TEXT: Henry David Thoreau, Excursions/Poems

Henry David Thoreau

EXCURSIONS AND POEMS

EXCURSIONS 

A YANKEE IN CANADA


New England is by some affirmed to be an island, bounded on the north
with the River Canada (so called from Monsieur Cane).--JOSSELYN'S
RARITIES.

And still older, in Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan," published in
1632, it is said, on page 97, "From this Lake [Erocoise] Northwards is
derived the famous River of Canada, so named, of Monsier de Cane, a
French Lord, who first planted a colony of French in America."




A YANKEE IN CANADA




CHAPTER I

CONCORD TO MONTREAL


I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen
much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold. I left Concord,
Massachusetts, Wednesday morning, September 25th, 1850, for Quebec.
Fare, seven dollars there and back; distance from Boston, five hundred
and ten miles; being obliged to leave Montreal on the return as soon
as Friday, October 4th, or within ten days. I will not stop to tell
the reader the names of my fellow-travelers; there were said to be
fifteen hundred of them. I wished only to be set down in Canada, and
take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an
afternoon.

The country was new to me beyond Fitchburg. In Ashburnham and
afterward, as we were whirled rapidly along, I noticed the woodbine
(_Ampelopsis quinquefolia_), its leaves now changed, for the most part
on dead trees, draping them like a red scarf. It was a little
exciting, suggesting bloodshed, or at least a military life, like an
epaulet or sash, as if it were dyed with the blood of the trees whose
wounds it was inadequate to stanch. For now the bloody autumn was
come, and an Indian warfare was waged through the forest. These
military trees appeared very numerous, for our rapid progress
connected those that were even some miles apart. Does the woodbine
prefer the elm? The first view of Monadnock was obtained five or six
miles this side of Fitzwilliam, but nearest and best at Troy and
beyond. Then there were the Troy cuts and embankments. Keene Street
strikes the traveler favorably, it is so wide, level, straight, and
long. I have heard one of my relatives, who was born and bred there,
say that you could see a chicken run across it a mile off. I have also
been told that when this town was settled they laid out a street four
rods wide, but at a subsequent meeting of the proprietors one rose and
remarked, "We have plenty of land, why not make the street eight rods
wide?" and so they voted that it should be eight rods wide, and the
town is known far and near for its handsome street. It was a cheap way
of securing comfort, as well as fame, and I wish that all new towns
would take pattern from this. It is best to lay our plans widely in
youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our
views afterward. Youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks,
that they may make handsome and liberal old men! Show me a youth whose
mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared
for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when
those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be
realized. I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out
a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide. I know one such
Washington city of a man, whose lots as yet are only surveyed and
staked out, and, except a cluster of shanties here and there, only the
Capitol stands there for all structures, and any day you may see from
afar his princely idea borne coachwise along the spacious but yet
empty avenues. Keene is built on a remarkably large and level
interval, like the bed of a lake, and the surrounding hills, which are
remote from its street, must afford some good walks. The scenery of
mountain towns is commonly too much crowded. A town which is built on
a plain of some extent, with an open horizon, and surrounded by hills
at a distance, affords the best walks and views.

As we travel northwest up the country, sugar maples, beeches, birches,
hemlocks, spruce, butternuts, and ash trees prevail more and more. To
the rapid traveler the number of elms in a town is the measure of its
civility. One man in the cars has a bottle full of some liquor. The
whole company smile whenever it is exhibited. I find no difficulty in
containing myself. The Westmoreland country looked attractive. I heard
a passenger giving the very obvious derivation of this name,
Westmore-land, as if it were purely American, and he had made a
discovery; but I thought of "my cousin Westmoreland" in England. Every
one will remember the approach to Bellows Falls, under a high cliff
which rises from the Connecticut. I was disappointed in the size of
the river here; it appeared shrunk to a mere mountain-stream. The
water was evidently very low. The rivers which we had crossed this
forenoon possessed more of the character of mountain-streams than
those in the vicinity of Concord, and I was surprised to see
everywhere traces of recent freshets, which had carried away bridges
and injured the railroad, though I had heard nothing of it. In
Ludlow, Mount Holly, and beyond, there is interesting mountain
scenery, not rugged and stupendous, but such as you could easily
ramble over,--long, narrow, mountain vales through which to see the
horizon. You are in the midst of the Green Mountains. A few more
elevated blue peaks are seen from the neighborhood of Mount Holly;
perhaps Killington Peak is one. Sometimes, as on the Western Railroad,
you are whirled over mountainous embankments, from which the scared
horses in the valleys appear diminished to hounds. All the hills
blush; I think that autumn must be the best season to journey over
even the _Green_ Mountains. You frequently exclaim to yourself, What
_red_ maples! The sugar maple is not so red. You see some of the
latter with rosy spots or cheeks only, blushing on one side like
fruit, while all the rest of the tree is green, proving either some
partiality in the light or frosts or some prematurity in particular
branches. Tall and slender ash trees, whose foliage is turned to a
dark mulberry color, are frequent. The butternut, which is a
remarkably spreading tree, is turned completely yellow, thus proving
its relation to the hickories. I was also struck by the bright yellow
tints of the yellow birch. The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean
ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their
branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from
the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that
you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy
canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.

As you approach Lake Champlain you begin to see the New York
mountains. The first view of the lake at Vergennes is impressive, but
rather from association than from any peculiarity in the scenery. It
lies there so small (not appearing in that proportion to the width of
the State that it does on the map), but beautifully quiet, like a
picture of the Lake of Lucerne on a music-box, where you trace the
name of Lucerne among the foliage; far more ideal than ever it looked
on the map. It does not say, "Here I am, Lake Champlain," as the
conductor might for it, but having studied the geography thirty years,
you crossed over a hill one afternoon and beheld it. But it is only a
glimpse that you get here. At Burlington you rush to a wharf and go on
board a steamboat, two hundred and thirty-two miles from Boston. We
left Concord at twenty minutes before eight in the morning, and were
in Burlington about six at night, but too late to see the lake. We got
our first fair view of the lake at dawn, just before reaching
Plattsburg, and saw blue ranges of mountains on either hand, in New
York and in Vermont, the former especially grand. A few white
schooners, like gulls, were seen in the distance, for it is not waste
and solitary like a lake in Tartary; but it was such a view as leaves
not much to be said; indeed, I have postponed Lake Champlain to
another day.

The oldest reference to these waters that I have yet seen is in the
account of Cartier's discovery and exploration of the St. Lawrence in
1535. Samuel Champlain actually discovered and paddled up the lake in
July, 1609, eleven years before the settlement of Plymouth,
accompanying a war-party of the Canadian Indians against the
Iroquois. He describes the islands in it as not inhabited, although
they are pleasant,--on account of the continual wars of the Indians,
in consequence of which they withdraw from the rivers and lakes into
the depths of the land, that they may not be surprised. "Continuing
our course," says he, "in this lake, on the western side, viewing the
country, I saw on the eastern side very high mountains, where there
was snow on the summit. I inquired of the savages if those places were
inhabited. They replied that they were, and that they were Iroquois,
and that in those places there were beautiful valleys and plains
fertile in corn, such as I have eaten in this country, with an
infinity of other fruits." This is the earliest account of what is now
Vermont.

The number of French-Canadian gentlemen and ladies among the
passengers, and the sound of the French language, advertised us by
this time that we were being whirled towards some foreign vortex. And
now we have left Rouse's Point, and entered the Sorel River, and
passed the invisible barrier between the States and Canada. The shores
of the Sorel, Richelieu, or St. John's River are flat and reedy, where
I had expected something more rough and mountainous for a natural
boundary between two nations. Yet I saw a difference at once, in the
few huts, in the pirogues on the shore, and as it were, in the shore
itself. This was an interesting scenery to me, and the very reeds or
rushes in the shallow water and the tree-tops in the swamps have left
a pleasing impression. We had still a distant view behind us of two or
three blue mountains in Vermont and New York. About nine o'clock in
the forenoon we reached St. John's, an old frontier post three hundred
and six miles from Boston, and twenty-four from Montreal. We now
discovered that we were in a foreign country, in a station-house of
another nation. This building was a barn-like structure, looking as if
it were the work of the villagers combined, like a log house in a new
settlement. My attention was caught by the double advertisements in
French and English fastened to its posts, by the formality of the
English, and the covert or open reference to their queen and the
British lion. No gentlemanly conductor appeared, none whom you would
know to be the conductor by his dress and demeanor; but ere long we
began to see here and there a solid, red-faced, burly-looking
Englishman, a little pursy perhaps, who made us ashamed of ourselves
and our thin and nervous countrymen,--a grandfatherly personage, at
home in his greatcoat, who looked as if he might be a stage
proprietor, certainly a railroad director, and knew, or had a right to
know, when the cars did start. Then there were two or three
pale-faced, black-eyed, loquacious Canadian-French gentlemen there,
shrugging their shoulders; pitted as if they had all had the
small-pox. In the meanwhile some soldiers, redcoats, belonging to the
barracks near by, were turned out to be drilled. At every important
point in our route the soldiers showed themselves ready for us; though
they were evidently rather raw recruits here, they manœuvred far
better than our soldiers; yet, as usual, I heard some Yankees talk as
if they were no great shakes, and they had seen the Acton Blues
manœuvre as well. The officers spoke sharply to them, and appeared
to be doing their part thoroughly. I heard one suddenly coming to the
rear, exclaim, "Michael Donouy, take his name!" though I could not see
what the latter did or omitted to do. It was whispered that Michael
Donouy would have to suffer for that. I heard some of our party
discussing the possibility of their driving these troops off the field
with their umbrellas. I thought that the Yankee, though undisciplined,
had this advantage at least, that he especially is a man who,
everywhere and under all circumstances, is fully resolved to better
his condition essentially, and therefore he could afford to be beaten
at first; while the virtue of the Irishman, and to a great extent the
Englishman, consists in merely maintaining his ground or condition.
The Canadians here, a rather poor-looking race, clad in gray homespun,
which gave them the appearance of being covered with dust, were riding
about in caleches and small one-horse carts called charettes. The
Yankees assumed that all the riders were racing, or at least
exhibiting the paces of their horses, and saluted them accordingly. We
saw but little of the village here, for nobody could tell us when the
cars would start; that was kept a profound secret, perhaps for
political reasons; and therefore we were tied to our seats. The
inhabitants of St. John's and vicinity are described by an English
traveler as "singularly unprepossessing," and before completing his
period he adds, "besides, they are generally very much disaffected to
the British crown." I suspect that that "besides" should have been a
because.

At length, about noon, the cars began to roll towards La Prairie. The
whole distance of fifteen miles was over a remarkably level country,
resembling a Western prairie, with the mountains about Chambly visible
in the northeast. This novel but monotonous scenery was exciting. At
La Prairie we first took notice of the tinned roofs, but above all of
the St. Lawrence, which looked like a lake; in fact it is considerably
expanded here; it was nine miles across diagonally to Montreal. Mount
Royal in the rear of the city, and the island of St. Helen's opposite
to it, were now conspicuous. We could also see the Sault St. Louis
about five miles up the river, and the Sault Norman still farther
eastward. The former are described as the most considerable rapids in
the St. Lawrence; but we could see merely a gleam of light there as
from a cobweb in the sun. Soon the city of Montreal was discovered
with its tin roofs shining afar. Their reflections fell on the eye
like a clash of cymbals on the ear. Above all the church of Notre Dame
was conspicuous, and anon the Bonsecours market-house, occupying a
commanding position on the quay, in the rear of the shipping. This
city makes the more favorable impression from being approached by
water, and also being built of stone, a gray limestone found on the
island. Here, after traveling directly inland the whole breadth of New
England, we had struck upon a city's harbor,--it made on me the
impression of a seaport,--to which ships of six hundred tons can
ascend, and where vessels drawing fifteen feet lie close to the wharf,
five hundred and forty miles from the Gulf, the St. Lawrence being
here two miles wide. There was a great crowd assembled on the
ferry-boat wharf and on the quay to receive the Yankees, and flags of
all colors were streaming from the vessels to celebrate their arrival.
When the gun was fired, the gentry hurrahed again and again, and then
the Canadian caleche-drivers, who were most interested in the matter,
and who, I perceived, were separated from the former by a fence,
hurrahed their welcome; first the broadcloth, then the homespun.

It was early in the afternoon when we stepped ashore. With a single
companion, I soon found my way to the church of Notre Dame. I saw that
it was of great size and signified something. It is said to be the
largest ecclesiastical structure in North America, and can seat ten
thousand. It is two hundred and fifty-five and a half feet long, and
the groined ceiling is eighty feet above your head. The Catholic are
the only churches which I have seen worth remembering, which are not
almost wholly profane. I do not speak only of the rich and splendid
like this, but of the humblest of them as well. Coming from the
hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages, we pushed aside the listed
door of this church, and found ourselves instantly in an atmosphere
which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one had any. There
sat one or two women who had stolen a moment from the concerns of the
day, as they were passing; but, if there had been fifty people there,
it would still have been the most solitary place imaginable. They did
not look up at us, nor did one regard another. We walked softly down
the broad aisle with our hats in our hands. Presently came in a troop
of Canadians, in their homespun, who had come to the city in the boat
with us, and one and all kneeled down in the aisle before the high
altar to their devotions, somewhat awkwardly, as cattle prepare to lie
down, and there we left them. As if you were to catch some farmer's
sons from Marlborough, come to cattle-show, silently kneeling in
Concord meeting-house some Wednesday! Would there not soon be a mob
peeping in at the windows? It is true, these Roman Catholics, priests
and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the
significance of their symbols. It is as if an ox had strayed into a
church and were trying to bethink himself. Nevertheless, they are
capable of reverence; but we Yankees are a people in whom this
sentiment has nearly died out, and in this respect we cannot bethink
ourselves even as oxen. I did not mind the pictures nor the candles,
whether tallow or tin. Those of the former which I looked at appeared
tawdry. It matters little to me whether the pictures are by a neophyte
of the Algonquin or the Italian tribe. But I was impressed by the
quiet, religious atmosphere of the place. It was a great cave in the
midst of a city; and what were the altars and the tinsel but the
sparkling stalactites, into which you entered in a moment, and where
the still atmosphere and the sombre light disposed to serious and
profitable thought? Such a cave at hand, which you can enter any day,
is worth a thousand of our churches which are open only Sundays,
hardly long enough for an airing, and then filled with a bustling
congregation,--a church where the priest is the least part, where you
do your own preaching, where the universe preaches to you and can be
heard. I am not sure but this Catholic religion would be an admirable
one if the priest were quite omitted. I think that I might go to
church myself some Monday, if I lived in a city where there was such a
one to go to. In Concord, to be sure, we do not need such. Our forests
are such a church, far grander and more sacred. We dare not leave
_our_ meeting-houses open for fear they would be profaned. Such a
cave, such a shrine, in one of our groves, for instance, how long
would it be respected? for what purposes would it be entered, by such
baboons as we are? I think of its value not only to religion, but to
philosophy and to poetry; besides a reading-room, to have a
thinking-room in every city! Perchance the time will come when every
house even will have not only its sleeping-rooms, and dining-room, and
talking-room or parlor, but its thinking-room also, and the architects
will put it into their plans. Let it be furnished and ornamented with
whatever conduces to serious and creative thought. I should not object
to the holy water, or any other simple symbol, if it were consecrated
by the imagination of the worshipers.

I heard that some Yankees bet that the candles were not wax, but tin.
A European assured them that they were wax; but, inquiring of the
sexton, he was surprised to learn that they were tin filled with oil.
The church was too poor to afford wax. As for the Protestant churches,
here or elsewhere, they did not interest me, for it is only as caves
that churches interest me at all, and in that respect they were
inferior.

Montreal makes the impression of a larger city than you had expected
to find, though you may have heard that it contains nearly sixty
thousand inhabitants. In the newer parts, it appeared to be growing
fast like a small New York, and to be considerably Americanized. The
names of the squares reminded you of Paris,--the Champ de Mars, the
Place d'Armes, and others,--and you felt as if a French revolution
might break out any moment. Glimpses of Mount Royal rising behind the
town, and the names of some streets in that direction, make one think
of Edinburgh. That hill sets off this city wonderfully. I inquired at
a principal bookstore for books published in Montreal. They said that
there were none but school-books and the like; they got their books
from the States. From time to time we met a priest in the streets, for
they are distinguished by their dress, like the _civil_ police. Like
clergymen generally, with or without the gown, they made on us the
impression of effeminacy. We also met some Sisters of Charity, dressed
in black, with Shaker-shaped black bonnets and crosses, and cadaverous
faces, who looked as if they had almost cried their eyes out, their
complexions parboiled with scalding tears; insulting the daylight by
their presence, having taken an oath not to smile. By cadaverous I
mean that their faces were like the faces of those who have been dead
and buried for a year, and then untombed, with the life's grief upon
them, and yet, for some unaccountable reason, the process of decay
arrested.

     "Truth never fails her servant, sir, nor leaves him
     With the day's shame upon him."

They waited demurely on the sidewalk while a truck laden with raisins
was driven in at the seminary of St. Sulpice, never once lifting their
eyes from the ground.

The soldier here, as everywhere in Canada, appeared to be put forward,
and by his best foot. They were in the proportion of the soldiers to
the laborers in an African ant-hill. The inhabitants evidently rely on
them in a great measure for music and entertainment. You would meet
with them pacing back and forth before some guard-house or
passage-way, guarding, regarding, and disregarding all kinds of law by
turns, apparently for the sake of the discipline to themselves, and
not because it was important to exclude anybody from entering that
way. They reminded me of the men who are paid for piling up bricks and
then throwing them down again. On every prominent ledge you could see
England's hands holding the Canadas, and I judged by the redness of
her knuckles that she would soon have to let go. In the rear of such a
guard-house, in a large graveled square or parade ground, called the
Champ de Mars, we saw a large body of soldiers being drilled, we being
as yet the only spectators. But they did not appear to notice us any
more than the devotees in the church, but were seemingly as
indifferent to fewness of spectators as the phenomena of nature are,
whatever they might have been thinking under their helmets of the
Yankees that were to come. Each man wore white kid gloves. It was one
of the most interesting sights which I saw in Canada. The problem
appeared to be how to smooth down all individual protuberances or
idiosyncrasies, and make a thousand men move as one man, animated by
one central will; and there was some approach to success. They obeyed
the signals of a commander who stood at a great distance, wand in
hand; and the precision, and promptness, and harmony of their
movements could not easily have been matched. The harmony was far more
remarkable than that of any choir or band, and obtained, no doubt, at
a greater cost. They made on me the impression, not of many
individuals, but of one vast centipede of a man, good for all sorts of
pulling down; and why not then for some kinds of building up? If men
could combine thus earnestly, and patiently, and harmoniously to some
really worthy end, what might they not accomplish? They now put their
hands, and partially perchance their heads together, and the result is
that they are the imperfect tools of an imperfect and tyrannical
government. But if they could put their hands and heads and hearts and
all together, such a coöperation and harmony would be the very end and
success for which government now exists in vain,--a government, as it
were, not only with tools, but stock to trade with.

I was obliged to frame some sentences that sounded like French in
order to deal with the market-women, who, for the most part, cannot
speak English. According to the guidebook the relative population of
this city stands nearly thus: two fifths are French-Canadian; nearly
one fifth British-Canadian; one and a half fifths English, Irish, and
Scotch; somewhat less than one half fifth Germans, United States
people, and others. I saw nothing like pie for sale, and no good cake
to put in my bundle, such as you can easily find in our towns, but
plenty of fair-looking apples, for which Montreal Island is
celebrated, and also pears cheaper and I thought better than ours, and
peaches, which, though they were probably brought from the South, were
as cheap as they commonly are with us. So imperative is the law of
demand and supply that, as I have been told, the market of Montreal is
sometimes supplied with green apples from the State of New York some
weeks even before they are ripe in the latter place. I saw here the
spruce wax which the Canadians chew, done up in little silvered
papers, a penny a roll; also a small and shriveled fruit which they
called _cerises_, mixed with many little stems, somewhat like raisins,
but I soon returned what I had bought, finding them rather insipid,
only putting a sample in my pocket. Since my return, I find on
comparison that it is the fruit of the sweet viburnum (_Viburnum
Lentago_), which with us rarely holds on till it is ripe.

I stood on the deck of the steamer John Munn, late in the afternoon,
when the second and third ferry-boats arrived from La Prairie,
bringing the remainder of the Yankees. I never saw so many caleches,
cabs, charettes, and similar vehicles collected before, and doubt if
New York could easily furnish more. The handsome and substantial stone
quay which stretches a mile along the riverside and protects the
street from the ice was thronged with the citizens who had turned out
on foot and in carriages to welcome or to behold the Yankees. It was
interesting to see the caleche-drivers dash up and down the slope of
the quay with their active little horses. They drive much faster than
in our cities. I have been told that some of them come nine miles into
the city every morning and return every night, without changing their
horses during the day. In the midst of the crowd of carts, I observed
one deep one loaded with sheep with their legs tied together, and
their bodies piled one upon another, as if the driver had forgotten
that they were sheep and not yet mutton,--a sight, I trust, peculiar
to Canada, though I fear that it is not.




CHAPTER II

QUEBEC AND MONTMORENCI


About six o'clock we started for Quebec, one hundred and eighty miles
distant by the river; gliding past Longueuil and Boucherville on the
right, and Pointe aux Trembles, "so called from having been originally
covered with aspens," and Bout de l'Isle, or the end of the island, on
the left. I repeat these names not merely for want of more substantial
facts to record, but because they sounded singularly poetic to my
ears. There certainly was no lie in them. They suggested that some
simple, and, perchance, heroic human life might have transpired there.
There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the
mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a
string of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word.
The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least
natural fact, and the allying his life to it. All the world
reiterating this slender truth, that aspens once grew there; and the
swift inference is that men were there to see them. And so it would be
with the names of our native and neighboring villages, if we had not
profaned them.

The daylight now failed us, and we went below; but I endeavored to
console myself for being obliged to make this voyage by night, by
thinking that I did not lose a great deal, the shores being low and
rather unattractive, and that the river itself was much the more
interesting object. I heard something in the night about the boat
being at William Henry, Three Rivers, and in the Richelieu Rapids, but
I was still where I had been when I lost sight of Pointe aux Trembles.
To hear a man who has been waked up at midnight in the cabin of a
steamboat inquiring, "Waiter, where are we now?" is as if, at any
moment of the earth's revolution round the sun, or of the system round
its centre, one were to raise himself up and inquire of one of the
deck hands, "Where are we now?"

I went on deck at daybreak, when we were thirty or forty miles above
Quebec. The banks were now higher and more interesting. There was an
"uninterrupted succession of whitewashed cottages," on each side of
the river. This is what every traveler tells. But it is not to be
taken as an evidence of the populousness of the country in general,
hardly even of the river-banks. They have presented a similar
appearance for a hundred years. The Swedish traveler and naturalist
Kalm, who descended the river in 1749, says, "It could really be
called a village, beginning at Montreal and ending at Quebec, which is
a distance of more than one hundred and eighty miles; for the
farmhouses are never above five arpents, and sometimes but three
asunder, a few places excepted." Even in 1684 Hontan said that the
houses were not more than a gunshot apart at most. Ere long we passed
Cape Rouge, eight miles above Quebec, the mouth of the Chaudière on
the opposite or south side; New Liverpool Cove with its lumber-rafts
and some shipping; then Sillery and Wolfe's Cove and the Heights of
Abraham on the north, with now a view of Cape Diamond, and the citadel
in front. The approach to Quebec was very imposing. It was about six
o'clock in the morning when we arrived. There is but a single street
under the cliff on the south side of the cape, which was made by
blasting the rocks and filling up the river. Three-story houses did
not rise more than one fifth or one sixth the way up the nearly
perpendicular rock, whose summit is three hundred and forty-five feet
above the water. We saw, as we glided past, the sign on the side of
the precipice, part way up, pointing to the spot where Montgomery was
killed in 1775. Formerly it was the custom for those who went to
Quebec for the first time to be ducked, or else pay a fine. Not even
the Governor-General escaped. But we were too many to be ducked, even
if the custom had not been abolished.[1]

Here we were, in the harbor of Quebec, still three hundred and sixty
miles from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, in a basin two miles across,
where the greatest depth is twenty-eight fathoms, and though the water
is fresh, the tide rises seventeen to twenty-four feet,--a harbor
"large and deep enough," says a British traveler, "to hold the English
navy." I may as well state that, in 1844, the county of Quebec
contained about forty-five thousand inhabitants (the city and suburbs
having about forty-three thousand),--about twenty-eight thousand being
Canadians of French origin; eight thousand British; over seven
thousand natives of Ireland; one thousand five hundred natives of
England; the rest Scotch and others. Thirty-six thousand belong to the
Church of Rome.

Separating ourselves from the crowd, we walked up a narrow street,
thence ascended by some wooden steps, called the Break-neck Stairs,
into another steep, narrow, and zigzag street, blasted through the
rock, which last led through a low, massive stone portal, called
Prescott Gate, the principal thoroughfare into the Upper Town. This
passage was defended by cannon, with a guard-house over it, a sentinel
at his post, and other soldiers at hand ready to relieve him. I rubbed
my eyes to be sure that I was in the Nineteenth Century, and was not
entering one of those portals which sometimes adorn the frontispieces
of new editions of old black-letter volumes. I thought it would be a
good place to read Froissart's Chronicles. It was such a reminiscence
of the Middle Ages as Scott's novels. Men apparently dwelt there for
security! Peace be unto them! As if the inhabitants of New York were
to go over to Castle William to live! What a place it must be to bring
up children! Being safe through the gate, we naturally took the street
which was steepest, and after a few turns found ourselves on the
Durham Terrace, a wooden platform on the site of the old castle of St.
Louis, still one hundred and fifteen feet below the summit of the
citadel, overlooking the Lower Town, the wharf where we had landed,
the harbor, the Isle of Orleans, and the river and surrounding country
to a great distance. It was literally a _splendid_ view. We could see,
six or seven miles distant, in the northeast, an indentation in the
lofty shore of the northern channel, apparently on one side of the
harbor, which marked the mouth of the Montmorenci, whose celebrated
fall was only a few rods in the rear.

At a shoe-shop, whither we were directed for this purpose, we got some
of our American money changed into English. I found that American hard
money would have answered as well, excepting cents, which fell very
fast before their pennies, it taking two of the former to make one of
the latter, and often the penny, which had cost us two cents, did us
the service of one cent only. Moreover, our robust cents were
compelled to meet on even terms a crew of vile half-penny tokens, and
Bungtown coppers, which had more brass in their composition, and so
perchance made their way in the world. Wishing to get into the
citadel, we were directed to the Jesuits' Barracks,--a good part of
the public buildings here are barracks,--to get a pass of the Town
Major. We did not heed the sentries at the gate, nor did they us, and
what under the sun they were placed there for, unless to hinder a free
circulation of the air, was not apparent. There we saw soldiers eating
their breakfasts in their mess-room, from bare wooden tables in camp
fashion. We were continually meeting with soldiers in the streets,
carrying funny little tin pails of all shapes, even semicircular, as
if made to pack conveniently. I supposed that they contained their
dinners,--so many slices of bread and butter to each, perchance.
Sometimes they were carrying some kind of military chest on a sort of
bier or hand-barrow, with a springy, undulating, military step, all
passengers giving way to them, even the charette-drivers stopping for
them to pass,--as if the battle were being lost from an inadequate
supply of powder. There was a regiment of Highlanders, and, as I
understood, of Royal Irish, in the city; and by this time there was a
regiment of Yankees also. I had already observed, looking up even from
the water, the head and shoulders of some General Poniatowsky, with an
enormous cocked hat and gun, peering over the roof of a house, away up
where the chimney caps commonly are with us, as it were a caricature
of war and military awfulness; but I had not gone far up St. Louis
Street before my riddle was solved, by the apparition of a real live
Highlander under a cocked hat, and with his knees out, standing and
marching sentinel on the ramparts, between St. Louis and St. John's
Gate. (It must be a holy war that is waged there.) We stood close by
without fear and looked at him. His legs were somewhat tanned, and the
hair had begun to grow on them, as some of our wise men predict that
it will in such cases, but I did not think they were remarkable in any
respect. Notwithstanding all his warlike gear, when I inquired of him
the way to the Plains of Abraham, he could not answer me without
betraying some bashfulness through his broad Scotch. Soon after, we
passed another of these creatures standing sentry at the St. Louis
Gate, who let us go by without shooting us, or even demanding the
countersign. We then began to go through the gate, which was so thick
and tunnel-like as to remind me of those lines in Claudian's "Old Man
of Verona," about the getting out of the gate being the greater part
of a journey;--as you might imagine yourself crawling through an
architectural vignette _at the end_ of a black-letter volume. We were
then reminded that we had been in a fortress, from which we emerged by
numerous zigzags in a ditch-like road, going a considerable distance
to advance a few rods, where they could have shot us two or three
times over, if their minds had been disposed as their guns were. The
greatest, or rather the most prominent, part of this city was
constructed with the design to offer the deadest resistance to leaden
and iron missiles that might be cast against it. But it is a
remarkable meteorological and psychological fact, that it is rarely
known to rain lead with much violence, except on places so
constructed. Keeping on about a mile we came to the Plains of
Abraham,--for having got through with the Saints, we came next to the
Patriarchs. Here the Highland regiment was being reviewed, while the
band stood on one side and played--methinks it was _La Claire
Fontaine_, the national air of the Canadian French. This is the site
where a real battle once took place, to commemorate which they have
had a sham fight here almost every day since. The Highlanders
manœuvred very well, and if the precision of their movements was
less remarkable, they did not appear so stiffly erect as the English
or Royal Irish, but had a more elastic and graceful gait, like a herd
of their own red deer, or as if accustomed to stepping down the sides
of mountains. But they made a sad impression on the whole, for it was
obvious that all true manhood was in the process of being drilled out
of them. I have no doubt that soldiers well drilled are, as a class,
peculiarly destitute of originality and independence. The officers
appeared like men dressed above their condition. It is impossible to
give the soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His
natural foe is the government that drills him. What would any
philanthropist who felt an interest in these men's welfare naturally
do, but first of all teach them so to respect themselves that they
could not be hired for this work, whatever might be the consequences
to this government or that?--not drill a few, but educate all. I
observed one older man among them, gray as a wharf-rat, and supple as
the devil, marching lock-step with the rest, who would have to pay for
that elastic gait.

We returned to the citadel along the heights, plucking such flowers as
grew there. There was an abundance of succory still in blossom,
broad-leaved goldenrod, buttercups, thorn bushes, Canada thistles, and
ivy, on the very summit of Cape Diamond. I also found the bladder
campion in the neighborhood. We there enjoyed an extensive view, which
I will describe in another place. Our pass, which stated that all the
rules were "to be strictly enforced," as if they were determined to
keep up the semblance of reality to the last gasp, opened to us the
Dalhousie Gate, and we were conducted over the citadel by a
bare-legged Highlander in cocked hat and full regimentals. He told us
that he had been here about three years, and had formerly been
stationed at Gibraltar. As if his regiment, having perchance been
nestled amid the rocks of Edinburgh Castle, must flit from rock to
rock thenceforth over the earth's surface, like a bald eagle, or other
bird of prey, from eyrie to eyrie. As we were going out, we met the
Yankees coming in, in a body headed by a red-coated officer called the
commandant, and escorted by many citizens, both English and
French-Canadian. I therefore immediately fell into the procession, and
went round the citadel again with more intelligent guides, carrying,
as before, all my effects with me. Seeing that nobody walked with the
red-coated commandant, I attached myself to him, and though I was not
what is called well-dressed, he did not know whether to repel me or
not, for I talked like one who was not aware of any deficiency in that
respect. Probably there was not one among all the Yankees who went to
Canada this time, who was not more splendidly dressed than I was. It
would have been a poor story if I had not enjoyed some distinction. I
had on my "bad-weather clothes," like Olaf Trygvesson the Northman,
when he went to the Thing in England, where, by the way, he won his
bride. As we stood by the thirty-two-pounder on the summit of Cape
Diamond, which is fired three times a day, the commandant told me that
it would carry to the Isle of Orleans, four miles distant, and that no
hostile vessel could come round the island. I now saw the subterranean
or rather "casemated" barracks of the soldiers, which I had not
noticed before, though I might have walked over them. They had very
narrow windows, serving as loop-holes for musketry, and small iron
chimneys rising above the ground. There we saw the soldiers at home
and in an undress, splitting wood,--I looked to see whether with
swords or axes,--and in various ways endeavoring to realize that their
nation was now at peace with this part of the world. A part of each
regiment, chiefly officers, are allowed to marry. A grandfatherly,
would-be witty Englishman could give a Yankee whom he was patronizing
no reason for the bare knees of the Highlanders, other than oddity.
The rock within the citadel is a little convex, so that shells falling
on it would roll toward the circumference, where the barracks of the
soldiers and officers are; it has been proposed, therefore, to make it
slightly concave, so that they may roll into the centre, where they
would be comparatively harmless; and it is estimated that to do this
would cost twenty thousand pounds sterling. It may be well to remember
this when I build my next house, and have the roof "all correct" for
bomb-shells.

At mid-afternoon we made haste down Sault-au-Matelot Street, towards
the Falls of Montmorenci, about eight miles down the St. Lawrence, on
the north side, leaving the further examination of Quebec till our
return. On our way, we saw men in the streets sawing logs pit-fashion,
and afterward, with a common wood-saw and horse, cutting the planks
into squares for paving the streets. This looked very shiftless,
especially in a country abounding in water-power, and reminded me that
I was no longer in Yankeeland. I found, on inquiry, that the excuse
for this was that labor was so cheap; and I thought, with some pain,
how cheap men are here! I have since learned that the English traveler
Warburton remarked, soon after landing at Quebec, that everything was
cheap there but men. That must be the difference between going thither
from New and from Old England. I had already observed the dogs
harnessed to their little milk-carts, which contain a single large
can, lying asleep in the gutters regardless of the horses, while they
rested from their labors, at different stages of the ascent in the
Upper Town. I was surprised at the regular and extensive use made of
these animals for drawing not only milk but groceries, wood, etc. It
reminded me that the dog commonly is not put to any use. Cats catch
mice; but dogs only worry the cats. Kalm, a hundred years ago, saw
sledges here for ladies to ride in, drawn by a pair of dogs. He says,
"A middle-sized dog is sufficient to draw a single person, when the
roads are good;" and he was told by old people that horses were very
scarce in their youth, and almost all the land-carriage was then
effected by dogs. They made me think of the Esquimaux, who, in fact,
are the next people on the north. Charlevoix says that the first
horses were introduced in 1665.

We crossed Dorchester Bridge, over the St. Charles, the little river
in which Cartier, the discoverer of the St. Lawrence, put his ships,
and spent the winter of 1535, and found ourselves on an excellent
macadamized road, called Le Chemin de Beauport. We had left Concord
Wednesday morning, and we endeavored to realize that now, Friday
morning, we were taking a walk in Canada, in the Seigniory of
Beauport, a foreign country, which a few days before had seemed
almost as far off as England and France. Instead of rambling to
Flint's Pond or the Sudbury meadows, we found ourselves, after being a
little detained in cars and steamboats,--after spending half a night
at Burlington, and half a day at Montreal,--taking a walk down the
bank of the St. Lawrence to the Falls of Montmorenci and elsewhere.
Well, I thought to myself, here I am in a foreign country; let me have
my eyes about me, and take it all in. It already looked and felt a
good deal colder than it had in New England, as we might have expected
it would. I realized fully that I was four degrees nearer the pole,
and shuddered at the thought; and I wondered if it were possible that
the peaches might not be all gone when I returned. It was an
atmosphere that made me think of the fur-trade, which is so
interesting a department in Canada, for I had for all head-covering a
thin palm-leaf hat without lining, that cost twenty-five cents, and
over my coat one of those unspeakably cheap, as well as thin, brown
linen sacks of the Oak Hall pattern, which every summer appear all
over New England, thick as the leaves upon the trees. It was a
thoroughly Yankee costume, which some of my fellow-travelers wore in
the cars to save their coats a dusting. I wore mine, at first, because
it looked better than the coat it covered, and last, because two coats
were warmer than one, though one was thin and dirty. I never wear my
best coat on a journey, though perchance I could show a certificate to
prove that I have a more costly one, at least, at home, if that were
all that a gentleman required. It is not wise for a traveler to go
dressed. I should no more think of it than of putting on a clean
dicky and blacking my shoes to go a-fishing; as if you were going out
to dine, when, in fact, the genuine traveler is going out to work
hard, and fare harder,--to eat a crust by the wayside whenever he can
get it. Honest traveling is about as dirty work as you can do, and a
man needs a pair of overalls for it. As for blacking my shoes in such
a case, I should as soon think of blacking my face. I carry a piece of
tallow to preserve the leather and keep out the water; that's all; and
many an officious shoe-black, who carried off my shoes when I was
slumbering, mistaking me for a gentleman, has had occasion to repent
it before he produced a gloss on them.

My pack, in fact, was soon made, for I keep a short list of those
articles which, from frequent experience, I have found indispensable
to the foot-traveler; and, when I am about to start, I have only to
consult that, to be sure that nothing is omitted, and, what is more
important, nothing superfluous inserted. Most of my fellow-travelers
carried carpet-bags, or valises. Sometimes one had two or three
ponderous yellow valises in his clutch, at each hitch of the cars, as
if we were going to have another rush for seats; and when there was a
rush in earnest,--and there were not a few,--I would see my man in the
crowd, with two or three affectionate lusty fellows along each side of
his arm, between his shoulder and his valises, which last held them
tight to his back, like the nut on the end of a screw. I could not
help asking in my mind, What so great cause for showing Canada to
those valises, when perhaps your very nieces had to stay at home for
want of an escort? I should have liked to be present when the
custom-house officer came aboard of him, and asked him to declare upon
his honor if he had anything but wearing apparel in them. Even the
elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of
traveling is to travel without baggage. After considerable reflection
and experience, I have concluded that the best bag for the
foot-traveler is made with a handkerchief, or, if he study
appearances, a piece of stiff brown paper, well tied up, with a fresh
piece within to put outside when the first is torn. That is good for
both town and country, and none will know but you are carrying home
the silk for a new gown for your wife, when it may be a dirty shirt. A
bundle which you can carry literally under your arm, and which will
shrink and swell with its contents. I never found the carpet-bag of
equal capacity which was not a bundle of itself. We styled ourselves
the Knights of the Umbrella and the Bundle; for, wherever we went,
whether to Notre Dame or Mount Royal or the Champ de Mars, to the Town
Major's or the Bishop's Palace, to the Citadel, with a bare-legged
Highlander for our escort, or to the Plains of Abraham, to dinner or
to bed, the umbrella and the bundle went with us; for we wished to be
ready to digress at any moment. We made it our home nowhere in
particular, but everywhere where our umbrella and bundle were. It
would have been an amusing circumstance, if the mayor of one of those
cities had politely asked us where we were staying. We could only have
answered that we were staying with his honor for the time being. I was
amused when, after our return, some green ones inquired if we found it
easy to get accommodated; as if we went abroad to get accommodated,
when we can get that at home.

We met with many charettes, bringing wood and stone to the city. The
most ordinary-looking horses traveled faster than ours, or perhaps
they were ordinary-looking because, as I am told, the Canadians do not
use the curry-comb. Moreover, it is said that on the approach of
winter their horses acquire an increased quantity of hair, to protect
them from the cold. If this be true, some of our horses would make you
think winter were approaching, even in midsummer. We soon began to see
women and girls at work in the fields, digging potatoes alone, or
bundling up the grain which the men cut. They appeared in rude health,
with a great deal of color in their cheeks, and, if their occupation
had made them coarse, it impressed me as better in its effects than
making shirts at fourpence apiece, or doing nothing at all--unless it
be chewing slate-pencils--with still smaller results. They were much
more agreeable objects, with their great broad-brimmed hats and
flowing dresses, than the men and boys. We afterwards saw them doing
various other kinds of work; indeed, I thought that we saw more women
at work out of doors than men. On our return, we observed in this town
a girl, with Indian boots nearly two feet high, taking the harness off
a dog.

The purity and transparency of the atmosphere were wonderful. When we
had been walking an hour, we were surprised, on turning round, to see
how near the city, with its glittering tin roofs, still looked. A
village ten miles off did not appear to be more than three or four. I
was convinced that you could see objects distinctly there much
farther than here. It is true the villages are of a dazzling white,
but the dazzle is to be referred, perhaps, to the transparency of the
atmosphere as much as to the whitewash.

We were now fairly in the village of Beauport, though there was still
but one road. The houses stood close upon this, without any front
yards, and at an angle with it, as if they had dropped down, being set
with more reference to the road which the sun travels. It being about
sundown, and the falls not far off, we began to look round for a
lodging, for we preferred to put up at a private house, that we might
see more of the inhabitants. We inquired first at the most
promising-looking houses,--if, indeed, any were promising. When we
knocked, they shouted some French word for come in, perhaps _Entrez_,
and we asked for a lodging in English; but we found, unexpectedly,
that they spoke French only. Then we went along and tried another
house, being generally saluted by a rush of two or three little curs,
which readily distinguished a foreigner, and which we were prepared
now to hear bark in French. Our first question would be "Parlez-vous
Anglais?" but the invariable answer was "Non, monsieur;" and we soon
found that the inhabitants were exclusively French Canadians, and
nobody spoke English at all, any more than in France; that, in fact,
we were in a foreign country, where the inhabitants uttered not one
familiar sound to us. Then we tried by turns to talk French with them,
in which we succeeded sometimes pretty well, but for the most part
pretty ill. "Pouvez-vous nous donner un lit cette nuit?" we would
ask, and then they would answer with French volubility, so that we
could catch only a word here and there. We could understand the women
and children generally better than the men, and they us; and thus,
after a while, we would learn that they had no more beds than they
used.

So we were compelled to inquire, "Y a-t-il une maison publique ici?"
(_auberge_ we should have said, perhaps, for they seemed never to have
heard of the other), and they answered at length that there was no
tavern, unless we could get lodgings at the mill, _le moulin_, which
we had passed; or they would direct us to a grocery, and almost every
house had a small grocery at one end of it. We called on the public
notary or village lawyer, but he had no more beds nor English than the
rest. At one house there was so good a misunderstanding at once
established through the politeness of all parties, that we were
encouraged to walk in and sit down, and ask for a glass of water; and
having drank their water, we thought it was as good as to have tasted
their salt. When our host and his wife spoke of their poor
accommodations, meaning for themselves, we assured them that they were
good enough, for we thought that they were only apologizing for the
poorness of the accommodations they were about to offer us, and we did
not discover our mistake till they took us up a ladder into a loft,
and showed to our eyes what they had been laboring in vain to
communicate to our brains through our ears, that they had but that one
apartment with its few beds for the whole family. We made our _adieus_
forthwith, and with gravity, perceiving the literal signification of
that word. We were finally taken in at a sort of public house, whose
master worked for Patterson, the proprietor of the extensive sawmills
driven by a portion of the Montmorenci stolen from the fall, whose
roar we now heard. We here talked, or murdered, French all the
evening, with the master of the house and his family, and probably had
a more amusing time than if we had completely understood one another.
At length they showed us to a bed in their best chamber, very high to
get into, with a low wooden rail to it. It had no cotton sheets, but
coarse, home-made, dark-colored linen ones. Afterward, we had to do
with sheets still coarser than these, and nearly the color of our
blankets. There was a large open buffet loaded with crockery in one
corner of the room, as if to display their wealth to travelers, and
pictures of Scripture scenes, French, Italian, and Spanish, hung
around. Our hostess came back directly to inquire if we would have
brandy for breakfast. The next morning, when I asked their names, she
took down the temperance pledges of herself and husband and children,
which were hanging against the wall. They were Jean Baptiste Binet and
his wife, Geneviève Binet. Jean Baptiste is the sobriquet of the
French Canadians.

