Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861
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20 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. VII.--APRIL, 1861.--NO. XLII.
APRIL DAYS.
"Can trouble dwell with April days?"
_In Memoriam._
In our methodical New England life, we still recognize some magic in
summer. Most persons reluctantly resign themselves to being decently
happy in June, at least. They accept June. They compliment its weather.
They complained of the earlier months as cold, and so spent them in
the city; and they will complain of the later months as hot, and so
refrigerate themselves on some barren sea-coast. God offers us yearly a
necklace of twelve pearls; most men choose the fairest, label it June,
and cast the rest away. It is time to chant a hymn of more liberal
gratitude.
There are no days in the whole round year more delicious than those
which often come to us in the latter half of April. On these days one
goes forth in the morning, and an Italian warmth broods over all the
hills, taking visible shape in a glistening mist of silvered azure, with
which mingles the smoke from many bonfires. The sun trembles in his
own soft rays, till one understands the old English tradition, that he
dances on Easter-Day. Swimming in a sea of glory, the tops of the hills
look nearer than their bases, and their glistening watercourses seem
close to the eye, as is their liberated murmur to the ear. All across
this broad interval the teams are ploughing. The grass in the meadow
seems all to have grown green since yesterday. The blackbirds jangle
in the oak, the robin is perched upon the elm, the song-sparrow on the
hazel, and the bluebird on the apple-tree. There rises a hawk and sails
slowly, the stateliest of airy things, a floating dream of long and
languid summer-hours. But as yet, though there is warmth enough for a
sense of luxury, there is coolness enough for exertion. No tropics can
offer such a burst of joy; indeed, no zone much warmer than our Northern
States can offer a genuine spring. There can be none where there is no
winter, and the monotone of the seasons is broken only by wearisome
rains. Vegetation and birds being distributed over the year, there is no
burst of verdure nor of song. But with us, as the buds are swelling, the
birds are arriving; they are building their nests almost simultaneously;
and in all the Southern year there is no such rapture of beauty and of
melody as here marks every morning from the last of April onward.
But days even earlier than these in April have a charm,--even days that
seem raw and rainy, when the sky is dull and a bequest of March-wind
lingers, chasing the squirrel from the tree and the children from the
meadows. There is a fascination in walking through these bare early
woods,--there is such a pause of preparation, winter's work is so
cleanly and thoroughly done. Everything is taken down and put away;
throughout the leafy arcades the branches show no remnant of last year,
save a few twisted leaves of oak and beech, a few empty seed-vessels of
the tardy witch-hazel, and a few gnawed nutshells dropped coquettishly
by the squirrels into the crevices of the bark. All else is bare, but
prophetic: buds everywhere, the whole splendor of the coming summer
concentrated in those hard little knobs on every bough; and clinging
here and there among them, a brown, papery chrysalis, from which shall
yet wave the superb wings of the Luna moth. An occasional shower patters
on the dry leaves, but it does not silence the robin on the outskirts of
the wood: indeed, he sings louder than ever, though the song-sparrow and
the bluebird are silent.
Then comes the sweetness of the nights in latter April. There is as yet
no evening-primrose to open suddenly, no cistus to drop its petals;
but the May-flower knows the hour, and becomes more fragrant in the
darkness, so that one can then often find it in the woods without
aid from the eye. The pleasant night-sounds are begun; the hylas are
uttering their shrill _peep_ from the meadows, mingled soon with hoarser
toads, who take to the water at this season to deposit their spawn. The
tree-toads soon join them; but one listens in vain for bullfrogs, or
katydids, or grasshoppers, or whippoorwills, or crickets: we must wait
for them until the delicious June.
The earliest familiar token of the coming season is the expansion of the
stiff catkins of the alder into soft, drooping tresses. These are so
sensitive, that, if you pluck them at almost any time during the winter,
a day's bright sunshine will make them open in a glass of water, and
thus they eagerly yield to every moment of April warmth. The blossom
of the birch is more delicate, that of the willow more showy, but the
alders come first. They cluster and dance everywhere upon the bare
boughs above the watercourses; the blackness of the buds is softened
into rich brown and yellow; and as this graceful creature thus comes
waving into the spring, it is pleasant to remember that the Norse Eddas
fabled the first woman to have been named Embla, because she was created
from an alder-bough.
