Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861

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Yet Nature does not work by single spasms only. That chestnut spray is
not an isolated and exhaustive effort of creative beauty: look upward
and see its sisters rise with pile above pile of fresh and stately
verdure, till tree meets sky in a dome of glorious blossom, the whole as
perfect as the parts, the least part as perfect as the whole. Studying
the details, it seems as if Nature were a series of costly fragments
with no coherency,--as if she would never encourage us to do anything
systematically, would tolerate no method but her own, and yet had none
of her own,--were as abrupt in her transitions from oak to maple as
the heroine who went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an
apple-pie; while yet there is no conceivable human logic so close
and inexorable as her connections. How rigid, how flexible are, for
instance, the laws of perspective! If one could learn to make his
statements as firm and unswerving as the horizon-line,--his continuity
of thought as marked, yet as unbroken, as yonder soft gradations by
which the eye is lured upward from lake to wood, from wood to hill, from
hill to heavens,--what more bracing tonic could literary culture demand?
As it is, Art misses the parts, yet does not grasp the whole.

Literature also learns from Nature the use of materials: either to
select only the choicest and rarest, or to transmute coarse to fine by
skill in using. How perfect is the delicacy with which the woods and
fields are kept, throughout the year! All these millions of living
creatures born every season, and born to die; yet where are the dead
bodies? We never see them. Buried beneath the earth by tiny nightly
sextons, sunk beneath the waters, dissolved into the air, or distilled
again and again as food for other organizations,--all have had their
swift resurrection. Their existence blooms again in these violet-petals,
glitters in the burnished beauty of these golden beetles, or enriches
the veery's song. It is only out of doors that even death and decay
become beautiful. The model farm, the most luxurious house, have their
regions of unsightliness; but the fine chemistry of Nature is constantly
clearing away all its impurities before our eyes, and yet so delicately
that we never suspect the process. The most exquisite work of literary
art exhibits a certain crudeness and coarseness, when we turn to it from
Nature,--as the smallest cambric needle appears rough and jagged,
when compared through the magnifier with the tapering fineness of the
insect's sting.

Once separated from Nature, literature recedes into metaphysics, or
dwindles into novels. How ignoble seems the current material of London
literary life, for instance, compared with the noble simplicity which, a
half-century ago, made the Lake Country an enchanted land forever! Is
it worth a voyage to England to sup with Thackeray in the Pot Tavern?
Compare the "enormity of pleasure" which De Quincey says Wordsworth
derived from the simplest natural object with the serious protest of
Wilkie Collins against the affectation of caring about Nature at all.
"Is it not strange", says this most unhappy man, "to see how little real
hold the objects of the natural world amidst which we live can gain on
our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in joy and sympathy
in trouble, only in books.... What share have the attractions of Nature
ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of
ourselves or our friends?... There is surely a reason for this want of
inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it."

Leslie says of "the most original landscape-painter he knew," meaning
Constable, that, whenever he sat down in the fields to sketch, he
endeavored to forget that he had ever seen a picture. In literature this
is easy, the descriptions are so few and so faint. When Wordsworth was
fourteen, he stopped one day by the wayside to observe the dark outline
of an oak against the western sky; and he says that he was at that
moment struck with "the infinite variety of natural appearances which
had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country," so far as he was
acquainted with them, and "made a resolution to supply in some degree
the deficiency." He spent a long life in studying and telling these
beautiful wonders; and yet, so vast is the sum of them, they seem almost
as undescribed before, and men to be still as content with vague or
conventional representations. On this continent, especially, people
fancied that all must be tame and second-hand, everything long since
duly analyzed and distributed and put up in appropriate quotations, and
nothing left for us poor American children but a preoccupied universe.
And yet Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely
nothing in Nature has ever yet been described,--not a bird nor a berry
of the woods, nor a drop of water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor
winter, nor sun, nor star.