After breakfast we proceeded to the fall, which was within half a
mile, and at this distance its rustling sound, like the wind among the
leaves, filled all the air. We were disappointed to find that we were
in some measure shut out from the west side of the fall by the private
grounds and fences of Patterson, who appropriates not only a part of
the water for his mill, but a still larger part of the prospect, so
that we were obliged to trespass. This gentleman's mansion-house and
grounds were formerly occupied by the Duke of Kent, father to Queen
Victoria. It appeared to me in bad taste for an individual, though he
were the father of Queen Victoria, to obtrude himself with his land
titles, or at least his fences, on so remarkable a natural phenomenon,
which should, in every sense, belong to mankind. Some falls should
even be kept sacred from the intrusion of mills and factories, as
water privileges in another than the millwright's sense. This small
river falls perpendicularly nearly two hundred and fifty feet at one
pitch. The St. Lawrence falls only one hundred and sixty-four feet at
Niagara. It is a very simple and noble fall, and leaves nothing to be
desired; but the most that I could say of it would only have the force
of one other testimony to assure the reader that it is there. We
looked directly down on it from the point of a projecting rock, and
saw far below us, on a low promontory, the grass kept fresh and green
by the perpetual drizzle, looking like moss. The rock is a kind of
slate, in the crevices of which grew ferns and goldenrods. The
prevailing trees on the shores were spruce and arbor-vitæ,--the latter
very large and now full of fruit,--also aspens, alders, and the
mountain-ash with its berries. Every emigrant who arrives in this
country by way of the St. Lawrence, as he opens a point of the Isle of
Orleans, sees the Montmorenci tumbling into the Great River thus
magnificently in a vast white sheet, making its contribution with
emphasis. Roberval's pilot, Jean Alphonse, saw this fall thus, and
described it, in 1542. It is a splendid introduction to the scenery of
Quebec. Instead of an artificial fountain in its square, Quebec has
this magnificent natural waterfall, to adorn one side of its harbor.
Within the mouth of the chasm below, which can be entered only at
ebb-tide, we had a grand view at once of Quebec and of the fall. Kalm
says that the noise of the fall is sometimes heard at Quebec, about
eight miles distant, and is a sign of a northeast wind. The side of
this chasm, of soft and crumbling slate too steep to climb, was among
the memorable features of the scene. In the winter of 1829 the frozen
spray of the fall, descending on the ice of the St. Lawrence, made a
hill one hundred and twenty-six feet high. It is an annual phenomenon
which some think may help explain the formation of glaciers.

In the vicinity of the fall we began to notice what looked like our
red-fruited thorn bushes, grown to the size of ordinary apple trees,
very common, and full of large red or yellow fruit, which the
inhabitants called _pommettes_, but I did not learn that they were put
to any use.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Hierosme Lalemant says in 1648, in his Relation, he being
Superior: "All those who come to New France know well enough the
mountain of Notre Dame, because the pilots and sailors, being arrived
at that part of the Great River which is opposite to those high
mountains, baptize ordinarily for sport the new passengers, if they do
not turn aside by some present the inundation of this baptism which
one makes flow plentifully on their heads."




CHAPTER III

ST. ANNE


By the middle of the forenoon, though it was a rainy day, we were once
more on our way down the north bank of the St. Lawrence, in a
northeasterly direction, toward the Falls of St. Anne, which are about
thirty miles from Quebec. The settled, more level, and fertile portion
of Canada East may be described rudely as a triangle, with its apex
slanting toward the northeast, about one hundred miles wide at its
base, and from two to three or even four hundred miles long, if you
reckon its narrow northeastern extremity; it being the immediate
valley of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, rising by a single or
by successive terraces toward the mountains on either hand. Though the
words Canada East on the map stretch over many rivers and lakes and
unexplored wildernesses, the actual Canada, which might be the colored
portion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the
river, which one of those syllables would more than cover. The banks
of the St. Lawrence are rather low from Montreal to the Richelieu
Rapids, about forty miles above Quebec. Thence they rise gradually to
Cape Diamond, or Quebec. Where we now were, eight miles northeast of
Quebec, the mountains which form the northern side of this triangle
were only five or six miles distant from the river, gradually
departing farther and farther from it, on the west, till they reach
the Ottawa, and making haste to meet it on the east, at Cape
Tourmente, now in plain sight about twenty miles distant. So that we
were traveling in a very narrow and sharp triangle between the
mountains and the river, tilted up toward the mountains on the north,
never losing sight of our great fellow-traveler on our right.
According to Bouchette's Topographical Description of the Canadas, we
were in the Seigniory of the Côte de Beaupré, in the county of
Montmorenci, and the district of Quebec,--in that part of Canada which
was the first to be settled, and where the face of the country and the
population have undergone the least change from the beginning, where
the influence of the States and of Europe is least felt, and the
inhabitants see little or nothing of the world over the walls of
Quebec. This Seigniory was granted in 1636, and is now the property of
the Seminary of Quebec. It is the most mountainous one in the
province. There are some half a dozen parishes in it, each containing
a church, parsonage-house, gristmill, and several sawmills. We were
now in the most westerly parish, called Ange Gardien, or the Guardian
Angel, which is bounded on the west by the Montmorenci. The north bank
of the St. Lawrence here is formed on a grand scale. It slopes gently,
either directly from the shore or from the edge of an interval, till,
at the distance of about a mile, it attains the height of four or five
hundred feet. The single road runs along the side of the slope two or
three hundred feet above the river at first, and from a quarter of a
mile to a mile distant from it, and affords fine views of the north
channel, which is about a mile wide, and of the beautiful Isle of
Orleans, about twenty miles long by five wide, where grow the best
apples and plums in the Quebec district.

Though there was but this single road, it was a continuous village for
as far as we walked this day and the next, or about thirty miles down
the river, the houses being as near together all the way as in the
middle of one of our smallest straggling country villages, and we
could never tell by their number when we were on the skirts of a
parish, for the road never ran through the fields or woods. We were
told that it was just six miles from one parish church to another. I
thought that we saw every house in Ange Gardien. Therefore, as it was
a muddy day, we never got out of the mud, nor out of the village,
unless we got over the fence; then, indeed, if it was on the north
side, we were out of the civilized world. There were sometimes a few
more houses near the church, it is true, but we had only to go a
quarter of a mile from the road, to the top of the bank, to find
ourselves on the verge of the uninhabited, and, for the most part,
unexplored wilderness stretching toward Hudson's Bay. The farms
accordingly were extremely long and narrow, each having a frontage on
the river. Bouchette accounts for this peculiar manner of laying out a
village by referring to "the social character of the Canadian peasant,
who is singularly fond of neighborhood," also to the advantage arising
from a concentration of strength in Indian times. Each farm, called
_terre_, he says, is, in nine cases out of ten, three arpents wide by
thirty deep, that is, very nearly thirty-five by three hundred and
forty-nine of our rods; sometimes one half arpent by thirty, or one to
sixty; sometimes, in fact, a few yards by half a mile. Of course it
costs more for fences. A remarkable difference between the Canadian
and the New England character appears from the fact that, in 1745, the
French government were obliged to pass a law forbidding the farmers or
_censitaires_ building on land less than one and a half arpents front
by thirty or forty deep, under a certain penalty, in order to compel
emigration, and bring the seigneur's estates all under cultivation;
and it is thought that they have now less reluctance to leave the
paternal roof than formerly, "removing beyond the sight of the parish
spire, or the sound of the parish bell." But I find that in the
previous or seventeenth century, the complaint, often renewed, was of
a totally opposite character, namely, that the inhabitants dispersed
and exposed themselves to the Iroquois. Accordingly, about 1664, the
king was obliged to order that "they should make no more clearings
except one next to another, and that they should reduce their parishes
to the form of the parishes in France as much as possible." The
Canadians of those days, at least, possessed a roving spirit of
adventure which carried them further, in exposure to hardship and
danger, than ever the New England colonist went, and led them, though
not to clear and colonize the wilderness, yet to range over it as
_coureurs de bois_, or runners of the woods, or, as Hontan prefers to
call them, _coureurs de risques_, runners of risks; to say nothing of
their enterprising priesthood; and Charlevoix thinks that if the
authorities had taken the right steps to prevent the youth from
ranging the woods (_de courir les bois_), they would have had an
excellent militia to fight the Indians and English.

The road in this clayey-looking soil was exceedingly muddy in
consequence of the night's rain. We met an old woman directing her
dog, which was harnessed to a little cart, to the least muddy part of
it. It was a beggarly sight. But harnessed to the cart as he was, we
heard him barking after we had passed, though we looked anywhere but
to the cart to see where the dog was that barked. The houses commonly
fronted the south, whatever angle they might make with the road; and
frequently they had no door nor cheerful window on the road side. Half
the time they stood fifteen to forty rods from the road, and there was
no very obvious passage to them, so that you would suppose that there
must be another road running by them. They were of stone, rather
coarsely mortared, but neatly whitewashed, almost invariably one story
high and long in proportion to their height, with a shingled roof, the
shingles being pointed, for ornament, at the eaves, like the pickets
of a fence, and also one row halfway up the roof. The gables sometimes
projected a foot or two at the ridge-pole only. Yet they were very
humble and unpretending dwellings. They commonly had the date of their
erection on them. The windows opened in the middle, like blinds, and
were frequently provided with solid shutters. Sometimes, when we
walked along the back side of a house which stood near the road, we
observed stout stakes leaning against it, by which the shutters, now
pushed half open, were fastened at night; within, the houses were
neatly ceiled with wood not painted. The oven was commonly out of
doors, built of stone and mortar, frequently on a raised platform of
planks. The cellar was often on the opposite side of the road, in
front of or behind the houses, looking like an ice-house with us, with
a lattice door for summer. The very few mechanics whom we met had an
old-Bettyish look, in their aprons and _bonnets rouges_ like fools'
caps. The men wore commonly the same _bonnet rouge_, or red woolen or
worsted cap, or sometimes blue or gray, looking to us as if they had
got up with their night-caps on, and, in fact, I afterwards found that
they had. Their clothes were of the cloth of the country, _étoffe du
pays_, gray or some other plain color. The women looked stout, with
gowns that stood out stiffly, also, for the most part, apparently of
some home-made stuff. We also saw some specimens of the more
characteristic winter dress of the Canadian, and I have since
frequently detected him in New England by his coarse gray homespun
capote and picturesque red sash, and his well-furred cap, made to
protect his ears against the severity of his climate.

It drizzled all day, so that the roads did not improve. We began now
to meet with wooden crosses frequently, by the roadside, about a dozen
feet high, often old and toppling down, sometimes standing in a square
wooden platform, sometimes in a pile of stones, with a little niche
containing a picture of the Virgin and Child, or of Christ alone,
sometimes with a string of beads, and covered with a piece of glass to
keep out the rain, with the words, _Pour la Vierge_, or INRI, on them.
Frequently, on the cross-bar, there would be quite a collection of
symbolical knickknacks, looking like an Italian's board; the
representation in wood of a hand, a hammer, spikes, pincers, a flask
of vinegar, a ladder, etc., the whole, perchance, surmounted by a
weathercock; but I could not look at an honest weathercock in this
walk without mistrusting that there was some covert reference in it to
St. Peter. From time to time we passed a little one-story chapel-like
building, with a tin-roofed spire, a shrine, perhaps it would be
called, close to the path-side, with a lattice door, through which we
could see an altar, and pictures about the walls; equally open,
through rain and shine, though there was no getting into it. At these
places the inhabitants kneeled and perhaps breathed a short prayer. We
saw one schoolhouse in our walk, and listened to the sounds which
issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of
enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils
received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the
Catholic Church. The churches were very picturesque, and their
interior much more showy than the dwelling-houses promised. They were
of stone, for it was ordered, in 1699, that that should be their
material. They had tinned spires, and quaint ornaments. That of Ange
Gardien had a dial on it, with the Middle Age Roman numerals on its
face, and some images in niches on the outside. Probably its
counterpart has existed in Normandy for a thousand years. At the
church of Château Richer, which is the next parish to Ange Gardien, we
read, looking over the wall, the inscriptions in the adjacent
churchyard, which began with _Ici gît_ or _Repose_, and one over a boy
contained _Priez pour lui_. This answered as well as Père la Chaise.
We knocked at the door of the curé's house here, when a sleek,
friar-like personage, in his sacerdotal robe, appeared. To our
"Parlez-vous Anglais?" even he answered, "Non, monsieur;" but at last
we made him understand what we wanted. It was to find the ruins of the
old _château_. "Ah! oui! oui!" he exclaimed, and, donning his coat,
hastened forth, and conducted us to a small heap of rubbish which we
had already examined. He said that fifteen years before, it was _plus
considérable_. Seeing at that moment three little red birds fly out of
a crevice in the ruins, up into an arbor-vitæ tree which grew out of
them, I asked him their names, in such French as I could muster, but
he neither understood me nor ornithology; he only inquired where we
had _appris à parler Français_; we told him, _dans les États-Unis_;
and so we bowed him into his house again. I was surprised to find a
man wearing a black coat, and with apparently no work to do, even in
that part of the world.

The universal salutation from the inhabitants whom we met was _bon
jour_, at the same time touching the hat; with _bon jour_, and
touching your hat, you may go smoothly through all Canada East. A
little boy, meeting us, would remark, "Bon jour, monsieur; le chemin
est mauvais" (Good morning, sir; it is bad walking). Sir Francis Head
says that the immigrant is forward to "appreciate the happiness of
living in a land in which the old country's servile custom of touching
the hat does not exist," but he was thinking of Canada West, of
course. It would, indeed, be a serious bore to be obliged to touch
your hat several times a day. A Yankee has not leisure for it.

We saw peas, and even beans, collected into heaps in the fields. The
former are an important crop here, and, I suppose, are not so much
infested by the weevil as with us. There were plenty of apples, very
fair and sound, by the roadside, but they were so small as to suggest
the origin of the apple in the crab. There was also a small, red fruit
which they called _snells_, and another, also red and very acid, whose
name a little boy wrote for me, "_pinbéna_." It is probably the same
with, or similar to, the _pembina_ of the voyageurs, a species of
viburnum, which, according to Richardson, has given its name to many
of the rivers of Rupert's Land. The forest trees were spruce,
arbor-vitæ, firs, birches, beeches, two or three kinds of maple,
basswood, wild cherry, aspens, etc., but no pitch pines (_Pinus
rigida_). I saw very few, if any, trees which had been set out for
shade or ornament. The water was commonly running streams or springs
in the bank by the roadside, and was excellent. The parishes are
commonly separated by a stream, and frequently the farms. I noticed
that the fields were furrowed or thrown into beds seven or eight feet
wide to dry the soil.

At the Rivière du Sault à la Puce, which, I suppose, means the River
of the Fall of the Flea, was advertised in English, as the sportsmen
are English, "The best Snipe-shooting grounds," over the door of a
small public house. These words being English affected me as if I had
been absent now ten years from my country, and for so long had not
heard the sound of my native language, and every one of them was as
interesting to me as if I had been a snipe-shooter, and they had been
snipes. The prunella, or self-heal, in the grass here, was an old
acquaintance. We frequently saw the inhabitants washing or cooking
for their pigs, and in one place hackling flax by the roadside. It was
pleasant to see these usually domestic operations carried on out of
doors, even in that cold country.

At twilight we reached a bridge over a little river, the boundary
between Château Richer and St. Anne, _le premier pont de Ste. Anne_,
and at dark the church of _La Bonne Ste. Anne_. Formerly vessels from
France, when they came in sight of this church, gave "a general
discharge of their artillery," as a sign of joy that they had escaped
all the dangers of the river. Though all the while we had grand views
of the adjacent country far up and down the river, and, for the most
part, when we turned about, of Quebec in the horizon behind us, and we
never beheld it without new surprise and admiration; yet, throughout
our walk, the Great River of Canada on our right hand was the main
feature in the landscape, and this expands so rapidly below the Isle
of Orleans, and creates such a breadth of level horizon above its
waters in that direction, that, looking down the river as we
approached the extremity of that island, the St. Lawrence seemed to be
opening into the ocean, though we were still about three hundred and
twenty-five miles from what can be called its mouth.[2]

When we inquired here for a _maison publique_ we were directed
apparently to that private house where we were most likely to find
entertainment. There were no guide-boards where we walked, because
there was but one road; there were no shops nor signs, because there
were no artisans to speak of, and the people raised their own
provisions; and there were no taverns, because there were no
travelers. We here bespoke lodging and breakfast. They had, as usual,
a large, old-fashioned, two-storied box stove in the middle of the
room, out of which, in due time, there was sure to be forthcoming a
supper, breakfast, or dinner. The lower half held the fire, the upper
the hot air, and as it was a cool Canadian evening, this was a
comforting sight to us. Being four or five feet high it warmed the
whole person as you stood by it. The stove was plainly a very
important article of furniture in Canada, and was not set aside during
the summer. Its size, and the respect which was paid to it, told of
the severe winters which it had seen and prevailed over. The master of
the house, in his long-pointed red woolen cap, had a thoroughly
antique physiognomy of the old Norman stamp. He might have come over
with Jacques Cartier. His was the hardest French to understand of any
we had heard yet, for there was a great difference between one speaker
and another, and this man talked with a pipe in his mouth beside,--a
kind of tobacco French. I asked him what he called his dog. He shouted
_Brock_! (the name of the breed). We like to hear the cat called
_min_, "Min! min! min!" I inquired if we could cross the river here to
the Isle of Orleans, thinking to return that way when we had been to
the falls. He answered, "S'il ne fait pas un trop grand vent" (If
there is not too much wind). They use small boats, or pirogues, and
the waves are often too high for them. He wore, as usual, something
between a moccasin and a boot, which he called _bottes Indiennes_,
Indian boots, and had made himself. The tops were of calf or
sheepskin, and the soles of cowhide turned up like a moccasin. They
were yellow or reddish, the leather never having been tanned nor
colored. The women wore the same. He told us that he had traveled ten
leagues due north into the bush. He had been to the Falls of St. Anne,
and said that they were more beautiful, but not greater, than
Montmorenci, _plus beau, mais non plus grand, que Montmorenci_. As
soon as we had retired, the family commenced their devotions. A little
boy officiated, and for a long time we heard him muttering over his
prayers.

In the morning, after a breakfast of tea, maple-sugar, bread and
butter, and what I suppose is called _potage_ (potatoes and meat
boiled with flour), the universal dish as we found, perhaps the
national one, I ran over to the Church of La Bonne Ste. Anne, whose
matin bell we had heard, it being Sunday morning. Our book said that
this church had "long been an object of interest, from the miraculous
cures said to have been wrought on visitors to the shrine." There was
a profusion of gilding, and I counted more than twenty-five crutches
suspended on the walls, some for grown persons, some for children,
which it was to be inferred so many sick had been able to dispense
with; but they looked as if they had been made to order by the
carpenter who made the church. There were one or two villagers at
their devotions at that early hour, who did not look up, but when they
had sat a long time with their little book before the picture of one
saint, went to another. Our whole walk was through a thoroughly
Catholic country, and there was no trace of any other religion. I
doubt if there are any more simple and unsophisticated Catholics
anywhere. Emery de Caen, Champlain's contemporary, told the Huguenot
sailors that "Monseigneur the Duke de Ventadour (Viceroy) did not wish
that they should sing psalms in the Great River."

On our way to the falls, we met the habitans coming to the Church of
La Bonne Ste. Anne, walking or riding in charettes by families. I
remarked that they were universally of small stature. The toll-man at
the bridge over the St. Anne was the first man we had chanced to meet,
since we left Quebec, who could speak a word of English. How good
French the inhabitants of this part of Canada speak, I am not
competent to say; I only know that it is not made impure by being
mixed with English. I do not know why it should not be as good as is
spoken in Normandy. Charlevoix, who was here a hundred years ago,
observes, "The French language is nowhere spoken with greater purity,
there being no accent perceptible;" and Potherie said "they had no
dialect, which, indeed, is generally lost in a colony."

The falls, which we were in search of, are three miles up the St.
Anne. We followed for a short distance a foot-path up the east bank of
this river, through handsome sugar maple and arbor-vitæ groves. Having
lost the path which led to a house where we were to get further
directions, we dashed at once into the woods, steering by guess and by
compass, climbing directly through woods a steep hill, or mountain,
five or six hundred feet high, which was, in fact, only the bank of
the St. Lawrence. Beyond this we by good luck fell into another path,
and following this or a branch of it, at our discretion, through a
forest consisting of large white pines,--the first we had seen in our
walk,--we at length heard the roar of falling water, and came out at
the head of the Falls of St. Anne. We had descended into a ravine or
cleft in the mountain, whose walls rose still a hundred feet above us,
though we were near its top, and we now stood on a very rocky shore,
where the water had lately flowed a dozen feet higher, as appeared by
the stones and driftwood, and large birches twisted and splintered as
a farmer twists a withe. Here the river, one or two hundred feet wide,
came flowing rapidly over a rocky bed out of that interesting
wilderness which stretches toward Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits.
Ha-ha Bay, on the Saguenay, was about one hundred miles north of where
we stood. Looking on the map, I find that the first country on the
north which bears a name is that part of Rupert's Land called East
Main. This river, called after the holy Anne, flowing from such a
direction, here tumbled over a precipice, at present by three
channels, how far down I do not know, but far enough for all our
purposes, and to as good a distance as if twice as far. It matters
little whether you call it one, or two, or three hundred feet; at any
rate, it was a sufficient water privilege for us. I crossed the
principal channel directly over the verge of the fall, where it was
contracted to about fifteen feet in width, by a dead tree which had
been dropped across and secured in a cleft of the opposite rock, and
a smaller one a few feet higher, which served for a hand-rail. This
bridge was rotten as well as small and slippery, being stripped of
bark, and I was obliged to seize a moment to pass when the falling
water did not surge over it, and midway, though at the expense of wet
feet, I looked down probably more than a hundred feet, into the mist
and foam below. This gave me the freedom of an island of precipitous
rock by which I descended as by giant steps,--the rock being composed
of large cubical masses, clothed with delicate close-hugging lichens
of various colors, kept fresh and bright by the moisture,--till I
viewed the first fall from the front, and looked down still deeper to
where the second and third channels fell into a remarkably large
circular basin worn in the stone. The falling water seemed to jar the
very rocks, and the noise to be ever increasing. The vista down-stream
was through a narrow and deep cleft in the mountain, all white suds at
the bottom; but a sudden angle in this gorge prevented my seeing
through to the bottom of the fall. Returning to the shore, I made my
way down-stream through the forest to see how far the fall extended,
and how the river came out of that adventure. It was to clamber along
the side of a precipitous mountain of loose mossy rocks, covered with
a damp primitive forest, and terminating at the bottom in an abrupt
precipice over the stream. This was the east side of the fall. At
length, after a quarter of a mile, I got down to still water, and, on
looking up through the winding gorge, I could just see to the foot of
the fall which I had before examined; while from the opposite side of
the stream, here much contracted, rose a perpendicular wall, I will
not venture to say how many hundred feet, but only that it was the
highest perpendicular wall of bare rock that I ever saw. In front of
me tumbled in from the summit of the cliff a tributary stream, making
a beautiful cascade, which was a remarkable fall in itself, and there
was a cleft in this precipice, apparently four or five feet wide,
perfectly straight up and down from top to bottom, which, from its
cavernous depth and darkness, appeared merely as _a black streak_.
This precipice is not sloped, nor is the material soft and crumbling
slate as at Montmorenci, but it rises perpendicular, like the side of
a mountain fortress, and is cracked into vast cubical masses of gray
and black rock shining with moisture, as if it were the ruin of an
ancient wall built by Titans. Birches, spruces, mountain-ashes with
their bright red berries, arbor-vitæs, white pines, alders, etc.,
overhung this chasm on the very verge of the cliff and in the
crevices, and here and there were buttresses of rock supporting trees
part way down, yet so as to enhance, not injure, the effect of the
bare rock. Take it altogether, it was a most wild and rugged and
stupendous chasm, so deep and narrow, where a river had worn itself a
passage through a mountain of rock, and all around was the
comparatively untrodden wilderness.

This was the limit of our walk down the St. Lawrence. Early in the
afternoon we began to retrace our steps, not being able to cross the
north channel and return by the Isle of Orleans, on account of the
_trop grand vent_, or too great wind. Though the waves did run pretty
high, it was evident that the inhabitants of Montmorenci County were
no sailors, and made but little use of the river. When we reached the
bridge between St. Anne and Château Richer, I ran back a little way to
ask a man in the field the name of the river which we were crossing,
but for a long time I could not make out what he said, for he was one
of the more unintelligible Jacques Cartier men. At last it flashed
upon me that it was _La Rivière au Chien_, or the Dog River, which my
eyes beheld, which brought to my mind the life of the Canadian
voyageur and _coureur de bois_, a more western and wilder Arcadia,
methinks, than the world has ever seen; for the Greeks, with all their
wood and river gods, were not so qualified to name the natural
features of a country as the ancestors of these French Canadians; and
if any people had a right to substitute their own for the Indian
names, it was they. They have preceded the pioneer on our own
frontiers, and named the _prairie_ for us. _La Rivière au Chien_
cannot, by any license of language, be translated into Dog River, for
that is not such a giving it to the dogs, and recognizing their place
in creation, as the French implies. One of the tributaries of the St.
Anne is named _La Rivière de la Rose_; and farther east are _La
Rivière de la Blondelle_ and _La Rivière de la Friponne_. Their very
_rivière_ meanders more than our _river_.

Yet the impression which this country made on me was commonly
different from this. To a traveler from the Old World, Canada East may
appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to
me, coming from New England and being a very green traveler
withal,--notwithstanding what I have said about Hudson's Bay,--it
appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard
of Europe and the Middle Ages. Even the names of humble Canadian
villages affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities
of antiquity. To be told by a habitan, when I asked the name of a
village in sight, that it is _St. Feréol_ or _St. Anne_, the _Guardian
Angel_ or the _Holy Joseph's_; or of a mountain, that it was _Bélange_
or _St. Hyacinthe_! As soon as you leave the States, these saintly
names begin. _St. Johns_ is the first town you stop at (fortunately we
did not see it), and thenceforward, the names of the mountains, and
streams, and villages reel, if I may so speak, with the intoxication
of poetry,--_Chambly_, _Longueuil_, _Pointe aux Trembles_,
_Bartholomy_, etc., etc.; as if it needed only a little foreign
accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to
make us locate our ideals at once. I began to dream of Provence and
the Troubadours, and of places and things which have no existence on
the earth. They veiled the Indian and the primitive forest, and the
woods toward Hudson's Bay were only as the forests of France and
Germany. I could not at once bring myself to believe that the
inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful and, to me,
significant names lead as prosaic lives as we of New England. In
short, the Canada which I saw was not merely a place for railroads to
terminate in and for criminals to run to.

When I asked the man to whom I have referred, if there were any falls
on the Rivière au Chien,--for I saw that it came over the same high
bank with the Montmorenci and St. Anne,--he answered that there were.
How far? I inquired. "Trois quatres lieue." How high? "Je
pense-quatre-vingt-dix pieds;" that is, ninety feet. We turned aside
to look at the falls of the Rivière du Sault à la Puce, half a mile
from the road, which before we had passed in our haste and ignorance,
and we pronounced them as beautiful as any that we saw; yet they
seemed to make no account of them there, and, when first we inquired
the way to the falls, directed us to Montmorenci, seven miles distant.
It was evident that this was the country for waterfalls; that every
stream that empties into the St. Lawrence, for some hundreds of miles,
must have a great fall or cascade on it, and in its passage through
the mountains was, for a short distance, a small Saguenay, with its
upright walls. This fall of La Puce, the least remarkable of the four
which we visited in this vicinity, we had never heard of till we came
to Canada, and yet, so far as I know, there is nothing of the kind in
New England to be compared with it. Most travelers in Canada would not
hear of it, though they might go so near as to hear it. Since my
return I find that in the topographical description of the country
mention is made of "two or three romantic falls" on this stream,
though we saw and heard of but this one. Ask the inhabitants
respecting any stream, if there is a fall on it, and they will
perchance tell you of something as interesting as Bashpish or the
Catskill, which no traveler has ever seen, or if they have not found
it, you may possibly trace up the stream and discover it yourself.
Falls there are a drug, and we became quite dissipated in respect to
them. We had drank too much of them. Beside these which I have
referred to, there are a thousand other falls on the St. Lawrence and
its tributaries which I have not seen nor heard of; and above all
there is one which I have heard of, called Niagara, so that I think
that this river must be the most remarkable for its falls of any in
the world.

At a house near the western boundary of Château Richer, whose master
was said to speak a very little English, having recently lived at
Quebec, we got lodging for the night. As usual, we had to go down a
lane to get round to the south side of the house, where the door was,
away from the road. For these Canadian houses have no front door,
properly speaking. Every part is for the use of the occupant
exclusively, and no part has reference to the traveler or to travel.
Every New England house, on the contrary, has a front and principal
door opening to the great world, though it may be on the cold side,
for it stands on the highway of nations, and the road which runs by it
comes from the Old World and goes to the far West; but the Canadian's
door opens into his backyard and farm alone, and the road which runs
behind his house leads only from the church of one saint to that of
another. We found a large family, hired men, wife, and children, just
eating their supper. They prepared some for us afterwards. The hired
men were a merry crew of short, black-eyed fellows, and the wife a
thin-faced, sharp-featured French-Canadian woman. Our host's English
staggered us rather more than any French we had heard yet; indeed, we
found that even we spoke better French than he did English, and we
concluded that a less crime would be committed on the whole if we
spoke French with him, and in no respect aided or abetted his attempts
to speak English. We had a long and merry chat with the family this
Sunday evening in their spacious kitchen. While my companion smoked a
pipe and parlez-vous'd with one party, I parleyed and gesticulated to
another. The whole family was enlisted, and I kept a little girl
writing what was otherwise unintelligible. The geography getting
obscure, we called for chalk, and the greasy oiled table-cloth having
been wiped,--for it needed no French, but only a sentence from the
universal language of looks on my part, to indicate that it needed
it,--we drew the St. Lawrence, with its parishes, thereon, and
thenceforward went on swimmingly, by turns handling the chalk and
committing to the table-cloth what would otherwise have been left in a
limbo of unintelligibility. This was greatly to the entertainment of
all parties. I was amused to hear how much use they made of the word
oui in conversation with one another. After repeated single insertions
of it, one would suddenly throw back his head at the same time with
his chair, and exclaim rapidly, "Oui! oui! oui! oui!" like a Yankee
driving pigs. Our host told us that the farms thereabouts were
generally two acres or three hundred and sixty French feet wide, by
one and a half leagues (?), or a little more than four and a half of
our miles deep. This use of the word _acre_ as long measure arises
from the fact that the French acre or arpent, the arpent of Paris,
makes a square of ten perches, of eighteen feet each, on a side, a
Paris foot being equal to 1.06575 English feet. He said that the wood
was cut off about one mile from the river. The rest was "bush," and
beyond that the "Queen's bush." Old as the country is, each landholder
bounds on the primitive forest, and fuel bears no price. As I had
forgotten the French for _sickle_, they went out in the evening to the
barn and got one, and so clenched the certainty of our understanding
one another. Then, wishing to learn if they used the cradle, and not
knowing any French word for this instrument, I set up the knives and
forks on the blade of the sickle to represent one; at which they all
exclaimed that they knew and had used it. When _snells_ were mentioned
they went out in the dark and plucked some. They were pretty good.
They said they had three kinds of plums growing wild,--blue, white,
and red, the two former much alike and the best. Also they asked me if
I would have _des pommes_, some apples, and got me some. They were
exceedingly fair and glossy, and it was evident that there was no worm
in them; but they were as hard almost as a stone, as if the season was
too short to mellow them. We had seen no soft and yellow apples by the
roadside. I declined eating one, much as I admired it, observing that
it would be good _dans le printemps_, in the spring. In the morning
when the mistress had set the eggs a-frying she nodded to a thick-set,
jolly-looking fellow, who rolled up his sleeves, seized the
long-handled griddle, and commenced a series of revolutions and
evolutions with it, ever and anon tossing its contents into the air,
where they turned completely topsy-turvy and came down t'other side
up; and this he repeated till they were done. That appeared to be his
duty when eggs were concerned. I did not chance to witness this
performance, but my companion did, and he pronounced it a masterpiece
in its way. This man's farm, with the buildings, cost seven hundred
pounds; some smaller ones, two hundred.

In 1827, Montmorenci County, to which the Isle of Orleans has since
been added, was nearly as large as Massachusetts, being the eighth
county out of forty (in Lower Canada) in extent; but by far the
greater part still must continue to be waste land, lying as it were
under the walls of Quebec.

I quote these old statistics, not merely because of the difficulty of
obtaining more recent ones, but also because I saw there so little
evidence of any recent growth. There were in this county, at the same
date, five Roman Catholic churches, and no others, five cures and five
presbyteries, two schools, two corn-mills, four sawmills, one
carding-mill,--no medical man or notary or lawyer,--five shopkeepers,
four taverns (we saw no sign of any, though, after a little
hesitation, we were sometimes directed to some undistinguished hut as
such), thirty artisans, and five river crafts, whose tonnage amounted
to sixty-nine tons! This, notwithstanding that it has a frontage of
more than thirty miles on the river, and the population is almost
wholly confined to its banks. This describes nearly enough what we
saw. But double some of these figures, which, however, its growth will
not warrant, and you have described a poverty which not even its
severity of climate and ruggedness of soil will suffice to account
for. The principal productions were wheat, potatoes, oats, hay, peas,
flax, maple-sugar, etc., etc.; linen cloth, or _étoffe du pays_,
flannel, and homespun, or _petite étoffe_.

In Lower Canada, according to Bouchette, there are two tenures,--the
feudal and the socage. _Tenanciers_, _censitaires_, or holders of land
_en roture_ pay a small annual rent to the seigneurs, to which "is
added some articles of provision, such as a couple of fowls, or a
goose, or a bushel of wheat." "They are also bound to grind their corn
at the _moulin banal_, or the lord's mill, where one fourteenth part
of it is taken for his use" as toll. He says that the toll is one
twelfth in the United States where competition exists. It is not
permitted to exceed one sixteenth in Massachusetts. But worse than
this monopolizing of mill rents is what are called _lods et ventes_,
or mutation fines,--according to which the seigneur has "a right to a
twelfth part of the purchase-money of every estate within his
seigniory that changes its owner by sale." This is over and above the
sum paid to the seller. In such cases, moreover, "the lord possesses
the _droit de retrait_, which is the privilege of preemption at the
highest bidden price within forty days after the sale has taken
place,"--a right which, however, is said to be seldom exercised.
"Lands held by Roman Catholics are further subject to the payment to
their curates of one twenty-sixth part of all the grain produced upon
them, and to occasional assessments for building and repairing
churches," etc.,--a tax to which they are not subject if the
proprietors change their faith; but they are not the less attached to
their church in consequence. There are, however, various modifications
of the feudal tenure. Under the socage tenure, which is that of the
townships or more recent settlements, English, Irish, Scotch, and
others, and generally of Canada West, the landholder is wholly
unshackled by such conditions as I have quoted, and "is bound to no
other obligations than those of allegiance to the king and obedience
to the laws." Throughout Canada "a freehold of forty shillings yearly
value, or the payment of ten pounds rent annually, is the
qualification for voters." In 1846 more than one sixth of the whole
population of Canada East were qualified to vote for members of
Parliament,--a greater proportion than enjoy a similar privilege in
the United States.

The population which we had seen the last two days--I mean the
habitans of Montmorenci County--appeared very inferior, intellectually
and even physically, to that of New England. In some respects they
were incredibly filthy. It was evident that they had not advanced
since the settlement of the country, that they were quite behind the
age, and fairly represented their ancestors in Normandy a thousand
years ago. Even in respect to the common arts of life, they are not so
far advanced as a frontier town in the West three years old. They have
no money invested in railroad stock, and probably never will have. If
they have got a French phrase for a railroad, it is as much as you can
expect of them. They are very far from a revolution, have no quarrel
with Church or State, but their vice and their virtue is content. As
for annexation, they have never dreamed of it; indeed, they have not a
clear idea what or where the States are. The English government has
been remarkably liberal to its Catholic subjects in Canada, permitting
them to wear their own fetters, both political and religious, as far
as was possible for subjects. Their government is even too good for
them. Parliament passed "an act [in 1825] to provide for the
extinction of feudal and seigniorial rights and burdens on lands in
Lower Canada, and for the gradual conversion of those tenures into the
tenure of free and common socage," etc. But as late as 1831, at least,
the design of the act was likely to be frustrated, owing to the
reluctance of the seigniors and peasants. It has been observed by
another that the French Canadians do not extend nor perpetuate their
influence. The British, Irish, and other immigrants, who have settled
the townships, are found to have imitated the American settlers and
not the French. They reminded me in this of the Indians, whom they
were slow to displace, and to whose habits of life they themselves more
readily conformed than the Indians to theirs. The Governor-General
Denouville remarked, in 1685, that some had long thought that it was
necessary to bring the Indians near them in order to Frenchify
(_franciser_) them, but that they had every reason to think themselves
in an error; for those who had come near them and were even collected
in villages in the midst of the colony had not become French, but the
French who had haunted them had become savages. Kalm said, "Though
many nations imitate the French customs, yet I observed, on the
contrary, that the French in Canada, in many respects, follow the
customs of the Indians, with whom they converse every day. They make
use of the tobacco-pipes, shoes, garters, and girdles of the Indians.
They follow the Indian way of making war with exactness; they mix the
same things with tobacco [he might have said that both French and
English learned the use itself of this weed of the Indian]; they make
use of the Indian bark-boats, and row them in the Indian way; they
wrap square pieces of cloth round their feet instead of stockings; and
have adopted many other Indian fashions." Thus, while the descendants
of the Pilgrims are teaching the English to make pegged boots, the
descendants of the French in Canada are wearing the Indian moccasin
still. The French, to their credit be it said, to a certain extent
respected the Indians as a separate and independent people, and spoke
of them and contrasted themselves with them as the English have never
done. They not only went to war with them as allies, but they lived at
home with them as neighbors. In 1627 the French king declared "that
the descendants" of the French, settled in New France, "and the
savages who should be brought to the knowledge of the faith, and
should make profession of it, should be counted and reputed French
born (_Naturels François_); and as such could emigrate to France, when
it seemed good to them, and there acquire, will, inherit, etc., etc.,
without obtaining letters of naturalization." When the English had
possession of Quebec, in 1630, the Indians, attempting to practice the
same familiarity with them that they had with the French, were driven
out of their houses with blows; which accident taught them a
difference between the two races, and attached them yet more to the
French. The impression made on me was that the French Canadians were
even sharing the fate of the Indians, or at least gradually
disappearing in what is called the Saxon current.

The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure,
nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under
the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest
and with freedom. The latter overran a great extent of country,
selling strong water, and collecting its furs, and converting its
inhabitants,--or at least baptizing its dying infants (_enfans
moribonds_),--without _improving_ it. First went the _coureur de bois_
with the _eau de vie_; then followed, if he did not precede, the
heroic missionary with the _eau d'immortalité_. It was freedom to
hunt, and fish, and convert, not to work, that they sought. Hontan
says that the _coureurs de bois_ lived like sailors ashore. In no part
of the Seventeenth Century could the French be said to have had a
foothold in Canada; they held only by the fur of the wild animals
which they were exterminating. To enable the poor seigneurs to get
their living, it was permitted by a decree passed in the reign of
Louis the Fourteenth, in 1685, "to all nobles and gentlemen settled in
Canada, to engage in commerce, without being called to account or
reputed to have done anything derogatory." The reader can infer to
what extent they had engaged in agriculture, and how their farms must
have shone by this time. The New England youth, on the other hand,
were never _coureurs de bois_ nor _voyageurs_, but backwoodsmen and
sailors rather. Of all nations the English undoubtedly have proved
hitherto that they had the most business here.

Yet I am not sure but I have most sympathy with that spirit of adventure
which distinguished the French and Spaniards of those days, and made
them especially the explorers of the American Continent,--which so
early carried the former to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the
north, and the latter to the same river on the south. It was long
before our frontiers reached their settlements in the West. So far as
inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English
was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the
enterprise of traders.

There was apparently a greater equality of condition among the
habitans of Montmorenci County than in New England. They are an almost
exclusively agricultural, and so far independent population, each
family producing nearly all the necessaries of life for itself. If the
Canadian wants energy, perchance he possesses those virtues, social
and others, which the Yankee lacks, in which case he cannot be
regarded as a poor man.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] From McCulloch's Geographical Dictionary we learn that
"immediately beyond the Island of Orleans it is a mile broad; where
the Saguenay joins it, eighteen miles; at Point Peter, upward of
thirty; at the Bay of Seven Islands, seventy miles; and at the Island
of Anticosti (above three hundred and fifty miles from Quebec), it
rolls a flood into the ocean nearly one hundred miles across."




CHAPTER IV

THE WALLS OF QUEBEC


After spending the night at a farmhouse in Château Richer, about a
dozen miles northeast of Quebec, we set out on our return to the city.
We stopped at the next house, a picturesque old stone mill, over the
_Chipré_,--for so the name sounded,--such as you will nowhere see in
the States, and asked the millers the age of the mill. They went
upstairs to call the master; but the crabbed old miser asked why we
wanted to know, and would tell us only for some compensation. I wanted
French to give him a piece of my mind. I had got enough to talk on a
pinch, but not to quarrel, so I had to come away, looking all I would
have said. This was the utmost incivility we met with in Canada. In
Beauport, within a few miles of Quebec, we turned aside to look at a
church which was just being completed,--a very large and handsome
edifice of stone, with a green bough stuck in its gable, of some
significance to Catholics. The comparative wealth of the Church in
this country was apparent; for in this village we did not see one good
house besides. They were all humble cottages; and yet this appeared to
me a more imposing structure than any church in Boston. But I am no
judge of these things.

Reëntering Quebec through St. John's Gate, we took a caleche in Market
Square for the Falls of the Chaudière, about nine miles southwest of
the city, for which we were to pay so much, besides forty sous for
tolls. The driver, as usual, spoke French only. The number of these
vehicles is very great for so small a town. They are like one of our
chaises that has lost its top, only stouter and longer in the body,
with a seat for the driver where the dasher is with us, and broad
leather ears on each side to protect the riders from the wheel and
keep children from falling out. They had an easy jaunting look, which,
as our hours were numbered, persuaded us to be riders. We met with
them on every road near Quebec these days, each with its complement of
two inquisitive-looking foreigners and a Canadian driver, the former
evidently enjoying their novel experience, for commonly it is only the
horse whose language you do not understand; but they were one remove
further from him by the intervention of an equally unintelligible
driver. We crossed the St. Lawrence to Point Levi in a French-Canadian
ferry-boat, which was inconvenient and dirty, and managed with great
noise and bustle. The current was very strong and tumultuous; and the
boat tossed enough to make some sick, though it was only a mile
across; yet the wind was not to be compared with that of the day
before, and we saw that the Canadians had a good excuse for not taking
us over to the Isle of Orleans in a pirogue, however shiftless they
may be for not having provided any other conveyance. The route which
we took to the Chaudière did not afford us those views of Quebec which
we had expected, and the country and inhabitants appeared less
interesting to a traveler than those we had seen. The Falls of the
Chaudière are three miles from its mouth on the south side of the St.
Lawrence. Though they were the largest which I saw in Canada, I was
not proportionately interested by them, probably from satiety. I did
not see any peculiar propriety in the name _Chaudière_, or caldron. I
saw here the most brilliant rainbow that I ever imagined. It was just
across the stream below the precipice, formed on the mist which this
tremendous fall produced; and I stood on a level with the keystone of
its arch. It was not a few faint prismatic colors merely, but a full
semicircle, only four or five rods in diameter, though as wide as
usual, so intensely bright as to pain the eye, and apparently as
substantial as an arch of stone. It changed its position and colors as
we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and
the mist was so thick. Evidently a picture painted on mist for the men
and animals that came to the falls to look at; but for what special
purpose beyond this, I know not. At the farthest point in this ride,
and when most inland, unexpectedly at a turn in the road we descried
the frowning citadel of Quebec in the horizon, like the beak of a bird
of prey. We returned by the river road under the bank, which is very
high, abrupt, and rocky. When we were opposite to Quebec, I was
surprised to see that in the Lower Town, under the shadow of the rock,
the lamps were lit, twinkling not unlike crystals in a cavern, while
the citadel high above, and we, too, on the south shore, were in broad
daylight. As we were too late for the ferry-boat that night, we put up
at a _maison de pension_ at Point Levi. The usual two-story stove was
here placed against an opening in the partition shaped like a
fireplace, and so warmed several rooms. We could not understand their
French here very well, but the _potage_ was just like what we had had
before. There were many small chambers with doorways, but no doors.
The walls of our chamber, all around and overhead, were neatly ceiled,
and the timbers cased with wood unpainted. The pillows were checkered
and tasseled, and the usual long-pointed red woolen or worsted
nightcap was placed on each. I pulled mine out to see how it was made.
It was in the form of a double cone, one end tucked into the other;
just such, it appeared, as I saw men wearing all day in the streets.
Probably I should have put it on if the cold had been then, as it is
sometimes there, thirty or forty degrees below zero.

