be found. Never was cardinal so robed. If Herbert's rose, in poetic
hyperbole, with its "hue angry and brave, bids the rash gazer wipe his
eye," certainly such a bed of lobelia as I once saw on the road to
"Rollo's Camp" was anything but what the Scotch would call "a sight for
sair een." For the space of a dozen or twenty yards grew a patch of
absolutely nothing but lobelia. At a little distance it was like a
scarlet carpet flung out by the roadside. If you desire to twine the
threefold chord of color, as Mr. Ruskin calls it, I know of no lovelier
foil for the lobelia than the white orchis, which haunts the same marshy
spots. Those long spikes of feathery and balanced blossoms are the most
absolute white of anything in Nature. They positively insist upon the
very refinement of purity, as you look at them.
Did you ever see a pond-lily?--not the miserable draggled
green-and-mud-colored buds which enterprising boys bring into the cars
for sale; but the white water-lily, floating on the silent brooks, or
far out in the safe depths of the mill-ponds. The "Autocrat" knows what
pond-lilies are, having visited Prospero's Isle and seen the pink-tinged
sisterhood of a certain mere that lies embosomed in its hills. But to
know them, you must hunt for them,--tramp off to the distant stream, and
then, not stand on the bank and wish and sigh, but off hose and shoon,
and, careless of water-snake and snapping-turtle, wade in up to their
virgin bower, and bear off the dripping, fragrant prize. None but the
brave deserve--lady or lily.
But if the stream be too deep and wide, and the lilies are anchored far
out among their broad pads,--a floral Venice, with the blue spikes and
arrowy leaves of the pickerel-weed for campaniles and towers,--there
are yet "lilies of the field" over which you may profitably meditate,
remembering that Solomon Ben-David was not so arrayed. Two kinds there
are,--one like the tiger-lily of the gardens, the petals curled back
and showing the whole leopard-spotted corolla,--the other bell-shaped,
rarer, and growing one only on a stalk. Both are to be found in open
spaces, bush-grown fields, and airy, sunny spots. It is worth a hot and
dusty June walk to get into one of those nooks. You can spend days and
not exhaust the study which one little triangular bit of overgrown
pasture affords,--spend them, not as a naturalist in close, patient
study, because to such a one a square yard of moss is as exhaustless as
the forests of Guiana to a Waterton, but as a nemophilist, taking simple
delight in mere observation and individual discovery.
"Many haps fall in the field
Seldom seen by watchful eyes."
And so all sorts of curious ways are discoverable by the mere
wood-lounger. At one time your way is barred by the great portcullis of
the strong threaded web of the field spider, who sits like a porter in
king's livery of black and gold at his gate. Then you have a peep into
the winding maelstroem-funnel of another of the spider family. Poe must
have suffered metempsychosis into the body of a blue-bottle, when he
wrote his "Descent into the Maelstroem"; for such an insect, hanging
midway down that treacherous, sticky descent, and seeing Death creeping
up from the bottom to grasp him, might have a clear idea of what was
undergone by the fisherman of Lofoden.
Or, if one tire of the open meadows, and the sun be too hot, think of
the laurel groves,--not now, as in the Christmas-time, white with snow,
but white again with thousands on thousands of argent cups, loaded with
blossoms, meeting over your head in arches of flowery tracery, and one
solitary tree standing deep in the woods, like a frigate packed with her
silver canvas lying out to windward of the fleet of merchantmen she is
convoying. The cool laurel groves! Often as one sees that sight, it is
always with a fresh shock of pleasure to the frame.
Then, when autumn comes and the leaves change, there is still endless
variety for the little basket or botanical-case which swings lightly on
your arm or hangs across your shoulder. Owen Jones never devised any
ornaments for wall or niche one half so brilliant as the color of those
leaves which a dexterous hand will readily group upon a sheet of white
paper, where your eye may catch it, as, after achieving a successful
sentence, you look up from your study-table. Speaking of leaves, who
knows how large an oak-loaf will grow in this New England? I have just
sat down after measuring one gathered in a bit of copse hard by the town
of M----, a bit of copse which skirts a beautiful wild ravine, with a
superb hemlock and pine grove creeping down its steep bank. I have just
honestly measured my leaf, and it shows _fourteen_ inches in length by a
trifle of _nine and a half_ in breadth.