Indeed, no person can portray Nature from any slight or transient
acquaintance. A reporter cannot step out between the sessions of a
caucus and give a racy abstract of the landscape. It may consume the
best hours of many days to certify for one's self the simplest out-door
fact, but every such piece of knowledge is intellectually worth the
time. Even the driest and barest book of Natural History is good and
nutritious, so far as it goes, if it represents genuine acquaintance;
one can find summer in January by poring over the Latin catalogues
of Massachusetts plants and animals in Hitchcock's Report. The most
commonplace out-door society has the same attraction. Every one of those
old outlaws who haunt our New England ponds and marshes, water-soaked
and soakers of something else,--intimate with the pure fluid in that
familiarity which breeds contempt,--has yet a wholesome side when you
explore his knowledge of frost and freshet, pickerel and musk-rat, and
is exceedingly good company while you can keep him beyond scent of the
tavern. Any intelligent farmer's boy can give you some narrative
of out-door observation which, so far as it goes, fulfils Milton's
definition of poetry, "simple, sensuous, passionate." He may not write
sonnets to the lake, but he will walk miles to bathe in it; he may not
notice the sunsets, but he knows where to search for the black-bird's
nest. How surprised the school-children looked, to be sure, when the
Doctor of Divinity from the city tried to sentimentalize, in addressing
them, about "the bobolink in the woods"! They knew that the darling of
the meadow had no more personal acquaintance with the woods than was
exhibited by the preacher.

But the preachers are not much worse than the authors. The prosaic
Buckle, to be sure, admits that the poets have in all time been
consummate observers, and that their observations have been as valuable
as those of the men of science; and yet we look even to the poets
for very casual and occasional glimpses of Nature only, not for any
continuous reflection of her glory. Thus, Chaucer is perfumed with early
spring; Homer resounds like the sea; in the Greek Anthology the sun
always shines on the fisherman's cottage by the beach; we associate the
Vishnu Purana with lakes and houses, Keats with nightingales in forest
dim, while the long grass waving on the lonely heath is the last
memorial of the fading fame of Ossian. Of course Shakspeare's
omniscience included all natural phenomena; but the rest, great or
small, associate themselves with some special aspects, and not with the
daily atmosphere. Coming to our own times, one must quarrel with Ruskin
as taking rather the artist's view of Nature, selecting the available
bits and dealing rather patronizingly with the whole; and one is tempted
to charge even Emerson, as he somewhere charges Wordsworth, with not
being of a temperament quite liquid and musical enough to admit the full
vibration of the great harmonics. The three human foster-children who
have been taken nearest into Nature's bosom, perhaps,--an odd triad,
surely, for the whimsical nursing mother to select,--are Wordsworth,
Bettine Brentano, and Thoreau. Is it yielding to an individual
preference too far, to say, that there seems almost a generic difference
between these three and any others,--however wide be the specific
differences among themselves,--to say that, after all, they in their
several paths have attained to an habitual intimacy with Nature, and the
rest have not?

Yet what wonderful achievements have some of the fragmentary artists
performed! Some of Tennyson's word-pictures, for instance, bear almost
as much study as the landscape. One afternoon, last spring, I had been
walking through a copse of young white birches,--their leaves scarce yet
apparent,--over a ground delicate with wood-anemones, moist and mottled
with dog's-tooth-violet leaves, and spangled with the delicate clusters
of that shy creature, the Claytonia or Spring Beauty. All this was
floored with last year's faded foliage, giving a singular bareness
and whiteness to the foreground. Suddenly, as if entering a cavern, I
stepped through the edge of all this, into a dark little amphitheatre
beneath a hemlock-grove, where the afternoon sunlight struck broadly
through the trees upon a tiny stream and a miniature swamp,--this last
being intensely and luridly green, yet overlaid with the pale gray of
last year's reeds, and absolutely flaming with the gayest yellow light
from great clumps of cowslips. The illumination seemed perfectly weird
and dazzling; the spirit of the place appeared live, wild, fantastic,
almost human. Now open your Tennyson:--

"_And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire
in swamps and hollows gray_."

Our cowslip is the English marsh-marigold.

History is a grander poetry, and it is often urged that the features of
Nature in America must seem tame because they have no legendary wreaths
to decorate them. It is perhaps hard for those of us who are untravelled
to appreciate how densely even the ruralities of Europe are overgrown
with this ivy of associations. Thus, it is fascinating to hear that
the great French forests of Fontainebleau and St. Germain are full of
historic trees,--the oak of Charlemagne, the oak of Clovis, of Queen
Blanche, of Henri Quatre, of Sully,--the alley of Richelieu,--the
rendezvous of St. Herem,--the star of Lamballe and of the Princesses,
a star being a point where several paths or roads converge. It is said
that every topographical work upon these forests has turned out a
history of the French monarchy. Yet surely we lose nearly as much as
we gain by this subordination of imperishable beauty to the perishable
memories of man. It may not be wholly unfortunate, that, in the
absence of those influences which come to older nations from ruins and
traditions, we must go more directly to Nature. Art may either rest upon
other Art, or it may rest directly upon the original foundation; the one
is easier, the other more valuable. Direct dependence on Nature leads
to deeper thought and affords the promise of far fresher results. Why
should I wish to fix my study in Heidelberg Castle, when I possess the
unexhausted treasures of this out-door study here?