When we landed at Quebec the next morning a man lay on his back on the
wharf, apparently dying, in the midst of a crowd and directly in the
path of the horses, groaning, "O ma conscience!" I thought that he
pronounced his French more distinctly than any I heard, as if the
dying had already acquired the accents of a universal language. Having
secured the only unengaged berths in the Lord Sydenham steamer, which
was to leave Quebec before sundown, and being resolved, now that I had
seen somewhat of the country, to get an idea of the city, I proceeded
to walk round the Upper Town, or fortified portion, which is two miles
and three quarters in circuit, alone, as near as I could get to the
cliff and the walls, like a rat looking for a hole; going round by the
southwest, where there is but a single street between the cliff and
the water, and up the long wooden stairs, through the suburbs
northward to the King's Woodyard, which I thought must have been a
long way from his fireplace, and under the cliffs of the St. Charles,
where the drains issue under the walls, and the walls are loopholed
for musketry; so returning by Mountain Street and Prescott Gate to the
Upper Town. Having found my way by an obscure passage near the St.
Louis Gate to the glacis on the north of the citadel proper,--I
believe that I was the only visitor then in the city who got in
there,--I enjoyed a prospect nearly as good as from within the citadel
itself, which I had explored some days before. As I walked on the
glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers' dwellings in
the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a
soldier's cat walking up a cleated plank into a high loophole designed
for _mus-catry_, as serene as Wisdom herself, and with a gracefully
waving motion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness
and all her paths were peace. Scaling a slat fence, where a small
force might have checked me, I got out of the esplanade into the
Governor's Garden, and read the well-known inscription on Wolfe and
Montcalm's monument, which for saying much in little, and that to the
purpose, undoubtedly deserved the prize medal which it received:--

     MORTEM . VIRTUS . COMMUNEM .
          FAMAM . HISTORIA .
     MONUMENTUM . POSTERITAS .
             DEDIT

(Valor gave them one death, history one fame, posterity one monument.)
The Government Garden has for nosegays, amid kitchen vegetables,
beside the common garden flowers, the usual complement of cannon
directed toward some future and possible enemy. I then returned up St.
Louis Street to the esplanade and ramparts there, and went round the
Upper Town once more, though I was very tired, this time on the
_inside_ of the wall; for I knew that the wall was the main thing in
Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money, and therefore I must make
the most of it. In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have
in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is
true. Moreover, I cannot say but I yielded in some measure to the
soldier instinct, and, having but a short time to spare, thought it
best to examine the wall thoroughly, that I might be the better
prepared if I should ever be called that way again in the service of
my country. I committed all the gates to memory, in their order, which
did not cost me so much trouble as it would have done at the
hundred-gated city, there being only five; nor were they so hard to
remember as those seven of Bœotian Thebes; and, moreover, I thought
that, if seven champions were enough against the latter, one would be
enough against Quebec, though he bore for all armor and device only an
umbrella and a bundle. I took the nunneries as I went, for I had
learned to distinguish them by the blinds; and I observed also the
foundling hospitals and the convents, and whatever was attached to, or
in the vicinity of the walls. All the rest I omitted, as naturally as
one would the inside of an inedible shell-fish. These were the only
pearls, and the wall the only mother-of-pearl for me. Quebec is
chiefly famous for the thickness of its parietal bones. The technical
terms of its conchology may stagger a beginner a little at first, such
as _banlieue_, _esplanade_, _glacis_, _ravelin_, _cavalier_, etc.,
etc., but with the aid of a comprehensive dictionary you soon learn
the nature of your ground. I was surprised at the extent of the
artillery barracks, built so long ago,--_Casernes Nouvelles_, they
used to be called,--nearly six hundred feet in length by forty in
depth, where the sentries, like peripatetic philosophers, were so
absorbed in thought as not to notice me when I passed in and out at
the gates. Within are "small arms of every description, sufficient for
the equipment of twenty thousand men," so arranged as to give a
startling _coup d'œil_ to strangers. I did not enter, not wishing
to get a black eye; for they are said to be "in a state of complete
repair and readiness for immediate use." Here, for a short time, I
lost sight of the wall, but I recovered it again on emerging from the
barrack yard. There I met with a Scotchman who appeared to have
business with the wall, like myself; and, being thus mutually drawn
together by a similarity of tastes, we had a little conversation _sub
moenibus_, that is, by an angle of the wall, which sheltered us. He
lived about thirty miles northwest of Quebec; had been nineteen years
in the country; said he was disappointed that he was not brought to
America after all, but found himself still under British rule and
where his own language was not spoken; that many Scotch, Irish, and
English were disappointed in like manner, and either went to the
States or pushed up the river to Canada West, nearer to the States,
and where their language was spoken. He talked of visiting the States
some time; and, as he seemed ignorant of geography, I warned him that
it was one thing to visit the State of Massachusetts, and another to
visit the State of California. He said it was colder there than usual
at that season, and he was lucky to have brought his thick togue, or
frock-coat, with him; thought it would snow, and then be pleasant and
warm. That is the way we are always thinking. However, his words were
music to me in my thin hat and sack.

At the ramparts on the cliff near the old Parliament House I counted
twenty-four thirty-two-pounders in a row, pointed over the harbor,
with their balls piled pyramid-wise between them,--there are said to
be in all about one hundred and eighty guns mounted at Quebec,--all
which were faithfully kept dusted by officials, in accordance with the
motto, "In time of peace prepare for war;" but I saw no preparations
for peace: she was plainly an uninvited guest.

Having thus completed the circuit of this fortress, both within and
without, I went no farther by the wall for fear that I should become
wall-eyed. However, I think that I deserve to be made a member of the
Royal Sappers and Miners.

In short, I observed everywhere the most perfect arrangements for
keeping a wall in order, not even permitting the lichens to grow on
it, which some think an ornament; but then I saw no cultivation nor
pasturing within it to pay for the outlay, and cattle were strictly
forbidden to feed on the glacis under the severest penalties. Where
the dogs get their milk I don't know, and I fear it is bloody at best.

The citadel of Quebec says, "I _will_ live here, and you shan't
prevent me." To which you return, that you have not the slightest
objection; live and let live. The Martello towers looked, for all the
world, exactly like abandoned windmills which had not had a grist to
grind these hundred years. Indeed, the whole castle here was a
"folly,"--England's folly,--and, in more senses than one, a castle in
the air. The inhabitants and the government are gradually waking up to
a sense of this truth; for I heard something said about their
abandoning the wall around the Upper Town, and confining the
fortifications to the citadel of forty acres. Of course they will
finally reduce their intrenchments to the circumference of their own
brave hearts.

The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them;
they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day
they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. The
very place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become
old and dilapidated, as the word _barrack_ implies. I couple all
fortifications in my mind with the dismantled Spanish forts to be
found in so many parts of the world; and if in any place they are not
actually dismantled, it is because that there the intellect of the
inhabitants is dismantled. The commanding officer of an old fort near
Valdivia in South America, when a traveler remarked to him that, with
one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces,
gravely replied, "No, I am sure, sir, they would stand two." Perhaps
the guns of Quebec would stand three. Such structures carry us back to
the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d'Acre, and the
days of the Bucaniers. In the armory of the citadel they showed me a
clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun.
I thought that their whole citadel was such a Lombard gun, fit object
for the museums of the curious. Such works do not consist with the
development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both
in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress
than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as
frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside
a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason
for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half
an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing
with me? The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and
it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it
almost from the first day of the settlement. The founders of the
colony thought this an excellent site for a wall,--and no doubt it was
a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,--but it
chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced, too, that a Lower Town
got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags,
as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country
village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion,--interesting
only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is like a
man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of
broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his
business. Or is this an indispensable machinery for the good
government of the country? The inhabitants of California succeed
pretty well, and are doing better and better every day, without any
such institution. What use has this fortress served, to look at it
even from the soldiers' point of view? At first the French took care
of it; yet Wolfe sailed by it with impunity, and took the town of
Quebec without experiencing any hindrance at last from its
fortifications. They were only the bone for which the parties fought.
Then the English began to take care of it. So of any fort in the
world,--that in Boston Harbor, for instance. We shall at length hear
that an enemy sailed by it in the night, for it cannot sail itself,
and both it and its inhabitants are always benighted. How often we
read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and
so the fort was evacuated! Have not the schoolhouse and the
printing-press occupied a position which commands such a fort as this?

However, this is a ruin kept in remarkably good repair. There are some
eight hundred or thousand men there to exhibit it. One regiment goes
bare-legged to increase the attraction. If you wish to study the
muscles of the leg about the knee, repair to Quebec. This universal
exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the
keeper of a menagerie showing his animals' claws. It was the English
leopard showing his claws. Always the royal something or other; as at
the menagerie, the Royal Bengal Tiger. Silliman states that "the cold
is so intense in the winter nights, particularly on Cape Diamond, that
the sentinels cannot stand it more than one hour, and are relieved at
the expiration of that time;" "and even, as it is said, at much
shorter intervals, in case of the most extreme cold." What a natural
or unnatural fool must that soldier be--to say nothing of his
government--who, when quicksilver is freezing and blood is ceasing to
be quick, will stand to have his face frozen, watching the walls of
Quebec, though, so far as they are concerned, both honest and
dishonest men all the world over have been in their beds nearly half a
century,--or at least for that space travelers have visited Quebec
only as they would read history! I shall never again wake up in a
colder night than usual, but I shall think how rapidly the sentinels
are relieving one another on the walls of Quebec, their quicksilver
being all frozen, as if apprehensive that some hostile Wolfe may even
then be scaling the Heights of Abraham, or some persevering Arnold
about to issue from the wilderness; some Malay or Japanese, perchance,
coming round by the northwest coast, have chosen that moment to
assault the citadel! Why, I should as soon expect to find the
sentinels still relieving one another on the walls of Nineveh, which
have so long been buried to the world. What a troublesome thing a wall
is! I thought it was to defend me, and not I it! Of course, if they
had no wall, they would not need to have any sentinels.

You might venture to advertise this farm as well fenced with
substantial stone walls (saying nothing about the eight hundred
Highlanders and Royal Irish who are required to keep them from
toppling down); stock and tools to go with the land if desired. But it
would not be wise for the seller to exhibit his farm-book.

Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older
country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All
things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain
rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust
of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of
Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some
cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was
on the inhabitants and their institutions. Yet the work of burnishing
goes briskly forward. I imagined that the government vessels at the
wharves were laden with rottenstone and oxalic acid,--that is what the
first ship from England in the spring comes freighted with,--and the
hands of the Colonial legislature are cased in wash-leather. The
principal exports must be _gun_ny bags, verdigris, and iron rust.
Those who first built this fort, coming from Old France with the
memory and tradition of feudal days and customs weighing on them, were
unquestionably behind their age; and those who now inhabit and repair
it are behind their ancestors or predecessors. Those old chevaliers
thought that they could transplant the feudal system to America. It
has been set out, but it has not thriven. Notwithstanding that Canada
was settled first, and, unlike New England, for a long series of years
enjoyed the fostering care of the mother country; notwithstanding
that, as Charlevoix tells us, it had more of the ancient _noblesse_
among its early settlers than any other of the French colonies, and
perhaps than all the others together, there are in both the Canadas
but 600,000 of French descent to-day,--about half so many as the
population of Massachusetts. The whole population of both Canadas is
but about 1,700,000 Canadians, English, Irish, Scotch, Indians, and
all, put together! Samuel Laing, in his essay on the Northmen, to
whom especially, rather than the Saxons, he refers the energy and
indeed the excellence of the English character, observes that, when
they occupied Scandinavia, "each man possessed his lot of land without
reference to, or acknowledgment of, any other man, without any local
chief to whom his military service or other quit-rent for his land was
due,--without tenure from, or duty or obligation to, any superior,
real or fictitious, except the general sovereign. The individual
settler held his land, as his descendants in Norway still express it,
by the same right as the King held his crown, by udal right, or
adel,--that is, noble right." The French have occupied Canada, not
_udally_, or by noble right, but _feudally_, or by ignoble right. They
are a nation of peasants.

It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the
aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada
as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists
in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay
here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the
Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad
citizen, probably a rebel, there,--certainly if he were already a
rebel at home. I suspect that a poor man who is not servile is a much
rarer phenomenon there and in England than in the Northern United
States. An Englishman, methinks,--not to speak of other European
nations,--habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of
the English nation; he is a member of the royal regiment of
Englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud
of it. But an American--one who has made a tolerable use of his
opportunities--cares, comparatively, little about such things, and is
advantageously nearer to the primitive and the ultimate condition of
man in these respects. It is a government, that English one,--like
most other European ones,--that cannot afford to be forgotten, as you
would naturally forget it; under which one cannot be wholesomely
neglected, and grow up a man and not an Englishman merely,--cannot be
a poet even without danger of being made poet-laureate! Give me a
country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a
government that does not understand you to let you alone. One would
say that a true Englishman could speculate only within bounds. (It is
true the Americans have proved that they, in more than one sense, can
_speculate_ without bounds.) He has to pay his respects to so many
things, that, before he knows it, he _may_ have paid away all he is
worth. What makes the United States government, on the whole, more
tolerable--I mean for us lucky white men--is the fact that there is so
much less of government with us. Here it is only once in a month or a
year that a man _needs_ remember that institution; and those who go to
Congress can play the game of the Kilkenny cats there without fatal
consequences to those who stay at home, their term is so short; but in
Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself
before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the
master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the
Champ de Mars and exhibits itself and toots. Everywhere there appeared
an attempt to make and to preserve trivial and otherwise transient
distinctions. In the streets of Montreal and Quebec you met not only
with soldiers in red, and shuffling priests in unmistakable black and
white, with Sisters of Charity gone into mourning for their deceased
relative,--not to mention the nuns of various orders depending on the
fashion of a tear, of whom you heard,--but youths belonging to some
seminary or other, wearing coats edged with white, who looked as if
their expanding hearts were already repressed with a piece of tape. In
short, the inhabitants of Canada appeared to be suffering between two
fires,--the soldiery and the priesthood.




CHAPTER V

THE SCENERY OF QUEBEC; AND THE RIVER ST. LAWRENCE


About twelve o'clock this day, being in the Lower Town, I looked up at
the signal-gun by the flagstaff on Cape Diamond, and saw a soldier up
in the heavens there making preparations to fire it,--both he and the
gun in bold relief against the sky. Soon after, being warned by the
boom of the gun to look up again, there was only the cannon in the
sky, the smoke just blowing away from it, as if the soldier, having
touched it off, had concealed himself for effect, leaving the sound to
echo grandly from shore to shore, and far up and down the river. This
answered the purpose of a dinner-horn.

There are no such restaurants in Quebec or Montreal as there are in
Boston. I hunted an hour or two in vain in this town to find one, till
I lost my appetite. In one house, called a restaurant, where lunches
were advertised, I found only tables covered with bottles and glasses
innumerable, containing apparently a sample of every liquid that has
been known since the earth dried up after the flood, but no scent of
solid food did I perceive gross enough to excite a hungry mouse. In
short, I saw nothing to tempt me there, but a large map of Canada
against the wall. In another place I once more got as far as the
bottles, and then asked for a bill of fare; was told to walk up
stairs; had no bill of fare, nothing but fare. "Have you any pies or
puddings?" I inquired, for I am obliged to keep my savageness in check
by a low diet. "No, sir; we've nice mutton-chop, roast beef,
beefsteak, cutlets," and so on. A burly Englishman, who was in the
midst of the siege of a piece of roast beef, and of whom I have never
had a front view to this day, turned half round, with his mouth half
full, and remarked, "You'll find no pies nor puddings in Quebec, sir;
they don't make any here." I found that it was even so, and therefore
bought some musty cake and some fruit in the open market-place. This
market-place by the waterside, where the old women sat by their tables
in the open air, amid a dense crowd jabbering all languages, was the
best place in Quebec to observe the people; and the ferry-boats,
continually coming and going with their motley crews and cargoes,
added much to the entertainment. I also saw them getting water from
the river, for Quebec is supplied with water by cart and barrel. This
city impressed me as wholly foreign and French, for I scarcely heard
the sound of the English language in the streets. More than three
fifths of the inhabitants are of French origin; and if the traveler
did not visit the fortifications particularly, he might not be
reminded that the English have any foothold here; and, in any case, if
he looked no farther than Quebec, they would appear to have planted
themselves in Canada only as they have in Spain at Gibraltar; and he
who plants upon a rock cannot expect much increase. The novel sights
and sounds by the waterside made me think of such ports as Boulogne,
Dieppe, Rouen, and Havre-de-Grâce, which I have never seen; but I
have no doubt that they present similar scenes. I was much amused from
first to last with the sounds made by the charette and caleche
drivers. It was that part of their foreign language that you heard the
most of,--the French they talked to their horses,--and which they
talked the loudest. It was a more novel sound to me than the French of
conversation. The streets resounded with the cries, "_Qui donc!_"
"_Marche tôt!_" I suspect that many of our horses which came from
Canada would prick up their ears at these sounds. Of the shops, I was
most attracted by those where furs and Indian works were sold, as
containing articles of genuine Canadian manufacture. I have been told
that two townsmen of mine, who were interested in horticulture,
traveling once in Canada, and being in Quebec, thought it would be a
good opportunity to obtain seeds of the real Canada crookneck squash.
So they went into a shop where such things were advertised, and
inquired for the same. The shopkeeper had the very thing they wanted.
"But are you sure," they asked, "that these are the genuine Canada
crookneck?" "Oh, yes, gentlemen," answered he, "they are a lot which I
have received directly from Boston." I resolved that my Canada
crookneck seeds should be such as had grown in Canada.

Too much has not been said about the scenery of Quebec. The
fortifications of Cape Diamond are omnipresent. They preside, they
frown over the river and surrounding country. You travel ten, twenty,
thirty miles up or down the river's banks, you ramble fifteen miles
amid the hills on either side, and then, when you have long since
forgotten them, perchance slept on them by the way, at a turn of the
road or of your body, there they are still, with their geometry
against the sky. The child that is born and brought up thirty miles
distant, and has never traveled to the city, reads his country's
history, sees the level lines of the citadel amid the cloud-built
citadels in the western horizon, and is told that that is Quebec. No
wonder if Jacques Cartier's pilot exclaimed in Norman French, "Que
bec!" (What a beak!) when he saw this cape, as some suppose. Every
modern traveler involuntarily uses a similar expression. Particularly
it is said that its sudden apparition on turning Point Levi makes a
memorable impression on him who arrives by water. The view from Cape
Diamond has been compared by European travelers with the most
remarkable views of a similar kind in Europe, such as from Edinburgh
Castle, Gibraltar, Cintra, and others, and preferred by many. A main
peculiarity in this, compared with other views which I have beheld, is
that it is from the ramparts of a fortified city, and not from a
solitary and majestic river cape alone, that this view is obtained. I
associate the beauty of Quebec with the steel-like and flashing air,
which may be peculiar to that season of the year, in which the blue
flowers of the succory and some late goldenrods and buttercups on the
summit of Cape Diamond were almost my only companions,--the former
bluer than the heavens they faced. Yet even I yielded in some degree
to the influence of historical associations, and found it hard to
attend to the geology of Cape Diamond or the botany of the Plains of
Abraham. I still remember the harbor far beneath me, sparkling like
silver in the sun, the answering highlands of Point Levi on the
southeast, the frowning Cap Tourmente abruptly bounding the seaward
view far in the northeast, the villages of Lorette and Charlesbourg on
the north, and, further west, the distant Val Cartier, sparkling with
white cottages, hardly removed by distance through the clear air,--not
to mention a few blue mountains along the horizon in that direction.
You look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of
civilization. Yonder small group of hills, according to the
guide-book, forms "the portal of the wilds which are trodden only by
the feet of the Indian hunters as far as Hudson's Bay." It is but a
few years since Bouchette declared that the country ten leagues north
of the British capital of North America was as little known as the
middle of Africa. Thus the citadel under my feet, and all historical
associations, were swept away again by an influence from the wilds and
from Nature, as if the beholder had read her history,--an influence
which, like the Great River itself, flowed from the Arctic fastnesses
and Western forests with irresistible tide over all.

The most interesting object in Canada to me was the River St.
Lawrence, known far and wide, and for centuries, as the Great River.
Cartier, its discoverer, sailed up it as far as Montreal in
1535,--nearly a century before the coming of the Pilgrims; and I have
seen a pretty accurate map of it so far, containing the city of
"Hochelaga" and the river "Saguenay," in Ortelius's _Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum_, printed at Antwerp in 1575,--the first edition having
appeared in 1570,--in which the famous cities of "Norumbega" and
"Orsinora" stand on the rough-blocked continent where New England is
to-day, and the fabulous but unfortunate Isle of Demons, and Frislant,
and others, lie off and on in the unfrequented sea, some of them
prowling near what is now the course of the Cunard steamers. In this
ponderous folio of the "Ptolemy of his age," said to be the first
general atlas published after the revival of the sciences in Europe,
only one page of which is devoted to the topography of the _Novus
Orbis_, the St. Lawrence is the only large river, whether drawn from
fancy or from observation, on the east side of North America. It was
famous in Europe before the other rivers of North America were heard
of, notwithstanding that the mouth of the Mississippi is said to have
been discovered first, and its stream was reached by Soto not long
after; but the St. Lawrence had attracted settlers to its cold shores
long before the Mississippi, or even the Hudson, was known to the
world. Schoolcraft was misled by Gallatin into saying that Narvaez
discovered the Mississippi. De Vega does _not_ say so. The first
explorers declared that the summer in that country was as warm as
France, and they named one of the bays in the Gulf of St. Lawrence the
Bay of Chaleur, or of warmth; but they said nothing about the winter
being as cold as Greenland. In the manuscript account of Cartier's
second voyage, attributed by some to that navigator himself, it is
called "the greatest river, without comparison, that is known to have
ever been seen." The savages told him that it was the "chemin du
Canada,"--the highway to Canada,--"which goes so far that no man had
ever been to the end that they had heard." The Saguenay, one of its
tributaries, which the panorama has made known to New England within
three years, is described by Cartier, in 1535, and still more
particularly by Jean Alphonse, in 1542, who adds, "I think that this
river comes from the sea of Cathay, for in this place there issues a
strong current, and there runs there a terrible tide." The early
explorers saw many whales and other sea-monsters far up the St.
Lawrence. Champlain, in his map, represents a whale spouting in the
harbor of Quebec, three hundred and sixty miles from what is called
the mouth of the river; and Charlevoix takes his reader to the summit
of Cape Diamond to see the "porpoises, white as snow," sporting on the
surface of the harbor of Quebec. And Boucher says in 1664, "from there
[Tadoussac] to Montreal is found a great quantity of _Marsouins
blancs_." Several whales have been taken pretty high up the river
since I was there. P. A. Gosse, in his "Canadian Naturalist," p. 171
(London, 1840), speaks of "the white dolphin of the St. Lawrence
(_Delphinus Canadensis_)," as considered different from those of the
sea. "The Natural History Society of Montreal offered a prize, a few
years ago, for an essay on the _Cetacea_ of the St. Lawrence, which
was, I believe, handed in." In Champlain's day it was commonly called
"the Great River of Canada." More than one nation has claimed it. In
Ogilby's "America of 1670," in the map _Novi Belgii_, it is called "De
Groote River van Niew Nederlandt." It bears different names in
different parts of its course, as it flows through what were formerly
the territories of different nations. From the Gulf to Lake Ontario
it is called at present the St. Lawrence; from Montreal to the same
place it is frequently called the Cateraqui; and higher up it is known
successively as the Niagara, Detroit, St. Clair, St. Mary's, and St.
Louis rivers. Humboldt, speaking of the Orinoco, says that this name
is unknown in the interior of the country; so likewise the tribes that
dwell about the sources of the St. Lawrence have never heard the name
which it bears in the lower part of its course. It rises near another
father of waters,--the Mississippi,--issuing from a remarkable spring
far up in the woods, called Lake Superior, fifteen hundred miles in
circumference; and several other springs there are thereabouts which
feed it. It makes such a noise in its tumbling down at one place as is
heard all round the world. Bouchette, the Surveyor-General of the
Canadas, calls it "the most splendid river on the globe;" says that it
is two thousand statute miles long (more recent geographers make it
four or five hundred miles longer); that at the Rivière du Sud it is
eleven miles wide; at the Traverse, thirteen; at the Paps of Matane,
twenty-five; at the Seven Islands, seventy-three; and at its mouth,
from Cape Rosier to the Mingan Settlements in Labrador, near one
hundred and five (?) miles wide. According to Captain Bayfield's
recent chart it is about _ninety-six_ geographical miles wide at the
latter place, measuring at right angles with the stream. It has much
the largest estuary, regarding both length and breadth, of any river
on the globe. Humboldt says that the River Plate, which has the
broadest estuary of the South American rivers, is ninety-two
geographical miles wide at its mouth; also he found the Orinoco to be
more than three miles wide at five hundred and sixty miles from its
mouth; but he does not tell us that ships of six hundred tons can sail
up it so far, as they can up the St. Lawrence to Montreal,--an equal
distance. If he had described a fleet of such ships at anchor in a
city's port so far inland, we should have got a very different idea of
the Orinoco. Perhaps Charlevoix describes the St. Lawrence truly as
the most _navigable_ river in the world. Between Montreal and Quebec
it averages about two miles wide. The tide is felt as far up as Three
Rivers, four hundred and thirty-two miles, which is as far as from
Boston to Washington. As far up as Cap aux Oyes, sixty or seventy
miles below Quebec, Kalm found a great part of the plants near the
shore to be marine, as glasswort (_Salicornia_), seaside pease (_Pisum
maritimum_), sea-milkwort (_Glaux_), beach-grass (_Psamma arenaria_),
seaside plantain (_Plantago maritima_), the sea-rocket (_Bunias
cakile_), etc.

The geographer Guyot observes that the Marañon is three thousand miles
long, and gathers its waters from a surface of a million and a half
square miles; that the Mississippi is also three thousand miles long,
but its basin covers only from eight to nine hundred thousand square
miles; that the St. Lawrence is eighteen hundred miles long, and its
basin covers more than a million square miles (Darby says five hundred
thousand); and speaking of the lakes, he adds, "These vast fresh-water
seas, together with the St. Lawrence, cover a surface of nearly one
hundred thousand square miles, and it has been calculated that they
contain about one half of all the fresh water on the surface of our
planet." But all these calculations are necessarily very rude and
inaccurate. Its tributaries, the Ottawa, St. Maurice, and Saguenay,
are great rivers themselves. The latter is said to be more than one
thousand (?) feet deep at its mouth, while its cliffs rise
perpendicularly an equal distance above its surface. Pilots say there
are no soundings till one hundred and fifty miles up the St. Lawrence.
The greatest sounding in the river, given on Bayfield's chart of the
gulf and river, is two hundred and twenty-eight fathoms. McTaggart, an
engineer, observes that "the Ottawa is larger than all the rivers in
Great Britain, were they running in one." The traveler Grey writes: "A
dozen Danubes, Rhines, Taguses, and Thameses would be nothing to
twenty miles of fresh water in breadth [as where he happened to be],
from ten to forty fathoms in depth." And again: "There is not perhaps
in the whole extent of this immense continent so fine an approach to
it as by the river St. Lawrence. In the Southern States you have, in
general, a level country for many miles inland; here you are
introduced at once into a majestic scenery, where everything is on a
grand scale,--mountains, woods, lakes, rivers, precipices,
waterfalls."

We have not yet the data for a minute comparison of the St. Lawrence
with the South American rivers; but it is obvious that, taking it in
connection with its lakes, its estuary, and its falls, it easily bears
off the palm from all the rivers on the globe; for though, as
Bouchette observes, it may not carry to the ocean a greater volume of
water than the Amazon and Mississippi, its surface and cubic mass are
far greater than theirs. But, unfortunately, this noble river is
closed by ice from the beginning of December to the middle of April.
The arrival of the first vessel from England when the ice breaks up
is, therefore, a great event, as when the salmon, shad, and alewives
come up a river in the spring to relieve the famishing inhabitants on
its banks. Who can say what would have been the history of this
continent if, as has been suggested, this river had emptied into the
sea where New York stands!

After visiting the Museum and taking one more look at the wall, I made
haste to the Lord Sydenham steamer, which at five o'clock was to leave
for Montreal. I had already taken a seat on deck, but finding that I
had still an hour and a half to spare, and remembering that large map
of Canada which I had seen in the parlor of the restaurant in my
search after pudding, and realizing that I might never see the like
out of the country, I returned thither, asked liberty to look at the
map, rolled up the mahogany table, put my handkerchief on it, stood on
it, and copied all I wanted before the maid came in and said to me
standing on the table, "Some gentlemen want the room, sir;" and I
retreated without having broken the neck of a single bottle, or my
own, very thankful and willing to pay for all the solid food I had
got. We were soon abreast of Cap Rouge, eight miles above Quebec,
after we got under weigh. It was in this place, then called _Fort du
France Roy_, that the Sieur de Roberval with his company, having sent
home two of his three ships, spent the winter of 1542-43. It appears
that they fared in the following manner (I translate from the
original): "Each mess had only two loaves, weighing each a pound, and
half a pound of beef. They ate pork for dinner, with half a pound of
butter, and beef for supper, with about two handfuls of beans without
butter. Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays they ate salted cod, and
sometimes green, for dinner, with butter; and porpoise and beans for
supper. Monsieur Roberval administered good justice, and punished each
according to his offense. One, named Michel Gaillon, was hung for
theft; John of Nantes was put in irons and imprisoned for his fault;
and others were likewise put in irons; and many were whipped, both men
and women; by which means they lived in peace and tranquillity." In an
account of a voyage up this river, printed in the Jesuit Relations in
the year 1664, it is said: "It was an interesting navigation for us in
ascending the river from Cap Tourmente to Quebec, to see on this side
and on that, for the space of eight leagues, the farms and the houses
of the company, built by our French, all along these shores. On the
right, the seigniories of Beauport, of Notre Dame des Anges; and on
the left, this beautiful Isle of Orleans." The same traveler names
among the fruits of the country observed at the Isles of Richelieu, at
the head of Lake St. Peter, "kinds (_des espèces_) of little apples or
haws (_senelles_), and of pears, which only ripen with the frost."

Night came on before we had passed the high banks. We had come from
Montreal to Quebec in one night. The return voyage, against the
stream, takes but an hour longer. Jacques Cartier, the first white man
who is known to have ascended this river, thus speaks of his voyage
from what is now Quebec to the foot of Lake St. Peter, or about
half-way to Montreal: "From the said day, the 19th, even to the 28th
of the said month [September, 1535], we had been navigating up the
said river without losing hour or day, during which time we had seen
and found as much country and lands as level as we could desire, full
of the most beautiful trees in the world," which he goes on to
describe. But we merely slept and woke again to find that we had
passed through all that country which he was eight days in sailing
through. He must have had a troubled sleep. We were not long enough on
the river to realize that it had length; we got only the impression of
its breadth, as if we had passed over a lake a mile or two in breadth
and several miles long, though we might thus have slept through a
European kingdom. Being at the head of Lake St. Peter, on the
above-mentioned 28th of September, dealing with the natives, Cartier
says: "We inquired of them by signs if this was the route to Hochelaga
[Montreal]; and they answered that it was, and that there were yet
three days' journeys to go there." He finally arrived at Hochelaga on
the 2d of October.

When I went on deck at dawn we had already passed through Lake St.
Peter, and saw islands ahead of us. Our boat advancing with a strong
and steady pulse over the calm surface, we felt as if we were
permitted to be awake in the scenery of a dream. Many vivacious
Lombardy poplars along the distant shores gave them a novel and
lively, though artificial, look, and contrasted strangely with the
slender and graceful elms on both shores and islands. The church of
Varennes, fifteen miles from Montreal, was conspicuous at a great
distance before us, appearing to belong to, and rise out of, the
river; and now, and before, Mount Royal indicated where the city was.
We arrived about seven o'clock, and set forth immediately to ascend
the mountain, two miles distant, going across lots in spite of
numerous signs threatening the severest penalties to trespassers, past
an old building known as the MacTavish property,--Simon MacTavish, I
suppose, whom Silliman refers to as "in a sense the founder of the
Northwestern Company." His tomb was behind in the woods, with a
remarkably high wall and higher monument. The family returned to
Europe. He could not have imagined how dead he would be in a few
years, and all the more dead and forgotten for being buried under such
a mass of gloomy stone, where not even memory could get at him without
a crowbar. Ah! poor man, with that last end of his! However, he may
have been the worthiest of mortals for aught that I know. From the
mountain-top we got a view of the whole city; the flat, fertile,
extensive island; the noble sea of the St. Lawrence swelling into
lakes; the mountains about St. Hyacinthe, and in Vermont and New York;
and the mouth of the Ottawa in the west, overlooking that St. Anne's
where the voyageur sings his "parting hymn," and bids adieu to
civilization,--a name, thanks to Moore's verses, the most suggestive
of poetic associations of any in Canada. We, too, climbed the hill
which Cartier, first of white men, ascended, and named Mont-real (the
3d of October, O. S., 1535), and, like him, "we saw the said river as
far as we could see, _grand_, _large_, _et spacieux_, going to
the southwest," toward that land whither Donnacona had told the
discoverer that he had been a month's journey from Canada, where there
grew "_force Canelle et Girofle_," much cinnamon and cloves, and where
also, as the natives told him, were three great lakes and afterward
_une mer douce_,--a sweet sea,--_de laquelle n'est mention avoir vu le
bout_, of which there is no mention to have seen the end. But instead
of an Indian town far in the interior of a new world, with guides to
show us where the river came from, we found a splendid and bustling
stone-built city of white men, and only a few squalid Indians offered
to sell us baskets at the Lachine Railroad Depot, and Hochelaga is,
perchance, but the fancy name of an engine company or an eating-house.

  [Illustration: _Montreal from Mount Royal_]

We left Montreal Wednesday, the 2d of October, late in the afternoon.
In the La Prairie cars the Yankees made themselves merry, imitating
the cries of the charette-drivers to perfection, greatly to the
amusement of some French-Canadian travelers, and they kept it up all
the way to Boston. I saw one person on board the boat at St. Johns,
and one or two more elsewhere in Canada, wearing homespun gray
greatcoats, or capotes, with conical and comical hoods, which fell
back between their shoulders like small bags, ready to be turned up
over the head when occasion required, though a hat usurped that place
now. They looked as if they would be convenient and proper enough as
long as the coats were new and tidy, but would soon come to have a
beggarly and unsightly look, akin to rags and dust-holes. We reached
Burlington early in the morning, where the Yankees tried to pass off
their Canada coppers, but the newsboys knew better. Returning through
the Green Mountains, I was reminded that I had not seen in Canada such
brilliant autumnal tints as I had previously seen in Vermont. Perhaps
there was not yet so great and sudden a contrast with the summer heats
in the former country as in these mountain valleys. As we were passing
through Ashburnham, by a new white house which stood at some distance
in a field, one passenger exclaimed, so that all in the car could hear
him, "There, there's not so good a house as that in all Canada!" I did
not much wonder at his remark, for there is a neatness, as well as
evident prosperity, a certain elastic easiness of circumstances, so to
speak, when not rich, about a New England house, as if the proprietor
could at least afford to make repairs in the spring, which the
Canadian houses do not suggest. Though of stone, they are no better
constructed than a stone barn would be with us; the only building,
except the château, on which money and taste are expended, being the
church. In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for
the château, and while every village here contains at least several
gentlemen or "squires," _there_ there is but one to a seigniory.

I got home this Thursday evening, having spent just one week in Canada
and traveled eleven hundred miles. The whole expense of this journey,
including two guide-books and a map, which cost one dollar twelve and
a half cents, was twelve dollars seventy-five cents. I do not suppose
that I have seen all British America; that could not be done by a
cheap excursion, unless it were a cheap excursion to the Icy Sea, as
seen by Hearne or Mackenzie, and then, no doubt, some interesting
features would be omitted. I wished to go a little way behind the word
_Canadense_, of which naturalists make such frequent use; and I should
like still right well to make a longer excursion on foot through the
wilder parts of Canada, which perhaps might be called _Iter
Canadense_.




NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS[3]


Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read
in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground,
of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes; of
the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the
rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting
of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of
health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.

     Within the circuit of this plodding life,
     There enter moments of an azure hue,
     Untarnished fair as is the violet
     Or anemone, when the spring strews them
     By some meandering rivulet, which make
     The best philosophy untrue that aims
     But to console man for his grievances.
     I have remembered, when the winter came,
     High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
     When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
     On every twig and rail and jutting spout,
     The icy spears were adding to their length
     Against the arrows of the coming sun,
     How in the shimmering noon of summer past
     Some unrecorded beam slanted across
     The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew;
     Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,
     The bee's long smothered hum, on the blue flag
     Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,
     Which now through all its course stands still and dumb,
     Its own memorial,--purling at its play
     Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,
     Until its youthful sound was hushed at last
     In the staid current of the lowland stream;
     Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,
     And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,
     When all the fields around lay bound and hoar
     Beneath a thick integument of snow.
     So by God's cheap economy made rich
     To go upon my winter's task again.

I am singularly refreshed in winter when I hear of service-berries,
poke-weed, juniper. Is not heaven made up of these cheap summer
glories? There is a singular health in those words, Labrador and East
Main, which no desponding creed recognizes. How much more than Federal
are these States! If there were no other vicissitudes than the
seasons, our interest would never tire. Much more is adoing than
Congress wots of. What journal do the persimmon and the buckeye keep,
and the sharp-shinned hawk? What is transpiring from summer to winter
in the Carolinas, and the Great Pine Forest, and the Valley of the
Mohawk? The merely political aspect of the land is never very
cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a
political organization. On this side all lands present only the
symptoms of decay. I see but Bunker Hill and Sing-Sing, the District
of Columbia and Sullivan's Island, with a few avenues connecting them.
But paltry are they all beside one blast of the east or the south wind
which blows over them.

In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at
least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and
livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so. There
is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance
so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high
pastures. I would keep some book of natural history always by me as a
sort of elixir, the reading of which should restore the tone of the
system. To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a
fountain of health. To him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty
no harm nor disappointment can come. The doctrines of despair, of
spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such
as shared the serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag
here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur
Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any
circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not
countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do
forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that
the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the
northern night the hunter does not give over to follow the seal and
walrus on the ice. They are of sick and diseased imaginations who
would toll the world's knell so soon. Cannot these sedentary sects do
better than prepare the shrouds and write the epitaphs of those other
busy living men? The practical faith of all men belies the preacher's
consolation. What is any man's discourse to me, if I am not sensible
of something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of crickets? In
it the woods must be relieved against the sky. Men tire me when I am
not constantly greeted and refreshed as by the flux of sparkling
streams. Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry
that leap in ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a
summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods
ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident
and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook
minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales, worn
bright by the attrition, is reflected upon the bank!

We fancy that this din of religion, literature, and philosophy, which
is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the
universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's
axle; but if a man sleep soundly, he will forget it all between sunset
and dawn. It is the three-inch swing of a pendulum in a cupboard,
which the great pulse of nature vibrates by and through each instant.
When we lift our eyelids and open our ears, it disappears with smoke
and rattle like the cars on a railroad. When I detect a beauty in any
of the recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and retired
spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible
privacy of a life,--how silent and unambitious it is. The beauty there
is in mosses must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook. What
an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life!
Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far
more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior. I am pleased
to learn that Thales was up and stirring by night not unfrequently,
as his astronomical discoveries prove. Linnæus, setting out for
Lapland, surveys his "comb" and "spare shirt," "leathern breeches" and
"gauze cap to keep off gnats," with as much complacency as Bonaparte a
park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the
man is admirable. His eye is to take in fish, flower, and bird,
quadruped and biped. Science is always brave; for to know is to know
good; doubt and danger quail before her eye. What the coward overlooks
in his hurry, she calmly scrutinizes, breaking ground like a pioneer
for the array of arts that follow in her train. But cowardice is
unscientific; for there cannot be a science of ignorance. There may be
a science of bravery, for that advances; but a retreat is rarely well
conducted; if it is, then is it an orderly advance in the face of
circumstances.

But to draw a little nearer to our promised topics. Entomology extends
the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with
a sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the
universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will
bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with
the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no
interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with
pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer
noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is
made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest-fly?
There were ears for these sounds in Greece long ago, as Anacreon's ode
will show.

     "We pronounce thee happy, Cicada,
     For on the tops of the trees,
     Drinking a little dew,
     Like any king thou singest,
     For thine are they all,
     Whatever thou seest in the fields,
     And whatever the woods bear.
     Thou art the friend of the husbandmen,
     In no respect injuring any one;
     And thou art honored among men,
     Sweet prophet of summer.
     The Muses love thee,
     And Phœbus himself loves thee,
     And has given thee a shrill song;
     Age does not wrack thee,
     Thou skillful, earthborn, song-loving,
     Unsuffering, bloodless one;
     Almost thou art like the gods."

In the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over all
the land, and as in summer they are heard chiefly at nightfall, so
then by their incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year.
Nor can all the vanities that vex the world alter one whit the measure
that night has chosen. Every pulse-beat is in exact time with the
cricket's chant and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall.
Alternate with these if you can.

About two hundred and eighty birds either reside permanently in the
State, or spend the summer only, or make us a passing visit. Those
which spend the winter with us have obtained our warmest sympathy. The
nuthatch and chickadee flitting in company through the dells of the
wood, the one harshly scolding at the intruder, the other with a faint
lisping note enticing him on; the jay screaming in the orchard; the
crow cawing in unison with the storm; the partridge, like a russet
link extended over from autumn to spring, preserving unbroken the
chain of summers; the hawk with warrior-like firmness abiding the
blasts of winter; the robin[4] and lark lurking by warm springs in the
woods; the familiar snowbird culling a few seeds in the garden or a
few crumbs in the yard; and occasionally the shrike, with heedless and
unfrozen melody bringing back summer again:--

     His steady sails he never furls
     At any time o' year,
     And perching now on Winter's curls,
     He whistles in his ear.

As the spring advances, and the ice is melting in the river, our
earliest and straggling visitors make their appearance. Again does the
old Teian poet sing as well for New England as for Greece, in the

RETURN OF SPRING

     Behold, how, Spring appearing,
     The Graces send forth roses;
     Behold, how the wave of the sea
     Is made smooth by the calm;
     Behold, how the duck dives;
     Behold, how the crane travels;
     And Titan shines constantly bright.
     The shadows of the clouds are moving;
     The works of man shine;
     The earth puts forth fruits;
     The fruit of the olive puts forth.
     The cup of Bacchus is crowned,
     Along the leaves, along the branches,
     The fruit, bending them down, flourishes.

The ducks alight at this season in the still water, in company with
the gulls, which do not fail to improve an east wind to visit our
meadows, and swim about by twos and threes, pluming themselves, and
diving to peck at the root of the lily, and the cranberries which the
frost has not loosened. The first flock of geese is seen beating to
north, in long harrows and waving lines; the jingle of the song
sparrow salutes us from the shrubs and fences; the plaintive note of
the lark comes clear and sweet from the meadow; and the bluebird, like
an azure ray, glances past us in our walk. The fish hawk, too, is
occasionally seen at this season sailing majestically over the water,
and he who has once observed it will not soon forget the majesty of
its flight. It sails the air like a ship of the line, worthy to
struggle with the elements, falling back from time to time like a ship
on its beam ends, and holding its talons up as if ready for the
arrows, in the attitude of the national bird. It is a great presence,
as of the master of river and forest. Its eye would not quail before
the owner of the soil, but make him feel like an intruder on its
domains. And then its retreat, sailing so steadily away, is a kind of
advance. I have by me one of a pair of ospreys, which have for some
years fished in this vicinity, shot by a neighboring pond, measuring
more than two feet in length, and six in the stretch of its wings.
Nuttall mentions that "the ancients, particularly Aristotle, pretended
that the ospreys taught their young to gaze at the sun, and those who
were unable to do so were destroyed. Linnæus even believed, on ancient
authority, that one of the feet of this bird had all the toes divided,
while the other was partly webbed, so that it could swim with one
foot, and grasp a fish with the other." But that educated eye is now
dim, and those talons are nerveless. Its shrill scream seems yet to
linger in its throat, and the roar of the sea in its wings. There is
the tyranny of Jove in its claws, and his wrath in the erectile
feathers of the head and neck. It reminds me of the Argonautic
expedition, and would inspire the dullest to take flight over
Parnassus.

The booming of the bittern, described by Goldsmith and Nuttall, is
frequently heard in our fens, in the morning and evening, sounding
like a pump, or the chopping of wood in a frosty morning in some
distant farm-yard. The manner in which this sound is produced I have
not seen anywhere described. On one occasion, the bird has been seen
by one of my neighbors to thrust its bill into the water, and suck up
as much as it could hold, then, raising its head, it pumped it out
again with four or five heaves of the neck, throwing it two or three
feet, and making the sound each time.

At length the summer's eternity is ushered in by the cackle of the
flicker among the oaks on the hillside, and a new dynasty begins with
calm security.

In May and June the woodland quire is in full tune, and, given the
immense spaces of hollow air, and this curious human ear, one does
not see how the void could be better filled.

     Each summer sound
     Is a summer round.

As the season advances, and those birds which make us but a passing
visit depart, the woods become silent again, and but few feathers
ruffle the drowsy air. But the solitary rambler may still find a
response and expression for every mood in the depths of the wood.

     Sometimes I hear the veery's[5] clarion,
     Or brazen trump of the impatient jay,
     And in secluded woods the chickadee
     Doles out her scanty notes, which sing the praise
     Of heroes, and set forth the loveliness
     Of virtue evermore.