The first wild-flower of the spring is like land after sea. The two
which, throughout the Northern Atlantic States, divide this interest are
the _Epigaea repens_ (May-flower, ground-laurel, or trailing-arbutus)
and the _Hepatica triloba_ (liverleaf, liverwort, or blue anemone). Of
these two, the latter is perhaps more immediately exciting on first
discovery; because it does not, like the epigaea, exhibit its buds all
winter, but opens its blue eyes almost as soon as it emerges from the
ground. Without the rich and delicious odor of its compeer, it has
an inexpressibly fresh and earthy scent, that seems to bring all the
promise of the blessed season with it; indeed, that clod of fresh turf
with the inhalation of which Lord Bacon delighted to begin the day must
undoubtedly have been full of the roots of our little hepatica. Its
healthy sweetness belongs to the opening year, like Chaucer's poetry;
and one thinks that anything more potent and voluptuous would be less
enchanting,--until one turns to the May-flower. Then comes a richer
fascination for the senses. To pick the May-flower is like following in
the footsteps of some spendthrift army which has scattered the contents
of its treasure-chest among beds of scented moss. The fingers sink in
the soft, moist verdure, and make at each instant some superb discovery
unawares; again and again, straying carelessly, they clutch some new
treasure; and, indeed, all is linked together in bright necklaces by
secret threads beneath the surface, and where you grasp at one, you hold
many. The hands go wandering over the moss as over the keys of a piano,
and bring forth fragrance for melody. The lovely creatures twine and
nestle and lay their glowing faces to the very earth beneath withered
leaves, and what seemed mere barrenness becomes fresh and fragrant
beauty. So great is the charm of the pursuit, that the epigaea is really
the one wild-flower for which our country-people have a hearty passion.
Every village child knows its best haunts, and watches for it eagerly
in the spring; boys wreathe their hats with it, girls twine it in their
hair, and the cottage-windows are filled with its beauty.
In collecting these early flowers, one finds or fancies singular natural
affinities. I flatter myself with being able always to find hepatica, if
there is any within reach, for I was brought up with it ("Cockatoo
he know me berry well"); but other persons, who were brought up
with May-flower, and remember searching for it with their almost
baby-fingers, can find that better. The most remarkable instance
of these natural affinities was in the case of L.T. and his double
anemones. L. had always a gift for wild-flowers, and used often to bring
to Cambridge the largest white anemones that ever were seen, from a
certain special hill in Watertown; they were not only magnificent in
size and whiteness, but had that exquisite blue on the outside of
the petals, as if the sky had bent down in ecstasy at last over its
darlings, and left visible kisses there. But even this success was
not enough, and one day he came with something yet choicer. It was a
rue-leaved anemone (_A. thalictraides_); and, if you will believe it,
each one of the three white flowers was _double,_ not merely with that
multiplicity of petals in the disk which is common with this species,
but technically and horticulturally double, like the double-flowering
almond or cherry,--the most exquisitely delicate little petals, seeming
like lace-work. He had three specimens,--gave one to the Autocrat of
Botany, who said it was almost or quite unexampled, and another to me.
As the man in the fable says of the chameleon,--"I have it yet, and can
produce it."
Now comes the marvel. The next winter L. went to New York for a year,
and wrote to me, as spring drew near, with solemn charge to visit his
favorite haunt and find another specimen. Armed with this letter of
introduction, I sought the spot, and tramped through and through its
leafy corridors. Beautiful wood-anemones I found, to be sure, trembling
on their fragile stems, deserving all their pretty names,--Wind-flower,
Easter-flower, Pasque-flower, and homeopathic Pulsatilla; rue-leaved
anemones I found also, rising taller and straighter and firmer in stem,
with the whorl of leaves a little higher up on the stalk than one
fancies it ought to be, as if there were a supposed danger that the
flowers would lose their balance, and as if the leaves must be all ready
to catch them. These I found, but the special wonder was not there for
me. Then I wrote to L. that he must evidently come himself and search;
or that, perhaps, as Sir Thomas Browne avers that "smoke doth follow the
fairest," so his little treasures had followed him towards New York.
Judge of my surprise, when, on opening his next letter, out dropped,
from those folds of metropolitan paper, a veritable double anemone. He
had just been out to Hoboken, or some such place, to spend an afternoon,
and, of course, his pets were there to meet him; and from that day to
this, I have never heard of the thing happening to any one else.