In the same ravine I found--and in any patch of woodland you may do the
like--a perfect treasury of mosses. A shallow tin box or a wooden bowl
filled with these and duly watered will give a winter-garden to
the smallest lodging. Sun and light are, as Mr. Toots says, of "no
consequence" to the moss family. But if one be above such trifles as
mosses, and with Young American loftiness aspire to full-grown trees,
there is still plenty to do in the most ordinary woodlands. After a
chapter of Mr. Ruskin upon Claude and Poussin and Turner, there is
nothing like going to the original documents. In default of the National
Gallery from London and the Pitti Palace from the other side of Arno,
which cannot be summoned into court at a moment's notice, we can solve
at least half the problem. Mr. Ruskin may or may not be right about the
Claudes; but it is very easy to see if he be right as to the trees. And
if we prove him right with his theory of branches and bark, we have a
fair presumption that he has eyes to see the alleged falsehoods in him
of Lorraine. Now here is a chance to do a little bit of Art-criticism
quite unexpensively. Discontented young gentlemen murmur about the
education of this people being too practical, unaesthetic, and all that,
and sigh for the culture which a foreign land only can give. But a man
who has no eye for Nature will hardly learn to love her at second-hand
through the mediation of canvas and colors. I should like very much to
be able to walk into a Turner Gallery once a week; but, for all that, I
would not give up a Connecticut Valley sunset, such as last summer could
be had for the looking at. Not Turner, even, could paint those level
shadows, all interfused with trembling light, that filled the hollows
of the hills across the river, and brought out their wavy contour, and
showed the depth and distance of the valley opening miles away. Could he
throw athwart the dark mirror of the sleeping water in the gorge, which
led the imprisoned river stealthily to the sea, the gliding snows of the
sails rosy-white that stole swan-like from behind the bluffs? Could he
bring down the rainbow till its hither abutment rested on the centre of
the stream in a transparent mist of driving rain, while its keystone was
lost in the stooping cloud above? Art is good, as well as long; but time
is also fleeting, and, not being millionnaires, with the luxury of a run
across the Atlantic at command, let us make what we can out of what we
have. It is very probable that architecture, too, is a sore subject to
aspiring Young America, who turns discontentedly from the stucco and
pine-plank tracery of the new cathedral of St. Aerian. But let Young
America go out to the meadows, and discover for himself a group of
young elms. There is one I know of, not unattainable by very moderate
pedestrianism from the same seaport before alluded to, where a most
exquisite arrangement of arches and tracery can be seen. Six or eight
elms, their long bending boughs clothed with thick, clinging leafage,
mingle their tops, forming a sort of vaulted roof, such as at the
intersection of nave and transepts occurs in every Gothic church which
has no central tower. More exquisite curves, better studies for a
healthy-minded and original architect, could hardly be found. The
interlacing branches are suggestive of tracery-patterns, not to be
outdone even in the flamboyant windows of York and Rouen. There is no
excuse for the squat, ugly, and stupid arches one sees in almost every
attempt at pointed architecture, when the elm-tree springs by every
riverside in the land.
But it is time to conclude our desultory rambles. It would be pleasant
to me to recall many another of my old haunts, spots which, perhaps,
were never called beautiful before now, and may not be again for many a
day. For they all lie in a very tame and prosaic country, nearly level,
the utmost elevation getting hardly a couple of hundred feet above
tidewater mark; a country with less natural beauty than belongs to most
New England towns,--bare, bleak, rocky, with stunted vegetation and
ungenial soil. Yet within its limits there are brooks and marshes and
copses and woodlands,--rocks over which the wild columbine hangs its
fuchsia-like pendants, and dells where nestle the earliest and sweetest
of the wood-flowerets.