The phœbe still sings in harmony with the sultry weather by the
brink of the pond, nor are the desultory hours of noon in the midst of
the village without their minstrel.

     Upon the lofty elm-tree sprays
     The vireo rings the changes sweet,
     During the trivial summer days,
     Striving to lift our thoughts above the street.

With the autumn begins in some measure a new spring. The plover is
heard whistling high in the air over the dry pastures, the finches
flit from tree to tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly in flocks, and
the goldfinch rides on the earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping
amid the rustle of the leaves. The crows, too, begin now to
congregate; you may stand and count them as they fly low and
straggling over the landscape, singly or by twos and threes, at
intervals of half a mile, until a hundred have passed.

I have seen it suggested somewhere that the crow was brought to this
country by the white man; but I shall as soon believe that the white
man planted these pines and hemlocks. He is no spaniel to follow our
steps; but rather flits about the clearings like the dusky spirit of
the Indian, reminding me oftener of Philip and Powhatan than of
Winthrop and Smith. He is a relic of the dark ages. By just so slight,
by just so lasting a tenure does superstition hold the world ever;
there is the rook in England, and the crow in New England.

     Thou dusky spirit of the wood,
     Bird of an ancient brood,
     Flitting thy lonely way,
     A meteor in the summer's day,
     From wood to wood, from hill to hill,
     Low over forest, field, and rill,
     What wouldst thou say?
     Why shouldst thou haunt the day?
     What makes thy melancholy float?
     What bravery inspires thy throat,
     And bears thee up above the clouds,
     Over desponding human crowds,
     Which far below
     Lay thy haunts low?

The late walker or sailor, in the October evenings, may hear the
murmurings of the snipe, circling over the meadows, the most
spirit-like sound in nature; and still later in the autumn, when the
frosts have tinged the leaves, a solitary loon pays a visit to our
retired ponds, where he may lurk undisturbed till the season of
moulting is passed, making the woods ring with his wild laughter. This
bird, the Great Northern Diver, well deserves its name; for when
pursued with a boat, it will dive, and swim like a fish under water,
for sixty rods or more, as fast as a boat can be paddled, and its
pursuer, if he would discover his game again, must put his ear to the
surface to hear where it comes up. When it comes to the surface, it
throws the water off with one shake of its wings, and calmly swims
about until again disturbed.

These are the sights and sounds which reach our senses oftenest during
the year. But sometimes one hears a quite new note, which has for
background other Carolinas and Mexicos than the books describe, and
learns that his ornithology has done him no service.

It appears from the Report that there are about forty quadrupeds
belonging to the State, and among these one is glad to hear of a few
bears, wolves, lynxes, and wildcats.

When our river overflows its banks in the spring, the wind from the
meadows is laden with a strong scent of musk, and by its freshness
advertises me of an unexplored wildness. Those backwoods are not far
off then. I am affected by the sight of the cabins of the muskrat,
made of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet along the river,
as when I read of the barrows of Asia. The muskrat is the beaver of
the settled States. Their number has even increased within a few
years in this vicinity. Among the rivers which empty into the
Merrimack, the Concord is known to the boatmen as a dead stream. The
Indians are said to have called it Musketaquid, or Prairie River. Its
current being much more sluggish and its water more muddy than the
rest, it abounds more in fish and game of every kind. According to the
History of the town, "The fur-trade was here once very important. As
early as 1641, a company was formed in the colony, of which Major
Willard of Concord was superintendent, and had the exclusive right to
trade with the Indians in furs and other articles; and for this right
they were obliged to pay into the public treasury one twentieth of all
the furs they obtained." There are trappers in our midst still, as
well as on the streams of the far West, who night and morning go the
round of their traps, without fear of the Indian. One of these takes
from one hundred and fifty to two hundred muskrats in a year, and even
thirty-six have been shot by one man in a day. Their fur, which is not
nearly as valuable as formerly, is in good condition in the winter and
spring only; and upon the breaking up of the ice, when they are driven
out of their holes by the water, the greatest number is shot from
boats, either swimming or resting on their stools, or slight supports
of grass and reeds, by the side of the stream. Though they exhibit
considerable cunning at other times, they are easily taken in a trap,
which has only to be placed in their holes, or wherever they frequent,
without any bait being used, though it is sometimes rubbed with their
musk. In the winter the hunter cuts holes in the ice, and shoots them
when they come to the surface. Their burrows are usually in the high
banks of the river, with the entrance under water, and rising within
to above the level of high water. Sometimes their nests, composed of
dried meadow-grass and flags, may be discovered where the bank is low
and spongy, by the yielding of the ground under the feet. They have
from three to seven or eight young in the spring.

Frequently, in the morning or evening, a long ripple is seen in the
still water, where a muskrat is crossing the stream, with only its
nose above the surface, and sometimes a green bough in its mouth to
build its house with. When it finds itself observed, it will dive and
swim five or six rods under water, and at length conceal itself in its
hole, or the weeds. It will remain under water for ten minutes at a
time, and on one occasion has been seen, when undisturbed, to form an
air-bubble under the ice, which contracted and expanded as it breathed
at leisure. When it suspects danger on shore, it will stand erect like
a squirrel, and survey its neighborhood for several minutes, without
moving.

In the fall, if a meadow intervene between their burrows and the
stream, they erect cabins of mud and grass, three or four feet high,
near its edge. These are not their breeding-places, though young are
sometimes found in them in late freshets, but rather their
hunting-lodges, to which they resort in the winter with their food,
and for shelter. Their food consists chiefly of flags and fresh-water
mussels, the shells of the latter being left in large quantities
around their lodges in the spring.

The Penobscot Indian wears the entire skin of a muskrat, with the
legs and tail dangling, and the head caught under his girdle, for a
pouch, into which he puts his fishing-tackle, and essences to scent
his traps with.

The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have
disappeared; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the
mink is less common than formerly.

Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest
and most familiar reputation, from the time of Pilpay and Æsop to the
present day. His recent tracks still give variety to a winter's walk.
I tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours,
or which perhaps I have started, with such a tiptoe of expectation as
if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood,
and expected soon to catch it in its lair. I am curious to know what
has determined its graceful curvatures, and how surely they were
coincident with the fluctuations of some mind. I know which way a mind
wended, what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks, and
whether it moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less intervals
and distinctness; for the swiftest step leaves yet a lasting trace.
Sometimes you will see the trails of many together, and where they
have gamboled and gone through a hundred evolutions, which testify to
a singular listlessness and leisure in nature.

When I see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the
carelessness of freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the
sunshine along the ridge of a hill, I give up to him sun and earth as
to their true proprietor. He does not go in the sun, but it seems to
follow him, and there is a visible sympathy between him and it.
Sometimes, when the snow lies light and but five or six inches deep,
you may give chase and come up with one on foot. In such a case he
will show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest
direction, though he may lose ground by it. Notwithstanding his
fright, he will take no step which is not beautiful. His pace is a
sort of leopard canter, as if he were in no wise impeded by the snow,
but were husbanding his strength all the while. When the ground is
uneven, the course is a series of graceful curves, conforming to the
shape of the surface. He runs as though there were not a bone in his
back. Occasionally dropping his muzzle to the ground for a rod or two,
and then tossing his head aloft, when satisfied of his course. When he
comes to a declivity, he will put his fore feet together, and slide
swiftly down it, shoving the snow before him. He treads so softly that
you would hardly hear it from any nearness, and yet with such
expression that it would not be quite inaudible at any distance.

Of fishes, seventy-five genera and one hundred and seven species are
described in the Report. The fisherman will be startled to learn that
there are but about a dozen kinds in the ponds and streams of any
inland town; and almost nothing is known of their habits. Only their
names and residence make one love fishes. I would know even the number
of their fin-rays, and how many scales compose the lateral line. I am
the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for
all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook.
Methinks I have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a
degree.

I have experienced such simple delight in the trivial matters of
fishing and sporting, formerly, as might have inspired the muse of
Homer or Shakespeare; and now, when I turn the pages and ponder the
plates of the Angler's Souvenir, I am fain to exclaim,--

                         "Can such things be,
     And overcome us like a summer's cloud?"

Next to nature, it seems as if man's actions were the most natural,
they so gently accord with her. The small seines of flax stretched
across the shallow and transparent parts of our river are no more
intrusion than the cobweb in the sun. I stay my boat in mid-current,
and look down in the sunny water to see the civil meshes of his nets,
and wonder how the blustering people of the town could have done this
elvish work. The twine looks like a new river-weed, and is to the
river as a beautiful memento of man's presence in nature, discovered
as silently and delicately as a footprint in the sand.

When the ice is covered with snow, I do not suspect the wealth under
my feet; that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go. How
many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain!
The revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. At
length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the
heavens again.

Early in the spring, after the ice has melted, is the time for
spearing fish. Suddenly the wind shifts from northeast and east to
west and south, and every icicle, which has tinkled on the meadow
grass so long, trickles down its stem, and seeks its level unerringly
with a million comrades. The steam curls up from every roof and
fence.

     I see the civil sun drying earth's tears,
     Her tears of joy, which only faster flow.

In the brooks is heard the slight grating sound of small cakes of ice,
floating with various speed, full of content and promise, and where
the water gurgles under a natural bridge, you may hear these hasty
rafts hold conversation in an undertone. Every rill is a channel for
the juices of the meadow. In the ponds the ice cracks with a merry and
inspiriting din, and down the larger streams is whirled grating
hoarsely, and crashing its way along, which was so lately a highway
for the woodman's team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of the
skaters still fresh upon it, and the holes cut for pickerel. Town
committees anxiously inspect the bridges and causeways, as if by mere
eye-force to intercede with the ice and save the treasury.

     The river swelleth more and more,
     Like some sweet influence stealing o'er
     The passive town; and for a while
     Each tussock makes a tiny isle,
     Where, on some friendly Ararat,
     Resteth the weary water-rat.

     No ripple shows Musketaquid,
     Her very current e'en is hid,
     As deepest souls do calmest rest
     When thoughts are swelling in the breast,
     And she that in the summer's drought
     Doth make a rippling and a rout,
     Sleeps from Nahshawtuck to the Cliff,
     Unruffled by a single skiff.
     But by a thousand distant hills
     The louder roar a thousand rills,
     And many a spring which now is dumb,
     And many a stream with smothered hum,
     Doth swifter well and faster glide,
     Though buried deep beneath the tide.
     Our village shows a rural Venice,
     Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;
     As lovely as the Bay of Naples
     Yon placid cove amid the maples;
     And in my neighbor's field of corn
     I recognize the Golden Horn.

     Here Nature taught from year to year,
     When only red men came to hear,--
     Methinks 't was in this school of art
     Venice and Naples learned their part;
     But still their mistress, to my mind,
     Her young disciples leaves behind.

The fisherman now repairs and launches his boat. The best time for
spearing is at this season, before the weeds have begun to grow, and
while the fishes lie in the shallow water, for in summer they prefer
the cool depths, and in the autumn they are still more or less
concealed by the grass. The first requisite is fuel for your crate;
and for this purpose the roots of the pitch pine are commonly used,
found under decayed stumps, where the trees have been felled eight or
ten years.

With a crate, or jack, made of iron hoops, to contain your fire, and
attached to the bow of your boat about three feet from the water, a
fish-spear with seven tines and fourteen feet long, a large basket or
barrow to carry your fuel and bring back your fish, and a thick outer
garment, you are equipped for a cruise. It should be a warm and still
evening; and then, with a fire crackling merrily at the prow, you may
launch forth like a cucullo into the night. The dullest soul cannot
go upon such an expedition without some of the spirit of adventure; as
if he had stolen the boat of Charon and gone down the Styx on a
midnight expedition into the realms of Pluto. And much speculation
does this wandering star afford to the musing night-walker, leading
him on and on, jack-o'-lantern-like, over the meadows; or, if he is
wiser, he amuses himself with imagining what of human life, far in the
silent night, is flitting moth-like round its candle. The silent
navigator shoves his craft gently over the water, with a smothered
pride and sense of benefaction, as if he were the phosphor, or
light-bringer, to these dusky realms, or some sister moon, blessing
the spaces with her light. The waters, for a rod or two on either hand
and several feet in depth, are lit up with more than noonday
distinctness, and he enjoys the opportunity which so many have
desired, for the roofs of a city are indeed raised, and he surveys the
midnight economy of the fishes. There they lie in every variety of
posture; some on their backs, with their white bellies uppermost, some
suspended in mid-water, some sculling gently along with a dreamy
motion of the fins, and others quite active and wide awake,--a scene
not unlike what the human city would present. Occasionally he will
encounter a turtle selecting the choicest morsels, or a muskrat
resting on a tussock. He may exercise his dexterity, if he sees fit,
on the more distant and active fish, or fork the nearer into his boat,
as potatoes out of a pot, or even take the sound sleepers with his
hands. But these last accomplishments he will soon learn to dispense
with, distinguishing the real object of his pursuit, and find
compensation in the beauty and never-ending novelty of his position.
The pines growing down to the water's edge will show newly as in the
glare of a conflagration; and as he floats under the willows with his
light, the song sparrow will often wake on her perch, and sing that
strain at midnight which she had meditated for the morning. And when
he has done, he may have to steer his way home through the dark by the
north star, and he will feel himself some degrees nearer to it for
having lost his way on the earth.

The fishes commonly taken in this way are pickerel, suckers, perch,
eels, pouts, breams, and shiners,--from thirty to sixty weight in a
night. Some are hard to be recognized in the unnatural light,
especially the perch, which, his dark bands being exaggerated,
acquires a ferocious aspect. The number of these transverse bands,
which the Report states to be seven, is, however, very variable, for
in some of our ponds they have nine and ten even.

It appears that we have eight kinds of tortoises, twelve snakes,--but
one of which is venomous,--nine frogs and toads, nine salamanders, and
one lizard, for our neighbors.

I am particularly attracted by the motions of the serpent tribe. They
make our hands and feet, the wings of the bird, and the fins of the
fish seem very superfluous, as if Nature had only indulged her fancy
in making them. The black snake will dart into a bush when pursued,
and circle round and round with an easy and graceful motion, amid the
thin and bare twigs, five or six feet from the ground, as a bird flits
from bough to bough, or hang in festoons between the forks.
Elasticity and flexibleness in the simpler forms of animal life are
equivalent to a complex system of limbs in the higher; and we have
only to be as wise and wily as the serpent, to perform as difficult
feats without the vulgar assistance of hands and feet.

In May, the snapping turtle (_Emysaurus serpentina_) is frequently
taken on the meadows and in the river. The fisherman, taking sight
over the calm surface, discovers its snout projecting above the water,
at the distance of many rods, and easily secures his prey through its
unwillingness to disturb the water by swimming hastily away, for,
gradually drawing its head under, it remains resting on some limb or
clump of grass. Its eggs, which are buried at a distance from the
water, in some soft place, as a pigeon-bed, are frequently devoured by
the skunk. It will catch fish by daylight, as a toad catches flies,
and is said to emit a transparent fluid from its mouth to attract
them.

Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education
and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which
flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in
the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise
purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is
typified there. I am struck with the pleasing friendships and
unanimities of nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes the form
of their leaves. In the most stupendous scenes you will see delicate
and fragile features, as slight wreaths of vapor, dew-lines, feathery
sprays, which suggest a high refinement, a noble blood and breeding,
as it were. It is not hard to account for elves and fairies; they
represent this light grace, this ethereal gentility. Bring a spray
from the wood, or a crystal from the brook, and place it on your
mantel, and your household ornaments will seem plebeian beside its
nobler fashion and bearing. It will wave superior there, as if used to
a more refined and polished circle. It has a salute and a response to
all your enthusiasm and heroism.

In the winter, I stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow
up without forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances. They
do not wait as man does, but now is the golden age of the sapling.
Earth, air, sun, and rain are occasion enough; they were no better in
primeval centuries. The "winter of _their_ discontent" never comes.
Witness the buds of the native poplar standing gayly out to the frost
on the sides of its bare switches. They express a naked confidence.
With cheerful heart one could be a sojourner in the wilderness, if he
were sure to find there the catkins of the willow or the alder. When I
read of them in the accounts of northern adventurers, by Baffin's Bay
or Mackenzie's River, I see how even there, too, I could dwell. They
are our little vegetable redeemers. Methinks our virtue will hold out
till they come again. They are worthy to have had a greater than
Minerva or Ceres for their inventor. Who was the benignant goddess
that bestowed them on mankind?

Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and
extravagance of genius. She has her luxurious and florid style as well
as art. Having a pilgrim's cup to make, she gives to the whole--stem,
bowl, handle, and nose--some fantastic shape, as if it were to be the
car of some fabulous marine deity, a Nereus or Triton.

In the winter, the botanist need not confine himself to his books and
herbarium, and give over his outdoor pursuits, but may study a new
department of vegetable physiology, what may be called crystalline
botany, then. The winter of 1837 was unusually favorable for this. In
December of that year, the Genius of vegetation seemed to hover by
night over its summer haunts with unusual persistency. Such a
hoar-frost as is very uncommon here or anywhere, and whose full
effects can never be witnessed after sunrise, occurred several times.
As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked
like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled
together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which
the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along
some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies
of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow. The
river, viewed from the high bank, appeared of a yellowish-green color,
though all the landscape was white. Every tree, shrub, and spire of
grass, that could raise its head above the snow, was covered with a
dense ice-foliage, answering, as it were, leaf for leaf to its summer
dress. Even the fences had put forth leaves in the night. The centre,
diverging, and more minute fibres were perfectly distinct, and the
edges regularly indented. These leaves were on the side of the twig or
stubble opposite to the sun, meeting it for the most part at right
angles, and there were others standing out at all possible angles upon
these and upon one another, with no twig or stubble supporting them.
When the first rays of the sun slanted over the scene, the grasses
seemed hung with innumerable jewels, which jingled merrily as they
were brushed by the foot of the traveler, and reflected all the hues
of the rainbow, as he moved from side to side. It struck me that these
ghost leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were the
creatures of but one law; that in obedience to the same law the
vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one
hand, and the crystalline particles troop to their standard in the
same order, on the other. As if the material were indifferent, but the
law one and invariable, and every plant in the spring but pushed up
into and filled a permanent and eternal mould, which, summer and
winter forever, is waiting to be filled.

This foliate structure is common to the coral and the plumage of
birds, and to how large a part of animate and inanimate nature. The
same independence of law on matter is observable in many other
instances, as in the natural rhymes, when some animal form, color, or
odor has its counterpart in some vegetable. As, indeed, all rhymes
imply an eternal melody, independent of any particular sense.

As confirmation of the fact that vegetation is but a kind of
crystallization, every one may observe how, upon the edge of the
melting frost on the window, the needle-shaped particles are bundled
together so as to resemble fields waving with grain, or shocks rising
here and there from the stubble; on one side the vegetation of the
torrid zone, high-towering palms and wide-spread banyans, such as are
seen in pictures of oriental scenery; on the other, arctic pines stiff
frozen, with downcast branches.

Vegetation has been made the type of all growth; but as in crystals
the law is more obvious, their material being more simple, and for the
most part more transient and fleeting, would it not be as
philosophical as convenient to consider all growth, all filling up
within the limits of nature, but a crystallization more or less rapid?

On this occasion, in the side of the high bank of the river, wherever
the water or other cause had formed a cavity, its throat and outer
edge, like the entrance to a citadel, bristled with a glistening
ice-armor. In one place you might see minute ostrich-feathers, which
seemed the waving plumes of the warriors filing into the fortress; in
another, the glancing, fan-shaped banners of the Lilliputian host; and
in another, the needle-shaped particles collected into bundles,
resembling the plumes of the pine, might pass for a phalanx of spears.
From the under side of the ice in the brooks, where there was a
thicker ice below, depended a mass of crystallization, four or five
inches deep, in the form of prisms, with their lower ends open, which,
when the ice was laid on its smooth side, resembled the roofs and
steeples of a Gothic city, or the vessels of a crowded haven under a
press of canvas. The very mud in the road, where the ice had melted,
was crystallized with deep rectilinear fissures, and the crystalline
masses in the sides of the ruts resembled exactly asbestos in the
disposition of their needles. Around the roots of the stubble and
flower-stalks, the frost was gathered into the form of irregular
conical shells, or fairy rings. In some places the ice-crystals were
lying upon granite rocks, directly over crystals of quartz, the
frostwork of a longer night, crystals of a longer period, but, to some
eye unprejudiced by the short term of human life, melting as fast as
the former.

In the Report on the Invertebrate Animals, this singular fact is
recorded, which teaches us to put a new value on time and space: "The
distribution of the marine shells is well worthy of notice as a
geological fact. Cape Cod, the right arm of the Commonwealth, reaches
out into the ocean, some fifty or sixty miles. It is nowhere many
miles wide; but this narrow point of land has hitherto proved a
barrier to the migrations of many species of Mollusca. Several genera
and numerous species, which are separated by the intervention of only
a few miles of land, are effectually prevented from mingling by the
Cape, and do not pass from one side to the other.... Of the one
hundred and ninety-seven marine species, eighty-three do not pass to
the south shore, and fifty are not found on the north shore of the
Cape."

That common mussel, the _Unio complanatus_, or more properly
_fluviatilis_, left in the spring by the muskrat upon rocks and
stumps, appears to have been an important article of food with the
Indians. In one place, where they are said to have feasted, they are
found in large quantities, at an elevation of thirty feet above the
river, filling the soil to the depth of a foot, and mingled with ashes
and Indian remains.

The works we have placed at the head of our chapter, with as much
license as the preacher selects his text, are such as imply more
labor than enthusiasm. The State wanted complete catalogues of its
natural riches, with such additional facts merely as would be directly
useful.

The reports on Fishes, Reptiles, Insects, and Invertebrate Animals,
however, indicate labor and research, and have a value independent of
the object of the legislature.

Those on Herbaceous Plants and Birds cannot be of much value, as long
as Bigelow and Nuttall are accessible. They serve but to indicate,
with more or less exactness, what species are found in the State. We
detect several errors ourselves, and a more practiced eye would no
doubt expand the list.

The Quadrupeds deserved a more final and instructive report than they
have obtained.

These volumes deal much in measurements and minute descriptions, not
interesting to the general reader, with only here and there a colored
sentence to allure him, like those plants growing in dark forests,
which bear only leaves without blossoms. But the ground was
comparatively unbroken, and we will not complain of the pioneer, if he
raises no flowers with his first crop. Let us not underrate the value
of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how
few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history
of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being
gradually written. Men are knowing enough after their fashion. Every
countryman and dairy-maid knows that the coats of the fourth stomach
of the calf will curdle milk, and what particular mushroom is a safe
and nutritious diet. You cannot go into any field or wood, but it
will seem as if every stone had been turned, and the bark on every
tree ripped up. But, after all, it is much easier to discover than to
see when the cover is off. It has been well said that "the attitude of
inspection is prone." Wisdom does not inspect, but behold. We must
look a long time before we can see. Slow are the beginnings of
philosophy. He has something demoniacal in him, who can discern a law
or couple two facts. We can imagine a time when "Water runs down hill"
may have been taught in the schools. The true man of science will know
nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see,
hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer
experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the
application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse
and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics,--we cannot know truth
by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and
with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will
still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more
perfect Indian wisdom.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] _Reports--on the Fishes, Reptiles, and Birds; the Herbaceous
Plants and Quadrupeds; the Insects Injurious to Vegetation; and the
Invertebrate Animals of Massachusetts._ Published agreeably to an
Order of the Legislature, by the Commissioners on the Zoölogical and
Botanical Survey of the State.

[4] A white robin and a white quail have occasionally been seen. It is
mentioned in Audubon as remarkable that the nest of a robin should be
found on the ground; but this bird seems to be less particular than
most in the choice of a building-spot. I have seen its nest placed
under the thatched roof of a deserted barn, and in one instance, where
the adjacent country was nearly destitute of trees, together with two
of the phœbe, upon the end of a board in the loft of a sawmill, but
a few feet from the saw, which vibrated several inches with the motion
of the machinery.

[5] This bird, which is so well described by Nuttall, but is
apparently unknown by the author of the Report, is one of the most
common in the woods in this vicinity, and in Cambridge I have heard
the college yard ring with its trill. The boys call it "yorrick," from
the sound of its querulous and chiding note, as it flits near the
traveler through the underwood. The cowbird's egg is occasionally
found in its nest, as mentioned by Audubon.




A WALK TO WACHUSETT

          CONCORD, July 19, 1842.

     The needles of the pine
     All to the west incline.


Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the
mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a
grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all
the allusions of poets and travelers; whether with Homer, on a spring
morning, we sat down on the many-peaked Olympus, or with Virgil and
his compeers roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with
Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe. Thus we spoke
our mind to them, standing on the Concord cliffs:--

     With frontier strength ye stand your ground,
     With grand content ye circle round,
     Tumultuous silence for all sound,
     Ye distant nursery of rills,
     Monadnock, and the Peterboro' hills;
     Like some vast fleet,
     Sailing through rain and sleet,
     Through winter's cold and summer's heat;
     Still holding on, upon your high emprise,
     Until ye find a shore amid the skies;
     Not skulking close to land,
     With cargo contraband,
     For they who sent a venture out by ye
     Have set the sun to see
     Their honesty.
     Ships of the line, each one,
     Ye to the westward run,
     Always before the gale,
     Under a press of sail,
     With weight of metal all untold.
     I seem to feel ye, in my firm seat here,
     Immeasurable depth of hold,
     And breadth of beam, and length of running gear.

     Methinks ye take luxurious pleasure
     In your novel western leisure;
     So cool your brows, and freshly blue,
     As Time had nought for ye to do;
     For ye lie at your length,
     An unappropriated strength,
     Unhewn primeval timber,
     For knees so stiff, for masts so limber;
     The stock of which new earths are made
     One day to be our western trade,
     Fit for the stanchions of a world
     Which through the seas of space is hurled.

     While we enjoy a lingering ray,
     Ye still o'ertop the western day,
     Reposing yonder, on God's croft,
     Like solid stacks of hay.
     Edged with silver, and with gold,
     The clouds hang o'er in damask fold,
     And with such depth of amber light
     The west is dight,
     Where still a few rays slant,
     That even heaven seems extravagant.
     On the earth's edge mountains and trees
     Stand as they were on air graven,
     Or as the vessels in a haven
     Await the morning breeze.
     I fancy even
     Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven;
     And yonder still, in spite of history's page,
     Linger the golden and the silver age;
     Upon the laboring gale
     The news of future centuries is brought,
     And of new dynasties of thought,
     From your remotest vale.

     But special I remember thee,
     Wachusett, who like me
     Standest alone without society.
     Thy far blue eye,
     A remnant of the sky,
     Seen through the clearing or the gorge
     Or from the windows of the forge,
     Doth leaven all it passes by.
     Nothing is true,
     But stands 'tween me and you,
     Thou western pioneer,
     Who know'st not shame nor fear
     By venturous spirit driven,
     Under the eaves of heaven.
     And canst expand thee there,
     And breathe enough of air?
     Upholding heaven, holding down earth,
     Thy pastime from thy birth,
     Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other;
     May I approve myself thy worthy brother!

  [Illustration: _Mount Wachusett from the Wayland Hills_]

At length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we
resolved to scale the blue wall which bounded the western horizon,
though not without misgivings that thereafter no visible fairyland
would exist for us. But we will not leap at once to our journey's end,
though near, but imitate Homer, who conducts his reader over the
plain, and along the resounding sea, though it be but to the tent of
Achilles. In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water,
where men go and come. The landscape lies far and fair within, and the
deepest thinker is the farthest traveled.

At a cool and early hour on a pleasant morning in July, my companion
and I passed rapidly through Acton and Stow, stopping to rest and
refresh us on the bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Assabet,
in the latter town. As we traversed the cool woods of Acton, with
stout staves in our hands, we were cheered by the song of the red-eye,
the thrushes, the phœbe, and the cuckoo; and as we passed through
the open country, we inhaled the fresh scent of every field, and all
nature lay passive, to be viewed and traveled. Every rail, every
farmhouse, seen dimly in the twilight, every tinkling sound told of
peace and purity, and we moved happily along the dank roads, enjoying
not such privacy as the day leaves when it withdraws, but such as it
has not profaned. It was solitude with light; which is better than
darkness. But anon, the sound of the mower's rifle was heard in the
fields, and this, too, mingled with the lowing of kine.

This part of our route lay through the country of hops, which plant
perhaps supplies the want of the vine in American scenery, and may
remind the traveler of Italy and the South of France, whether he
traverses the country when the hop-fields, as then, present solid and
regular masses of verdure, hanging in graceful festoons from pole to
pole, the cool coverts where lurk the gales which refresh the
wayfarer; or in September, when the women and children, and the
neighbors from far and near, are gathered to pick the hops into long
troughs; or later still, when the poles stand piled in vast pyramids
in the yards, or lie in heaps by the roadside.

The culture of the hop, with the processes of picking, drying in the
kiln, and packing for the market, as well as the uses to which it is
applied, so analogous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford
a theme for future poets.

The mower in the adjacent meadow could not tell us the name of the
brook on whose banks we had rested, or whether it had any, but his
younger companion, perhaps his brother, knew that it was Great Brook.
Though they stood very near together in the field, the things they
knew were very far apart; nor did they suspect each other's reserved
knowledge, till the stranger came by. In Bolton, while we rested on
the rails of a cottage fence, the strains of music which issued from
within, probably in compliment to us, sojourners, reminded us that
thus far men were fed by the accustomed pleasures. So soon did we,
wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few
facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel
to find it new. The flowers grow more various ways than he. But coming
soon to higher land, which afforded a prospect of the mountains, we
thought we had not traveled in vain, if it were only to hear a truer
and wilder pronunciation of their names from the lips of the
inhabitants; not _Way_-tatic, _Way_-chusett, but _Wor_-tatic,
_Wor_-chusett. It made us ashamed of our tame and civil pronunciation,
and we looked upon them as born and bred farther west than we. Their
tongues had a more generous accent than ours, as if breath was cheaper
where they wagged. A countryman, who speaks but seldom, talks
copiously, as it were, as his wife sets cream and cheese before you
without stint. Before noon we had reached the highlands overlooking
the valley of Lancaster (affording the first fair and open prospect
into the west), and there, on the top of a hill, in the shade of some
oaks, near to where a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we rested
during the heat of the day, reading Virgil and enjoying the scenery.
It was such a place as one feels to be on the outside of the earth;
for from it we could, in some measure, see the form and structure of
the globe. There lay Wachusett, the object of our journey, lowering
upon us with unchanged proportions, though with a less ethereal aspect
than had greeted our morning gaze, while further north, in successive
order, slumbered its sister mountains along the horizon.

We could get no further into the Æneid than

     -- atque altae moenia Romae,
     -- and the wall of high Rome,

before we were constrained to reflect by what myriad tests a work of
genius has to be tried; that Virgil, away in Rome, two thousand years
off, should have to unfold his meaning, the inspiration of Italian
vales, to the pilgrim on New England hills. This life so raw and
modern, that so civil and ancient; and yet we read Virgil mainly to be
reminded of the identity of human nature in all ages, and, by the
poet's own account, we are both the children of a late age, and live
equally under the reign of Jupiter.

     "He shook honey from the leaves, and removed fire,
     And stayed the wine, everywhere flowing in rivers;
     That experience, by meditating, might invent various arts
     By degrees, and seek the blade of corn in furrows,
     And strike out hidden fire from the veins of the flint."

The old world stands serenely behind the new, as one mountain yonder
towers behind another, more dim and distant. Rome imposes her story
still upon this late generation. The very children in the school we
had that morning passed had gone through her wars, and recited her
alarms, ere they had heard of the wars of neighboring Lancaster. The
roving eye still rests inevitably on her hills, and she still holds up
the skirts of the sky on that side, and makes the past remote.

The lay of the land hereabouts is well worthy the attention of the
traveler. The hill on which we were resting made part of an extensive
range, running from southwest to northeast, across the country, and
separating the waters of the Nashua from those of the Concord, whose
banks we had left in the morning, and by bearing in mind this fact, we
could easily determine whither each brook was bound that crossed our
path. Parallel to this, and fifteen miles further west, beyond the
deep and broad valley in which lie Groton, Shirley, Lancaster, and
Boylston, runs the Wachusett range, in the same general direction. The
descent into the valley on the Nashua side is by far the most sudden;
and a couple of miles brought us to the southern branch of the Nashua,
a shallow but rapid stream, flowing between high and gravelly banks.
But we soon learned that these were no _gelidae valles_ into which we
had descended, and, missing the coolness of the morning air, feared it
had become the sun's turn to try his power upon us.

     "The sultry sun had gained the middle sky,
     And not a tree, and not an herb was nigh,"

and with melancholy pleasure we echoed the melodious plaint of our
fellow-traveler, Hassan, in the desert,--

     "Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,
     When first from Schiraz' walls I bent my way."

The air lay lifeless between the hills, as in a seething caldron, with
no leaf stirring, and instead of the fresh odor of grass and clover,
with which we had before been regaled, the dry scent of every herb
seemed merely medicinal. Yielding, therefore, to the heat, we strolled
into the woods, and along the course of a rivulet, on whose banks we
loitered, observing at our leisure the products of these new fields.
He who traverses the woodland paths, at this season, will have
occasion to remember the small, drooping, bell-like flowers and
slender red stem of the dogsbane, and the coarser stem and berry of
the poke, which are both common in remoter and wilder scenes; and if
"the sun casts such a reflecting heat from the sweet-fern" as makes
him faint, when he is climbing the bare hills, as they complained who
first penetrated into these parts, the cool fragrance of the
swamp-pink restores him again, when traversing the valleys between.

As we went on our way late in the afternoon, we refreshed ourselves by
bathing our feet in every rill that crossed the road, and anon, as we
were able to walk in the shadows of the hills, recovered our morning
elasticity. Passing through Sterling, we reached the banks of the
Stillwater, in the western part of the town, at evening, where is a
small village collected. We fancied that there was already a certain
western look about this place, a smell of pines and roar of water,
recently confined by dams, belying its name, which were exceedingly
grateful. When the first inroad has been made, a few acres leveled,
and a few houses erected, the forest looks wilder than ever. Left to
herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a
certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of
the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had
concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight. This
village had, as yet, no post-office, nor any settled name. In the
small villages which we entered, the villagers gazed after us, with a
complacent, almost compassionate look, as if we were just making our
_début_ in the world at a late hour. "Nevertheless," did they seem to
say, "come and study us, and learn men and manners." So is each one's
world but a clearing in the forest, so much open and inclosed ground.
The landlord had not yet returned from the field with his men, and the
cows had yet to be milked. But we remembered the inscription on the
wall of the Swedish inn, "You will find at Trolhate excellent bread,
meat, and wine, provided you bring them with you," and were contented.
But I must confess it did somewhat disturb our pleasure, in this
withdrawn spot, to have our own village newspaper handed us by our
host, as if the greatest charm the country offered to the traveler was
the facility of communication with the town. Let it recline on its own
everlasting hills, and not be looking out from their summits for some
petty Boston or New York in the horizon.

At intervals we heard the murmuring of water, and the slumberous
breathing of crickets, throughout the night; and left the inn the next
morning in the gray twilight, after it had been hallowed by the night
air, and when only the innocent cows were stirring, with a kind of
regret. It was only four miles to the base of the mountain, and the
scenery was already more picturesque. Our road lay along the course of
the Stillwater, which was brawling at the bottom of a deep ravine,
filled with pines and rocks, tumbling fresh from the mountains, so
soon, alas! to commence its career of usefulness. At first, a cloud
hung between us and the summit, but it was soon blown away. As we
gathered the raspberries, which grew abundantly by the roadside, we
fancied that that action was consistent with a lofty prudence; as if
the traveler who ascends into a mountainous region should fortify
himself by eating of such light ambrosial fruits as grow there, and
drinking of the springs which gush out from the mountain-sides, as he
gradually inhales the subtler and purer atmosphere of those elevated
places, thus propitiating the mountain gods by a sacrifice of their
own fruits. The gross products of the plains and valleys are for such
as dwell therein; but it seemed to us that the juices of this berry
had relation to the thin air of the mountain-tops.

In due time we began to ascend the mountain, passing, first, through a
grand sugar maple wood, which bore the marks of the auger, then a
denser forest, which gradually became dwarfed, till there were no
trees whatever. We at length pitched our tent on the summit. It is but
nineteen hundred feet above the village of Princeton, and three
thousand above the level of the sea; but by this slight elevation it
is infinitely removed from the plain, and when we reached it we felt a
sense of remoteness, as if we had traveled into distant regions, to
Arabia Petræa, or the farthest East. A robin upon a staff was the
highest object in sight. Swallows were flying about us, and the
chewink and cuckoo were heard near at hand. The summit consists of a
few acres, destitute of trees, covered with bare rocks, interspersed
with blueberry bushes, raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, moss,
and a fine, wiry grass. The common yellow lily and dwarf cornel grow
abundantly in the crevices of the rocks. This clear space, which is
gently rounded, is bounded a few feet lower by a thick shrubbery of
oaks, with maples, aspens, beeches, cherries, and occasionally a
mountain-ash intermingled, among which we found the bright blue
berries of the Solomon's-seal, and the fruit of the pyrola. From the
foundation of a wooden observatory, which was formerly erected on the
highest point, forming a rude, hollow structure of stone, a dozen feet
in diameter, and five or six in height, we could see Monadnock, in
simple grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thousand feet
higher, still the "far blue mountain," though with an altered profile.
The first day the weather was so hazy that it was in vain we
endeavored to unravel the obscurity. It was like looking into the sky
again, and the patches of forest here and there seemed to flit like
clouds over a lower heaven. As to voyagers of an aerial Polynesia, the
earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as
low as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around
it, a blue Pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and
as we sail near its shores we see the waving of trees and hear the
lowing of kine.

We read Virgil and Wordsworth in our tent, with new pleasure there,
while waiting for a clearer atmosphere, nor did the weather prevent
our appreciating the simple truth and beauty of Peter Bell:--

     "And he had lain beside his asses,
     On lofty Cheviot Hills:

     "And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales,
     Among the rocks and winding _scars_;
     Where deep and low the hamlets lie
     Beneath their little patch of sky
     And little lot of stars."

Who knows but this hill may one day be a Helvellyn, or even a
Parnassus, and the Muses haunt here, and other Homers frequent the
neighboring plains?

     Not unconcerned Wachusett rears his head
       Above the field, so late from nature won,
     With patient brow reserved, as one who read
       New annals in the history of man.

The blueberries which the mountain afforded, added to the milk we had
brought, made our frugal supper, while for entertainment the even-song
of the wood thrush rang along the ridge. Our eyes rested on no painted
ceiling nor carpeted hall, but on skies of Nature's painting, and
hills and forests of her embroidery. Before sunset, we rambled along
the ridge to the north, while a hawk soared still above us. It was a
place where gods might wander, so solemn and solitary, and removed
from all contagion with the plain. As the evening came on, the haze
was condensed in vapor, and the landscape became more distinctly
visible, and numerous sheets of water were brought to light.

     "Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant,
     Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae."

     And now the tops of the villas smoke afar off,
     And the shadows fall longer from the high mountains.

As we stood on the stone tower while the sun was setting, we saw the
shades of night creep gradually over the valleys of the east; and the
inhabitants went into their houses, and shut their doors, while the
moon silently rose up, and took possession of that part. And then the
same scene was repeated on the west side, as far as the Connecticut
and the Green Mountains, and the sun's rays fell on us two alone, of
all New England men.

It was the night but one before the full of the moon, so bright that
we could see to read distinctly by moonlight, and in the evening
strolled over the summit without danger. There was, by chance, a fire
blazing on Monadnock that night, which lighted up the whole western
horizon, and, by making us aware of a community of mountains, made our
position seem less solitary. But at length the wind drove us to the
shelter of our tent, and we closed its door for the night, and fell
asleep.

It was thrilling to hear the wind roar over the rocks, at intervals
when we waked, for it had grown quite cold and windy. The night was,
in its elements, simple even to majesty in that bleak place,--a bright
moonlight and a piercing wind. It was at no time darker than twilight
within the tent, and we could easily see the moon through its
transparent roof as we lay; for there was the moon still above us,
with Jupiter and Saturn on either hand, looking down on Wachusett, and
it was a satisfaction to know that they were our fellow-travelers
still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny. Truly the
stars were given for a consolation to man. We should not know but our
life were fated to be always groveling, but it is permitted to behold
them, and surely they are deserving of a fair destiny. We see laws
which never fail, of whose failure we never conceived; and their lamps
burn all the night, too, as well as all day,--so rich and lavish is
that nature which can afford this superfluity of light.

The morning twilight began as soon as the moon had set, and we arose
and kindled our fire, whose blaze might have been seen for thirty
miles around. As the daylight increased, it was remarkable how rapidly
the wind went down. There was no dew on the summit, but coldness
supplied its place. When the dawn had reached its prime, we enjoyed
the view of a distinct horizon line, and could fancy ourselves at sea,
and the distant hills the waves in the horizon, as seen from the deck
of a vessel. The cherry-birds flitted around us, the nuthatch and
flicker were heard among the bushes, the titmouse perched within a few
feet, and the song of the wood thrush again rang along the ridge. At
length we saw the run rise up out of the sea, and shine on
Massachusetts; and from this moment the atmosphere grew more and more
transparent till the time of our departure, and we began to realize
the extent of the view, and how the earth, in some degree, answered to
the heavens in breadth, the white villages to the constellations in
the sky. There was little of the sublimity and grandeur which belong
to mountain scenery, but an immense landscape to ponder on a summer's
day. We could see how ample and roomy is nature. As far as the eye
could reach there was little life in the landscape; the few birds
that flitted past did not crowd. The travelers on the remote highways,
which intersect the country on every side, had no fellow-travelers for
miles, before or behind. On every side, the eye ranged over successive
circles of towns, rising one above another, like the terraces of a
vineyard, till they were lost in the horizon. Wachusett is, in fact,
the observatory of the State. There lay Massachusetts, spread out
before us in its length and breadth, like a map. There was the level
horizon which told of the sea on the east and south, the well-known
hills of New Hampshire on the north, and the misty summits of the
Hoosac and Green Mountains, first made visible to us the evening
before, blue and unsubstantial, like some bank of clouds which the
morning wind would dissipate, on the northwest and west. These last
distant ranges, on which the eye rests unwearied, commence with an
abrupt boulder in the north, beyond the Connecticut, and travel
southward, with three or four peaks dimly seen. But Monadnock, rearing
its masculine front in the northwest, is the grandest feature. As we
beheld it, we knew that it was the height of land between the two
rivers, on this side the valley of the Merrimack, on that of the
Connecticut, fluctuating with their blue seas of air,--these rival
vales, already teeming with Yankee men along their respective streams,
born to what destiny who shall tell? Watatic and the neighboring
hills, in this State and in New Hampshire, are a continuation of the
same elevated range on which we were standing. But that New Hampshire
bluff,--that promontory of a State,--lowering day and night on this
our State of Massachusetts, will longest haunt our dreams.

We could at length realize the place mountains occupy on the land, and
how they come into the general scheme of the universe. When first we
climb their summits and observe their lesser irregularities, we do not
give credit to the comprehensive intelligence which shaped them; but
when afterward we behold their outlines in the horizon, we confess
that the hand which moulded their opposite slopes, making one to
balance the other, worked round a deep centre, and was privy to the
plan of the universe. So is the least part of nature in its bearings
referred to all space. These lesser mountain ranges, as well as the
Alleghanies, run from northeast to southwest, and parallel with these
mountain streams are the more fluent rivers, answering to the general
direction of the coast, the bank of the great ocean stream itself.
Even the clouds, with their thin bars, fall into the same direction by
preference, and such even is the course of the prevailing winds, and
the migration of men and birds. A mountain chain determines many
things for the statesman and philosopher. The improvements of
civilization rather creep along its sides than cross its summit. How
often is it a barrier to prejudice and fanaticism! In passing over
these heights of land, through their thin atmosphere, the follies of
the plain are refined and purified; and as many species of plants do
not scale their summits, so many species of folly, no doubt, do not
cross the Alleghanies; it is only the hardy mountain-plant that creeps
quite over the ridge, and descends into the valley beyond.

We get a dim notion of the flight of birds, especially of such as fly
high in the air, by having ascended a mountain. We can now see what
landmarks mountains are to their migrations; how the Catskills and
Highlands have hardly sunk to them, when Wachusett and Monadnock open
a passage to the northeast; how they are guided, too, in their course
by the rivers and valleys; and who knows but by the stars, as well as
the mountain ranges, and not by the petty landmarks which we use. The
bird whose eye takes in the Green Mountains on the one side, and the
ocean on the other, need not be at a loss to find its way.