May-Day is never allowed to pass in this community without profuse
lamentations over the tardiness of our spring as compared with that
of England and the poets. Yet it is very common to exaggerate this
difference. Even so good an observer as Wilson Flagg is betrayed into
saying that the epigaea and hepatica "seldom make their appearance until
after the middle of April" in Massachusetts, and that "it is not unusual
for the whole month of April to pass away without producing more than
two or three species of wild-flowers." But I have formerly found the
hepatica in bloom at Mount Auburn, for three successive years, on the
twenty-seventh of March; and last spring it was actually found, farther
inland, where the season is later, on the seventeenth. The May-flower is
usually as early, though the more gradual expansion of the buds renders
it less easy to give dates. And there are nearly twenty species which I
have noted, for five or six years together, as found before May-Day, and
which may therefore be properly assigned to April. The list includes
bloodroot, cowslip, houstonia, saxifrage, dandelion, chickweed,
cinquefoil, strawberry, mouse-ear, bellwort, dog's-tooth violet, five
species of violet proper, and two of anemone. These are all common
flowers, and easily observed; and the catalogue might be increased by
rare ones, as the white corydalis, the smaller yellow violet, (_V.
rotundifolia_,) and the claytonia or spring-beauty.
But in England the crocus and the snowdrop--neither being probably an
indigenous flower, since neither is mentioned by Chaucer--usually open
before the first of March; indeed, the snowdrop was formerly known by
the yet more fanciful name of "Fair Maid of February." Chaucer's daisy
comes equally early; and March brings daffodils, narcissi, violets,
daisies, jonquils, hyacinths, and marsh-marigolds. This is altogether in
advance of our season, so far as the flowers give evidence,--though we
have plucked snowdrops in February. But, on the other hand, it would
appear, that, though a larger number of birds winter in England than in
Massachusetts, yet the return of those which migrate is actually earlier
among us. From journals kept during sixty years in England, and an
abstract of which is printed in Hone's "Every-Day Book," it appears that
only two birds of passage revisit England before the fifteenth of April,
and only thirteen more before the first of May; while with us the
song-sparrow and the bluebird appear about the first of March, and quite
a number more by the middle of April. This is a peculiarity of the
English spring which I have never seen explained or even mentioned.
After the epigaea and the hepatica have opened, there is a slight pause
among the wild-flowers,--these two forming a distinct prologue for their
annual drama, as the brilliant witch-hazel in October brings up its
separate epilogue. The truth is, Nature attitudinizes a little, liking
to make a neat finish with everything, and then to begin again with
_eclat_. Flowers seem spontaneous things enough, but there is evidently
a secret marshalling among them, that all may be brought out with due
effect. As the country-people say that so long as any snow is left on
the ground more snow may be expected, it must all vanish simultaneously
at last,--so every seeker of spring-flowers has observed how accurately
they seem to move in platoons, with little straggling. Each species
seems to burst upon us with a united impulse; you may search for them
day after day in vain, but the day when you find one specimen the spell
is broken and you find twenty. By the end of April all the margins
of the great poem of the woods are illuminated with these exquisite
vignettes.
Most of the early flowers either come before the full unfolding of their
leaves or else have inconspicuous ones. Yet Nature always provides for
her bouquets the due proportion of green. The verdant and graceful
sprays of the wild raspberry are unfolded very early, long before its
time of flowering. Over the meadows spread the regular Chinese-pagodas
of the equisetum, (horsetail or scouring-rush,) and the rich coarse
vegetation of the veratrum, or American hellebore. In moist copses the
ferns and osmundas begin to uncurl in April, opening their soft coils
of spongy verdure, coated with woolly down, from which the humming-bird
steals the lining of her nest.
The early blossoms represent the aboriginal epoch of our history: the
blood-root and the May-flower are older than the white man, older
perchance than the red man; they alone are the true Native Americans. Of
the later wild plants, many of the most common are foreign importations.
In our sycophancy we attach grandeur to the name _exotic_: we call
aristocratic garden-flowers by that epithet; yet they are no more exotic
than the humbler companions they brought with them, which have become
naturalized. The dandelion, the buttercup, duckweed, celandine, mullein,
burdock, yarrow, whiteweed, nightshade, and most of the thistles,--these
are importations. Miles Standish never crushed these with his heavy heel
as he strode forth to give battle to the savages; they never kissed the
daintier foot of Priscilla, the Puritan maiden. It is noticeable that
these are all of rather coarser texture than our indigenous flowers; the
children instinctively recognize this, and are apt to omit them, when
gathering the more delicate native blossoms of the woods.