The walls of my study are of ever-changing verdure, and its roof and
floor of ever-varying blue. I never enter it without a new heaven above
and new thoughts below. The lake has no lofty shores and no level ones,
but a series of undulating hills, fringed with woods from end to end.
The profaning axe may sometimes come near the margin, and one may hear
the whetting of the scythe; but no cultivated land abuts upon the main
lake, though beyond the narrow woods there are here and there glimpses
of rye-fields that wave like rolling mist. Graceful islands rise from
the quiet waters,--Grape Island, Grass Island, Sharp Pine Island,
and the rest, baptized with simple names by departed generations of
farmers,--all wooded and bushy and trailing with festoonery of vines.
Here and there the banks are indented, and one may pass beneath drooping
chestnut-leaves and among alder-branches into some secret sanctuary of
stillness. The emerald edges of these silent tarns are starred with
dandelions which have strayed here, one scarce knows how, from their
foreign home; the buck-bean perchance grows in the water, or the Rhodora
fixes here one of its shy camping-places, or there are whole skies of
lupine on the sloping banks;--the catbird builds its nest beside us,
the yellow-bird above, the wood-thrush sings late and the whippoorwill
later, and sometimes the scarlet tanager and his golden-haired bride
send a gleam of the tropics through these leafy aisles.

Sometimes I rest in a yet more secluded place amid the waters, where
a little wooded island holds a small lagoon in the centre, just wide
enough for the wherry to turn round. The entrance lies between two
hornbeam trees, which stand close to the brink, spreading over it their
thorn-like branches and their shining leaves. Within there is perfect
shelter; the island forms a high circular bank, like a coral reef, and
shuts out the wind and the passing boats; the surface is paved with
leaves of lily and pond-weed, and the boughs above are full of song. No
matter what white caps may crest the blue waters of the pond, which here
widens out to its broadest reach, there is always quiet here. A few
oar-strokes distant lies a dam or water-break, where the whole lake is
held under control by certain distant mills, towards which a sluggish
stream goes winding on through miles of water-lilies. The old gray
timbers of the dam are the natural resort of every boy or boatman within
their reach; some come in pursuit of pickerel, some of turtles, some of
bull-frogs, some of lilies, some of bathing. It is a good place for the
last desideratum, and it is well to leave here the boat tethered to
the vines which overhang the cove, and perform a sacred and Oriental
ablution beneath the sunny afternoon.

Oh, radiant and divine afternoon! The poets profusely celebrate silver
evenings and golden mornings; but what floods on floods of beauty steep
the earth and gladden it in the first hours of day's decline! The
exuberant rays reflect and multiply themselves from every leaf and
blade; the cows lie upon the hill-side, with their broad peaceful backs
painted into the landscape; the hum of insects, "tiniest bells on the
garment of silence," fills the air; the gorgeous butterflies doze upon
the thistle-blooms till they almost fall from the petals; the air is
full of warm fragrance from the wild-grape clusters; the grass is
burning hot beneath the naked feet in sunshine, and cool as water in the
shade. Diving from this overhanging beam,--for Ovid evidently meant that
Midas to be cured must dive,--

"Subde caput, corpusque simul, simul elue
crinem,"--

one finds as kindly a reception from the water as in childish days, and
as safe a shelter in the green dressing-room afterwards; and the patient
wherry floats near by, in readiness for a reembarkation.

Here a word seems needed, unprofessionally and non-technically, upon
boats,--these being the sole seats provided for occupant or visitor in
my out-door study. When wherries first appeared in this peaceful inland
community, the novel proportions occasioned remark. Facetious bystanders
inquired sarcastically whether that thing were expected to carry
more than one,--plainly implying by labored emphasis that it would
occasionally be seen tenanted by even less than that number.
Transcendental friends inquired, with more refined severity, if the
proprietor expected to _meditate_ in that thing? This doubt at least
seemed legitimate. Meditation seems to belong to sailing rather than
rowing; there is something so gentle and unintrusive in gliding
effortless beneath overhanging branches and along the trailing edges of
clematis thickets;--what a privilege of fairy-land is this noiseless
prow, looking in and out of one flowery cove after another, scarcely
stirring the turtle from his log, and leaving no wake behind! It seemed
as if all the process of rowing had too much noise and bluster, and as
if the sharp slender wherry, in particular, were rather too pert and
dapper to win the confidence of the woods and waters. Time has dispelled
the fear. As I rest poised upon the oars above some submerged shallow,
diamonded with ripple-broken sunbeams, the fantastic Notonecta or
water-boatman rests upon his oars below, and I see that his proportions
anticipated the wherry, as honeycombs antedated the problem of the
hexagonal cell. While one of us rests, so does the other; and when one
shoots away rapidly above the water, the other does the same beneath.
For the time, as our motions seem the same, so with our motives,--my
enjoyment certainly not less, with the conveniences of humanity thrown
in.