At noon we descended the mountain, and, having returned to the abodes
of men, turned our faces to the east again; measuring our progress,
from time to time, by the more ethereal hues which the mountain
assumed. Passing swiftly through Stillwater and Sterling, as with a
downward impetus, we found ourselves almost at home again in the green
meadows of Lancaster, so like our own Concord, for both are watered by
two streams which unite near their centres, and have many other
features in common. There is an unexpected refinement about this
scenery; level prairies of great extent, interspersed with elms and
hop-fields and groves of trees, give it almost a classic appearance.
This, it will be remembered, was the scene of Mrs. Rowlandson's
capture, and of other events in the Indian wars, but from this July
afternoon, and under that mild exterior, those times seemed as remote
as the irruption of the Goths. They were the dark age of New England.
On beholding a picture of a New England village as it then appeared,
with a fair open prospect, and a light on trees and river, as if it
were broad noon, we find we had not thought the sun shone in those
days, or that men lived in broad daylight then. We do not imagine the
sun shining on hill and valley during Philip's war, nor on the
war-path of Paugus, or Standish, or Church, or Lovell, with serene
summer weather, but a dim twilight or night did those events transpire
in. They must have fought in the shade of their own dusky deeds.

At length, as we plodded along the dusty roads, our thoughts became as
dusty as they; all thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or
proceeded only passively in a sort of rhythmical cadence of the
confused material of thought, and we found ourselves mechanically
repeating some familiar measure which timed with our tread; some verse
of the Robin Hood ballads, for instance, which one can recommend to
travel by:--

     "Sweavens are swift, sayd lyttle John,
       As the wind blows over the hill;
     For if it be never so loud this night,
       To-morrow it may be still."

And so it went, up-hill and down, till a stone interrupted the line,
when a new verse was chosen:--

     "His shoote it was but loosely shott,
       Yet flewe not the arrowe in vaine,
     For it mett one of the sheriffe's men,
       And William a Trent was slaine."

There is, however, this consolation to the most wayworn traveler, upon
the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly
symbolical of human life,--now climbing the hills, now descending into
the vales. From the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon,
from the vales he looks up to the heights again. He is treading his
old lessons still, and though he may be very weary and travel-worn, it
is yet sincere experience.

Leaving the Nashua, we changed our route a little, and arrived at
Stillriver Village, in the western part of Harvard, just as the sun
was setting. From this place, which lies to the northward, upon the
western slope of the same range of hills on which we had spent the
noon before, in the adjacent town, the prospect is beautiful, and the
grandeur of the mountain outlines unsurpassed. There was such a repose
and quiet here at this hour, as if the very hillsides were enjoying
the scene; and as we passed slowly along, looking back over the
country we had traversed, and listening to the evening song of the
robin, we could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the
bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume always a
crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.

And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let
us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur into it. We
will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level
life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest
valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour,
as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen
from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command
an uninterrupted horizon.

We rested that night at Harvard, and the next morning, while one bent
his steps to the nearer village of Groton, the other took his
separate and solitary way to the peaceful meadows of Concord; but let
him not forget to record the brave hospitality of a farmer and his
wife, who generously entertained him at their board, though the poor
wayfarer could only congratulate the one on the continuance of hay
weather, and silently accept the kindness of the other. Refreshed by
this instance of generosity, no less than by the substantial viands
set before him, he pushed forward with new vigor, and reached the
banks of the Concord before the sun had climbed many degrees into the
heavens.




THE LANDLORD


Under the one word "house" are included the schoolhouse, the
almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwelling-house; and the meanest
shed or cave in which men live contains the elements of all these. But
nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house. The
Parthenon, St. Peter's, the Gothic minster, the palace, the hovel, are
but imperfect executions of an imperfect idea. Who would dwell in
them? Perhaps to the eye of the gods the cottage is more holy than the
Parthenon, for they look down with no especial favor upon the shrines
formally dedicated to them, and that should be the most sacred roof
which shelters most of humanity. Surely, then, the gods who are most
interested in the human race preside over the Tavern, where especially
men congregate. Methinks I see the thousand shrines erected to
Hospitality shining afar in all countries, as well Mahometan and
Jewish as Christian, khans and caravansaries and inns, whither all
pilgrims without distinction resort.

Likewise we look in vain, east or west over the earth, to find the
perfect man; but each represents only some particular excellence. The
Landlord is a man of more open and general sympathies, who possesses a
spirit of hospitality which is its own reward, and feeds and shelters
men from pure love of the creatures. To be sure, this profession is as
often filled by imperfect characters, and such as have sought it from
unworthy motives, as any other, but so much the more should we prize
the true and honest Landlord when we meet with him.

Who has not imagined to himself a country inn, where the traveler
shall really feel _in_, and at home, and at his public house, who was
before at his private house?--whose host is indeed a _host_, and a
_lord_ of the _land_, a self-appointed brother of his race; called to
his place, beside, by all the winds of heaven and his good genius, as
truly as the preacher is called to preach; a man of such universal
sympathies, and so broad and genial a human nature, that he would fain
sacrifice the tender but narrow ties of private friendship to a broad,
sunshiny, fair-weather-and-foul friendship for his race; who loves
men, not as a philosopher, with philanthropy, nor as an overseer of
the poor, with charity, but by a necessity of his nature, as he loves
dogs and horses; and standing at his open door from morning till night
would fain see more and more of them come along the highway, and is
never satiated. To him the sun and moon are but travelers, the one by
day and the other by night; and they too patronize his house. To his
imagination all things travel save his sign-post and himself; and
though you may be his neighbor for years, he will show you only the
civilities of the road. But on the other hand, while nations and
individuals are alike selfish and exclusive, he loves all men equally;
and if he treats his nearest neighbor as a stranger, since he has
invited all nations to share his hospitality, the farthest-traveled is
in some measure kindred to him who takes him into the bosom of his
family.

He keeps a house of entertainment at the sign of the Black Horse or
the Spread Eagle, and is known far and wide, and his fame travels with
increasing radius every year. All the neighborhood is in his interest,
and if the traveler ask how far to a tavern, he receives some such
answer as this: "Well, sir, there's a house about three miles from
here, where they haven't taken down their sign yet; but it's only ten
miles to Slocum's, and that's a capital house, both for man and
beast." At three miles he passes a cheerless barrack, standing
desolate behind its sign-post, neither public nor private, and has
glimpses of a discontented couple who have mistaken their calling. At
ten miles see where the Tavern stands,--really an _entertaining_
prospect,--so public and inviting that only the rain and snow do not
enter. It is no gay pavilion, made of bright stuffs, and furnished
with nuts and gingerbread, but as plain and sincere as a caravansary;
located in no Tarrytown, where you receive only the civilities of
commerce, but far in the fields it exercises a primitive hospitality,
amid the fresh scent of new hay and raspberries, if it be summer-time,
and the tinkling of cow-bells from invisible pastures; for it is a
land flowing with milk and honey, and the newest milk courses in a
broad, deep stream across the premises.

In these retired places the tavern is first of all a
house,--elsewhere, last of all, or never,--and warms and shelters its
inhabitants. It is as simple and sincere in its essentials as the
caves in which the first men dwelt, but it is also as open and public.
The traveler steps across the threshold, and lo! he too is master, for
he only can be called proprietor of the house here who behaves with
most propriety in it. The Landlord stands clear back in nature, to my
imagination, with his axe and spade felling trees and raising potatoes
with the vigor of a pioneer; with Promethean energy making nature
yield her increase to supply the wants of so many; and he is not so
exhausted, nor of so short a stride, but that he comes forward even to
the highway to this wide hospitality and publicity. Surely, he has
solved some of the problems of life. He comes in at his back door,
holding a log fresh cut for the hearth upon his shoulder with one
hand, while he greets the newly arrived traveler with the other.

Here at length we have free range, as not in palaces, nor cottages,
nor temples, and intrude nowhere. All the secrets of housekeeping are
exhibited to the eyes of men, above and below, before and behind. This
is the necessary way to live, men have confessed, in these days, and
shall he skulk and hide? And why should we have any serious disgust at
kitchens? Perhaps they are the holiest recess of the house. There is
the hearth, after all,--and the settle, and the fagots, and the
kettle, and the crickets. We have pleasant reminiscences of these.
They are the heart, the left ventricle, the very vital part of the
house. Here the real and sincere life which we meet in the streets was
actually fed and sheltered. Here burns the taper that cheers the
lonely traveler by night, and from this hearth ascend the smokes that
populate the valley to his eyes by day. On the whole, a man may not be
so little ashamed of any other part of his house, for here is his
sincerity and earnest, at least. It may not be here that the besoms
are plied most,--it is not here that they need to be, for dust will
not settle on the kitchen floor more than in nature.

Hence it will not do for the Landlord to possess too fine a nature. He
must have health above the common accidents of life, subject to no
modern fashionable diseases; but no taste, rather a vast relish or
appetite. His sentiments on all subjects will be delivered as freely
as the wind blows; there is nothing private or individual in them,
though still original, but they are public, and of the hue of the
heavens over his house,--a certain out-of-door obviousness and
transparency not to be disputed. What he does, his manners are not to
be complained of, though abstractly offensive, for it is what man
does, and in him the race is exhibited. When he eats, he is liver and
bowels and the whole digestive apparatus to the company, and so all
admit the thing is done. He must have no idiosyncrasies, no particular
bents or tendencies to this or that, but a general, uniform, and
healthy development, such as his portly person indicates, offering
himself equally on all sides to men. He is not one of your peaked and
inhospitable men of genius, with particular tastes, but, as we said
before, has one uniform relish, and taste which never aspires higher
than a tavern-sign, or the cut of a weather-cock. The man of genius,
like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a
patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs
out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all
possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone,--good-by,--farewell. But
the Landlord can afford to live without privacy. He entertains no
private thought, he cherishes no solitary hour, no Sabbath-day, but
thinks,--enough to assert the dignity of reason,--and talks, and reads
the newspaper. What he does not tell to one traveler he tells to
another. He never wants to be alone, but sleeps, wakes, eats, drinks,
sociably, still remembering his race. He walks abroad through the
thoughts of men, and the Iliad and Shakespeare are tame to him, who
hears the rude but homely incidents of the road from every traveler.
The mail might drive through his brain in the midst of his most lonely
soliloquy without disturbing his equanimity, provided it brought
plenty of news and passengers. There can be no _pro_fanity where there
is no fane behind, and the whole world may see quite round him.
Perchance his lines have fallen to him in dustier places, and he has
heroically sat down where two roads meet, or at the Four Corners or
the Five Points, and his life is sublimely trivial for the good of
men. The dust of travel blows ever in his eyes, and they preserve
their clear, complacent look. The hourlies and half-hourlies, the
dailies and weeklies, whirl on well-worn tracks, round and round his
house, as if it were the goal in the stadium, and still he sits within
in unruffled serenity, with no show of retreat. His neighbor dwells
timidly behind a screen of poplars and willows, and a fence with
sheaves of spears at regular intervals, or defended against the tender
palms of visitors by sharp spikes,--but the traveler's wheels rattle
over the door-step of the tavern, and he cracks his whip in the entry.
He is truly glad to see you, and sincere as the bull's-eye over his
door. The traveler seeks to find, wherever he goes, some one who will
stand in this broad and catholic relation to him, who will be an
inhabitant of the land to him a stranger, and represent its human
nature, as the rock stands for its inanimate nature; and this is he.
As his crib furnishes provender for the traveler's horse, and his
larder provisions for his appetite, so his conversation furnishes the
necessary aliment to his spirits. He knows very well what a man wants,
for he is a man himself, and as it were the farthest-traveled, though
he has never stirred from his door. He understands his needs and
destiny. He would be well fed and lodged, there can be no doubt, and
have the transient sympathy of a cheerful companion, and of a heart
which always prophesies fair weather. And after all the greatest men,
even, want much more the sympathy which every honest fellow can give,
than that which the great only can impart. If he is not the most
upright, let us allow him this praise, that he is the most downright
of men. He has a hand to shake and to be shaken, and takes a sturdy
and unquestionable interest in you, as if he had assumed the care of
you, but if you will break your neck, he will even give you the best
advice as to the method.

The great poets have not been ungrateful to their landlords. Mine host
of the Tabard Inn, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, was an
honor to his profession:--

     "A semely man our Hoste was, with alle,
     For to han been a marshal in an halle.
     A large man he was, with eyen stepe;
     A fairer burgeis was ther non in Chepe:
     Bold of his speche, and wise, and well ytaught,
     And of manhood him lacked righte naught.
     Eke thereto was he right a mery man,
     And after souper plaien he began,
     And spake of mirthe amonges other thinges,
     Whan that we hadden made our reckoninges."

He is the true house-band, and centre of the company,--of greater
fellowship and practical social talent than any. He it is that
proposes that each shall tell a tale to while away the time to
Canterbury, and leads them himself, and concludes with his own tale,--

     "Now, by my fader's soule that is ded,
     But ye be mery, smiteth of my hed:
     Hold up your hondes withouten more speche."

If we do not look up to the Landlord, we look round for him on all
emergencies, for he is a man of infinite experience, who unites hands
with wit. He is a more public character than a statesman,--a publican,
and not consequently a sinner; and surely, he, if any, should be
exempted from taxation and military duty.

Talking with our host is next best and instructive to talking with
one's self. It is a more conscious soliloquy; as it were, to speak
generally, and try what we would say provided we had an audience. He
has indulgent and open ears, and does not require petty and particular
statements. "Heigh-ho!" exclaims the traveler. Them's my sentiments,
thinks mine host, and stands ready for what may come next, expressing
the purest sympathy by his demeanor. "Hot as blazes!" says the other.
"Hard weather, sir,--not much stirring nowadays," says he. He is wiser
than to contradict his guest in any case; he lets him go on; he lets
him travel.

The latest sitter leaves him standing far in the night, prepared to
live right on, while suns rise and set, and his "good-night" has as
brisk a sound as his "good-morning;" and the earliest riser finds him
tasting his liquors in the bar ere flies begin to buzz, with a
countenance fresh as the morning star over the sanded floor,--and not
as one who had watched all night for travelers. And yet, if beds be
the subject of conversation, it will appear that no man has been a
sounder sleeper in his time.

Finally, as for his moral character, we do not hesitate to say that he
has no grain of vice or meanness in him, but represents just that
degree of virtue which all men relish without being obliged to
respect. He is a good man, as his bitters are good,--an unquestionable
goodness. Not what is called a good man,--good to be considered, as a
work of art in galleries and museums,--but a good fellow, that is,
good to be associated with. Who ever thought of the religion of an
innkeeper,--whether he was joined to the Church, partook of the
sacrament, said his prayers, feared God, or the like? No doubt he has
had his experiences, has felt a change, and is a firm believer in the
perseverance of the saints. In this last, we suspect, does the
peculiarity of his religion consist. But he keeps an inn, and not a
conscience. How many fragrant charities and sincere social virtues are
implied in this daily offering of himself to the public! He cherishes
good-will to all, and gives the wayfarer as good and honest advice to
direct him on his road as the priest.

To conclude, the tavern will compare favorably with the church. The
church is the place where prayers and sermons are delivered, but the
tavern is where they are to take effect, and if the former are good,
the latter cannot be bad.




A WINTER WALK


The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with
feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a
summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow
mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a
hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and
the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the
hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth
itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when
some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its
hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work,--the only sound
awake 'twixt Venus and Mars,--advertising us of a remote inward
warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together,
but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has
slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending,
as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over
all the fields.

We sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a winter
morning. The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window-sill;
the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light,
which enhances the snug cheer within. The stillness of the morning is
impressive. The floor creaks under our feet as we move toward the
window to look abroad through some clear space over the fields. We
see the roofs stand under their snow burden. From the eaves and fences
hang stalactites of snow, and in the yard stand stalagmites covering
some concealed core. The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky
on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see fantastic forms
stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature
had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for
man's art.

Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step
abroad to face the cutting air. Already the stars have lost some of
their sparkle, and a dull, leaden mist skirts the horizon. A lurid
brazen light in the east proclaims the approach of day, while the
western landscape is dim and spectral still, and clothed in a sombre
Tartarean light, like the shadowy realms. They are Infernal sounds
only that you hear,--the crowing of cocks, the barking of dogs, the
chopping of wood, the lowing of kine, all seem to come from Pluto's
barnyard and beyond the Styx,--not for any melancholy they suggest,
but their twilight bustle is too solemn and mysterious for earth. The
recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each
hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is
still working and making tracks in the snow. Opening the gate, we
tread briskly along the lone country road, crunching the dry and
crisped snow under our feet, or aroused by the sharp, clear creak of
the wood-sled, just starting for the distant market, from the early
farmer's door, where it has lain the summer long, dreaming amid the
chips and stubble; while far through the drifts and powdered windows
we see the farmer's early candle, like a paled star, emitting a lonely
beam, as if some severe virtue were at its matins there. And one by
one the smokes begin to ascend from the chimneys amid the trees and
snows.

     The sluggish smoke curls up from some deep dell,
     The stiffened air exploring in the dawn,
     And making slow acquaintance with the day
     Delaying now upon its heavenward course,
     In wreathèd loiterings dallying with itself,
     With as uncertain purpose and slow deed
     As its half-wakened master by the hearth,
     Whose mind still slumbering and sluggish thoughts
     Have not yet swept into the onward current
     Of the new day;--and now it streams afar,
     The while the chopper goes with step direct,
     And mind intent to swing the early axe.
       First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad
     His early scout, his emissary, smoke,
     The earliest, latest pilgrim from the roof,
     To feel the frosty air, inform the day;
     And while he crouches still beside the hearth,
     Nor musters courage to unbar the door,
     It has gone down the glen with the light wind,
     And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath,
     Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill,
     And warmed the pinions of the early bird;
     And now, perchance, high in the crispy air,
     Has caught sight of the day o'er the earth's edge,
     And greets its master's eye at his low door,
     As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky.

We hear the sound of wood-chopping at the farmers' doors, far over the
frozen earth, the baying of the house-dog, and the distant clarion of
the cock,--though the thin and frosty air conveys only the finer
particles of sound to our ears, with short and sweet vibrations, as
the waves subside soonest on the purest and lightest liquids, in which
gross substances sink to the bottom. They come clear and bell-like,
and from a greater distance in the horizon, as if there were fewer
impediments than in summer to make them faint and ragged. The ground
is sonorous, like seasoned wood, and even the ordinary rural sounds
are melodious, and the jingling of the ice on the trees is sweet and
liquid. There is the least possible moisture in the atmosphere, all
being dried up or congealed, and it is of such extreme tenuity and
elasticity that it becomes a source of delight. The withdrawn and
tense sky seems groined like the aisles of a cathedral, and the
polished air sparkles as if there were crystals of ice floating in it.
As they who have resided in Greenland tell us that when it freezes
"the sea smokes like burning turf-land, and a fog or mist arises,
called frost-smoke," which "cutting smoke frequently raises blisters
on the face and hands, and is very pernicious to the health." But this
pure, stinging cold is an elixir to the lungs, and not so much a
frozen mist as a crystallized midsummer haze, refined and purified by
cold.

The sun at length rises through the distant woods, as if with the
faint clashing, swinging sound of cymbals, melting the air with his
beams, and with such rapid steps the morning travels, that already his
rays are gilding the distant western mountains. Meanwhile we step
hastily along through the powdery snow, warmed by an inward heat,
enjoying an Indian summer still, in the increased glow of thought and
feeling. Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we
should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but
find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.
If our bodies were fed with pure and simple elements, and not with a
stimulating and heating diet, they would afford no more pasture for
cold than a leafless twig, but thrive like the trees, which find even
winter genial to their expansion.

The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact.
Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves
of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow. In the bare fields
and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and
bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. A
cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can
withstand it but what has a virtue in it, and accordingly, whatever we
meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we
respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness. All
things beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out
must be part of the original frame of the universe, and of such valor
as God himself. It is invigorating to breathe the cleansed air. Its
greater fineness and purity are visible to the eye, and we would fain
stay out long and late, that the gales may sigh through us, too, as
through the leafless trees, and fit us for the winter,--as if we hoped
so to borrow some pure and steadfast virtue, which will stead us in
all seasons.

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes
out, and which no cold can chill. It finally melts the great snow,
and in January or July is only buried under a thicker or thinner
covering. In the coldest day it flows somewhere, and the snow melts
around every tree. This field of winter rye, which sprouted late in
the fall, and now speedily dissolves the snow, is where the fire is
very thinly covered. We feel warmed by it. In the winter, warmth
stands for all virtue, and we resort in thought to a trickling rill,
with its bare stones shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the
woods, with as much eagerness as rabbits and robins. The steam which
rises from swamps and pools is as dear and domestic as that of our own
kettle. What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day,
when the meadow mice come out by the wall-sides, and the chickadee
lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly from the
sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer; and when we
feel his beams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we are
grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has
followed us into that by-place.

This subterranean fire has its altar in each man's breast; for in the
coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer
fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A
healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter,
summer is in his heart. There is the south. Thither have all birds and
insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are
gathered the robin and the lark.

At length, having reached the edge of the woods, and shut out the
gadding town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of
a cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with
snow. They are glad and warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter
as in summer. As we stand in the midst of the pines in the flickering
and checkered light which straggles but little way into their maze, we
wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple story. It seems to us
that no traveler has ever explored them, and notwithstanding the
wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every day, who would not
like to hear their annals? Our humble villages in the plain are their
contribution. We borrow from the forest the boards which shelter and
the sticks which warm us. How important is their evergreen to the
winter, that portion of the summer which does not fade, the permanent
year, the unwithered grass! Thus simply, and with little expense of
altitude, is the surface of the earth diversified. What would human
life be without forests, those natural cities? From the tops of
mountains they appear like smooth-shaven lawns, yet whither shall we
walk but in this taller grass?

In this glade covered with bushes of a year's growth, see how the
silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such
infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the
absence of color. Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem,
and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs
over all, as if the impurities of the summer sky, refined and shrunk
by the chaste winter's cold, had been winnowed from the heavens upon
the earth.

Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens
seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and
distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a
Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.

How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life
which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and
woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise!

         "The foodless wilds
     Pour forth their brown inhabitants."

The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and playful in the remote
glens, even on the morning of the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and
Labrador, and for our Esquimaux and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed Indians,
Novazemblaites, and Spitzbergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and
woodchopper, the fox, muskrat, and mink?

Still, in the midst of the arctic day, we may trace the summer to its
retreats, and sympathize with some contemporary life. Stretched over
the brooks, in the midst of the frost-bound meadows, we may observe
the submarine cottages of the caddis-worms, the larvæ of the
Plicipennes; their small cylindrical cases built around themselves,
composed of flags, sticks, grass, and withered leaves, shells, and
pebbles, in form and color like the wrecks which strew the
bottom,--now drifting along over the pebbly bottom, now whirling in
tiny eddies and dashing down steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along
with the current, or else swaying to and fro at the end of some
grass-blade or root. Anon they will leave their sunken habitations,
and, crawling up the stems of plants, or to the surface, like gnats,
as perfect insects henceforth, flutter over the surface of the water,
or sacrifice their short lives in the flame of our candles at evening.
Down yonder little glen the shrubs are drooping under their burden,
and the red alderberries contrast with the white ground. Here are the
marks of a myriad feet which have already been abroad. The sun rises
as proudly over such a glen as over the valley of the Seine or the
Tiber, and it seems the residence of a pure and self-subsistent valor,
such as they never witnessed,--which never knew defeat nor fear. Here
reign the simplicity and purity of a primitive age, and a health and
hope far remote from towns and cities. Standing quite alone, far in
the forest, while the wind is shaking down snow from the trees, and
leaving the only human tracks behind us, we find our reflections of a
richer variety than the life of cities. The chickadee and nuthatch are
more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall
return to these last as to more vulgar companions. In this lonely
glen, with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals
of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side,
and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are
more serene and worthy to contemplate.

As the day advances, the heat of the sun is reflected by the
hillsides, and we hear a faint but sweet music, where flows the rill
released from its fetters, and the icicles are melting on the trees;
and the nuthatch and partridge are heard and seen. The south wind
melts the snow at noon, and the bare ground appears with its withered
grass and leaves, and we are invigorated by the perfume which exhales
from it, as by the scent of strong meats.

Let us go into this deserted woodman's hut, and see how he has passed
the long winter nights and the short and stormy days. For here man has
lived under this south hillside, and it seems a civilized and public
spot. We have such associations as when the traveler stands by the
ruins of Palmyra or Hecatompolis. Singing birds and flowers perchance
have begun to appear here, for flowers as well as weeds follow in the
footsteps of man. These hemlocks whispered over his head, these
hickory logs were his fuel, and these pitch pine roots kindled his
fire; yonder fuming rill in the hollow, whose thin and airy vapor
still ascends as busily as ever, though he is far off now, was his
well. These hemlock boughs, and the straw upon this raised platform,
were his bed, and this broken dish held his drink. But he has not been
here this season, for the phœbes built their nest upon this shelf
last summer. I find some embers left as if he had but just gone out,
where he baked his pot of beans; and while at evening he smoked his
pipe, whose stemless bowl lies in the ashes, chatted with his only
companion, if perchance he had any, about the depth of the snow on the
morrow, already falling fast and thick without, or disputed whether
the last sound was the screech of an owl, or the creak of a bough, or
imagination only; and through his broad chimney-throat, in the late
winter evening, ere he stretched himself upon the straw, he looked up
to learn the progress of the storm, and, seeing the bright stars of
Cassiopeia's Chair shining brightly down upon him, fell contentedly
asleep.

See how many traces from which we may learn the chopper's history!
From this stump we may guess the sharpness of his axe, and from the
slope of the stroke, on which side he stood, and whether he cut down
the tree without going round it or changing hands; and, from the
flexure of the splinters, we may know which way it fell. This one chip
contains inscribed on it the whole history of the woodchopper and of
the world. On this scrap of paper, which held his sugar or salt,
perchance, or was the wadding of his gun, sitting on a log in the
forest, with what interest we read the tattle of cities, of those
larger huts, empty and to let, like this, in High Streets and
Broadways. The eaves are dripping on the south side of this simple
roof, while the titmouse lisps in the pine and the genial warmth of
the sun around the door is somewhat kind and human.

After two seasons, this rude dwelling does not deform the scene.
Already the birds resort to it, to build their nests, and you may
track to its door the feet of many quadrupeds. Thus, for a long time,
nature overlooks the encroachment and profanity of man. The wood still
cheerfully and unsuspiciously echoes the strokes of the axe that fells
it, and while they are few and seldom, they enhance its wildness, and
all the elements strive to naturalize the sound.

Now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill,
from whose precipitous south side we can look over the broad country
of forest and field and river, to the distant snowy mountains. See
yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some
invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead.
There must be a warmer and more genial spot there below, as where we
detect the vapor from a spring forming a cloud above the trees. What
fine relations are established between the traveler who discovers this
airy column from some eminence in the forest and him who sits below!
Up goes the smoke as silently and naturally as the vapor exhales from
the leaves, and as busy disposing itself in wreaths as the housewife
on the hearth below. It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests
more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where
its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human
life has planted itself,--and such is the beginning of Rome, the
establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on
the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia.

And now we descend again, to the brink of this woodland lake, which
lies in a hollow of the hills, as if it were their expressed juice,
and that of the leaves which are annually steeped in it. Without
outlet or inlet to the eye, it has still its history, in the lapse of
its waves, in the rounded pebbles on its shore, and in the pines which
grow down to its brink. It has not been idle, though sedentary, but,
like Abu Musa, teaches that "sitting still at home is the heavenly
way; the going out is the way of the world." Yet in its evaporation it
travels as far as any. In summer it is the earth's liquid eye, a
mirror in the breast of nature. The sins of the wood are washed out
in it. See how the woods form an amphitheatre about it, and it is an
arena for all the genialness of nature. All trees direct the traveler
to its brink, all paths seek it out, birds fly to it, quadrupeds flee
to it, and the very ground inclines toward it. It is nature's saloon,
where she has sat down to her toilet. Consider her silent economy and
tidiness; how the sun comes with his evaporation to sweep the dust
from its surface each morning, and a fresh surface is constantly
welling up; and annually, after whatever impurities have accumulated
herein, its liquid transparency appears again in the spring. In summer
a hushed music seems to sweep across its surface. But now a plain
sheet of snow conceals it from our eyes, except where the wind has
swept the ice bare, and the sere leaves are gliding from side to side,
tacking and veering on their tiny voyages. Here is one just keeled up
against a pebble on shore, a dry beech leaf, rocking still, as if it
would start again. A skillful engineer, methinks, might project its
course since it fell from the parent stem. Here are all the elements
for such a calculation. Its present position, the direction of the
wind, the level of the pond, and how much more is given. In its
scarred edges and veins is its log rolled up.

We fancy ourselves in the interior of a larger house. The surface of
the pond is our deal table or sanded floor, and the woods rise
abruptly from its edge, like the walls of a cottage. The lines set to
catch pickerel through the ice look like a larger culinary
preparation, and the men stand about on the white ground like pieces
of forest furniture. The actions of these men, at the distance of
half a mile over the ice and snow, impress us as when we read the
exploits of Alexander in history. They seem not unworthy of the
scenery, and as momentous as the conquest of kingdoms.

Again we have wandered through the arches of the wood, until from its
skirts we hear the distant booming of ice from yonder bay of the
river, as if it were moved by some other and subtler tide than oceans
know. To me it has a strange sound of home, thrilling as the voice of
one's distant and noble kindred. A mild summer sun shines over forest
and lake, and though there is but one green leaf for many rods, yet
nature enjoys a serene health. Every sound is fraught with the same
mysterious assurance of health, as well now the creaking of the boughs
in January, as the soft sough of the wind in July.

     When Winter fringes every bough
       With his fantastic wreath,
     And puts the seal of silence now
       Upon the leaves beneath;

     When every stream in its penthouse
       Goes gurgling on its way,
     And in his gallery the mouse
       Nibbleth the meadow hay;

     Methinks the summer still is nigh,
       And lurketh underneath,
     As that same meadow mouse doth lie
       Snug in that last year's heath.

     And if perchance the chickadee
       Lisp a faint note anon,
     The snow is summer's canopy,
       Which she herself put on.

     Fair blossoms deck the cheerful trees,
       And dazzling fruits depend;
     The north wind sighs a summer breeze,
       The nipping frosts to fend,

     Bringing glad tidings unto me,
       The while I stand all ear,
     Of a serene eternity,
       Which need not winter fear.

     Out on the silent pond straightway
       The restless ice doth crack,
     And pond sprites merry gambols play
       Amid the deafening rack.

     Eager I hasten to the vale,
       As if I heard brave news,
     How nature held high festival,
       Which it were hard to lose.

     I gambol with my neighbor ice,
       And sympathizing quake,
     As each new crack darts in a trice
       Across the gladsome lake.

     One with the cricket in the ground,
       And fagot on the hearth,
     Resounds the rare domestic sound
       Along the forest path.

Before night we will take a journey on skates along the course of this
meandering river, as full of novelty to one who sits by the cottage
fire all the winter's day, as if it were over the polar ice, with
Captain Parry or Franklin; following the winding of the stream, now
flowing amid hills, now spreading out into fair meadows, and forming a
myriad coves and bays where the pine and hemlock overarch. The river
flows in the rear of the towns, and we see all things from a new and
wilder side. The fields and gardens come down to it with a frankness,
and freedom from pretension, which they do not wear on the highway. It
is the outside and edge of the earth. Our eyes are not offended by
violent contrasts. The last rail of the farmer's fence is some swaying
willow bough, which still preserves its freshness, and here at length
all fences stop, and we no longer cross any road. We may go far up
within the country now by the most retired and level road, never
climbing a hill, but by broad levels ascending to the upland meadows.
It is a beautiful illustration of the law of obedience, the flow of a
river; the path for a sick man, a highway down which an acorn cup may
float secure with its freight. Its slight occasional falls, whose
precipices would not diversify the landscape, are celebrated by mist
and spray, and attract the traveler from far and near. From the remote
interior, its current conducts him by broad and easy steps, or by one
gentler inclined plane, to the sea. Thus by an early and constant
yielding to the inequalities of the ground it secures itself the
easiest passage.

No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times, and now we
draw near to the empire of the fishes. Our feet glide swiftly over
unfathomed depths, where in summer our line tempted the pout and
perch, and where the stately pickerel lurked in the long corridors
formed by the bulrushes. The deep, impenetrable marsh, where the heron
waded and bittern squatted, is made pervious to our swift shoes, as if
a thousand railroads had been made into it. With one impulse we are
carried to the cabin of the muskrat, that earliest settler, and see
him dart away under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to his
hole in the bank; and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately "the
mower whet his scythe," through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with
meadow-grass. We skate near to where the blackbird, the pewee, and the
kingbird hung their nests over the water, and the hornets builded from
the maple in the swamp. How many gay warblers, following the sun, have
radiated from this nest of silver birch and thistle-down! On the
swamp's outer edge was hung the supermarine village, where no foot
penetrated. In this hollow tree the wood duck reared her brood, and
slid away each day to forage in yonder fen.

In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried
specimens, in their natural order and position. The meadows and
forests are a _hortus siccus_. The leaves and grasses stand perfectly
pressed by the air without screw or gum, and the birds' nests are not
hung on an artificial twig, but where they builded them. We go about
dry-shod to inspect the summer's work in the rank swamp, and see what
a growth have got the alders, the willows, and the maples; testifying
to how many warm suns, and fertilizing dews and showers. See what
strides their boughs took in the luxuriant summer,--and anon these
dormant buds will carry them onward and upward another span into the
heavens.

Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the
river is lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left,
where we least expected; still holding on its way underneath, with a
faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot,
it too had hibernated, and we had followed its faint summer trail to
where it earthed itself in snow and ice. At first we should have
thought that rivers would be empty and dry in midwinter, or else
frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but their volume is not
diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surfaces.
The thousand springs which feed the lakes and streams are flowing
still. The issues of a few surface springs only are closed, and they
go to swell the deep reservoirs. Nature's wells are below the frost.
The summer brooks are not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower
quench his thirst with that alone. The streams are swollen when the
snow melts in the spring, because nature's work has been delayed, the
water being turned into ice and snow, whose particles are less smooth
and round, and do not find their level so soon.

Far over the ice, between the hemlock woods and snow-clad hills,
stands the pickerel-fisher, his lines set in some retired cove, like a
Finlander, with his arms thrust into the pouches of his dreadnaught;
with dull, snowy, fishy thoughts, himself a finless fish, separated a
few inches from his race; dumb, erect, and made to be enveloped in
clouds and snows, like the pines on shore. In these wild scenes, men
stand about in the scenery, or move deliberately and heavily, having
sacrificed the sprightliness and vivacity of towns to the dumb
sobriety of nature. He does not make the scenery less wild, more than
the jays and muskrats, but stands there as a part of it, as the
natives are represented in the voyages of early navigators, at Nootka
Sound, and on the Northwest coast, with their furs about them, before
they were tempted to loquacity by a scrap of iron. He belongs to the
natural family of man, and is planted deeper in nature and has more
root than the inhabitants of towns. Go to him, ask what luck, and you
will learn that he too is a worshiper of the unseen. Hear with what
sincere deference and waving gesture in his tone he speaks of the lake
pickerel, which he has never seen, his primitive and ideal race of
pickerel. He is connected with the shore still, as by a fish-line, and
yet remembers the season when he took fish through the ice on the
pond, while the peas were up in his garden at home.

But now, while we have loitered, the clouds have gathered again, and a
few straggling snowflakes are beginning to descend. Faster and faster
they fall, shutting out the distant objects from sight. The snow falls
on every wood and field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river and
the pond, on the hill and in the valley. Quadrupeds are confined to
their coverts and the birds sit upon their perches this peaceful hour.
There is not so much sound as in fair weather, but silently and
gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences, and the polished
ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are concealed,
and the tracks of men and beasts are lost. With so little effort does
nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men. Hear how
Homer has described the same: "The snowflakes fall thick and fast on a
winter's day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant,
covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains
where the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are
falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently
dissolved by the waves." The snow levels all things, and infolds them
deeper in the bosom of nature, as, in the slow summer, vegetation
creeps up to the entablature of the temple, and the turrets of the
castle, and helps her to prevail over art.

The surly night-wind rustles through the wood, and warns us to retrace
our steps, while the sun goes down behind the thickening storm, and
birds seek their roosts, and cattle their stalls.

                         "Drooping the lab'rer ox
     Stands covered o'er with snow, and _now_ demands
     The fruit of all his toil."

Though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the
wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of
him as a merry woodchopper, and warm-blooded youth, as blithe as
summer. The unexplored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of
the traveler. It does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness.
In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery,
like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half
concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The
imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house
affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth
and see the sky through the chimney-top, enjoying the quiet and serene
life that may be had in a warm corner by the chimney-side, or feeling
our pulse by listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the
sound of the flail in distant barns all the long afternoon. No doubt a
skillful physician could determine our health by observing how these
simple and natural sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an Oriental,
but a Boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the
shadow of motes in the sunbeams.

Sometimes our fate grows too homely and familiarly serious ever to be
cruel. Consider how for three months the human destiny is wrapped in
furs. The good Hebrew Revelation takes no cognizance of all this
cheerful snow. Is there no religion for the temperate and frigid
zones? We know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the
gods on a New England winter night. Their praises have never been
sung, only their wrath deprecated. The best scripture, after all,
records but a meagre faith. Its saints live reserved and austere. Let
a brave, devout man spend the year in the woods of Maine or Labrador,
and see if the Hebrew Scriptures speak adequately to his condition and
experience, from the setting in of winter to the breaking up of the
ice.

Now commences the long winter evening around the farmer's hearth, when
the thoughts of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are by
nature and necessity charitable and liberal to all creatures. Now is
the happy resistance to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and
thinks of his preparedness for winter, and, through the glittering
panes, sees with equanimity "the mansion of the northern bear," for
now the storm is over,--

               "The full ethereal round,
     Infinite worlds disclosing to the view,
     Shines out intensely keen; and all one cope
     Of starry glitter glows from pole to pole."




THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES[6]


Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a
transcendentalist; and for my part I am more interested in the men
than in the cattle. I wish to see once more those old familiar faces,
whose names I do not know, which for me represent the Middlesex
country, and come as near being indigenous to the soil as a white man
can; the men who are not above their business, whose coats are not too
black, whose shoes do not shine very much, who never wear gloves to
conceal their hands. It is true, there are some queer specimens of
humanity attracted to our festival, but all are welcome. I am pretty
sure to meet once more that weak-minded and whimsical fellow,
generally weak-bodied too, who prefers a crooked stick for a cane;
perfectly useless, you would say, only _bizarre_, fit for a cabinet,
like a petrified snake. A ram's horn would be as convenient, and is
yet more curiously twisted. He brings that much indulged bit of the
country with him, from some town's end or other, and introduces it to
Concord groves, as if he had promised it so much sometime. So some, it
seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think
that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best
ruler. Or why choose a man to do plain work who is distinguished for
his oddity? However, I do not know but you will think that they have
committed this mistake who invited me to speak to you to-day.

In my capacity of surveyor, I have often talked with some of you, my
employers, at your dinner-tables, after having gone round and round
and behind your farming, and ascertained exactly what its limits were.
Moreover, taking a surveyor's and a naturalist's liberty, I have been
in the habit of going across your lots much oftener than is usual, as
many of you, perhaps to your sorrow, are aware. Yet many of you, to my
relief, have seemed not to be aware of it; and, when I came across you
in some out-of-the-way nook of your farms, have inquired, with an air
of surprise, if I were not lost, since you had never seen me in that
part of the town or county before; when, if the truth were known, and
it had not been for betraying my secret, I might with more propriety
have inquired if _you_ were not lost, since I had never seen _you_
there before. I have several times shown the proprietor the shortest
way out of his wood-lot.

Therefore, it would seem that I have some title to speak to you
to-day; and considering what that title is, and the occasion that has
called us together, I need offer no apology if I invite your
attention, for the few moments that are allotted me, to a purely
scientific subject.

At those dinner-tables referred to, I have often been asked, as many
of you have been, if I could tell how it happened, that when a pine
wood was cut down an oak one commonly sprang up, and _vice versa_. To
which I have answered, and now answer, that I can tell,--that it is no
mystery to me. As I am not aware that this has been clearly shown by
any one, I shall lay the more stress on this point. Let me lead you
back into your wood-lots again.

When, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a forest springs up
naturally where none of its kind grew before, I do not hesitate to
say, though in some quarters still it may sound paradoxical, that it
came from a seed. Of the various ways by which trees are _known_ to be
propagated,--by transplanting, cuttings, and the like,--this is the
only supposable one under these circumstances. No such tree has ever
been known to spring from anything else. If any one asserts that it
sprang from something else, or from nothing, the burden of proof lies
with him.

It remains, then, only to show how the seed is transported from where
it grows to where it is planted. This is done chiefly by the agency of
the wind, water, and animals. The lighter seeds, as those of pines and
maples, are transported chiefly by wind and water; the heavier, as
acorns and nuts, by animals.

In all the pines, a very thin membrane, in appearance much like an
insect's wing, grows over and around the seed, and independent of it,
while the latter is being developed within its base. Indeed this is
often perfectly developed, though the seed is abortive; nature being,
you would say, more sure to provide the means of transporting the
seed, than to provide the seed to be transported. In other words, a
beautiful thin sack is woven around the seed, with a handle to it such
as the wind can take hold of, and it is then committed to the wind,
expressly that it may transport the seed and extend the range of the
species; and this it does, as effectually as when seeds are sent by
mail in a different kind of sack from the Patent Office. There is a
patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose
managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody
at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more
extensive and regular.

There is, then, no necessity for supposing that the pines have sprung
up from nothing, and I am aware that I am not at all peculiar in
asserting that they come from seeds, though the mode of their
propagation _by nature_ has been but little attended to. They are very
extensively raised from the seed in Europe, and are beginning to be
here.

When you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood will not _at once_ spring
up there unless there are, or have been quite recently, seed-bearing
pines near enough for the seeds to be blown from them. But, adjacent
to a forest of pines, if you prevent other crops from growing there,
you will surely have an extension of your pine forest, provided the
soil is suitable.

As for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not furnished with wings,
the notion is still a very common one that, when the trees which bear
these spring up where none of their kind were noticed before, they
have come from seeds or other principles spontaneously generated there
in an unusual manner, or which have lain dormant in the soil for
centuries, or perhaps been called into activity by the heat of a
burning. I do not believe these assertions, and I will state some of
the ways in which, according to my observation, such forests are
planted and raised.

Every one of these seeds, too, will be found to be winged or legged in
another fashion. Surely it is not wonderful that cherry trees of all
kinds are widely dispersed, since their fruit is well known to be the
favorite food of various birds. Many kinds are called bird cherries,
and they appropriate many more kinds, which are not so called. Eating
cherries is a bird-like employment, and unless we disperse the seeds
occasionally, as they do, I shall think that the birds have the best
right to them. See how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in
order that a bird may be compelled to transport it,--in the very midst
of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour this
must commonly take the stone also into its mouth or bill. If you ever
ate a cherry, and did not make two bites of it, you must have
perceived it,--right in the centre of the luscious morsel, a large
earthy residuum left on the tongue. We thus take into our mouths
cherry-stones as big as peas, a dozen at once, for Nature can persuade
us to do almost anything when she would compass her ends. Some wild
men and children instinctively swallow these, as the birds do when in
a hurry, it being the shortest way to get rid of them. Thus, though
these seeds are not provided with vegetable wings, Nature has impelled
the thrush tribe to take them into their bills and fly away with them;
and they are winged in another sense, and more effectually than the
seeds of pines, for these are carried even against the wind. The
consequence is, that cherry trees grow not only here but there. The
same is true of a great many other seeds.

But to come to the observation which suggested these remarks. As I
have said, I suspect that I can throw some light on the fact that when
hereabouts a dense pine wood is cut down, oaks and other hard woods
may at once take its place. I have got only to show that the acorns
and nuts, provided they are grown in the neighborhood, are regularly
planted in such woods; for I assert that if an oak tree has not grown
within ten miles, and man has not carried acorns thither, then an oak
wood will not spring up _at once_, when a pine wood is cut down.

Apparently, there were only pines there before. They are cut off, and
after a year or two you see oaks and other hard woods springing up
there, with scarcely a pine amid them, and the wonder commonly is, how
the seed could have lain in the ground so long without decaying. But
the truth is, that it has not lain in the ground so long, but is
regularly planted each year by various quadrupeds and birds.

In this neighborhood, where oaks and pines are about equally
dispersed, if you look through the thickest pine wood, even the
seemingly unmixed pitch pine ones, you will commonly detect many
little oaks, birches, and other hard woods, sprung from seeds carried
into the thicket by squirrels and other animals, and also blown
thither, but which are overshadowed and choked by the pines. The
denser the evergreen wood, the more likely it is to be well planted
with these seeds, because the planters incline to resort with their
forage to the closest covert. They also carry it into birch and other
woods. This planting is carried on annually, and the oldest seedlings
annually die; but when the pines are cleared off, the oaks, having got
just the start they want, and now secured favorable conditions,
immediately spring up to trees.