There is something touching in the gradual retirement before
civilization of these delicate aborigines. They do not wait for the
actual brute contact of red bricks and curbstones, but they feel the
danger miles away. The Indians called the low plantain "the white man's
footstep"; and these shy creatures gradually disappear, the moment
the red man gets beyond their hearing. Bigelow's delightful "Florula
Bostoniensis" is becoming a series of epitaphs. Too well we know it,--we
who in happy Cambridge childhood often gathered, almost within a stone's
throw of Professor Agassiz's new Museum, the arethusa and the gentian,
the cardinal-flower and the gaudy rhexia,--we who remember the last
secret hiding-place of the rhodora in West Cambridge, of the yellow
violet and the _Viola debilis_ in Watertown, of the _Convallaria
trifolia_ near Fresh Pond, of the _Hottonia_ beyond Wellington's Hill,
of the _Cornus florida_ in West Roxbury, of the _Clintonia_ and the
dwarf ginseng in Brookline,--we who have found in its one chosen nook
the sacred _Andromeda polyfolia_ of Linnaeus. Now vanished almost or
wholly from city-suburbs, these fragile creatures still linger in
more rural parts of Massachusetts; but they are doomed everywhere,
unconsciously, yet irresistibly; while others still more shy, as the
_Linnoea_, the yellow _Cypripedium_, the early pink _Azalea_, and the
delicate white _Corydalis_ or "Dutchman's breeches," are being chased
into the very recesses of the Green and the White Mountains. The relics
of the Indian tribes are supported by the legislature at Martha's
Vineyard, while these precursors of the Indian are dying unfriended
away.
And with these receding plants go also the special insects which haunt
them. Who that knew that pure enthusiast, Dr. Harris, but remembers the
accustomed lamentations of the entomologist over the departure of these
winged companions of his lifetime? Not the benevolent Mr. John Beeson
more tenderly mourns the decay of the Indians than he the exodus of
these more delicate native tribes. In a letter which I happened to
receive from him a short time previous to his death, he thus renewed
the lament:--"I mourn for the loss of many of the beautiful plants
and insects that were once found in this vicinity. _Clethra, Rhodora,
Sanguinaria, Viola debilis, Viola acuta, Dracoena borealis, Rhexia,
Cypripedium, Corallorhiza verna, Orchis spectabilis_, with others of
less note, have been rooted out by the so-called hand of improvement.
_Cicindela rugifrons, Helluo proeusta, Sphoeroderus stenostomus,
Blethisa quadricollis, (Americana mi,) Carabus, Horia_, (which for
several years occurred in profusion on the sands beyond Mount Auburn,)
with others, have entirely disappeared from their former haunts, driven
away, or exterminated perhaps, by the changes effected therein. There
may still remain in your vicinity some sequestered spots, congenial
to these and other rarities, which may reward the botanist and the
entomologist who will search them carefully. Perhaps you may find there
the pretty coccinella-shaped, silver-margined _Omophron_, or the still
rarer _Panagoeus fasciatus_, of which I once took two specimens on
Wellington's Hill, but have not seen it since." Is not this indeed
handling one's specimens "gently as if you loved them," as Isaak Walton
bids the angler do with his worm?
There is this merit, at least, among the coarser crew of imported
flowers, that they bring their own proper names with them, and we know
precisely whom we have to deal with. In speaking of our own native
flowers, we must either be careless and inaccurate, or else resort
sometimes to the Latin, in spite of the indignation of friends. There
is something yet to be said on this point. In England, where the old
household and monkish names adhere, they are sufficient for popular
and poetic purposes, and the familiar use of scientific names seems an
affectation. But here, where many native flowers have no popular names
at all, and others are called confessedly by wrong ones,--where
it really costs less trouble to use Latin names than English, the
affectation seems the other way. Think of the long list of wild-flowers
where the Latin name is spontaneously used by all who speak of
the flower: as, Arethusa, Aster, Cistus, ("after the fall of the
cistus-flower,") Clematis, Clethra, Geranium, Iris, Lobdia, Bhodora,
Spirtea, Tiarella, Trientalis, and so on. Even those formed from proper
names (the worst possible system of nomenclature) become tolerable at
last, and we forget the man in the more attractive flower. Are those
who pick the Houstonia to be supposed thereby to indorse the Texan
President? Or are the deluded damsels who chew Cassia-buds to be
regarded as swallowing the late Secretary of State? The names have long
since been made over to the flowers, and every questionable aroma has
vanished. When the godfather happens to be a botanist, there is a
peculiar fitness in the association; the Linaea, at least, would not
smell so sweet by any other name.