But the sun is declining low. The club-boats are out, and from island
to island in the distance these shafts of youthful life shoot swiftly
across. There races some swift Atalanta, with no apple to fall in her
path but some soft and spotted oak-apple from an overhanging tree; there
the Phantom, with a crew white and ghostlike in the distance, glimmers
in and out behind the headlands, while yonder wherry glides lonely
across the smooth expanse. The voices of all these oarsmen are dim and
almost inaudible, being so far away; but one would scarcely wish that
distance should annihilate the ringing laughter of these joyous
girls, who come gliding, in a safe and heavy boat, they and some blue
dragon-flies together, around yonder wooded point.

Many a summer afternoon have I rowed joyously with these same maidens
beneath these steep and garlanded shores; many a time have they pulled
the heavy four-oar, with me as coxswain at the helm,--the said patient
steersman being oft-times insulted by classical allusions from rival
boats, satirically comparing him to an indolent Venus drawn by doves,
while the oarswomen in turn were likened to Minerva with her feet upon
a tortoise. Many were the disasters in the earlier days of feminine
training;--first of toilet, straw hats blowing away, hair coming down,
hair-pins strewing the floor of the boat, gloves commonly happening to
be off at the precise moment of starting, and trials of speed impaired
by somebody's oar catching in somebody's dress-pocket. Then the actual
difficulties of handling the long and heavy oars,--the first essays
at feathering, with a complicated splash of air and water, as when a
wild-duck in rising swims and flies together, and uses neither element
handsomely,--the occasional pulling of a particularly vigorous stroke
through the atmosphere alone, and at other times the compensating
disappearance of nearly the whole oar beneath the liquid surface, as if
some Uncle Kuehleborn had grasped it, while our Undine by main strength
tugged it from the beguiling wave. But with what triumphant abundance
of merriment were these preliminary disasters repaid, and how soon
outgrown! What "time" we sometimes made, when nobody happened to be near
with a watch, and how successfully we tossed oars in saluting, when the
world looked on from a pic-nic! We had our applauses, too. To be sure,
owing to the age and dimensions of the original barge, we could not
command such a burst of enthusiasm as when the young men shot by us in
their race-boat;--but then, as one of the girls justly remarked, we
remained longer in sight.

And many a day, since promotion to a swifter craft, have they rowed with
patient stroke down the lovely lake, still attended by their guide,
philosopher, and coxswain,--along banks where herds of young birch-trees
overspread the sloping valley and ran down in a blaze of sunshine to the
rippling water,--or through the Narrows, where some breeze rocked the
boat till trailing shawls and ribbons were water-soaked, and the bold
little foam would even send a daring drop over the gunwale, to play at
ocean,--or to Davis's Cottage, where a whole parterre of lupines bloomed
to the water's edge, as if relics of some ancient garden-bower of a
forgotten race,--or to the dam by Lily Pond, there to hunt among the
stones for snakes' eggs, each empty shell cut crosswise, where the
young creatures had made their first fierce bite into the universe
outside,--or to some island, where white violets bloomed fragrant and
lonely, separated by relentless breadths of water from their shore-born
sisters, until mingled in their visitors' bouquets,--then up the lake
homeward again at nightfall, the boat all decked with clematis, clethra,
laurel, azalea, or water-lilies, while purple sunset clouds turned forth
their golden linings for drapery above our heads, and then unrolling
sent northward long roseate wreaths to outstrip our loitering speed, and
reach the floating-bridge before us.

It is nightfall now. One by one the birds grow silent, and the soft
dragon-flies, children of the day, are fluttering noiselessly to their
rest beneath the under sides of drooping leaves. From shadowy coves the
evening air is thrusting forth a thin film of mist to spread a white
floor above the waters. The gathering darkness deepens the quiet of the
lake, and bids us, at least for this time, to forsake it. "_De soir
fontaines, de matin montaignes_," says the old French proverb,--Morning
for labor, evening for repose.

A SERMON IN A STONE.