The shade of a dense pine wood is more unfavorable to the springing up
of pines of the same species than of oaks within it, though the former
may come up abundantly when the pines are cut, if there chance to be
sound seed in the ground.

But when you cut off a lot of hard wood, very often the little pines
mixed with it have a similar start, for the squirrels have carried off
the nuts to the pines, and not to the more open wood, and they
commonly make pretty clean work of it; and moreover, if the wood was
old, the sprouts will be feeble or entirely fail; to say nothing about
the soil being, in a measure, exhausted for this kind of crop.

If a pine wood is surrounded by a white oak one chiefly, white oaks
may be expected to succeed when the pines are cut. If it is surrounded
instead by an edging of shrub oaks, then you will probably have a
dense shrub oak thicket.

I have no time to go into details, but will say, in a word, that while
the wind is conveying the seeds of pines into hard woods and open
lands, the squirrels and other animals are conveying the seeds of oaks
and walnuts into the pine woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept
up.

I affirmed this confidently many years ago, and an occasional
examination of dense pine woods confirmed me in my opinion. It has
long been known to observers that squirrels bury nuts in the ground,
but I am not aware that any one has thus accounted for the regular
succession of forests.

On the 24th of September, in 1857, as I was paddling down the Assabet,
in this town, I saw a red squirrel run along the bank under some
herbage, with something large in its mouth. It stopped near the foot
of a hemlock, within a couple of rods of me, and, hastily pawing a
hole with its fore feet, dropped its booty into it, covered it up, and
retreated part way up the trunk of the tree. As I approached the shore
to examine the deposit, the squirrel, descending part way, betrayed no
little anxiety about its treasure, and made two or three motions to
recover it before it finally retreated. Digging there, I found two
green pignuts joined together, with the thick husks on, buried about
an inch and a half under the reddish soil of decayed hemlock
leaves,--just the right depth to plant it. In short, this squirrel was
then engaged in accomplishing two objects, to wit, laying up a store
of winter food for itself, and planting a hickory wood for all
creation. If the squirrel was killed, or neglected its deposit, a
hickory would spring up. The nearest hickory tree was twenty rods
distant. These nuts were there still just fourteen days later, but
were gone when I looked again, November 21st, or six weeks later
still.

I have since examined more carefully several dense woods, which are
said to be, and are apparently, exclusively pine, and always with the
same result. For instance, I walked the same day to a small but very
dense and handsome white pine grove, about fifteen rods square, in the
east part of this town. The trees are large for Concord, being from
ten to twenty inches in diameter, and as exclusively pine as any wood
that I know. Indeed, I selected this wood because I thought it the
least likely to contain anything else. It stands on an open plain or
pasture, except that it adjoins another small pine wood, which has a
few little oaks in it, on the southeast side. On every other side, it
was at least thirty rods from the nearest woods. Standing on the edge
of this grove and looking through it, for it is quite level and free
from underwood, for the most part bare, red-carpeted ground, you would
have said that there was not a hardwood tree in it, young or old. But
on looking carefully along over its floor I discovered, though it was
not till my eye had got used to the search, that, alternating with
thin ferns, and small blueberry bushes, there was, not merely here and
there, but as often as every five feet and with a degree of
regularity, a little oak, from three to twelve inches high, and in one
place I found a green acorn dropped by the base of a pine.

I confess I was surprised to find my theory so perfectly proved in
this case. One of the principal agents in this planting, the red
squirrels, were all the while curiously inspecting me, while I was
inspecting their plantation. Some of the little oaks had been browsed
by cows, which resorted to this wood for shade.

After seven or eight years, the hard woods evidently find such a
locality unfavorable to their growth, the pines being allowed to
stand. As an evidence of this, I observed a diseased red maple
twenty-five feet long, which had been recently prostrated, though it
was still covered with green leaves, the only maple in any position in
the wood.

But although these oaks almost invariably die if the pines are not cut
down, it is probable that they do better for a few years under their
shelter than they would anywhere else.

The very extensive and thorough experiments of the English have at
length led them to adopt a method of raising oaks almost precisely
like this which somewhat earlier had been adopted by Nature and her
squirrels here; they have simply rediscovered the value of pines as
nurses for oaks. The English experimenters seem, early and generally,
to have found out the importance of using trees of some kind as
nurse-plants for the young oaks. I quote from Loudon what he describes
as "the ultimatum on the subject of planting and sheltering
oaks,"--"an abstract of the practice adopted by the government
officers in the national forests" of England, prepared by Alexander
Milne.

At first some oaks had been planted by themselves, and others mixed
with Scotch pines; "but in all cases," says Mr. Milne, "where oaks
were planted actually among the pines and surrounded by them [though
the soil might be inferior], the oaks were found to be much the best."
"For several years past, the plan pursued has been to plant the
inclosures with Scotch pines only [a tree very similar to our pitch
pine], and when the pines have got to the height of five or six feet,
then to put in good strong oak plants of about four or five years'
growth among the pines,--not cutting away any pines at first, unless
they happen to be so strong and thick as to overshadow the oaks. In
about two years it becomes necessary to shred the branches of the
pines, to give light and air to the oaks, and in about two or three
more years to begin gradually to remove the pines altogether, taking
out a certain number each year, so that, at the end of twenty or
twenty-five years, not a single Scotch pine shall be left; although,
for the first ten or twelve years, the plantation may have appeared to
contain nothing else but pine. The advantage of this mode of planting
has been found to be that the pines dry and ameliorate the soil,
destroying the coarse grass and brambles which frequently choke and
injure oaks; and that no mending over is necessary, as scarcely an oak
so planted is found to fail."

Thus much the English planters have discovered by patient experiment,
and, for aught I know, they have taken out a patent for it; but they
appear not to have discovered that it was discovered before, and that
they are merely adopting the method of Nature, which she long ago made
patent to all. She is all the while planting the oaks amid the pines
without our knowledge, and at last, instead of government officers, we
send a party of woodchoppers to cut down the pines, and so rescue an
oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped from the skies.

As I walk amid hickories, even in August, I hear the sound of green
pignuts falling from time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my
head. In the fall, I notice on the ground, either within or in the
neighborhood of oak woods, on all sides of the town, stout oak twigs
three or four inches long, bearing half a dozen empty acorn-cups,
which twigs have been gnawed off by squirrels, on both sides of the
nuts, in order to make them more portable. The jays scream and the red
squirrels scold while you are clubbing and shaking the chestnut trees,
for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree.
I frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut
bur, as I am going through the woods, and I used to think, sometimes,
that they were cast at me. In fact, they are so busy about it, in the
midst of the chestnut season, that you cannot stand long in the woods
without hearing one fall. A sportsman told me that he had, the day
before,--that was in the middle of October,--seen a green chestnut bur
dropped on our great river meadow, fifty rods from the nearest wood,
and much further from the nearest chestnut tree, and he could not tell
how it came there. Occasionally, when chestnutting in midwinter, I
find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just under
the leaves, by the common wood mouse (_Mus leucopus_).

But especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation
and planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. In
almost every wood, you will see where the red or gray squirrels have
pawed down through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet
deep, and almost always directly to a nut or a pine cone, as directly
as if they had started from it and bored upward,--which you and I
could not have done. It would be difficult for us to find one before
the snow falls. Commonly, no doubt, they had deposited them there in
the fall. You wonder if they remember the localities, or discover them
by the scent. The red squirrel commonly has its winter abode in the
earth under a thicket of evergreens, frequently under a small clump of
evergreens in the midst of a deciduous wood. If there are any nut
trees which still retain their nuts standing at a distance without the
wood, their paths often lead directly to and from them. We therefore
need not suppose an oak standing here and there _in_ the wood in order
to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or thirty rods of it, it
is sufficient.

I think that I may venture to say that every white pine cone that
falls to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing
its seeds, and almost every pitch pine one that falls at all, is cut
off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them long before they are
ripe, so that when the crop of white pine cones is a small one, as it
commonly is, they cut off thus almost every one of these before it
fairly ripens. I think, moreover, that their design, if I may so
speak, in cutting them off green, is, partly, to prevent their opening
and losing their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig
through the snow, and the only white pine cones which contain anything
then. I have counted in one heap, within a diameter of four feet, the
cores of 239 pitch pine cones which had been cut off and stripped by
the red squirrel the previous winter.

The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are
placed in the most favorable circumstances for germinating. I have
sometimes wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the
earth got planted; but, by the end of December, I find the chestnut of
the same year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the
decaying and mouldy leaves, where there is all the moisture and manure
they want, for the nuts fall fast. In a plentiful year, a large
proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are,
of course, somewhat concealed from squirrels. One winter, when the
crop had been abundant, I got, with the aid of a rake, many quarts of
these nuts as late as the tenth of January, and though some bought at
the store the same day were more than half of them mouldy, I did not
find a single mouldy one among these which I picked from under the wet
and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed on once or twice. Nature
knows how to pack them best. They were still plump and tender.
Apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. In the spring they
were all sprouting.

Loudon says that "when the nut [of the common walnut of Europe] is to
be preserved through the winter for the purpose of planting in the
following spring, it should be laid in a rot-heap, as soon as
gathered, with the husk on, and the heap should be turned over
frequently in the course of the winter."

Here, again, he is stealing Nature's "thunder." How can a poor mortal
do otherwise? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and the
treasure to be stolen. In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the
best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know
it. Generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate,
and succeed best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a
spade, and then covered with leaves or straw. These results to which
planters have arrived remind us of the experience of Kane and his
companions at the north, who, when learning to live in that climate,
were surprised to find themselves steadily adopting the customs of the
natives, simply becoming Esquimaux. So, when we experiment in planting
forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does. Would it not
be well to consult with Nature in the outset? for she is the most
extensive and experienced planter of us all, not excepting the Dukes
of Athol.

In short, they who have not attended particularly to this subject are
but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed,
especially in the fall, in collecting, and so disseminating and
planting, the seeds of trees. It is the almost constant employment of
the squirrels at that season, and you rarely meet with one that has
not a nut in its mouth, or is not just going to get one. One
squirrel-hunter of this town told me that he knew of a walnut tree
which bore particularly good nuts, but that on going to gather them
one fall, he found that he had been anticipated by a family of a dozen
red squirrels. He took out of the tree, which was hollow, one bushel
and three pecks by measurement, without the husks, and they supplied
him and his family for the winter. It would be easy to multiply
instances of this kind. How commonly in the fall you see the
cheek-pouches of the striped squirrel distended by a quantity of nuts!
This species gets its scientific name, _Tamias_, or the steward, from
its habit of storing up nuts and other seeds. Look under a nut tree a
month after the nuts have fallen, and see what proportion of sound
nuts to the abortive ones and shells you will find ordinarily. They
have been already eaten, or dispersed far and wide. The ground looks
like a platform before a grocery, where the gossips of the village sit
to crack nuts and less savory jokes. You have come, you would say,
after the feast was over, and are presented with the shells only.

Occasionally, when threading the woods in the fall, you will hear a
sound as if some one had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay
pecking at an acorn, or you will see a flock of them at once about it,
in the top of an oak, and hear them break them off. They then fly to a
suitable limb, and placing the acorn under one foot, hammer away at it
busily, making a sound like a woodpecker's tapping, looking round from
time to time to see if any foe is approaching, and soon reach the
meat, and nibble at it, holding up their heads to swallow, while they
hold the remainder very firmly with their claws. Nevertheless it often
drops to the ground before the bird has done with it. I can confirm
what William Bartram wrote to Wilson, the ornithologist, that "the jay
is one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature, for
disseminating forest trees and other nuciferous and hard-seeded
vegetables on which they feed. Their chief employment during the
autumnal season is foraging to supply their winter stores. In
performing this necessary duty they drop abundance of seed in their
flight over fields, hedges, and by fences, where they alight to
deposit them in the post-holes, etc. It is remarkable what numbers of
young trees rise up in fields and pastures after a wet winter and
spring. These birds alone are capable, in a few years' time, to
replant all the cleared lands."

I have noticed that squirrels also frequently drop their nuts in open
land, which will still further account for the oaks and walnuts which
spring up in pastures, for, depend on it, every new tree comes from a
seed. When I examine the little oaks, one or two years old, in such
places, I invariably find the empty acorn from which they sprung.

So far from the seed having lain dormant in the soil since oaks grew
there before, as many believe, it is well known that it is difficult
to preserve the vitality of acorns long enough to transport them to
Europe; and it is recommended in Loudon's "Arboretum," as the safest
course, to sprout them in pots on the voyage. The same authority
states that "very few acorns of any species will germinate after
having been kept a year," that beech mast "only retains its vital
properties one year," and the black walnut "seldom more than six
months after it has ripened." I have frequently found that in November
almost every acorn left on the ground had sprouted or decayed. What
with frost, drouth, moisture, and worms, the greater part are soon
destroyed. Yet it is stated by one botanical writer that "acorns that
have lain for centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon vegetated."

Mr. George B. Emerson, in his valuable Report on the Trees and Shrubs
of this State, says of the pines: "The tenacity of life of the seeds
is remarkable. They will remain for many years unchanged in the
ground, protected by the coolness and deep shade of the forest above
them. But when the forest is removed, and the warmth of the sun
admitted, they immediately vegetate." Since he does not tell us on
what observation his remark is founded, I must doubt its truth.
Besides, the experience of nursery-men makes it the more questionable.

The stories of wheat raised from seed buried with an ancient Egyptian,
and of raspberries raised from seed found in the stomach of a man in
England, who is supposed to have died sixteen or seventeen hundred
years ago, are generally discredited, simply because the evidence is
not conclusive.

Several men of science, Dr. Carpenter among them, have used the
statement that beach plums sprang up in sand which was dug up forty
miles inland in Maine, to prove that the seed had lain there a very
long time, and some have inferred that the coast has receded so far.
But it seems to me necessary to their argument to show, first, that
beach plums grow only on a beach. They are not uncommon here, which is
about half that distance from the shore; and I remember a dense patch
a few miles north of us, twenty-five miles inland, from which the
fruit was annually carried to market. How much further inland they
grow, I know not. Dr. Charles T. Jackson speaks of finding "beach
plums" (perhaps they were this kind) more than one hundred miles
inland in Maine.

It chances that similar objections lie against all the more notorious
instances of the kind on record.

Yet I am prepared to believe that some seeds, especially small ones,
may retain their vitality for centuries under favorable circumstances.
In the spring of 1859, the old Hunt house, so called, in this town,
whose chimney bore the date 1703, was taken down. This stood on land
which belonged to John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts,
and a part of the house was evidently much older than the above date,
and belonged to the Winthrop family. For many years I have ransacked
this neighborhood for plants, and I consider myself familiar with its
productions. Thinking of the seeds which are said to be sometimes dug
up at an unusual depth in the earth, and thus to reproduce long
extinct plants, it occurred to me last fall that some new or rare
plants might have sprung up in the cellar of this house, which had
been covered from the light so long. Searching there on the 22d of
September, I found, among other rank weeds, a species of nettle
(_Urtica urens_) which I had not found before; dill, which I had not
seen growing spontaneously; the Jerusalem oak (_Chenopodium Botrys_),
which I had seen wild in but one place; black nightshade (_Solanum
nigrum_), which is quite rare hereabouts, and common tobacco, which,
though it was often cultivated here in the last century, has for fifty
years been an unknown plant in this town, and a few months before this
not even I had heard that one man, in the north part of the town, was
cultivating a few plants for his own use. I have no doubt that some or
all of these plants sprang from seeds which had long been buried under
or about that house, and that that tobacco is an additional evidence
that the plant was formerly cultivated here. The cellar has been
filled up this year, and four of those plants, including the tobacco,
are now again extinct in that locality.

It is true, I have shown that the animals consume a great part of the
seeds of trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent their becoming
trees; but in all these cases, as I have said, the consumer is
compelled to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and this
is the tax which he pays to Nature. I think it is Linnæus who says
that while the swine is rooting for acorns he is planting acorns.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has
been, I have great faith in a seed,--a, to me, equally mysterious
origin for it. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am
prepared to expect wonders. I shall even believe that the millennium
is at hand, and that the reign of justice is about to commence, when
the Patent Office, or Government, begins to distribute, and the people
to plant, the seeds of these things.

In the spring of 1857 I planted six seeds sent to me from the Patent
Office, and labeled, I think, _Poitrine jaune grosse_, large yellow
squash. Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighed 123½ pounds,
the other bore four, weighing together 186¼ pounds. Who would have
believed that there was 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ in that
corner of my garden? These seeds were the bait I used to catch it, my
ferrets which I sent into its burrow, my brace of terriers which
unearthed it. A little mysterious hoeing and manuring was all the
_abracadabra presto-change_ that I used, and lo! true to the label,
they found for me 310 pounds of _poitrine jaune grosse_ there, where
it never was known to be, nor was before. These talismans had
perchance sprung from America at first, and returned to it with
unabated force. The big squash took a premium at your fair that fall,
and I understood that the man who bought it, intended to sell the
seeds for ten cents apiece. (Were they not cheap at that?) But I have
more hounds of the same breed. I learn that one which I despatched to
a distant town, true to its instincts, points to the large yellow
squash there, too, where no hound ever found it before, as its
ancestors did here and in France.

Other seeds I have which will find other things in that corner of my
garden, in like fashion, almost any fruit you wish, every year for
ages, until the crop more than fills the whole garden. You have but
little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these
American days. Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances
without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible
treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold
merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it. Yet farmers'
sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his
throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love
darkness rather than light.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] An Address read to the Middlesex Agricultural Society in Concord,
September, 1860.




WALKING


I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,
as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man
as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member
of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an
emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the
minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care
of that.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a
genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_, which word is beautifully
derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle
Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going _à la Sainte Terre_,"
to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a
_Sainte-Terrer_," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the
Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and
vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense,
such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from _sans
terre_, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense,
will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.
For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in
a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the
saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering
river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course
to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most
probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by
some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land
from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers,
nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our
expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old
hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our
steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the
spirit of undying adventure, never to return,--prepared to send back
our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you
are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife
and child and friends, and never see them again,--if you have paid
your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are
a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes
have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a
new, or rather an old, order,--not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not
Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable
class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to
the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into,
the Walker,--not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of
fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble
art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are
to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I
do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom,
and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes
only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from
Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the
Walkers. _Ambulator nascitur, non fit._ Some of my townsmen, it is
true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took
ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for
half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have
confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions
they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were
elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of
existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.

     "When he came to grene wode,
       In a mery mornynge,
     There he herde the notes small
       Of byrdes mery syngynge.

     "It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
       That I was last here;
     Me lyste a lytell for to shote
       At the donne dere."

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend
four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than
that--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,
absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A
penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am
reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not
only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed
legs, so many of them,--as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not
to stand or walk upon,--I think that they deserve some credit for not
having all committed suicide long ago.

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring
some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the
eleventh hour, or four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem
the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled
with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be
atoned for,--I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance,
to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine
themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months,
aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they
are of,--sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it
were three o'clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the
three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage
which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over
against one's self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out
a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I
wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o'clock in
the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the
evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the
street, scattering a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and
whims to the four winds for an airing,--and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men,
stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them
do not _stand_ it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have
been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments,
making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts,
which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers
that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed.
Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture,
which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping
watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with
it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor
occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the
evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just
before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an
hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking
exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated
hours,--as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs; but is itself the
enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in
search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumbbells for
his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures
unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only
beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's
servant to show him her master's study, she answered, "Here is his
library, but his study is out of doors."

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a
certain roughness of character,--will cause a thicker cuticle to grow
over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and
hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their
delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may
produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin,
accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions.
Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to
our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind
blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to
proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a
scurf that will fall off fast enough,--that the natural remedy is to
be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the
winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the
more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the
laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism,
whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.
That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself
white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would
become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some
sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods
to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "They planted
groves and walks of Platanes," where they took _subdiales
ambulationes_ in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use
to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I
am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods
bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would
fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.
The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my
body is,--I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my
senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of
something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a
shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good
works,--for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I
have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together,
I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great
happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours'
walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.
A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as
the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of
harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within
a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and
the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become
quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of
houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees,
simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest
stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle
of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after
his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not
see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole
in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the
middle of a boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found
his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had
been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was
his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles,
commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without
crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by
the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside.
There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From
many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The
farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and
their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade
and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the
most alarming of them all,--I am pleased to see how little space they
occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that
still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the
traveler thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the
great road,--follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and
it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely,
and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field
into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off
to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from
one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not,
for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion
of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads
are the arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the
thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers. The word is from the Latin
_villa_, which together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and
_vella_, Varro derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the
place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living
by teaming were said _vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, the Latin word
_vilis_ and our vile, also _villain_. This suggests what kind of
degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel
that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk
across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not
travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get
to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they
lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The
landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not
make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old
prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may
name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius,
nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a
truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so
called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as
if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is
the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now,
methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the
bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or
two such roads in every town.


  [Illustration: _The Old Marlborough Road_]

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD

     Where they once dug for money,
     But never found any;
     Where sometimes Martial Miles
     Singly files,
     And Elijah Wood,
     I fear for no good:
     No other man,
     Save Elisha Dugan,--
     O man of wild habits,
     Partridges and rabbits,
     Who hast no cares
     Only to set snares,
     Who liv'st all alone,
     Close to the bone,
             And where life is sweetest
             Constantly eatest.
     When the spring stirs my blood
           With the instinct to travel,
           I can get enough gravel
         On the Old Marlborough Road.
             Nobody repairs it,
             For nobody wears it;
             It is a living way,
             As the Christians say.
         Not many there be
           Who enter therein,
         Only the guests of the
           Irishman Quin.
         What is it, what is it,
           But a direction out there,
         And the bare possibility
           Of going somewhere?
             Great guide-boards of stone,
             But travelers none;
             Cenotaphs of the towns
             Named on their crowns.
             It is worth going to see
             Where you _might_ be.
             What king
             Did the thing,
             I am still wondering;
             Set up how or when,
             By what selectmen,
             Gourgas or Lee,
             Clark or Darby?
             They're a great endeavor
             To be something forever;
             Blank tablets of stone,
             Where a traveler might groan,
             And in one sentence
             Grave all that is known;
             Which another might read,
             In his extreme need.
         I know one or two
         Lines that would do,
         Literature that might stand
         All over the land,
         Which a man could remember
         Till next December,
         And read again in the spring,
         After the thawing.
     If with fancy unfurled
       You leave your abode,
     You may go round the world
       By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys
comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be
partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will
take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,--when fences shall be
multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to
the _public_ road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall
be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy
a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true
enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the
evil days come.

       *       *       *       *       *

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we
will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature,
which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is
not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we
are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one.
We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this
actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love
to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we
find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet
exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will
bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I
find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and
inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or
deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to
settle,--varies a few degrees, and does not always point due
southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation,
but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future
lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer
on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a
circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits
which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case
opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I
turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour,
until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the
southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go
free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that
I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind
the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk
thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western
horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there
are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me.
Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the
wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and
withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on
this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the
prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and
not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say
that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have
witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the
settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement,
and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first
generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment.
The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet.
"The world ends there," say they; "beyond there is nothing but a
shoreless sea." It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and
literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into
the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is
a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity
to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed
this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before
it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the
Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of
singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest
walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something
akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,--which, in
some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe,
impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they
were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its
particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging
narrower streams with their dead,--that something like the _furor_
which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred
to a worm in their tails, affects both nations and individuals, either
perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles
over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real
estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that
disturbance into account.

     "Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
     And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a
West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He
appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is
the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night
of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor
only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and
the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial
paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients,
enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when
looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the
foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men
in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.

     "And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
     And now was dropped into the western bay;
     At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
     To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with
that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and
varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the
European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that
"the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America
than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred
and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there
are but thirty that attain this size." Later botanists more than
confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his
youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its
greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most
gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently
described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes
farther,--farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says:
"As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made
for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World....
The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands
of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of
his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding,
by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses
on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not,
and turns upon his footprints for an instant." When he has exhausted
the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences
his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages." So far
Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the
Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The
younger Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,"
says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From
what part of the world have you come?' As if these vast and fertile
regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of
all the inhabitants of the globe."

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, _Ex Oriente lux; ex
Occidente_ FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of
Canada, tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres
of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger
scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly
colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old
World.... The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is
bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks
larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning
is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains
are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains
broader." This statement will do at least to set against Buffon's
account of this part of the world and its productions.

Linnæus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies _laeta_, _glabra_ plantis
Americanis" (I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the
aspect of American plants); and I think that in this country there are
no, or at most very few, _Africanae bestiae_, African beasts, as the
Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly
fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles
of the centre of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the
inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveler can
lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America
without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than
in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of
America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that
these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and
poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length,
perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the
American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For
I believe that climate does thus react on man,--as there is something
in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man
grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under
these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are
in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our
thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our
sky,--our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our
plains,--our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder
and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests,--and our hearts
shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland
seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveler something, he knows
not what, of _laeta_ and _glabra_, of joyous and serene, in our very
faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America
discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say,--

     "Westward the star of empire takes its way."

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise
was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this
country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England;
though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the
West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the
Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too
late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even
the slang of to-day.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a
dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in
something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans,
and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names
were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend.
There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew
only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There
seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys
a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated
along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to
an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I
worked my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the
steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh
ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream,
and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and
the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's
Cliff,--still thinking more of the future than of the past or
present,--I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that
the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges
were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that _this was the
heroic age itself_, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly
the simplest and obscurest of men.

       *       *       *       *       *

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I
have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of
the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild.
The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the
forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.
Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being
suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every
state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and
vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the
Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and
displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which
the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock spruce or arbor-vitæ
in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for
strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the
marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course.
Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic
reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the
antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have
stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to
feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and
slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance
no civilization can endure,--as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos
devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush,
to which I would migrate,--wild lands where no settler has squatted;
to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as
well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most
delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much
like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his
very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence,
and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel
no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odor
of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly
exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's garments. When I go into
their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy
plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty
merchants' exchanges and libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is
a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. "The
pale white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin
the naturalist says, "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian
was like a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine,
dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields."

Ben Jonson exclaims,--

      "How near to good is what is fair!"

So I would say,--

      How near to good is what is _wild_!

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet
subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward
incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made
infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country
or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be
climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not
in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When,
formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had
contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted
solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog,--a
natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me.
I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my
native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are
no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda
(_Cassandra calyculata_) which cover these tender places on the
earth's surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of
the shrubs which grow there,--the high blueberry, panicled andromeda,
lambkill, azalea, and rhodora,--all standing in the quaking sphagnum.
I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass
of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders,
transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks,--to have this
fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrowfuls of soil
only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why
not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that
meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and
Art, which I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make
a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though
done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most
tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to
me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops, or what not, soon
wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the
swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so
that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front yards are not
made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back
way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to
dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human
art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide
for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens,
for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.
Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure
air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The
traveler Burton says of it: "Your _morale_ improves; you become frank
and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert,
spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a
mere animal existence." They who have been traveling long on the
steppes of Tartary say, "On reëntering cultivated lands, the
agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and
suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as
if about to die of asphyxia." When I would recreate myself, I seek the
darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen,
most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a _sanctum
sanctorum_. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood
covers the virgin mould, and the same soil is good for men and for
trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect
as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which
he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by
the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive
forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,--such a
town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and
philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and
Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the
Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest
for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years
ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the
very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a
tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's
thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate
days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of
good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by
the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They
survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture!
little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is
exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its
fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous
fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin soil,"
and that "agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown
everywhere else." I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even
because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in
some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a
single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a
swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante
read over the entrance to the infernal regions, "Leave all hope, ye
that enter,"--that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I
saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in
his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp
which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under
water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did
_survey_ from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts,
that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of
the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling
ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it
by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories,
which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not
the sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the
spade, and the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and
begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds
blew the Indian's corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the way
which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with
which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer
is armed with plow and spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but
another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild
thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and
mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild
duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--the
mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the
fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly
and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the
prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light
which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which
perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper
lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light
of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,
included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It
is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and
Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There
is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself.
Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild
man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The
poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the
accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be
a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to
speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers
drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who
derived his words as often as he used them,--transplanted them to his
page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and
fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at
the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two
musty leaves in a library,--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after
their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with
surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this
yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is
tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or
modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I
am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no
Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no _culture_, in short, can give.
Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a
Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English
literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its
soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected
with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is
unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which
overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the
Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will
endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in
which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The
valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their
crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate,
the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.
Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a
fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the
present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American
mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though
they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common
among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that
recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild
clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are
reminiscent,--others merely _sensible_, as the phrase is,--others
prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health.
The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins,
flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have
their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct
before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy
knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindoos
dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an
unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state,
that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough
to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild
fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are
the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas,
but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a
strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human
voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for
instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me
of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so
much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and
neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a
faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native
rights,--any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original
wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her
pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray
tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It
is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some
dignity on the herd in my eyes,--already dignified. The seeds of
instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses,
like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a
dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport,
like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised
their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their
horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe.
But, alas! a sudden loud _Whoa!_ would have damped their ardor at
once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and
sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried "Whoa!" to
mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a
sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his
machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the
whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a
_side_ of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a _side_ of
beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be
made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats
still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.
Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization;
and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited
disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their
natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in
the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be
various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite
as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be
regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other
man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did.
Confucius says, "The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are
tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned." But it is
not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to
make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the
best use to which they can be put.

       *       *       *       *       *

When looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of
military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular
subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The
name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more
human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the
Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they
had been named by the child's rigmarole, _Iery wiery ichery van,
tittle-tol-tan_. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming
over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous
sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap
and meaningless as _Bose_ and _Tray_, the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named
merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to
know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the
individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier
in a Roman army had a name of his own,--because we have not supposed
that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from
his peculiar energy, was called "Buster" by his playmates, and this
rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travelers tell us that an
Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was
his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new
exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely,
who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see
men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less
strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his
own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a
savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my
neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William or Edwin, takes it
off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in
anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear
pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in
some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all
around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the
leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to
that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,--a
sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English
nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a
certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are
already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from
the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating
manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,
both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very
late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman,
discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a
chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues
of metal "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of
sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would
soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the
agencies of the universe." But he observed that "those bodies which
underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of
restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of
night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it
has been inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the
inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic
kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to
darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any
more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be
tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only
serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant
future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus
invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and
dusky knowledge, _Gramática parda_, tawny grammar, a kind of
mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It
is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal
need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will
call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for
what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we
know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual
ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance;
ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry
and reading of the newspapers,--for what are the libraries of science
but files of newspapers?--a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them
up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters
abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass
like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would
say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,
sometimes,--Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring
has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their
country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one
unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all
the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,--while
his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides
being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,--he who knows nothing
about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows
nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he
knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head
in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest
that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.
I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more
definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the
insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,--a discovery that
there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our
philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot
_know_ in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely
and with impunity in the face of the sun: Ὡς τὶ νοῶν, οὐ κεῖνον νοήσεις,
"You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing," say the
Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which
we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our
convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate
discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not
know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist,--and
with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who
takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of
his relation to the lawmaker. "That is active duty," says the Vishnu
Purana, "which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for
our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other
knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist."

       *       *       *       *       *

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories,
how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we
have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly,
though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,--though it be with
struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It
would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of
this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to have
been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a
kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not
contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a
good deal more to live for, aye, and to die for, than they have
commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is
walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his
hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and
the cars return.

     "Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
     And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
     Traveler of the windy glens,
     Why hast thou left my ear so soon?"

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few
are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men
appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than
the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of
the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape
there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world
Κόσμος, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and
we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border
life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and
transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state
into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.
Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a
will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon
nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality
so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The
walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town
sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their
owners' deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the
actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the
word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have
myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still
as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade
from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter
painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are
commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

       *       *       *       *       *

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the
setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its
golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble
hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and
shining family had settled there in that part of the land called
Concord, unknown to me,--to whom the sun was servant,--who had not
gone into society in the village,--who had not been called on. I saw
their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in
Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as
they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew
through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed
hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have
sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which
leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,
as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected
skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their
neighbor,--notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team
through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives.
Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines
and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no
politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they
were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and
hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of
a distant hive in May,--which perchance was the sound of their
thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see
their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences
embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of
my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and
recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to
recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I
should move out of Concord.

       *       *       *       *       *

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons
visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it
would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to
year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold to feed
unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill,--and there is scarcely
a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with
us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across
the landscape of the mind, cast by the _wings_ of some thought in its
vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect
the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to
poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and
Cochin-China grandeur. Those _gra-a-ate thoughts_, those _gra-a-ate
men_ you hear of!

       *       *       *       *       *

We hug the earth,--how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate
ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my
account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top
of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for
I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen
before,--so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have
walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and
yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I
discovered around me,--it was near the end of June,--on the ends of
the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like
blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I
carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to
stranger jurymen who walked the streets,--for it was court week,--and
to farmers and lumber-dealers and woodchoppers and hunters, and not
one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star
dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the
tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts!
Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest
only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved by them. We
see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines
have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the
wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature's red
children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the
land has ever seen them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed
over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in
remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in
every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly
reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments
and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time
than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer
testament,--the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen
astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is
is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression
of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the
world,--healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the
Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no
fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many
times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all
plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter,
but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in
doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on
a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a
cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us
well, at any rate,"--and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

       *       *       *       *       *

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a
meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before
setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the
horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry
grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the
leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched
long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its
beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment
before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was
wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this
was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it
would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and
cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more
glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with
all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance
as it has never set before,--where there is but a solitary marsh hawk
to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his
cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the
marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying
stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered
grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never
bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The
west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of
Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman
driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine
more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our
minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening
light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.




AUTUMNAL TINTS


Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our
autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English
poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. The
most that Thomson says on this subject in his "Autumn" is contained in
the lines,--

     "But see the fading many-colored woods
     Shade deepening over shade, the country round
     Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun,
     Of every hue, from wan declining green
     To sooty dark;"

and in the line in which he speaks of

     "Autumn beaming o'er the yellow woods."

The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our
own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry.

A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never
chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this,
the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding
with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most
brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not believe that
there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon
before. Not only many in our towns have never witnessed it, but it is
scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.

Most appear to confound changed leaves with withered ones, as if they
were to confound ripe apples with rotten ones. I think that the change
to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a
late and perfect maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits. It is
generally the lowest and oldest leaves which change first. But as the
perfect-winged and usually bright-colored insect is short-lived, so
the leaves ripen but to fall.

Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it
commences a more independent and individual existence, requiring less
nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth
through its stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. So
do leaves. The physiologist says it is "due to an increased absorption
of oxygen." That is the scientific account of the matter,--only a
reassertion of the fact. But I am more interested in the rosy cheek
than I am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on. The very
forest and herbage, the pellicle of the earth, must acquire a bright
color, an evidence of its ripeness,--as if the globe itself were a
fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the sun.

Flowers are but colored leaves, fruits but ripe ones. The edible part
of most fruits is, as the physiologist says, "the parenchyma or fleshy
tissue of the leaf," of which they are formed.

Our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its
phenomena, color, mellowness, and perfectness, to the fruits which we
eat, and we are wont to forget that an immense harvest which we do not
eat, hardly use at all, is annually ripened by Nature. At our annual
cattle-shows and horticultural exhibitions, we make, as we think, a
great show of fair fruits, destined, however, to a rather ignoble end,
fruits not valued for their beauty chiefly. But round about and within
our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely
grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone.

October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes
round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a
bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting.
October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

I formerly thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen
leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had
acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from
the green to the brown state, outline it, and copy its color exactly,
with paint, in a book, which should be entitled "October, or Autumnal
Tints,"--beginning with the earliest reddening woodbine and the lake
of radical leaves, and coming down through the maples, hickories, and
sumachs, and many beautifully freckled leaves less generally known, to
the latest oaks and aspens. What a memento such a book would be! You
would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the
autumn woods whenever you pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves
themselves, unfaded, it would be better still. I have made but little
progress toward such a book, but I have endeavored, instead, to
describe all these bright tints in the order in which they present
themselves. The following are some extracts from my notes.


THE PURPLE GRASSES

By the twentieth of August, everywhere in woods and swamps we are
reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted sarsaparilla leaves
and brakes, and the withering and blackened skunk-cabbage and
hellebore, and, by the riverside, the already blackening pontederia.

The purple grass (_Eragrostis pectinacea_) is now in the height of its
beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass particularly.
Standing on a hillside near our river, I saw, thirty or forty rods
off, a stripe of purple half a dozen rods long, under the edge of a
wood, where the ground sloped toward a meadow. It was as high-colored
and interesting, though not quite so bright, as the patches of rhexia,
being a darker purple, like a berry's stain laid on close and thick.
On going to and examining it, I found it to be a kind of grass in
bloom, hardly a foot high, with but few green blades, and a fine
spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish mist
trembling around me. Close at hand it appeared but a dull purple, and
made little impression on the eye; it was even difficult to detect;
and if you plucked a single plant, you were surprised to find how thin
it was, and how little color it had. But viewed at a distance in a
favorable light, it was of a fine lively purple, flower-like,
enriching the earth. Such puny causes combine to produce these decided
effects. I was the more surprised and charmed because grass is
commonly of a sober and humble color.

With its beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the
place, of the rhexia, which is now leaving off, and it is one of the
most interesting phenomena of August. The finest patches of it grow on
waste strips or selvages of land at the base of dry hills, just above
the edge of the meadows, where the greedy mower does not deign to
swing his scythe; for this is a thin and poor grass, beneath his
notice. Or, it may be, because it is so beautiful he does not know
that it exists; for the same eye does not see this and timothy. He
carefully gets the meadow-hay and the more nutritious grasses which
grow next to that, but he leaves this fine purple mist for the
walker's harvest,--fodder for his fancy stock. Higher up the hill,
perchance, grow also blackberries, John's-wort, and neglected,
withered, and wiry June-grass. How fortunate that it grows in such
places, and not in the midst of the rank grasses which are annually
cut! Nature thus keeps use and beauty distinct. I know many such
localities, where it does not fail to present itself annually, and
paint the earth with its blush. It grows on the gentle slopes, either
in a continuous patch or in scattered and rounded tufts a foot in
diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by the first smart frosts.

In most plants the corolla or calyx is the part which attains the
highest color, and is the most attractive; in many it is the
seed-vessel or fruit; in others, as the red maple, the leaves; and in
others still it is the very culm itself which is the principal flower
or blooming part.

The last is especially the case with the poke or garget (_Phytolacca
decandra_). Some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with
their purple stems now and early in September. They are as interesting
to me as most flowers, and one of the most important fruits of our
autumn. Every part is flower (or fruit), such is its superfluity of
color,--stem, branch, peduncle, pedicel, petiole, and even the at
length yellowish, purple-veined leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of
berries of various hues, from green to dark purple, six or seven
inches long, are gracefully drooping on all sides, offering repasts to
the birds; and even the sepals from which the birds have picked the
berries are a brilliant lake red, with crimson flame-like reflections,
equal to anything of the kind,--all on fire with ripeness. Hence the
_lacca_, from _lac_, lake. There are at the same time flower-buds,
flowers, green berries, dark-purple or ripe ones, and these
flower-like sepals, all on the same plant.

We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It
is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a
bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be
seen at this season of the year. On warm hillsides its stems are ripe
by the twenty-third of August. At that date I walked through a
beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, on the side of one of
our cliffs, where they ripen early. Quite to the ground they were a
deep, brilliant purple, with a bloom contrasting with the still clear
green leaves. It appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and
perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer. What a
perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life
concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature.
What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in
the midst of our decay, like the poke! I confess that it excites me to
behold them. I cut one for a cane, for I would fain handle and lean on
it. I love to press the berries between my fingers, and see their
juice staining my hand. To walk amid these upright, branching casks of
purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one
with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a
privilege! For Nature's vintage is not confined to the vine. Our poets
have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they
never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the
singers. Indeed, this has been called by some the American grape, and,
though a native of America, its juices are used in some foreign
countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may
be celebrating the virtues of the poke without knowing it. Here are
berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal
with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make,
to be used in such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend
the evening of the year musing amid the poke stems. And perchance amid
these groves might arise at last a new school of philosophy or poetry.
It lasts all through September.

At the same time with this, or near the end of August, a to me very
interesting genus of grasses, andropogons, or beard-grasses, is in its
prime: _Andropogon furcatus_, forked beard-grass, or call it
purple-fingered grass; _Andropogon scoparius_, purple wood-grass; and
_Andropogon_ (now called _Sorghum_) _nutans_, Indian-grass. The first
is a very tall and slender-culmed grass, three to seven feet high,
with four or five purple finger-like spikes raying upward from the
top. The second is also quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high
by one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, which, as the spikes
go out of bloom, have a whitish, fuzzy look. These two are prevailing
grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. The
culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple
tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have
the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer,
and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like
ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest.
Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves.
The farmer has long since done his upland haying, and he will not
condescend to bring his scythe to where these slender wild grasses
have at length flowered thinly; you often see spaces of bare sand amid
them. But I walk encouraged between the tufts of purple wood-grass
over the sandy fields, and along the edge of the shrub oaks, glad to
recognize these simple contemporaries. With thoughts cutting a broad
swathe I "get" them, with horse-raking thoughts I gather them into
windrows. The fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe.
These two were almost the first grasses that I learned to distinguish,
for I had not known by how many friends I was surrounded; I had seen
them simply as grasses standing. The purple of their culms also
excites me like that of the poke-weed stems.

Think what refuge there is for one, before August is over, from
college commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the
tufts of purple wood-grass on the borders of the "Great Fields."
Wherever I walk these afternoons, the purple-fingered grass also
stands like a guide-board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths
than they have lately traveled.

A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his
head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have
cut many tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to
his cattle for years. Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he
may be overcome by their beauty. Each humblest plant, or weed, as we
call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet
how long it stands in vain! I had walked over those Great Fields so
many Augusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these purple
companions that I had there. I had brushed against them and trodden on
them, forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and
blessed me. Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.
Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid. Who can doubt
that these grasses, which the farmer says are of no account to him,
find some compensation in your appreciation of them? I may say that I
never saw them before; though, when I came to look them face to face,
there did come down to me a purple gleam from previous years; and now,
wherever I go, I see hardly anything else. It is the reign and
presidency of the andropogons.

Almost the very sands confess the ripening influence of the August
sun, and methinks, together with the slender grasses waving over them,
reflect a purple tinge. The impurpled sands! Such is the consequence
of all this sunshine absorbed into the pores of plants and of the
earth. All sap or blood is now wine-colored. At last we have not only
the purple sea, but the purple land.

The chestnut beard-grass, Indian-grass, or wood-grass, growing here
and there in waste places, but more rare than the former (from two to
four or five feet high), is still handsomer and of more vivid colors
than its congeners, and might well have caught the Indian's eye. It
has a long, narrow, one-sided, and slightly nodding panicle of bright
purple and yellow flowers, like a banner raised above its reedy
leaves. These bright standards are now advanced on the distant
hillsides, not in large armies, but in scattered troops or single
file, like the red men. They stand thus fair and bright,
representative of the race which they are named after, but for the
most part unobserved as they. The expression of this grass haunted me
for a week, after I first passed and noticed it, like the glance of an
eye. It stands like an Indian chief taking a last look at his favorite
hunting-grounds.


THE RED MAPLE

By the twenty-fifth of September, the red maples generally are
beginning to be ripe. Some large ones have been conspicuously changing
for a week, and some single trees are now very brilliant. I notice a
small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green woodside
there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer,
and more conspicuous. I have observed this tree for several autumns
invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens
its fruit earlier than another. It might serve to mark the season,
perhaps. I should be sorry if it were cut down. I know of two or three
such trees in different parts of our town, which might, perhaps, be
propagated from, as early ripeners or September trees, and their seed
be advertised in the market, as well as that of radishes, if we cared
as much about them.

At present these burning bushes stand chiefly along the edge of the
meadows, or I distinguish them afar on the hillsides here and there.
Sometimes you will see many small ones in a swamp turned quite crimson
when all other trees around are still perfectly green, and the former
appear so much the brighter for it. They take you by surprise, as you
are going by on one side, across the fields, thus early in the season,
as if it were some gay encampment of the red men, or other foresters,
of whose arrival you had not heard.