In other cases the English name is a mere modification of the Latin
one, and our ideal associations have really a scientific basis: as with
Violet, Lily, Laurel, Gentian, Vervain. Indeed, our enthusiasm for
vernacular names is like that for Indian names, one-sided: we enumerate
only the graceful ones, and ignore the rest. It would be a pity to
Latinize Touch-me-not, or Yarrow, or Gold-Thread, or Self-Heal, or
Columbine, or Blue-Eyed-Grass,--though, to be sure, this last has an
annoying way of shutting up its azure orbs the moment you gather it, and
you reach home with a bare, stiff blade, which deserves no better
name than _Sisyrinchium anceps._ But in what respect is Cucumber-Root
preferable to Medeola, or Solomon's-Seal to Convallaria, or Rock-Tripe
to Umbilicaria, or Lousewort to Pedicularis? In other cases the merit
is divided: Anemone may dispute the prize of melody with Windflower,
Campanula with Harebell, Neottia with Ladies'-Tresses, Uvularia with
Bellwort and Strawbell, Potentilla with Cinquefoil, and Sanguinaria with
Bloodroot. Hepatica may be bad, but Liverleaf is worse. The pretty name
of May-flower is not so popular, after all, as that of Trailing-Arbutus,
where the graceful and appropriate adjective redeems the substantive,
which happens to be Latin and incorrect at the same time. It does seem a
waste of time to say _Chrysanthemum leucanthemum_ instead of Whiteweed;
though, if the long scientific name were an incantation to banish the
intruder, our farmers would gladly consent to adopt it.
But the great advantage of a reasonable use of the botanical name is,
that it does not deceive us. Our primrose is not the English primrose,
any more than it was our robin who tucked up the babes in the wood;
our cowslip is not the English cowslip, it is the English
marsh-marigold,--Tennyson's "wild marsh-marigold shines like fire in
swamps and hollows gray." The pretty name of Azalea means something
definite; but its rural name of Honeysuckle confounds under that name
flowers without even an external resemblance,--Azalea, Diervilla,
Lonioera, Aquilegia,--just as every bird which sings loud in deep woods
is popularly denominated a thrush. The really rustic names of both
plants and animals are very few with us,--the different species are
many; and as we come to know them better and love them more, we
absolutely require some way to distinguish them from their half-sisters
and second-cousins. It is hopeless to try to create new popular
epithets, or even to revive those which are thoroughly obsolete. Miss
Cooper may strive in vain, with benevolent intent, to christen her
favorite spring-blossoms "May-Wings" and "Gay-Wings," and "Fringe-Cup"
and "Squirrel-Cup," and "Cool-Wort" and "Bead-Ruby"; there is no
conceivable reason why these should not be the familiar appellations,
except the irresistible fact that they are not. It is impossible to
create a popular name: one might as well attempt to invent a legend or
compose a ballad. _Nascitur, non fit_.
As the spring comes on, and the densening outlines of the elm give daily
a new design for a Grecian urn,--its hue, first brown with blossoms,
then emerald with leaves,--we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the
bare boughs. In our favored temperate zone, the trees denude themselves
each year, like the goddesses before Paris, that we may see which
unadorned loveliness is the fairest. Only the unconquerable delicacy of
the beech still keeps its soft vestments about it: far into spring, when
worn to thin rags and tatters, they cling there still; and when they
fall, the new appear as by magic. It must be owned, however, that the
beech has good reasons for this prudishness, and possesses little beauty
of figure; while the elms, maples, chestnuts, walnuts, and even oaks,
have not exhausted all their store of charms for us, until we have seen
them disrobed. Only yonder magnificent pine-tree,--that pitch-pine,
nobler when seen in perfection than white-pine, or Norwegian, or Norfolk
Islander,--that pitch-pine, herself a grove, _una nemus_, holds her
unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean,
whose voice she shares; and only marks the flowing of her annual tide of
life by the new verdure that yearly submerges all trace of last year's
ebb.
How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no
winter in our year! Sometimes, in following up a watercourse among our
hills, in the early spring, one comes to a weird and desolate place,
where one huge wild grapevine has wreathed its ragged arms around a
whole thicket and brought it to the ground,--swarming to the tops of
hemlocks, clenching a dozen young maples at once and tugging them
downward, stretching its wizard black length across the underbrush, into
the earth and out again, wrenching up great stones in its blind, aimless
struggle. What a piece of chaos is this! Yet come here again, two months
hence, and you shall find all this desolation clothed with beauty
and with fragrance, one vast bower of soft green leaves and graceful
tendrils, while summer-birds chirp and flutter amid these sunny arches
all the livelong day. "Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness."
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