And now to come back to the miserable sinner. As schoolboy, as
bank-clerk, as teacher, as worker in many ways, he has unemployed
leisure in the hours of daylight,--not so many as he should have,
perhaps, but still many hours in the course of the month. Shall he go to
the livery-stable, the bowling-alley, or the billiard-saloon? Not being
a saint, of course he can plead no high-toned sense of need of physical
culture, to warrant these indulgences. He goes because he likes it, gets
enjoyment, exercise, rest for a mind tasked to the full with the day's
work. This he ought to have; and if butting little ivory balls about or
propelling big wooden ones will give it him, let him have it, if so be
that it cannot be got otherwise. There is no contamination in the cue or
the ten-pin; but there is in the habits and associations of the places
where they are found. Let us not be maw-wormish about it, but tell the
truth as it is. The quasi-gambling principle upon which all such places
are conducted stimulates the love of hazard and makes way for the
betting propensity to become full-blown. Of course, one can bet, if one
have money; two lumps of sugar and a few flies will enable a man to lose
the fortune of the Rothschilds, if he will. That is not the question.
The billiard-saloons do educate men for the gambling-house, simply
because they cannot go to them without either losing their money or
winning their games. Beside that, the gaseous, dusty, confined, and
tobacco-scented air of those places is not to be compared with our free,
open, out-doors hills and meadows, for any hygienic purposes.
But, argument apart, there is a sad New England story, so often repeated
as to be almost wearisome, were it not so sad. It is of the fresh,
frank, honest-hearted boy, who may be seen behind many a bank-counter.
At first, so active, trustworthy, and trusted,--yet with the constant
temptation of unemployed time and energies demanding supply of action.
Little by little these are supplied,--supplied by the billiard-table
and its concomitants. It is the same story,--first, rumors, then
equivocation, then exposure. Perhaps a petty sum is all; but, to the
austere justice of banking, this is as bad, nay, worse than millions.
And then a brief paragraph in the newspaper, and one more ruined young
man, sulking beside the family-hearthstone, his father's shame, his
mother's unextinguishable sorrow,--a candidate for crime, if he have
power of mind and spirit to feel, or an imbecile dependant, if he have
not.
Now preaching, whether lay or clerical, will not do much to prevent
this, especially if it be pitched (as it commonly is) upon too high a
key. _Preventing_ means, or used to mean, when words had a meaning,
_getting beforehand with anything._ And if young Homespun have from the
outset something he likes better, he will not take to the ivory balls in
pleasant weather, and in rainy weather will be apt to prefer even quite
a stupid book to the board of green cloth. Therefore, boys, go,--and
girls, too, for that matter,--on flower and moss hunts!--and ye, dear
middle-aged people, send them, and go also upon the same! Find something
that will tempt you into the woods,--something neither berries nor
sassafras,--something which cannot be eaten or sold, but which will
simply give you a sense and a love of beauty. These pages have been
written to show that it lies at your very doors,--that nothing but stout
boots, an old coat or jacket, and an observant eye, is needed. When you
come to be saints, or even to be men, there will be plenty of active
work to do, if so be that you will only do it. Then, in careful regard
to your bodies, you may have hard-trotting (not fast-trotting) horses,
pickerel-backed boats, and a billiard-room over the stable,--if your
canonization seem to require it. But the saint, if he be true saint,
needs no such care. He will get work enough, hard, physical work, if
only in trotting up and down the steep stairs of tenant-houses, to keep
his digestion in tolerable order. It is only your pseudo-saint,
who cuddles himself for the pulpit and the platform, and keeps the
safety-valve down with midnight sittings while "rosining up" the
furnaces with strong coffee, that will come to grief by collapse of
flues. If a man, whether sinner or saint, will run races for the honor
of being the fastest boat in the river of popular favor, he must take
the consequences.
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