Some single trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen against others of their
kind still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more memorable
than whole groves will be by and by. How beautiful, when a whole tree
is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from
lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward
the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape?
Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon
occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity,
and get into the mythology at last.

The whole tree thus ripening in advance of its fellows attains a
singular preëminence, and sometimes maintains it for a week or two. I
am thrilled at the sight of it, bearing aloft its scarlet standard for
the regiment of green-clad foresters around, and I go half a mile out
of my way to examine it. A single tree becomes thus the crowning
beauty of some meadowy vale, and the expression of the whole
surrounding forest is at once more spirited for it.

A small red maple has grown, perchance, far away at the head of some
retired valley, a mile from any road, unobserved. It has faithfully
discharged the duties of a maple there, all winter and summer,
neglected none of its economies, but added to its stature in the
virtue which belongs to a maple, by a steady growth for so many
months, never having gone gadding abroad, and is nearer heaven than it
was in the spring. It has faithfully husbanded its sap, and afforded a
shelter to the wandering bird, has long since ripened its seeds and
committed them to the winds, and has the satisfaction of knowing,
perhaps, that a thousand little well-behaved maples are already
settled in life somewhere. It deserves well of Mapledom. Its leaves
have been asking it from time to time, in a whisper, "When shall we
redden?" And now, in this month of September, this month of traveling,
when men are hastening to the seaside, or the mountains, or the lakes,
this modest maple, still without budging an inch, travels in its
reputation,--runs up its scarlet flag on that hillside, which shows
that it has finished its summer's work before all other trees, and
withdraws from the contest. At the eleventh hour of the year, the
tree which no scrutiny could have detected here when it was most
industrious is thus, by the tint of its maturity, by its very blushes,
revealed at last to the careless and distant traveler, and leads his
thoughts away from the dusty road into those brave solitudes which it
inhabits. It flashes out conspicuous with all the virtue and beauty of
a maple,--_Acer rubrum_. We may now read its title, or _rubric_,
clear. Its _virtues_, not its sins, are as scarlet.

Notwithstanding the red maple is the most intense scarlet of any of
our trees, the sugar maple has been the most celebrated, and Michaux
in his "Sylva" does not speak of the autumnal color of the former.
About the second of October, these trees, both large and small, are
most brilliant, though many are still green. In "sprout-lands" they
seem to vie with one another, and ever some particular one in the
midst of the crowd will be of a peculiarly pure scarlet, and by its
more intense color attract our eye even at a distance, and carry off
the palm. A large red maple swamp, when at the height of its change,
is the most obviously brilliant of all tangible things, where I dwell,
so abundant is this tree with us. It varies much both in form and
color. A great many are merely yellow; more, scarlet; others, scarlet
deepening into crimson, more red than common. Look at yonder swamp of
maples mixed with pines, at the base of a pine-clad hill, a quarter of
a mile off, so that you get the full effect of the bright colors,
without detecting the imperfections of the leaves, and see their
yellow, scarlet, and crimson fires, of all tints, mingled and
contrasted with the green. Some maples are yet green, only yellow or
crimson-tipped on the edges of their flakes, like the edges of a
hazelnut bur; some are wholly brilliant scarlet, raying out regularly
and finely every way, bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf; others,
of more irregular form, when I turn my head slightly, emptying out
some of its earthiness and concealing the trunk of the tree, seem to
rest heavily flake on flake, like yellow and scarlet clouds, wreath
upon wreath, or like snow-drifts driving through the air, stratified
by the wind. It adds greatly to the beauty of such a swamp at this
season, that, even though there may be no other trees interspersed, it
is not seen as a simple mass of color, but, different trees being of
different colors and hues, the outline of each crescent treetop is
distinct, and where one laps on to another. Yet a painter would hardly
venture to make them thus distinct a quarter of a mile off.

As I go across a meadow directly toward a low rising ground this
bright afternoon, I see, some fifty rods off toward the sun, the top
of a maple swamp just appearing over the sheeny russet edge of the
hill, a stripe apparently twenty rods long by ten feet deep, of the
most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange, and yellow, equal to any
flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted. As I advance, lowering
the edge of the hill which makes the firm foreground or lower frame of
the picture, the depth of the brilliant grove revealed steadily
increases, suggesting that the whole of the inclosed valley is filled
with such color. One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the
town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and
exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. I do not
see what the Puritans did at this season, when the maples blaze out in
scarlet. They certainly could not have worshiped in groves then.
Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round
with horse-sheds for.


THE ELM

Now too, the first of October, or later, the elms are at the height of
their autumnal beauty,--great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their
September oven, hanging over the highway. Their leaves are perfectly
ripe. I wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the
men who live beneath them. As I look down our street, which is lined
with them, they remind me both by their form and color of yellowing
sheaves of grain, as if the harvest had indeed come to the village
itself, and we might expect to find some maturity and _flavor_ in the
thoughts of the villagers at last. Under those bright rustling yellow
piles just ready to fall on the heads of the walkers, how can any
crudity or greenness of thought or act prevail? When I stand where
half a dozen large elms droop over a house, it is as if I stood within
a ripe pumpkin-rind, and I feel as mellow as if I were the pulp,
though I may be somewhat stringy and seedy withal. What is the late
greenness of the English elm, like a cucumber out of season, which
does not know when to have done, compared with the early and golden
maturity of the American tree? The street is the scene of a great
harvest-home. It would be worth the while to set out these trees, if
only for their autumnal value. Think of these great yellow canopies
or parasols held over our heads and houses by the mile together,
making the village all one and compact,--an _ulmarium_, which is at
the same time a nursery of men! And then how gently and unobserved
they drop their burden and let in the sun when it is wanted, their
leaves not heard when they fall on our roofs and in our streets; and
thus the village parasol is shut up and put away! I see the market-man
driving into the village, and disappearing under its canopy of
elm-tops, with _his_ crop, as into a great granary or barn-yard. I am
tempted to go thither as to a husking of thoughts, now dry and ripe,
and ready to be separated from their integuments; but, alas! I foresee
that it will be chiefly husks and little thought, blasted pig-corn,
fit only for cob-meal,--for, as you sow, so shall you reap.


FALLEN LEAVES

By the sixth of October the leaves generally begin to fall, in
successive showers, after frost or rain; but the principal
leaf-harvest, the acme of the _Fall_, is commonly about the sixteenth.
Some morning at that date there is perhaps a harder frost than we have
seen, and ice formed under the pump, and now, when the morning wind
rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. They suddenly
form thick beds or carpets on the ground, in this gentle air, or even
without wind, just the size and form of the tree above. Some trees, as
small hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously,
as a soldier grounds arms at a signal; and those of the hickory,
being bright yellow still, though withered, reflect a blaze of light
from the ground where they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at
the first earnest touch of autumn's wand, making a sound like rain.

Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a
fall of leaves there has been in the night, though it may not yet be
the touch that loosens the rock maple leaf. The streets are thickly
strewn with the trophies, and fallen elm leaves make a dark brown
pavement under our feet. After some remarkably warm Indian-summer day
or days, I perceive that it is the unusual heat which, more than
anything, causes the leaves to fall, there having been, perhaps, no
frost nor rain for some time. The intense heat suddenly ripens and
wilts them, just as it softens and ripens peaches and other fruits,
and causes them to drop.

The leaves of late red maples, still bright, strew the earth, often
crimson-spotted on a yellow ground, like some wild apples,--though
they preserve these bright colors on the ground but a day or two,
especially if it rains. On causeways I go by trees here and there all
bare and smoke-like, having lost their brilliant clothing; but there
it lies, nearly as bright as ever, on the ground on one side, and
making nearly as regular a figure as lately on the tree. I would
rather say that I first observe the trees thus flat on the ground like
a permanent colored shadow, and they suggest to look for the boughs
that bore them. A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant
trees have spread their bright cloaks in the mud. I see wagons roll
over them as a shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just
as little as they did their shadows before.

Birds' nests, in the huckleberry and other shrubs, and in trees, are
already being filled with the withered leaves. So many have fallen in
the woods that a squirrel cannot run after a falling nut without being
heard. Boys are raking them in the streets, if only for the pleasure
of dealing with such clean, crisp substances. Some sweep the paths
scrupulously neat, and then stand to see the next breath strew them
with new trophies. The swamp floor is thickly covered, and the
_Lycopodium lucidulum_ looks suddenly greener amid them. In dense
woods they half cover pools that are three or four rods long. The
other day I could hardly find a well-known spring, and even suspected
that it had dried up, for it was completely concealed by freshly
fallen leaves; and when I swept them aside and revealed it, it was
like striking the earth, with Aaron's rod, for a new spring. Wet
grounds about the edges of swamps look dry with them. At one swamp,
where I was surveying, thinking to step on a leafy shore from a rail,
I got into the water more than a foot deep.

When I go to the river the day after the principal fall of leaves, the
sixteenth, I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with the
leaves of the golden willow under which it is moored, and I set sail
with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I empty it, it will be
full again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out,
but accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my
carriage. When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is
wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it
were getting out to sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a
little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the
water for a rod in width, under and amid the alders, button-bushes,
and maples, still perfectly light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and
at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind,
they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river.
When I turn my prow that way, and the wave which it makes strikes
them, list what a pleasant rustling from these dry substances getting
on one another! Often it is their undulation only which reveals the
water beneath them. Also every motion of the wood turtle on the shore
is betrayed by their rustling there. Or even in mid-channel, when the
wind rises, I hear them blown with a rustling sound. Higher up they
are slowly moving round and round in some great eddy which the river
makes, as that at the "Leaning Hemlocks," where the water is deep, and
the current is wearing into the bank.

Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly
calm and full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream,
and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove, where I unexpectedly
find myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers,
which seem to have the same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself.
See this great fleet of scattered leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in
this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's
skill, each nerve a stiff spruce knee,--like boats of hide, and of all
patterns,--Charon's boat probably among the rest,--and some with
lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients,
scarcely moving in the sluggish current,--like the great fleets, the
dense Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering some
great mart, some New York or Canton, which we are all steadily
approaching together. How gently each has been deposited on the water!
No violence has been used towards them yet, though, perchance,
palpitating hearts were present at the launching. And painted ducks,
too, the splendid wood duck among the rest, often come to sail and
float amid the painted leaves,--barks of a nobler model still!

What wholesome herb drinks are to be had in the swamps now! What
strong medicinal but rich scents from the decaying leaves! The rain
falling on the freshly dried herbs and leaves, and filling the pools
and ditches into which they have dropped thus clean and rigid, will
soon convert them into tea,--green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of
all degrees of strength, enough to set all Nature a-gossiping. Whether
we drink them or not, as yet, before their strength is drawn, these
leaves, dried on great Nature's coppers, are of such various pure and
delicate tints as might make the fame of Oriental teas.

How they are mixed up, of all species, oak and maple and chestnut and
birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect
husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus
annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is
the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth
with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting.
They are about to add a leaf's thickness to the depth of the soil.
This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I
chaffer with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the
cost of carting. We are all the richer for their decay. I am more
interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in the
corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future corn-fields and forests,
on which the earth fattens. It keeps our homestead in good heart.

For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not
merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that
we know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing maple,
the poison sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry ash, the
rich chrome yellow of the poplars, the brilliant red huckleberry, with
which the hills' backs are painted, like those of sheep. The frost
touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or
jarring of earth's axle, see in what showers they come floating down!
The ground is all parti-colored with them. But they still live in the
soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that
spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years,
by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees; and the
sapling's first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its
crown, when, in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest.

It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and
rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently
lay themselves down and turn to mould!--painted of a thousand hues,
and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last
resting-place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily
they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot,
ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about
it,--some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering
beneath, and meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they
rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how
contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to
lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new
generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach
us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with
their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as
ripe,--with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as
they do their hair and nails.

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk
in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no
lying nor vain epitaphs. What though you own no lot at Mount Auburn?
Your lot is surely cast somewhere in this vast cemetery, which has
been consecrated from of old. You need attend no auction to secure a
place. There is room enough here. The loosestrife shall bloom and the
huckleberry-bird sing over your bones. The woodman and hunter shall be
your sextons, and the children shall tread upon the borders as much as
they will. Let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves; this is your
true Greenwood Cemetery.


  [Illustration: _Fallen Leaves_]

THE SUGAR MAPLE

But think not that the splendor of the year is over; for as one leaf
does not make a summer, neither does one falling leaf make an autumn.
The smallest sugar maples in our streets make a great show as early as
the fifth of October, more than any other trees there. As I look up
the main street, they appear like painted screens standing before the
houses; yet many are green. But now, or generally by the seventeenth
of October, when almost all red maples and some white maples are bare,
the large sugar maples also are in their glory, glowing with yellow
and red, and show unexpectedly bright and delicate tints. They are
remarkable for the contrast they often afford of deep blushing red on
one half and green on the other. They become at length dense masses of
rich yellow with a deep scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the
exposed surfaces. They are the brightest trees now in the street.

The large ones on our Common are particularly beautiful. A delicate
but warmer than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with
scarlet cheeks. Yet, standing on the east side of the Common just
before sundown, when the western light is transmitted through them, I
see that their yellow even, compared with the pale lemon yellow of an
elm close by, amounts to a scarlet, without noticing the bright
scarlet portions. Generally, they are great regular oval masses of
yellow and scarlet. All the sunny warmth of the season, the Indian
summer, seems to be absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and inmost
leaves next the bole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and
green, like the complexion of young men brought up in the house. There
is an auction on the Common to-day, but its red flag is hard to be
discerned amid this blaze of color.

Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success,
when they caused to be imported from farther in the country some
straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called sugar
maples; and, as I remember, after they were set out, a neighboring
merchant's clerk, by way of jest, planted beans about them. Those
which were then jestingly called bean-poles are to-day far the most
beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth all and
more than they have cost,--though one of the selectmen, while setting
them out, took the cold which occasioned his death,--if only because
they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color
unstintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask them to yield us sugar
in the spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn.
Wealth indoors may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally
distributed on the Common. All children alike can revel in this golden
harvest.

Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October
splendor, though I doubt whether this is ever considered by the "Tree
Society." Do you not think it will make some odds to these children
that they were brought up under the maples? Hundreds of eyes are
steadily drinking in this color, and by these teachers even the
truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad. Indeed,
neither the truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the
schools. These are instead of the bright colors in apothecaries'
shops and city windows. It is a pity that we have no more _red_
maples, and some hickories, in our streets as well. Our paint-box is
very imperfectly filled. Instead of, or beside, supplying such
paint-boxes as we do, we might supply these natural colors to the
young. Where else will they study color under greater advantages? What
School of Design can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of
painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and
paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these
autumnal colors. The stationer's envelopes may be of very various
tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. If
you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have
only to look farther within or without the tree or the wood. These
leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they
are dyed in light of infinitely various degrees of strength and left
to set and dry there.

Shall the names of so many of our colors continue to be derived from
those of obscure foreign localities, as Naples yellow, Prussian blue,
raw Sienna, burnt Umber, Gamboge? (surely the Tyrian purple must have
faded by this time), or from comparatively trivial articles of
commerce,--chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinnamon, claret? (shall we
compare our hickory to a lemon, or a lemon to a hickory?) or from ores
and oxides which few ever see? Shall we so often, when describing to
our neighbors the color of something we have seen, refer them, not to
some natural object in our neighborhood, but perchance to a bit of
earth fetched from the other side of the planet, which possibly they
may find at the apothecary's, but which probably neither they nor we
ever saw? Have we not an _earth_ under our feet,--aye, and a sky over
our heads? Or is the last _all_ ultramarine? What do we know of
sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, amber, and the like,--most of us
who take these names in vain? Leave these precious words to
cabinet-keepers, virtuosos, and maids-of-honor,--to the Nabobs,
Begums, and Chobdars of Hindostan, or wherever else. I do not see why,
since America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves
should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors;
and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the names of some of our
trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular
chromatic nomenclature.

But of much more importance than a knowledge of the names and
distinctions of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored
leaves excite. Already these brilliant trees throughout the street,
without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and
holiday, or a week of such. These are cheap and innocent gala-days,
celebrated by one and all without the aid of committees or marshals,
such a show as may safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers or
rum-sellers, not requiring any special police to keep the peace. And
poor indeed must be that New England village's October which has not
the maple in its streets. This October festival costs no powder, nor
ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a
thousand bright flags are waving.

No wonder that we must have our annual cattle-show, and fall training,
and perhaps cornwallis, our September courts, and the like. Nature
herself holds her annual fair in October, not only in the streets, but
in every hollow and on every hillside. When lately we looked into that
red maple swamp all ablaze, where the trees were clothed in their
vestures of most dazzling tints, did it not suggest a thousand gypsies
beneath,--a race capable of wild delight,--or even the fabled fauns,
satyrs, and wood-nymphs come back to earth? Or was it only a
congregation of wearied woodchoppers, or of proprietors come to
inspect their lots, that we thought of? Or, earlier still, when we
paddled on the river through that fine-grained September air, did
there not appear to be something new going on under the sparkling
surface of the stream, a shaking of props, at least, so that we made
haste in order to be up in time? Did not the rows of yellowing willows
and button-bushes on each side seem like rows of booths, under which,
perhaps, some fluviatile egg-pop equally yellow was effervescing? Did
not all these suggest that man's spirits should rise as high as
Nature's,--should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be
interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity?

No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its
scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the
annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let
them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,--flags of all
her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can
read,--while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms. Leave it
to Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring
States or not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can
understand them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her woodbine flag!
What public-spirited merchant, think you, has contributed this part of
the show? There is no handsomer shingling and paint than this vine, at
present covering a whole side of some houses. I do not believe that
the ivy _never sere_ is comparable to it. No wonder it has been
extensively introduced into London. Let us have a good many maples and
hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty
roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can
display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark
the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village
that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw
loose, an essential part is wanting. Let us have willows for spring,
elms for summer, maples and walnuts and tupeloes for autumn,
evergreens for winter, and oaks for all seasons. What is a gallery in
a house to a gallery in the streets, which every market-man rides
through, whether he will or not? Of course, there is not a
picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as
is the western view at sunset under the elms of our main street. They
are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them. An
avenue of elms as large as our largest and three miles long would seem
to lead to some admirable place, though only C---- were at the end of
it.

A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering
prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two
villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of
October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a
single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the
latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the
most desperate drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone
will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their
barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look
to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most
barren and forlorn doctrine,--as that the world is speedily coming to
an end, or has already got to it, or that they themselves are turned
wrong side outward. They will perchance crack their dry joints at one
another and call it a spiritual communication.

But to confine ourselves to the maples. What if we were to take half
as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out,--not
stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia stems?

What meant the fathers by establishing this _perfectly living_
institution before the church,--this institution which needs no
repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired
by its growth? Surely they

     "Wrought in a sad sincerity;
     Themselves from God they could not free;
     They _planted_ better than they knew;--
     The conscious _trees_ to beauty grew."

Verily these maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which
preach their half-century, and century, aye, and century-and-a-half
sermons, with constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering
to many generations of men; and the least we can do is to supply them
with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm.


THE SCARLET OAK

Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful form of its
leaves, I suspect that some scarlet oak leaves surpass those of all
other oaks in the rich and wild beauty of their outlines. I judge from
an acquaintance with twelve species, and from drawings which I have
seen of many others.

Stand under this tree and see how finely its leaves are cut against
the sky,--as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a midrib.
They look like double, treble, or quadruple crosses. They are far more
ethereal than the less deeply scalloped oak leaves. They have so
little leafy _terra firma_ that they appear melting away in the light,
and scarcely obstruct our view. The leaves of very young plants are,
like those of full-grown oaks of other species, more entire, simple,
and lumpish in their outlines, but these, raised high on old trees,
have solved the leafy problem. Lifted higher and higher, and
sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and cultivating
more intimacy with the light each year, they have at length the least
possible amount of earthy matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of
skyey influences. There they dance, arm in arm with the
light,--tripping it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial
halls. So intimately mingled are they with it, that, what with their
slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at last
what in the dance is leaf and what is light. And when no zephyr stirs,
they are at most but a rich tracery to the forest windows.

I am again struck with their beauty, when, a month later, they thickly
strew the ground in the woods, piled one upon another under my feet.
They are then brown above, but purple beneath. With their narrow lobes
and their bold, deep scallops reaching almost to the middle, they
suggest that the material must be cheap, or else there has been a
lavish expense in their creation, as if so much had been cut out. Or
else they seem to us the remnants of the stuff out of which leaves
have been cut with a die. Indeed, when they lie thus one upon another,
they remind me of a pile of scrap-tin.

Or bring one home, and study it closely at your leisure, by the
fireside. It is a type, not from any Oxford font, not in the Basque
nor the arrow-headed character, not found on the Rosetta Stone, but
destined to be copied in sculpture one day, if they ever get to
whittling stone here. What a wild and pleasing outline, a combination
of graceful curves and angles! The eye rests with equal delight on
what is not leaf and on what is leaf,--on the broad, free, open
sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple oval
outline would include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf;
but how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep
scallops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed! If
I were a drawing-master, I would set my pupils to copying these
leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully.

Regarded as water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded
promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each side,
while its watery bays extend far inland, like sharp friths, at each of
whose heads several fine streams empty in,--almost a leafy
archipelago.

But it oftener suggests land, and, as Dionysius and Pliny compared the
form of the Morea to that of the leaf of the Oriental plane tree, so
this leaf reminds me of some fair wild island in the ocean, whose
extensive coast, alternate rounded bays with smooth strands, and
sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habitation of
man, and destined to become a centre of civilization at last. To the
sailor's eye, it is a much indented shore. Is it not, in fact, a shore
to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats? At sight of this
leaf we are all mariners,--if not vikings, buccaneers, and
filibusters. Both our love of repose and our spirit of adventure are
addressed. In our most casual glance, perchance, we think that if we
succeed in doubling those sharp capes we shall find deep, smooth, and
secure havens in the ample bays. How different from the white oak
leaf, with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be
placed! That is an England, with its long civil history, that may be
read. This is some still unsettled New-found Island or Celebes. Shall
we go and be rajahs there?

By the twenty-sixth of October the large scarlet oaks are in their
prime, when other oaks are usually withered. They have been kindling
their fires for a week past, and now generally burst into a blaze.
This alone of _our_ indigenous deciduous trees (excepting the
dogwood, of which I do not know half a dozen, and they are but large
bushes) is now in its glory. The two aspens and the sugar maple come
nearest to it in date, but they have lost the greater part of their
leaves. Of evergreens, only the pitch pine is still commonly bright.

But it requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these
phenomena, to appreciate the wide-spread, but late and unexpected
glory of the scarlet oaks. I do not speak here of the small trees and
shrubs, which are commonly observed, and which are now withered, but
of the large trees. Most go in and shut their doors, thinking that
bleak and colorless November has already come, when some of the most
brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit.

This very perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in
an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now,
the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark-scarlet,--every
leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet
dye. The whole tree is much like a heart in form, as well as color.
Was not this worth waiting for? Little did you think, ten days ago,
that that cold green tree would assume such color as this. Its leaves
are still firmly attached, while those of other trees are falling
around it. It seems to say: "I am the last to blush, but I blush
deeper than any of ye. I bring up the rear in my red coat. We scarlet
ones, alone of oaks, have not given up the fight."

The sap is now, and even far into November, frequently flowing fast in
these trees, as in maples in the spring; and apparently their bright
tints, now that most other oaks are withered, are connected with this
phenomenon. They are full of life. It has a pleasantly astringent,
acorn-like taste, this strong oak wine, as I find on tapping them with
my knife.

Looking across this woodland valley, a quarter of a mile wide, how
rich those scarlet oaks embosomed in pines, their bright red branches
intimately intermingled with them! They have their full effect there.
The pine boughs are the green calyx to their red petals. Or, as we go
along a road in the woods, the sun striking endwise through it, and
lighting up the red tents of the oaks, which on each side are mingled
with the liquid green of the pines, makes a very gorgeous scene.
Indeed, without the evergreens for contrast, the autumnal tints would
lose much of their effect.

The scarlet oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late October
days. These bring out its colors. If the sun goes into a cloud they
become comparatively indistinct. As I sit on a cliff in the southwest
part of our town, the sun is now getting low, and the woods in
Lincoln, south and east of me, are lit up by its more level rays; and
in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, there is
brought out a more brilliant redness than I had believed was in them.
Every tree of this species which is visible in those directions, even
to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift
their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge
roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a
small grove of white pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the very verge
of the horizon, alternating with the pines on the edge of the grove,
and shouldering them with their red coats, look like soldiers in red
amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. Till the
sun got low, I did not believe that there were so many redcoats in the
forest army. Theirs is an intense, burning red, which would lose some
of its strength, methinks, with every step you might take toward them;
for the shade that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at
this distance, and they are unanimously red. The focus of their
reflected color is in the atmosphere far on this side. Every such tree
becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where, with the declining sun,
that color grows and glows. It is partly borrowed fire, gathering
strength from the sun on its way to your eye. It has only some
comparatively dull red leaves for a rallying-point, or kindling-stuff,
to start it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire,
which finds fuel for itself in the very atmosphere. So vivacious is
redness. The very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season.
You see a redder tree than exists.

If you wish to count the scarlet oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand
thus on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and
every one within range of your vision, excepting in the west, will be
revealed. You might live to the age of Methuselah and never find a
tithe of them, otherwise. Yet sometimes even in a dark day I have
thought them as bright as I ever saw them. Looking westward, their
colors are lost in a blaze of light; but in other directions the whole
forest is a flower-garden, in which these late roses burn, alternating
with green, while the so-called "gardeners," walking here and there,
perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, see only a few little
asters amid withered leaves.

These are _my_ China-asters, _my_ late garden-flowers. It costs me
nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are
protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen,
and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your
yard. We have only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole
forest as a garden. The blossoming of the scarlet oak,--the
forest-flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)!
I do not know but they interest me more than the maples, they are so
widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy,
a nobler tree on the whole; our chief November flower, abiding the
approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to early November
prospects. It is remarkable that the latest bright color that is
general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, the intensest of
colors. The ripest fruit of the year; like the cheek of a hard, glossy
red apple, from the cold Isle of Orleans, which will not be mellow for
eating till next spring! When I rise to a hilltop, a thousand of these
great oak roses, distributed on every side, as far as the horizon! I
admire them four or five miles off! This my unfailing prospect for a
fortnight past! This late forest-flower surpasses all that spring or
summer could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty specks
comparatively (created for the near-sighted, who walk amid the
humblest herbs and underwoods), and made no impression on a distant
eye. Now it is an extended forest or a mountain-side, through or along
which we journey from day to day, that bursts into bloom.
Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale,--the gardener still
nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters
and roses which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his
care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up
against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views,
walk in the great garden; not skulk in a little "debauched" nook of
it? consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few
impounded herbs?

Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If,
about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our
town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may
see--well, what I have endeavored to describe. All this you surely
_will_ see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,--if you
_look_ for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is,
whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, you will think for
threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sere
and brown. Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because
they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not
bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see
in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize
how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The
greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed
from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden.
Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand.
Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much
beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to
appreciate,--not a grain more. The actual objects which one man will
see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which
another will see as the beholders are different. The scarlet oak must,
in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see anything
until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our
heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical
rambles I find that, first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my
thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this locality,--no nearer
than Hudson's Bay,--and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it,
and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length I surely see it. This
is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I
could name. A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in
the study of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks.
He, as it were, tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most
sees only their shadows. I have found that it required a different
intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different plants,
even when they were closely allied, as _Juncaceae_ and _Gramineae_:
when I was looking for the former, I did not see the latter in the
midst of them. How much more, then, it requires different intentions
of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of
knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at
objects!

Take a New England selectman, and set him on the highest of our hills,
and tell him to look,--sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting
on the glasses that suit him best (aye, using a spy-glass, if he
likes),--and make a full report. What, probably, will he _spy_?--what
will he _select_ to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre
of himself. He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and,
perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is, since
he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius Cæsar, or Emanuel
Swedenborg, or a Fiji-Islander, and set him up there. Or suppose all
together, and let them compare notes afterward. Will it appear that
they have enjoyed the same prospect? What they will see will be as
different as Rome was from heaven or hell, or the last from the Fiji
Islands. For aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always
at our elbow.

Why, it takes a sharpshooter to bring down even such trivial game as
snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what
he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at
random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so
is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky
falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons
and haunts, and the color of its wing,--if he has not dreamed of it,
so that he can _anticipate_ it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every
step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in
corn-fields. The sportsman trains himself, dresses, and watches
unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. He prays
for it, and offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. After due and long
preparation, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and asleep,
with gun and paddle and boat, he goes out after meadow-hens, which
most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, and paddles for miles
against a head wind, and wades in water up to his knees, being out all
day without his dinner, and _therefore_ he gets them. He had them
half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them
down. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his
windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? It comes and perches at
last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it
_with the feathers on_. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and
honk when they get there, and he will keep himself supplied by firing
up his chimney; twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of his
traps before it is empty. If he lives, and his game spirit increases,
heaven and earth shall fail him sooner than game; and when he dies, he
will go to more extensive and, perchance, happier hunting-grounds. The
fisherman, too, dreams of fish, sees a bobbing cork in his dreams,
till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. I knew a girl who,
being sent to pick huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by the
quart, where no one else knew that there were any, because she was
accustomed to pick them up-country where she came from. The astronomer
knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind
before any have seen it with a glass. The hen scratches and finds her
food right under where she stands; but such is not the way with the
hawk.

       *       *       *       *       *

These bright leaves which I have mentioned are not the exception, but
the rule; for I believe that all leaves, even grasses and mosses,
acquire brighter colors just before their fall. When you come to
observe faithfully the changes of each humblest plant, you find that
each has, sooner or later, its peculiar autumnal tint; and if you
undertake to make a complete list of the bright tints, it will be
nearly as long as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.




WILD APPLES

THE HISTORY OF THE APPLE TREE


It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is
connected with that of man. The geologist tells us that the order of
the _Rosaceae_, which includes the apple, also the true grasses, and
the _Labiatae_, or mints, were introduced only a short time previous
to the appearance of man on the globe.

It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown
primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of
the Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of Rome, so
old that they had no metallic implements. An entire black and
shriveled crab-apple has been recovered from their stores.

Tacitus says of the ancient Germans that they satisfied their hunger
with wild apples (_agrestia poma_), among other things.

Niebuhr observes that "the words for a house, a field, a plow,
plowing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to
agriculture and the gentler way of life, agree in Latin and Greek,
while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase
are utterly alien from the Greek." Thus the apple tree may be
considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive.

The apple was early so important, and generally distributed, that its
name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general.
Μῆλον, in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a
sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general.

The apple tree has been celebrated by the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and
Scandinavians. Some have thought that the first human pair were
tempted by its fruit. Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it,
dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it.

The tree is mentioned in at least three places in the Old Testament,
and its fruit in two or three more. Solomon sings, "As the apple-tree
among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons." And
again, "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples." The noblest
part of man's noblest feature is named from this fruit, "the apple of
the eye."

The apple tree is also mentioned by Homer and Herodotus. Ulysses saw
in the glorious garden of Alcinoûs "pears and pomegranates, and apple
trees bearing beautiful fruit" (καὶ μηλέαι ἀγλαόκαρποι). And according
to Homer, apples were among the fruits which Tantalus could not pluck,
the wind ever blowing their boughs away from him. Theophrastus knew and
described the apple tree as a botanist.

According to the Prose Edda, "Iduna keeps in a box the apples which
the gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste of to
become young again. It is in this manner that they will be kept in
renovated youth until Ragnarôk" (or the destruction of the gods).

I learn from Loudon that "the ancient Welsh bards were rewarded for
excelling in song by the token of the apple-spray;" and "in the
Highlands of Scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the clan Lamont."

The apple tree (_Pyrus malus_) belongs chiefly to the northern
temperate zone. Loudon says that "it grows spontaneously in every part
of Europe except the frigid zone, and throughout Western Asia, China,
and Japan." We have also two or three varieties of the apple
indigenous in North America. The cultivated apple tree was first
introduced into this country by the earliest settlers, and is thought
to do as well or better here than anywhere else. Probably some of the
varieties which are now cultivated were first introduced into Britain
by the Romans.

Pliny, adopting the distinction of Theophrastus, says, "Of trees there
are some which are altogether wild (_sylvestres_), some more civilized
(_urbaniores_)." Theophrastus includes the apple among the last; and,
indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees. It is as
harmless as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valuable as flocks
and herds. It has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is
more humanized; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be
no longer traceable to its wild original? It migrates with man, like
the dog and horse and cow: first, perchance, from Greece to Italy,
thence to England, thence to America; and our Western emigrant is
still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the
apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his
load. At least a million apple trees are thus set farther westward
this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. Consider how the
Blossom Week, like the Sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the
prairies; for when man migrates, he carries with him not only his
birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sward, but his
orchard also.

The leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable food to many domestic
animals, as the cow, horse, sheep, and goat; and the fruit is sought
after by the first, as well as by the hog. Thus there appears to have
existed a natural alliance between these animals and this tree from
the first. "The fruit of the crab in the forests of France" is said to
be "a great resource for the wild boar."

Not only the Indian, but many indigenous insects, birds, and
quadrupeds, welcomed the apple tree to these shores. The tent
caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed,
and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry; and the
canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. As it
grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, kingbird, and many more
came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and
so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. It was an era
in the history of their race. The downy woodpecker found such a savory
morsel under its bark that he perforated it in a ring quite round the
tree, before he left it,--a thing which he had never done before, to
my knowledge. It did not take the partridge long to find out how sweet
its buds were, and every winter eve she flew, and still flies, from
the wood, to pluck them, much to the farmer's sorrow. The rabbit, too,
was not slow to learn the taste of its twigs and bark; and when the
fruit was ripe, the squirrel half rolled, half carried it to his hole;
and even the musquash crept up the bank from the brook at evening, and
greedily devoured it, until he had worn a path in the grass there; and
when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the jay were glad to taste
it occasionally. The owl crept into the first apple tree that became
hollow, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for
him; so, settling down into it, he has remained there ever since.

My theme being the Wild Apple, I will merely glance at some of the
seasons in the annual growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to
my special province.

The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's,
so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. The walker is
frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually
handsome one, whose blossoms are two-thirds expanded. How superior it
is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored
nor fragrant!

By the middle of July, green apples are so large as to remind us of
coddling, and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little
ones which fall stillborn, as it were,--Nature thus thinning them for
us. The Roman writer Palladius said, "If apples are inclined to fall
before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them."
Some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones
which we see placed, to be overgrown, in the forks of trees. They have
a saying in Suffolk, England,--

     "At Michaelmas time, or a little before,
     Half an apple goes to the core."

Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think
that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth
more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell
in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten,
along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the
road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona,--carrying
me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and
ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.

A week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens,
especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed
by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price,
and without robbing anybody.

There is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and
ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which
cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. No mortal has ever enjoyed
the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin
to taste its ambrosial qualities. For nectar and ambrosia are only
those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates
fail to perceive,--just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without
knowing it. When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair
and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on
between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the
other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it. Pliny says that
apples are the heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin to
sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. Our driver begins to lose
his load the moment he tries to transport them to where they do not
belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. Though he gets out
from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, I
see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to
heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going
to market. They are not apples, but pomace. Are not these still
Iduna's apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and
think you that they will let Loki or Thjassi carry them off to
Jötunheim, while they grow wrinkled and gray? No, for Ragnarök, or the
destruction of the gods, is not yet.

There is another thinning of the fruit, commonly near the end of
August or in September, when the ground is strewn with windfalls; and
this happens especially when high winds occur after rain. In some
orchards you may see fully three quarters of the whole crop on the
ground, lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet hard and
green, or, if it is a hillside, rolled far down the hill. However, it
is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. All the country over,
people are busy picking up the windfalls, and this will make them
cheap for early apple pies.

In October, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the
trees. I saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit
than I remember to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging
over the road. The branches were gracefully drooping with their
weight, like a barberry bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new
character. Even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect,
spread and drooped in all directions; and there were so many poles
supporting the lower ones that they looked like pictures of banyan
trees. As an old English manuscript says, "The mo appelen the tree
bereth the more sche boweth to the folk."

Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let the most beautiful or
the swiftest have it. That should be the "going" price of apples.

Between the 5th and 20th of October I see the barrels lie under the
trees. And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some choice
barrels to fulfill an order. He turns a specked one over many times
before he leaves it out. If I were to tell what is passing in my mind,
I should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he
rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave
it. Cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length I
see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees.

It would be well, if we accepted these gifts with more joy and
gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of
compost about the tree. Some old English customs are suggestive at
least. I find them described chiefly in Brand's "Popular Antiquities."
It appears that "on Christmas Eve the farmers and their men in
Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and
carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with
much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season." This
salutation consists in "throwing some of the cider about the roots of
the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches," and then,
"encircling one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink
the following toast three several times:--

       'Here's to thee, old apple tree,
     Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,
     And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
       Hats-full! caps-full!
       Bushel, bushel, sacks-full!
       And my pockets full, too! Hurra!'"

Also what was called "apple-howling" used to be practiced in various
counties of England on New Year's Eve. A troop of boys visited the
different orchards, and, encircling the apple trees, repeated the
following words:--

     "Stand fast, root! bear well, top!
     Pray God send us a good howling crop:
     Every twig, apples big;
     Every bough, apples enow!"

"They then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a
cow's horn. During this ceremony they rap the trees with their
sticks." This is called "wassailing" the trees, and is thought by some
to be "a relic of the heathen sacrifice to Pomona."

Herrick sings,--

     "Wassaile the trees that they may beare
     You many a plum and many a peare;
     For more or less fruits they will bring
     As you so give them wassailing."

Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine;
but it behooves them to sing better than English Phillips did, else
they will do no credit to their Muse.


THE WILD APPLE

So much for the more civilized apple trees (_urbaniores_, as Pliny
calls them). I love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted
apple trees, at what ever season of the year,--so irregularly planted:
sometimes two trees standing close together; and the rows so devious
that you would think that they not only had grown while the owner was
sleeping, but had been set out by him in a somnambulic state. The rows
of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these.
But I now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent
experience, such ravages have been made!

Some soils, like a rocky tract called the Easterbrooks Country in my
neighborhood, are so suited to the apple, that it will grow faster in
them without any care, or if only the ground is broken up once a year,
than it will in many places with any amount of care. The owners of
this tract allow that the soil is excellent for fruit, but they say
that it is so rocky that they have not patience to plow it, and that,
together with the distance, is the reason why it is not cultivated.
There are, or were recently, extensive orchards there standing without
order. Nay, they spring up wild and bear well there in the midst of
pines, birches, maples, and oaks. I am often surprised to see rising
amid these trees the rounded tops of apple trees glowing with red or
yellow fruit, in harmony with the autumnal tints of the forest.

Going up the side of a cliff about the first of November, I saw a
vigorous young apple tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot
up amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it,
uninjured by the frosts, when all cultivated apples were gathered. It
was a rank, wild growth, with many green leaves on it still, and made
an impression of thorniness. The fruit was hard and green, but looked
as if it would be palatable in the winter. Some was dangling on the
twigs, but more half buried in the wet leaves under the tree, or
rolled far down the hill amid the rocks. The owner knows nothing of
it. The day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it
first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee. There was no dancing on the
green beneath it in its honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its
fruit,--which is only gnawed by squirrels, as I perceive. It has done
double duty,--not only borne this crop, but each twig has grown a foot
into the air. And this is _such_ fruit! bigger than many berries, we
must admit, and carried home will be sound and palatable next spring.
What care I for Iduna's apples so long as I can get these?

When I go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling
fruit, I respect the tree, and I am grateful for Nature's bounty, even
though I cannot eat it. Here on this rugged and woody hillside has
grown an apple tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard,
but a natural growth, like the pines and oaks. Most fruits which we
prize and use depend entirely on our care. Corn and grain, potatoes,
peaches, melons, etc., depend altogether on our planting; but the
apple emulates man's independence and enterprise. It is not simply
carried, as I have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has
migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its
way amid the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse
sometimes run wild and maintain themselves.

  [Illustration: _Wild Apple Tree_]

Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable
position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.


THE CRAB

Nevertheless, _our_ wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance,
who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the
woods from the cultivated stock. Wilder still, as I have said, there
grows elsewhere in this country a native and aboriginal crab-apple,
_Malus coronaria_, "whose nature has not yet been modified by
cultivation." It is found from western New York to Minnesota, and
southward. Michaux says that its ordinary height "is fifteen or
eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet
high," and that the large ones "exactly resemble the common apple
tree." "The flowers are white mingled with rose color, and are
collected in corymbs." They are remarkable for their delicious odor.
The fruit, according to him, is about an inch and a half in diameter,
and is intensely acid. Yet they make fine sweetmeats and also cider of
them. He concludes that "if, on being cultivated, it does not yield
new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the
beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume."

I never saw the crab-apple till May, 1861. I had heard of it through
Michaux, but more modern botanists, so far as I know, have not
treated it as of any peculiar importance. Thus it was a half-fabulous
tree to me. I contemplated a pilgrimage to the "Glades," a portion of
Pennsylvania where it was said to grow to perfection. I thought of
sending to a nursery for it, but doubted if they had it, or would
distinguish it from European varieties. At last I had occasion to go
to Minnesota, and on entering Michigan I began to notice from the cars
a tree with handsome rose-colored flowers. At first I thought it some
variety of thorn; but it was not long before the truth flashed on me,
that this was my long-sought crab-apple. It was the prevailing
flowering shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at that season of the
year,--about the middle of May. But the cars never stopped before one,
and so I was launched on the bosom of the Mississippi without having
touched one, experiencing the fate of Tantalus. On arriving at St.
Anthony's Falls, I was sorry to be told that I was too far north for
the crab-apple. Nevertheless I succeeded in finding it about eight
miles west of the Falls; touched it and smelled it, and secured a
lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. This must have been near
its northern limit.


HOW THE WILD APPLE GROWS

But though these are indigenous, like the Indians, I doubt whether
they are any hardier than those backwoodsmen among the apple trees,
which, though descended from cultivated stocks, plant themselves in
distant fields and forests, where the soil is favorable to them. I
know of no trees which have more difficulties to contend with, and
which more sturdily resist their foes. These are the ones whose story
we have to tell. It oftentimes reads thus:--

Near the beginning of May, we notice little thickets of apple trees
just springing up in the pastures where cattle have been,--as the
rocky ones of our Easterbrooks Country, or the top of Nobscot Hill, in
Sudbury. One or two of these, perhaps, survive the drought and other
accidents,--their very birthplace defending them against the
encroaching grass and some other dangers, at first.

     In two years' time 't had thus
       Reached the level of the rocks,
     Admired the stretching world,
       Nor feared the wandering flocks.

     But at this tender age
       Its sufferings began:
     There came a browsing ox
       And cut it down a span.

This time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid the grass; but the
next year, when it has grown more stout, he recognizes it for a
fellow-emigrant from the old country, the flavor of whose leaves and
twigs he well knows; and though at first he pauses to welcome it, and
express his surprise, and gets for answer, "The same cause that
brought you here brought me," he nevertheless browses it again,
reflecting, it may be, that he has some title to it.

Thus cut down annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two
short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground
in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby,
until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff,
twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. Some of the
densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that I have ever seen,
as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches
as of their thorns, have been these wild apple scrubs. They are more
like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand, and
sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they
contend with, than anything else. No wonder they are prompted to grow
thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes. In their
thorniness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid.

The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred to--for they maintain
their ground best in a rocky field--are thickly sprinkled with these
little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or
lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up
between them, with the seed still attached to them.

Being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge
with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form,
from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by
the gardener's art. In the pastures on Nobscot Hill and its spurs,
they make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. They are also an
excellent covert from hawks for many small birds that roost and build
in them. Whole flocks perch in them at night, and I have seen three
robins' nests in one which was six feet in diameter.

No doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the
day they were planted, but infants still when you consider their
development and the long life before them. I counted the annual rings
of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found
that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty!
They were so low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of
their contemporaries from the nurseries were already bearing
considerable crops. But what you gain in time is perhaps in this case,
too, lost in power,--that is, in the vigor of the tree. This is their
pyramidal state.

The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more,
keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they
are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior
shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it
has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit
in triumph.

Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now,
if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see
that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its
apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than
an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its
repressed energy to these upright parts. In a short time these become
a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so
that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. The spreading
bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the
generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in
its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in
spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse
the seed.

Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its
hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.

It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should
trim young apple trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes.
The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the
right height, I think.