Harry Jones and Tom Murdock got down from the cars,
Near a still country village, and lit their cigars.
They had left the hot town for a stroll and a chat,
And wandered on looking at this and at that,--
Plumed grass with pink clover that waltzed in the breeze,
Ruby currants in gardens, and pears on the trees,--
Till a green church-yard showed them its sun-checkered gloom,
And in they both went and sat down on a tomb.
The dead name was mossy; the letters were dim;
But they spelled out "James Woodson," and mused upon him,
Till Harry said, poring, "I wish I could know
What manner of man used the bones down below."
Answered Tom,--as he took his cigar from his lip
And tapped off the ashes that crusted the tip,
His quaint face somewhat shaded with awe and with mystery,--
"You shall hear, if you will, the main points in his story."--
"You don't mean you knew him? You could not! See here!
Why, this, since he died, is the thirtieth year!"--
"I never saw him, nor the place where he lay,
Nor heard of nor thought of the man, till to-day;
But I'll tell you his story, and leave it to you
If 'tis not ten to one that my story is true.

"The man whose old mould underneath us is hid
Meant a great deal more good and less harm than he did.
He knelt in yon church 'mid the worshipping throng,
And vowed to do right, but went out to do wrong;
For, going up of a Sunday to look at the gate
Of Saints' Alley, he stuck there and found it was strait,
And slid back of a Monday to walk in the way
That is popular, populous, smooth-paved, and gay.
The flesh it was strong, but the spirit was faint.
He first was too young, then too old, for a saint.
He wished well by his neighbors, did well by himself,
And hoped for salvation, and struggled for pelf;
And easy Tomorrow still promised to pay
The still swelling debts of his bankrupt Today,
Till, bestriding the deep sudden chasm that is fixed
The sunshiny world and the shadowy betwixt,
His Today with a pale wond'ring face stood alone,
And over the border Tomorrow had flown.
So after went he, his accounts as he could
To settle and make his loose reckonings good,
And left us his tomb and his skeleton under,--
Two boons to his race,--to sit down on and ponder.
Heaven help him! Yet heaven, I fear, he hath lost.
Here lies his poor dust; but where cries his poor ghost?
We know not. Perhaps we shall see by-and-by,
When out of our coffins we get, you and I."

AGNES OF SORRENTO.

CHAPTER X.

THE INTERVIEW.

The dreams of Agnes, on the night after her conversation with the monk
and her singular momentary interview with the cavalier, were a strange
mixture of images, indicating the peculiarities of her education and
habits of daily thought.

She dreamed that she was sitting alone in the moonlight, and heard some
one rustling in the distant foliage of the orange-groves, and from them
came a young man dressed in white of a dazzling clearness like sunlight;
large pearly wings fell from his shoulders and seemed to shimmer with
a phosphoric radiance; his forehead was broad and grave, and above it
floated a thin, tremulous tongue of flame; his eyes had that deep,
mysterious gravity which is so well expressed in all the Florentine
paintings of celestial beings: and yet, singularly enough, this
white-robed, glorified form seemed to have the features and lineaments
of the mysterious cavalier of the evening before,--the same deep,
mournful, dark eyes, only that in them the light of earthly pride had
given place to the calm, strong gravity of an assured peace,--the same
broad forehead,--the same delicately chiselled features, but elevated
and etherealized, glowing with a kind of interior ecstasy. He seemed to
move from the shadow of the orange-trees with a backward floating of his
lustrous garments, as if borne on a cloud just along the surface of
the ground; and in his hand he held the lily-spray, all radiant with a
silvery, living light, just as the monk had suggested to her a divine
flower might be. Agnes seemed to herself to hold her breath and marvel
with a secret awe, and, as often happens in dreams, she wondered to
herself,--"Was this stranger, then, indeed, not even mortal, not even a
king's brother, but an angel?--How strange," she said to herself, "that
I should never have seen it in his eyes!" Nearer and nearer the vision
drew, and touched her forehead with the lily, which seemed dewy and
icy cool; and with the contact it seemed to her that a delicious
tranquillity, a calm ecstasy, possessed her soul, and the words were
impressed in her mind, as if spoken in her ear, "The Lord hath sealed
thee for his own!"--and then, with the wild fantasy of dreams, she saw
the cavalier in his wonted form and garments, just as he had kneeled to
her the night before, and he said, "Oh, Agnes! Agnes! little lamb of
Christ, love me and lead me!"--and in her sleep it seemed to her that
her heart stirred and throbbed with a strange, new movement in answer to
those sad, pleading eyes, and thereafter her dream became more troubled.

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