In spite of wandering kine, and other adverse circumstances, that
despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter
from hawks, has its blossom week at last, and in course of time its
harvest, sincere, though small.

By the end of some October, when its leaves have fallen, I frequently
see such a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I
thought it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop
of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at
over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and I make haste
to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the
numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is
the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more and more
memorable varieties than both of them.

Through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit! Though
somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that
which has grown in a garden,--will perchance be all the sweeter and
more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with.
Who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on
some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man,
may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear
of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of
the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,--at
least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter and
the Baldwin grew.

Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every
wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to
man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the
celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by
fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself
and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its
perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and
statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the
hosts of unoriginal men.

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the
golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed
dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck
them.

This is one, and the most remarkable way in which the wild apple is
propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and
swamp, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows
with comparative rapidity. Those which grow in dense woods are very
tall and slender. I frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly
mild and tamed fruit. As Palladius says, "_Et injussu consternitur
ubere mali_:" And the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden
apple tree.

It is an old notion that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable
fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to
posterity the most highly prized qualities of others. However, I am
not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust
has suffered no "inteneration." It is not my

                 "highest plot
     To plant the Bergamot."


THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR

The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of
November. They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they
are still perhaps as beautiful as ever. I make a great account of
these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to
gather,--wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The
farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken,
unless he has a walker's appetite and imagination, neither of which
can he have.

Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November,
I presume that the owner does not mean to gather. They belong to
children as wild as themselves,--to certain active boys that I
know,--to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes
amiss, who gleans after all the world, and, moreover, to us walkers.
We have met with them, and they are ours. These rights, long enough
insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries,
where they have learned how to live. I hear that "the custom of
grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly,
practiced in Herefordshire. It consists in leaving a few apples, which
are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering,
for the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them."

As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this
quarter of the earth,--fruit of old trees that have been dying ever
since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the
woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not
faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the
tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens
to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground
strewn with spirited fruit,--some of it, perhaps, collected at
squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried
them,--some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and
some, especially in damp days, a shell-less snail. The very sticks and
stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the
savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past
years.

I have seen no account of these among the "Fruits and Fruit-Trees of
America," though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted
kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess when
October and November, when December and January, and perhaps February
and March even, have assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my
neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that "they have
a kind of bow-arrow tang."

Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much
for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and
bearing qualities,--not so much for their beauty, as for their
fairness and soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists
of pomological gentlemen. Their "Favorites" and "None-suches" and
"Seek-no-farthers," when I have fruited them, commonly turn out very
tame and forgettable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest,
and have no real _tang_ nor _smack_ to them.

What if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine
_verjuice_, do they not still belong to the _Pomaceæ_, which are
uniformly innocent and kind to our race? I still begrudge them to the
cider-mill. Perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet.

No wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make
the best cider. Loudon quotes from the "Herefordshire Report," that
"apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be
preferred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel
may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the
weakest and most watery juice." And he says that, "to prove this, Dr.
Symonds, of Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider
entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp
only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor,
while the latter was sweet and insipid."

Evelyn says that the "Red-strake" was the favorite cider-apple in his
day; and he quotes one Dr. Newburg as saying, "In Jersey 'tis a
general observation, as I hear, that the more of red any apple has in
its rind, the more proper it is for this use. Pale-faced apples they
exclude as much as may be from their cider-vat." This opinion still
prevails.

All apples are good in November. Those which the farmer leaves out as
unsalable and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets are
choicest fruit to the walker. But it is remarkable that the wild apple,
which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or
woods, being brought into the house has frequently a harsh and crabbed
taste. The Saunterer's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the
house. The palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and
demands a tamed one; for there you miss the November air, which is the
sauce it is to be eaten with. Accordingly, when Tityrus, seeing the
lengthening shadows, invites Melibœus to go home and pass the night
with him, he promises him _mild_ apples and soft chestnuts,--_mitia
poma_, _castaneæ molles_. I frequently pluck wild apples of so rich
and spicy a flavor that I wonder all orchardists do not get a scion
from that tree, and I fail not to bring home my pockets full. But
perchance, when I take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber,
I find it unexpectedly crude,--sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth
on edge and make a jay scream.

These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have
absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly
_seasoned_, and they _pierce_ and _sting_ and _permeate_ us with their
spirit. They must be eaten in _season_, accordingly,--that is,
out-of-doors.

To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it
is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air.
The outdoor air and exercise which the walker gets give a different
tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would
call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields, when your
system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your
fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining
leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. What is sour in the
house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be
labeled, "To be eaten in the wind."

Of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the taste
that is up to them. Some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps
one half of them must be eaten in the house, the other outdoors. One
Peter Whitney wrote from Northborough in 1782, for the Proceedings of
the Boston Academy, describing an apple tree in that town "producing
fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple being frequently
sour and the other sweet;" also some all sour, and others all sweet,
and this diversity on all parts of the tree.

There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town which has to me a
peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is
three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it
smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and
relish it.

I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum tree in Provence is "called
_Prunes sibarelles_, because it is impossible to whistle after having
eaten them, from their sourness." But perhaps they were only eaten in
the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging
atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and
clearer?

In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated;
just as the woodchopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle
of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there, and dreams
of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would
make a student miserable. They who are at work abroad are not cold,
but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. As with
temperatures, so with flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour and
sweet. This natural raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased
palate refuses, are the true condiments.

Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate
the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses,
_papillæ_ firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily
flattened and tamed.

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may
be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the
civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It
takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of
life, the apple of the world, then!

     "Nor is it every apple I desire,
       Nor that which pleases every palate best;
     'Tis not the lasting Deuxan I require,
       Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,
     Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife,
     Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife:
     No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life."

So there is one _thought_ for the field, another for the house. I
would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and
will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.


THEIR BEAUTY

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and
crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming
traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed
or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that
the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some
part of its sphere. It will have some red stains, commemorating the
mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches,
in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over
it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of
nature,--green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a
milder flavor,--yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,--apples not of Discord, but of
Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share.
Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or
crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the
influence of the sun on all sides alike,--some with the faintest pink
blush imaginable,--some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or
with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the
stem-dimple to the blossom end, like meridional lines, on a
straw-colored ground,--some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine
lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less
confluent and fiery when wet,--and others gnarly, and freckled or
peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white
ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints
the autumn leaves. Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused
with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,--apple of
the Hesperides, apple of the evening sky! But like shells and pebbles
on the seashore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering
leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie
in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the
house.


THE NAMING OF THEM

It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred
varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not
tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the
_lingua vernacula_? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of
the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if
they were used, and make the _lingua vernacula_ flag. We should have
to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn
woods and the wild-flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch
and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler
and the truant boy, to our aid.

In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society
more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which
they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which
our crab might yield to cultivation.

Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all,
to give the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live
where English is not spoken,--for they are likely to have a world-wide
reputation.

There is, first of all, the Wood Apple (_Malus sylvatica_); the
Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods
(_sylvestrivallis_), also in Hollows in Pastures (_campestrivallis_);
the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (_Malus cellaris_); the
Meadow Apple; the Partridge Apple; the Truant's Apple (_cessatoris_),
which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however _late_
it may be; the Saunterer's Apple,--you must lose yourself before you
can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (_decus aëris_);
December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed (_gelato-soluta_), good only in
that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the
_Musketaquidensis_; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New
England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (_Malus viridis_),--this
has many synonyms: in an imperfect state, it is the _choleramorbifera
aut dysenterifera_, _puerulis dilectissima_; the Apple which Atalanta
stopped to pick up; the Hedge Apple (_Malus sepium_); the Slug Apple
(_limacea_); the Railroad Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown
out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our
Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue; _pedestrium
solatium_; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's
Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many
more I have on my list, too numerous to mention,--all of them good. As
Bodæus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting
Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodæus,--

     "Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
     An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
     And reckon up all the names of these _wild apples_."


THE LAST GLEANING

By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their
brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the
ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. The note of
the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old
trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half closed and tearful. But
still, if you are a skillful gleaner, you may get many a pocketful
even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone
out-of-doors. I know a Blue Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of
a swamp, almost as good as wild. You would not suppose that there was
any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you must look according
to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or
perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the
wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes, I explore amid the
bare alders and the huckleberry bushes and the withered sedge, and in
the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under
the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves,
thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen
into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree
itself,--a proper kind of packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere
within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet
and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and
perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript
from a monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it,
and at least as ripe and well-kept, if not better than those in
barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to
yield anything, I have learned to look between the bases of the
suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and
then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where
they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them
out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue Pearmain, I fill
my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve,
being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this
side, and then from that, to keep my balance.

I learn from Topsell's Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus,
that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and
carries home his apples. He says,--"His meat is apples, worms, or
grapes: when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth
himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then
carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth;
and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise
shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until
they be all settled upon his back again. So, forth he goeth, making a
noise like a cart-wheel; and if he have any young ones in his nest,
they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what
they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come."


THE "FROZEN-THAWED" APPLE

Toward the end of November, though some of the sound ones are yet more
mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves,
lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is finger-cold, and
prudent farmers get in their barreled apples, and bring you the apples
and cider which they have engaged; for it is time to put them into the
cellar. Perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks above the
early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and
soundness under the snow throughout the winter. But generally at the
beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed,
acquire the color of a baked apple.

Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first
thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite
unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while
sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them,--for they are extremely
sensitive to its rays,--are found to be filled with a rich, sweet
cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I
am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this
state, and your jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have more
substance, are a sweet and luscious food,--in my opinion of more worth
than the pineapples which are imported from the West Indies. Those
which lately even I tasted only to repent of it,--for I am
semicivilized,--which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I am now
glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the
young oaks. It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. Let the
frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or
a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a
flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang.
Or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in
your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. But after the
third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good.

What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid south, to this
fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north? These are those crabbed
apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that
I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets with
them,--bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the
overflowing juice,--and grow more social with their wine. Was there
one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our
sticks could not dislodge it?

It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,--quite
distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and
cider,--and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection.

The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will
probably become extinct in New England. You may still wander through
old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part
went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an
orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples
rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side,
and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider.
Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted
fruit, no native apple trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted
pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out.
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not
know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are
many pleasures which he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence
of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are
set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast
straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank
apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost
nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to
stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see
nobody planting trees to-day in such out of the way places, along the
lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now
that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect
them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in,--and the end of
it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a
barrel.

This is "The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.

"Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land!
Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?...

"That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that
which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which
the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten.

"Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine,
because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.

"For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number,
whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a
great lion.

"He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made it
clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white....

"Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers....

"The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate
tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of
the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of
men."




NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT


Chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago, I
resolved to take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another
side of nature: I have done so.

According to Pliny, there is a stone in Arabia called Selenites,
"wherein is a white, which increases and decreases with the moon." My
journal for the last year or two has been _selenitic_ in this sense.

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not
tempted to explore it,--to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad,
and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the
Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are
there to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa
of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The
expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or
perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile
that concerns us.

I shall be a benefactor if I conquer some realms from the night, if I
report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season
worthy of their attention,--if I can show men that there is some
beauty awake while they are asleep,--if I add to the domains of
poetry.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon
discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion, and as for
the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a
shutter, occasionally. Why not walk a little way in her light?

Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one
month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything
in literature or religion? But why not study this Sanskrit? What if
one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird
teachings, its oracular suggestions,--so divine a creature freighted
with hints for me, and I have not used her? One moon gone by
unnoticed?

I think it was Dr. Chalmers who said, criticising Coleridge, that for
his part he wanted ideas which he could see all round, and not such as
he must look at away up in the heavens. Such a man, one would say,
would never look at the moon, because she never turns her other side
to us. The light which comes from ideas which have their orbit as
distant from the earth, and which is no less cheering and enlightening
to the benighted traveler than that of the moon and stars, is
naturally reproached or nicknamed as moonshine by such. They are
moonshine, are they? Well, then, do your night traveling when there is
no moon to light you; but I will be thankful for the light that
reaches me from the star of least magnitude. Stars are lesser or
greater only as they appear to us so. I will be thankful that I see so
much as one side of a celestial idea, one side of the rainbow and the
sunset sky.

Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities
very well, and despised them; as owls might talk of sunshine,--none of
your sunshine!--but this word commonly means merely something which
they do not understand,--which they are abed and asleep to, however
much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it.

It must be allowed that the light of the moon, sufficient though it is
for the pensive walker, and not disproportionate to the inner light we
have, is very inferior in quality and intensity to that of the sun.
But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she
sends to us, but also by her influence on the earth and its
inhabitants. "The moon gravitates toward the earth, and the earth
reciprocally toward the moon." The poet who walks by moonlight is
conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar
influence. I will endeavor to separate the tide in my thoughts from
the current distractions of the day. I would warn my hearers that they
must not try my thoughts by a daylight standard, but endeavor to
realize that I speak out of the night. All depends on your point of
view. In Drake's "Collection of Voyages," Wafer says of some albinos
among the Indians of Darien: "They are quite white, but their
whiteness is like that of a horse, quite different from the fair or
pale European, as they have not the least tincture of a blush or
sanguine complexion.... Their eyebrows are milk-white, as is likewise
the hair of their heads, which is very fine.... They seldom go abroad
in the daytime, the sun being disagreeable to them, and causing their
eyes, which are weak and poring, to water, especially if it shines
towards them, yet they see very well by moonlight, from which we call
them moon-eyed."

Neither in our thoughts in these moonlight walks, methinks, is there
"the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion," but we are
intellectually and morally albinos, children of Endymion, such is the
effect of conversing much with the moon.

I complain of arctic voyagers that they do not enough remind us of the
constant peculiar dreariness of the scenery, and the perpetual
twilight of the arctic night. So he whose theme is moonlight, though
he may find it difficult, must, as it were, illustrate it with the
light of the moon alone.

Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a very different
season. Take a July night, for instance. About ten o'clock,--when man
is asleep, and day fairly forgotten,--the beauty of moonlight is seen
over lonely pastures where cattle are silently feeding. On all sides
novelties present themselves. Instead of the sun there are the moon
and stars; instead of the wood thrush there is the whip-poor-will;
instead of butterflies in the meadows, fireflies, winged sparks of
fire! who would have believed it? What kind of cool deliberate life
dwells in those dewy abodes associated with a spark of fire? So man
has fire in his eyes, or blood, or brain. Instead of singing birds,
the half-throttled note of a cuckoo flying over, the croaking of
frogs, and the intenser dream of crickets. But above all, the
wonderful trump of the bullfrog, ringing from Maine to Georgia. The
potato vines stand upright, the corn grows apace, the bushes loom, the
grain-fields are boundless. On our open river terraces once cultivated
by the Indian, they appear to occupy the ground like an army, their
heads nodding in the breeze. Small trees and shrubs are seen in the
midst overwhelmed as by an inundation. The shadows of rocks and trees,
and shrubs and hills, are more conspicuous than the objects
themselves. The slightest irregularities in the ground are revealed by
the shadows, and what the feet find comparatively smooth appears rough
and diversified in consequence. For the same reason the whole
landscape is more variegated and picturesque than by day. The smallest
recesses in the rocks are dim and cavernous; the ferns in the wood
appear of tropical size. The sweet-fern and indigo in overgrown
wood-paths wet you with dew up to your middle. The leaves of the shrub
oak are shining as if a liquid were flowing over them. The pools seen
through the trees are as full of light as the sky. "The light of the
day takes refuge in their bosoms," as the Purana says of the ocean.
All white objects are more remarkable than by day. A distant cliff
looks like a phosphorescent space on a hillside. The woods are heavy
and dark. Nature slumbers. You see the moonlight reflected from
particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if she selected
what to shine on. These small fractions of her light remind one of the
plant called moonseed,--as if the moon were sowing it in such places.

In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head. Other
senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of
smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now, swamp-pink
in the meadow and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry
scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels. The senses both of
hearing and smelling are more alert. We hear the tinkling of rills
which we never detected before. From time to time, high up on the
sides of hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air, a blast which
has come up from the sultry plains of noon. It tells of the day, of
sunny noontide hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the
bee humming amid flowers. It is an air in which work has been
done,--which men have breathed. It circulates about from woodside to
hillside like a dog that has lost its master, now that the sun is
gone. The rocks retain all night the warmth of the sun which they have
absorbed. And so does the sand. If you dig a few inches into it you
find a warm bed. You lie on your back on a rock in a pasture on the
top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the height of the
starry canopy. The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance
surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was
sailing one very windy but bright moonlight night, when the stars were
few and faint, thought that a man could get along with _them_, though
he was considerably reduced in his circumstances,--that they were a
kind of bread and cheese that never failed.

No wonder that there have been astrologers, that some have conceived
that they were personally related to particular stars. Dubartas, as
translated by Sylvester, says he'll

             "not believe that the great architect
     With all these fires the heavenly arches decked
     Only for show, and with these glistering shields,
     T' awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields."
     He'll "not believe that the least flower which pranks
     Our garden borders, or our common banks,
     And the least stone, that in her warming lap
     Our mother earth doth covetously wrap,
     Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,
     And that the glorious stars of heav'n have none."

And Sir Walter Raleigh well says, "The stars are instruments of far
greater use than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on
after sunset;" and he quotes Plotinus as affirming that they "are
significant, but not efficient;" and also Augustine as saying, "_Deus
regit inferiora corpora per superiora_:" God rules the bodies below by
those above. But best of all is this which another writer has
expressed: "_Sapiens adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola
terrae naturam_:" a wise man assisteth the work of the stars as the
husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil.

It does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very
important to the traveler, whether the moon shines brightly or is
obscured. It is not easy to realize the serene joy of all the earth,
when she commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been
abroad alone in moonlight nights. She seems to be waging continual war
with the clouds in your behalf. Yet we fancy the clouds to be _her_
foes also. She comes on magnifying her dangers by her light,
revealing, displaying them in all their hugeness and blackness, then
suddenly casts them behind into the light concealed, and goes her way
triumphant through a small space of clear sky.

In short, the moon traversing, or appearing to traverse, the small
clouds which lie in her way, now obscured by them, now easily
dissipating and shining through them, makes the drama of the moonlight
night to all watchers and night-travelers. Sailors speak of it as the
moon eating up the clouds. The traveler all alone, the moon all alone,
except for his sympathy, overcoming with incessant victory whole
squadrons of clouds above the forests and lakes and hills. When she is
obscured he so sympathizes with her that he could whip a dog for her
relief, as Indians do. When she enters on a clear field of great
extent in the heavens, and shines unobstructedly, he is glad. And when
she has fought her way through all the squadron of her foes, and rides
majestic in a clear sky unscathed, and there are no more any
obstructions in her path, he cheerfully and confidently pursues his
way, and rejoices in his heart, and the cricket also seems to express
joy in its song.

How insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and
darkness did not come to restore the drooping world. As the shades
begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we
steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in
search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural
prey of the intellect.

Richter says that "the earth is every day overspread with the veil of
night for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened, viz.,
that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought
in the hush and quiet of darkness. Thoughts which day turns into smoke
and mist stand about us in the night as light and flames; even as the
column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime
appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire."

There are nights in this climate of such serene and majestic beauty,
so medicinal and fertilizing to the spirit, that methinks a sensitive
nature would not devote them to oblivion, and perhaps there is no man
but would be better and wiser for spending them out-of-doors, though
he should sleep all the next day to pay for it,--should sleep an
Endymion sleep, as the ancients expressed it,--nights which warrant
the Grecian epithet ambrosial, when, as in the land of Beulah, the
atmosphere is charged with dewy fragrance, and with music, and we take
our repose and have our dreams awake,--when the moon, not secondary to
the sun,--

             "gives us his blaze again,
     Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.
     Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,
     Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime."

Diana still hunts in the New England sky.

     "In Heaven queen she is among the spheres.
       She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.
     Eternity in her oft change she bears;
       She Beauty is; by her the fair endure.

     "Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;
       Mortality below her orb is placed;
     By her the virtues of the stars down slide;
       By her is Virtue's perfect image cast."

The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the
last stage of bodily existence.

Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter! In a mild night when the
harvest or hunter's moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our
village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only
a master. The village street is then as wild as the forest. New and
old things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the
ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one.
Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude
opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither radical nor
conservative. Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!

The light is more proportionate to our knowledge than that of day. It
is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual
atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated
moments are.

     "In such a night let me abroad remain
     Till morning breaks, and all's confused again."

Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of
an inward dawn?--to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if
the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and
glaring.

When Ossian, in his address to the sun, exclaims,--

     "Where has darkness its dwelling?
     Where is the cavernous home of the stars,
     When thou quickly followest their steps,
     Pursuing them like a hunter in the sky,--
     Thou climbing the lofty hills,
     They descending on barren mountains?"

who does not in his thought accompany the stars to their "cavernous
home," "descending" with them "on barren mountains"?

Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see
through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day,
where the sunbeams are reveling.




TRANSLATIONS




THE PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ÆSCHYLUS


PERSONS OF THE DRAMA

     KRATOS _and_ BIA (Strength and Force).
     HEPHAISTUS (Vulcan).
     PROMETHEUS.
     CHORUS OF OCEAN NYMPHS.
     OCEANUS.
     IO, _Daughter of Inachus_.
     HERMES.

KRATOS _and_ BIA, HEPHAISTUS, PROMETHEUS.

     _Kr._ We are come to the far-bounding plain of earth,
     To the Scythian way, to the unapproached solitude.
     Hephaistus, orders must have thy attention,
     Which the Father has enjoined on thee, this bold one
     To the high-hanging rocks to bind
     In indissoluble fetters of adamantine bonds.
     For thy flower, the splendor of fire useful in all arts,
     Stealing, he bestowed on mortals; and for such
     A crime 't is fit he should give satisfaction to the gods;
     That he may learn the tyranny of Zeus
     To love, and cease from his man-loving ways.

     _Heph._ Kratos and Bia, your charge from Zeus
     Already has its end, and nothing further in the way;
     But I cannot endure to bind
     A kindred god by force to a bleak precipice,--
     Yet absolutely there's necessity that I have courage for
          these things;
     For it is hard the Father's words to banish.
     High-plotting son of the right-counseling Themis,
     Unwilling thee unwilling in brazen fetters hard to be loosed
     I am about to nail to this inhuman hill,
     Where neither voice [you'll hear], nor form of any mortal
     See, but, scorched by the sun's clear flame,
     Will change your color's bloom; and to you glad
     The various-robed night will conceal the light,
     And sun disperse the morning frost again;
     And always the burden of the present ill
     Will wear you; for he that will relieve you has not yet been born.
     Such fruits you've reaped from your man-loving ways,
     For a god, not shrinking from the wrath of gods,
     You have bestowed honors on mortals more than just,
     For which this pleasureless rock you'll sentinel,
     Standing erect, sleepless, not bending a knee;
     And many sighs and lamentations to no purpose
     Will you utter; for the mind of Zeus is hard to be changed;
     And he is wholly rugged who may newly rule.

     _Kr._ Well, why dost thou delay and pity in vain?
     Why not hate the god most hostile to gods,
     Who has betrayed thy prize to mortals?

     _Heph._ The affinity indeed is appalling, and the familiarity.

     _Kr._ I agree, but to disobey the Father's words
     How is it possible? Fear you not this more?

     _Heph._ Ay, you are always without pity, and full of confidence.

     _Kr._ For 't is no remedy to bewail this one;
     Cherish not vainly troubles which avail naught.

     _Heph._ O much hated handicraft!

     _Kr._ Why hatest it? for in simple truth, for these misfortunes
     Which are present now Art's not to blame.

     _Heph._ Yet I would 't had fallen to another's lot.

     _Kr._ All things were done but to rule the gods,
     For none is free but Zeus.

     _Heph._ I knew it, and have naught to say against these things.

     _Kr._ Will you not haste, then, to put the bonds about him,
     That the Father may not observe you loitering?

     _Heph._ Already at hand the shackles you may see.

     _Kr._ Taking them, about his hands with firm strength
     Strike with the hammer, and nail him to the rocks.

     _Heph._ 'T is done, and not in vain this work.

     _Kr._ Strike harder, tighten, nowhere relax,
     For he is skillful to find out ways e'en from the impracticable.

     _Heph._ Ay, but this arm is fixed inextricably.

     _Kr._ And this now clasp securely, that
     He may learn he is a duller schemer than is Zeus.

     _Heph._ Except him would none justly blame me.

     _Kr._ Now with an adamantine wedge's stubborn fang
     Through the breasts nail strongly.

     _Heph._ Alas! alas! Prometheus, I groan for thy afflictions.

     _Kr._ And do you hesitate? for Zeus' enemies
     Do you groan? Beware lest one day you yourself will pity.

     _Heph._ You see a spectacle hard for eyes to behold.

     _Kr._ I see him meeting his deserts;
     But round his sides put straps.

     _Heph._ To do this is necessity, insist not much.

     _Kr._ Surely I will insist and urge beside;
     Go downward, and the thighs surround with force.

     _Heph._ Already it is done, the work, with no long labor.

     _Kr._ Strongly now drive the fetters, through and through,
     For the critic of the works is difficult.

     _Heph._ Like your form your tongue speaks.

     _Kr._ Be thou softened, but for my stubbornness
     Of temper and harshness reproach me not.

     _Heph._ Let us withdraw, for he has a net about his limbs.

     _Kr._ There now insult, and the shares of gods
     Plundering on ephemerals bestow; what thee
     Can mortals in these ills relieve?
     Falsely thee the divinities Prometheus
     Call; for you yourself need one _foreseeing_
     In what manner you will escape this fortune.

PROMETHEUS, _alone_.

     O divine ether, and ye swift-winged winds,
     Fountains of rivers, and countless smilings
     Of the ocean waves, and earth, mother of all,
     And thou all-seeing orb of the sun I call.
     Behold me what a god I suffer at the hands of gods.
     See by what outrages
     Tormented the myriad-yeared
     Time I shall endure; such the new
     Ruler of the blessed has contrived for me,
     Unseemly bonds.
     Alas! alas! the present and the coming
     Woe I groan; where ever of these sufferings
     Must an end appear.
     But what say I? I know beforehand all,
     Exactly what will be, nor to me strange
     Will any evil come. The destined fate
     As easily as possible it behooves to bear, knowing
     Necessity's is a resistless strength.
     But neither to be silent nor unsilent about this
     Lot is possible for me; for a gift to mortals
     Giving, I wretched have been yoked to these necessities;
     Within a hollow reed by stealth I carry off fire's
     Stolen source, which seemed the teacher
     Of all art to mortals, and a great resource.
     For such crimes penalty I pay,
     Under the sky, riveted in chains.
     Ah! ah! alas! alas!
     What echo, what odor has flown to me obscure,
     Of god, or mortal, or else mingled,--
     Came it to this terminal hill
     A witness of my sufferings, or wishing what?
     Behold bound me an unhappy god,
     The enemy of Zeus, fallen under
     The ill will of all the gods, as many as
     Enter into the hall of Zeus,
     Through too great love of mortals.
     Alas! alas! what fluttering do I hear
     Of birds near? for the air rustles
     With the soft rippling of wings.
     Everything to me is fearful which creeps this way.

PROMETHEUS _and_ CHORUS.

     _Ch._ Fear nothing; for friendly this band
     Of wings with swift contention
     Drew to this hill, hardly
     Persuading the paternal mind.
     The swift-carrying breezes sent me;
     For the echo of beaten steel pierced the recesses
     Of the caves, and struck out from me reserved modesty;
     And I rushed unsandaled in a winged chariot.

     _Pr._ Alas! alas! alas! alas!
     Offspring of the fruitful Tethys,
     And of him rolling around all
     The earth with sleepless stream children,
     Of Father Ocean; behold, look on me;
     By what bonds embraced
     On this cliff's topmost rocks
     I shall maintain unenvied watch.

     _Ch._ I see, Prometheus; but to my eyes a fearful
     Mist has come surcharged
     With tears, looking upon thy body
     Shrunk to the rocks
     By these mischiefs of adamantine bonds;
     Indeed, new helmsmen rule Olympus;
     And with new laws Zeus strengthens himself, annulling the old,
     And the before great now makes unknown.

     _Pr._ Would that under earth, and below Hades,
     Receptacle of dead, to impassable
     Tartarus he had sent me, to bonds indissoluble
     Cruelly conducting, that neither god
     Nor any other had rejoiced at this.
     But now the sport of winds, unhappy one,
     A source of pleasure to my foes, I suffer.

     _Ch._ Who so hard-hearted
     Of the gods, to whom these things are pleasant?
     Who does not sympathize with thy
     Misfortunes, excepting Zeus? for he in wrath always
     Fixing his stubborn mind,
     Afflicts the heavenly race;
     Nor will he cease, until his heart is sated;
     Or with some palm some one may take the power hard to be taken.

     _Pr._ Surely yet, though in strong
     Fetters I am now maltreated,
     The ruler of the blessed will have need of me,
     To show the new conspiracy by which
     He's robbed of sceptre and of honors,
     And not at all me with persuasion's honey-tongued
     Charms will he appease, nor ever,
     Shrinking from his firm threats, will I
     Declare this, till from cruel
     Bonds he may release, and to do justice
     For this outrage be willing.

     _Ch._ You are bold; and to bitter
     Woes do nothing yield,
     But too freely speak.
     But my mind piercing fear disturbs;
     For I'm concerned about thy fortunes,
     Where at length arriving you may see
     An end to these afflictions. For manners
     Inaccessible, and a heart hard to be dissuaded has the son
          of Kronos.

     _Pr._ I know, that--Zeus is stern and having
     Justice to himself. But after all
     Gentle-minded
     He will one day be, when thus he's crushed,
     And his stubborn wrath allaying,
     Into agreement with me and friendliness
     Earnest to me earnest he at length will come.

     _Ch._ The whole account disclose and tell us plainly,
     In what crime taking you Zeus
     Thus disgracefully and bitterly insults;
     Inform us, if you are nowise hurt by the recital.

     _Pr._ Painful indeed it is to me to tell these things,
     And a pain to be silent, and every way unfortunate.
     When first the divinities began their strife,
     And discord 'mong themselves arose,
     Some wishing to cast Kronos from his seat,
     That Zeus might reign, forsooth, others the contrary
     Striving, that Zeus might never rule the gods;
     Then I, the best advising, to persuade
     The Titans, sons of Uranus and Chthon,
     Unable was; but crafty stratagems
     Despising with rude minds,
     They thought without trouble to rule by force;
     But to me my mother not once only, Themis,
     And Gæa, of many names one form,
     How the future should be accomplished had foretold,
     That not by power nor by strength
     Would it be necessary, but by craft the victors should prevail.
     Such I in words expounding,
     They deigned not to regard at all.
     The best course, therefore, of those occurring then
     Appeared to be, taking my mother to me,
     Of my own accord to side with Zeus glad to receive me;
     And by my counsels Tartarus' black-pitted
     Depths conceals the ancient Kronos,
     With his allies. In such things by me
     The tyrant of the gods having been helped,
     With base rewards like these repays me;
     For there is somehow in kingship
     This disease, not to trust its friends.
     What then you ask, for what cause
     He afflicts me, this will I now explain.
     As soon as on his father's throne
     He sat, he straightway to the gods distributes honors,
     Some to one and to another some, and arranged
     The government; but of unhappy mortals account
     Had none; but blotting out the race
     Entire, wished to create another new.
     And these things none opposed but I,
     But I adventured; I rescued mortals
     From going destroyed to Hades.
     Therefore, indeed, with such afflictions am I bent,
     To suffer grievous, and piteous to behold,
     And, holding mortals up to pity, myself am not
     Thought worthy to obtain it; but without pity
     Am I thus corrected, a spectacle inglorious to Zeus.

     _Ch._ Of iron heart and made of stone,
     Whoe'er, Prometheus, with thy sufferings
     Does not grieve; for I should not have wished to see
     These things, and having seen them I am grieved at heart.

     _Pr._ Indeed to friends I'm piteous to behold.

     _Ch._ Did you in no respect go beyond this?

     _Pr._ True, mortals I made cease foreseeing fate.

     _Ch._ Having found what remedy for this all?

     _Pr._ Blind hopes in them I made to dwell.

     _Ch._ A great advantage this you gave to men.

     _Pr._ Beside these, too, I bestowed on them fire.

     _Ch._ And have mortals flamy fire?

     _Pr._ From which, indeed, they will learn many arts.

     _Ch._ Upon such charges, then, does Zeus
     Maltreat you, and nowhere relax from ills?
     Is there no term of suffering lying before thee?

     _Pr._ Nay, none at all, but when to him it may seem good.

     _Ch._ And how will it seem good? What hope? See you not that
     You have erred? But how you've erred, for me to tell
     Not pleasant, and to you a pain. But these things
     Let us omit, and seek you some release from sufferings.

     _Pr._ Easy, whoever out of trouble holds his
     Foot, to admonish and remind those faring
     Ill. But all these things I knew;
     Willing, willing I erred, I'll not deny;
     Mortals assisting I myself found trouble.
     Not indeed with penalties like these thought I
     That I should pine on lofty rocks,
     Gaining this drear unneighbored hill.
     But bewail not my present woes,
     But alighting, the fortunes creeping on
     Hear ye, that ye may learn all to the end.
     Obey me, obey, sympathize
     With him now suffering. Thus indeed affliction,
     Wandering round, sits now by one, then by another.

     _Ch._ Not to unwilling ears do you urge
     This, Prometheus.
     And now with light foot the swift-rushing
     Seat leaving, and the pure ether,
     Path of birds, to this peaked
     Ground I come; for thy misfortunes
     I wish fully to hear.

PROMETHEUS, CHORUS, _and_ OCEANUS.

     _Oc._ I come to the end of a long way
     Traveling to thee, Prometheus,
     By my will without bits directing
     This wing-swift bird;
     For at thy fortunes know I grieve.
     And, I think, affinity thus
     Impels me, but apart from birth,
     There's not to whom a higher rank
     I would assign than thee.
     And you will know these things as true, and not in vain
     To flatter with the tongue is in me. Come, therefore,
     Show how it is necessary to assist you;
     For never will you say, than Ocean
     There's a firmer friend to thee.

     _Pr._ Alas! what now? And you, then, of my sufferings
     Come spectator? How didst thou dare, leaving
     The stream which bears thy name, and rock-roofed
     Caves self-built, to the iron-mother
     Earth to go? To behold my fate
     Hast come, and to compassionate my ills?
     Behold a spectacle, this, the friend of Zeus,
     Having with him stablished his tyranny,
     With what afflictions by himself I'm bent.

     _Oc._ I see, Prometheus, and would admonish
     Thee the best, although of varied craft.
     Know thyself, and fit thy manners
     New; for new also the king among the gods.
     For if thus rude and whetted words
     Thou wilt hurl out, quickly may Zeus, though sitting
     Far above, hear thee, so that thy present wrath
     Of troubles child's play will seem to be.
     But, O wretched one, dismiss the indignation which thou hast,
     And seek deliverance from these woes.
     Like an old man, perhaps, I seem to thee to say these things;
     Such, however, are the wages
     Of the too lofty speaking tongue, Prometheus;
     But thou art not yet humble, nor dost yield to ills,
     And beside the present wish to receive others still.
     But thou wouldst not, with my counsel,
     Against the pricks extend your limbs, seeing that
     A stern monarch irresponsible reigns.
     And now I go, and will endeavor,
     If I can, to release thee from these sufferings.
     But be thou quiet, nor too rudely speak.
     Know'st thou not well, with thy superior wisdom, that
     On a vain tongue punishment is inflicted?

     _Pr._ I congratulate thee that thou art without blame,
     Having shared and dared all with me;
     And now leave off, and let it not concern thee.
     For altogether thou wilt not persuade him, for he's not easily
          persuaded,
     But take heed yourself lest you be injured by the way.

     _Oc._ Far better thou art to advise those near
     Than thyself; by deed and not by word I judge.
     But me hastening by no means mayest thou detain,
     For I boast, I boast, this favor will Zeus
     Grant me, from these sufferings to release thee.

     _Pr._ So far I praise thee, and will never cease;
     For zeal you nothing lack. But
     Strive not; for in vain, naught helping
     Me, thou 'lt strive, if aught to strive you wish.
     But be thou quiet, holding thyself aloof,
     For I would not, though I'm unfortunate, that on this account
     Evils should come to many.

     _Oc._ Surely not, for me too the fortunes of thy brother
     Atlas grieve, who towards the evening-places
     Stands, the pillar of heaven and earth
     Upon his shoulders bearing, a load not easy to be borne.
     And the earth-born inhabitant of the Cilician
     Caves seeing, I pitied, the savage monster
     With a hundred heads, by force o'ercome,
     Typhon impetuous, who stood 'gainst all the gods,
     With frightful jaws hissing out slaughter;
     And from his eyes flashed a Gorgonian light,
     Utterly to destroy by force the sovereignty of Zeus;
     But there came to him Zeus' sleepless bolt,
     Descending thunder, breathing flame,
     Which struck him out from lofty
     Boastings. For, struck to his very heart,
     His strength was scorched and thundered out.
     And now a useless and extended carcass
     Lies he near a narrow passage of the sea,
     Pressed down under the roots of Ætna.
     And on the topmost summit seated, Hephaistus
     Hammers the ignited mass, whence will burst out at length
     Rivers of fire, devouring with wild jaws
     Fair-fruited Sicily's smooth fields;
     Such rage will Typhon make boil over
     With hot discharges of insatiable fire-breathing tempest,
     Though by the bolt of Zeus burnt to a coal.

     _Pr._ Thou art not inexperienced, nor dost want
     My counsel; secure thyself as thou know'st how;
     And I against the present fortune will bear up,
     Until the thought of Zeus may cease from wrath.

     _Oc._ Know'st thou not this, Prometheus, that
     Words are healers of distempered wrath?

     _Pr._ If any seasonably soothe the heart,
     And swelling passion check not rudely.

     _Oc._ In the consulting and the daring
     What harm seest thou existing? Teach me.

     _Pr._ Trouble superfluous, and light-minded folly.

     _Oc._ Be this my ail then, since it is
     Most profitable, being wise, not to seem wise.

     _Pr._ This will seem to be my error.

     _Oc._ Plainly homeward thy words remand me.

     _Pr._ Aye, let not grief for me into hostility cast thee.

     _Oc._ To the new occupant of the all-powerful seats?

     _Pr._ Beware lest ever his heart be angered.

     _Oc._ Thy fate, Prometheus, is my teacher.

     _Pr._ Go thou, depart; preserve the present mind.

     _Oc._ To me rushing this word you utter.
     For the smooth path of the air sweeps with his wings
     The four-legged bird; and gladly would
     In the stalls at home bend a knee.

PROMETHEUS _and_ CHORUS.

     _Ch._ I mourn for thee thy ruinous
     Fate, Prometheus,
     And tear-distilling from my tender
     Eyes a stream has wet
     My cheeks with flowing springs;
     For these, unenvied, Zeus
     By his own laws enforcing,
     Haughty above the gods
     That were displays his sceptre.
     And every region now
     With groans resounds,
     Mourning the illustrious
     And ancient honor
     Of thee and of thy kindred;
     As many mortals as the habitable seat
     Of sacred Asia pasture,
     With thy lamentable
     Woes have sympathy;
     And of the Colchian land, virgin
     Inhabitants, in fight undaunted,
     And Scythia's multitude, who the last
     Place of earth, about
     Mæotis lake possess,
     And Arabia's martial flower,
     And who the high-hung citadels
     Of Caucasus inhabit near,
     A hostile army, raging
     With sharp-prowed spears.
     Only one other god before, in sufferings
     Subdued by injuries
     Of adamantine bonds, I've seen, Titanian
     Atlas, who always with superior strength
     The huge and heavenly globe
     On his back bears;
     And with a roar the sea waves
     Dashing, groans the deep,
     And the dark depth of Hades murmurs underneath
     The earth, and fountains of pure-running rivers
     Heave a pitying sigh.

     _Pr._ Think not, indeed, through weakness or through pride
     That I am silent; for with the consciousness I gnaw my heart,
     Seeing myself thus basely used.
     And yet to these new gods their shares
     Who else than I wholly distributed?
     But of these things I am silent; for I should tell you
     What you know; the sufferings of mortals too
     You've heard, how I made intelligent
     And possessed of sense them ignorant before.
     But I will speak, not bearing any grudge to men,
     But showing in what I gave the good intention;
     At first, indeed, seeing they saw in vain,
     And hearing heard not; but like the forms
     Of dreams, for that long time, rashly confounded
     All, nor brick-woven dwellings
     Knew they, placed in the sun, nor woodwork;
     But digging down they dwelt, like puny
     Ants, in sunless nooks of caves.
     And there was naught to them, neither of winter sign,
     Nor of flower-giving spring, nor fruitful
     Summer, that was sure; but without knowledge
     Did they all, till I taught them the risings
     Of the stars, and goings down, hard to determine.
     And numbers, chief of inventions,
     I found out for them, and the assemblages of letters,
     And memory, Muse-mother, doer of all things;
     And first I joined in pairs wild animals
     Obedient to the yoke; and that they might be
     Alternate workers with the bodies of men
     In the severest toils, I harnessed the rein-loving horses
     To the car, the ornament of over-wealthy luxury.
     And none else than I invented the sea-wandering
     Flaxen-winged vehicles of sailors.
     Such inventions I wretched having found out
     For men, myself have not the ingenuity by which
     From the now present ill I may escape.

     _Ch._ You suffer unseemly ill; deranged in mind
     You err; and as some bad physician, falling
     Sick you are dejected, and cannot find
     By what remedies you may be healed.

     _Pr._ Hearing the rest from me more will you wonder
     What arts and what expedients I planned.
     That which was greatest, if any might fall sick,
     There was alleviation none, neither to eat,
     Nor to anoint, nor drink, but for the want
     Of medicines they were reduced to skeletons, till to them
     I showed the mingling of mild remedies,
     By which all ails they drive away.
     And many modes of prophecy I settled,
     And distinguished first of dreams what a real
     Vision is required to be, and omens hard to be determined
     I made known to them; and tokens by the way,
     And flight of crooked-taloned birds I accurately
     Defined, which lucky are,
     And unlucky, and what mode of life
     Have each, and to one another what
     Hostilities, attachments, and assemblings;
     The entrails' smoothness, and what color having
     They would be to the divinities acceptable;
     Of the gall and liver the various symmetry,
     And the limbs concealed in fat; and the long
     Flank burning, to an art hard to be guessed
     I showed the way to mortals; and flammeous signs
     Explained, before obscure.
     Such indeed these; and under ground
     Concealed the helps to men;
     Brass, iron, silver, gold, who
     Would affirm that he discovered before me?
     None, I well know, not wishing in vain to boast.
     But learn all in one word,
     _All arts to mortals from Prometheus_.

     _Ch._ Assist not mortals now unseasonably,
     And neglect yourself unfortunate; for I
     Am of good hope that, from these bonds
     Released, you will yet have no less power than Zeus.

     _Pr._ Never thus has Fate the Accomplisher
     Decreed to fulfill these things, but by a myriad ills
     And woes subdued, thus bonds I flee;
     For art 's far weaker than necessity.

     _Ch._ Who, then, is helmsman of necessity?

     _Pr._ The Fates three-formed, and the remembering Furies.

     _Ch._ Than these, then, is Zeus weaker?

     _Pr._ Ay, he could not escape what has been fated.

     _Ch._ But what to Zeus is fated, except always to rule?

     _Pr._ This thou wilt not learn; seek not to know.

     _Ch._ Surely some awful thing it is which you withhold.

     _Pr._ Remember other words, for this by no means
     Is it time to tell, but to be concealed
     As much as possible; for keeping this do I
     Escape unseemly bonds and woes.

     _Ch._ Never may the all-ruling
     Zeus put into my mind
     Force antagonist to him.
     Nor let me cease drawing near
     The gods with holy sacrifices
     Of slain oxen, by Father Ocean's
     Ceaseless passage,
     Nor offend with words,
     But in me this remain
     And ne'er be melted out.
     'Tis something sweet with bold
     Hopes the long life to
     Extend, in bright
     Cheerfulness the cherishing spirit.
     But I shudder, thee beholding
     By a myriad sufferings tormented....
     For, not fearing Zeus,
     In thy private mind thou dost regard
     Mortals too much, Prometheus.
     Come, though a thankless
     Favor, friend, say where is any strength,
     From ephemerals any help? Saw you not
     The powerless inefficiency,
     Dream-like, in which the blind ...
     Race of mortals are entangled?
     Never counsels of mortals
     May transgress the harmony of Zeus.
     I learned these things looking on
     Thy destructive fate, Prometheus.
     For different to me did this strain come,
     And that which round thy baths
     And couch I hymned,
     With the design of marriage, when my father's child
     With bridal gifts persuading, thou didst lead
     Hesione the partner of thy bed.

PROMETHEUS, CHORUS, _and_ IO.

     _Io._ What earth, what race, what being shall I is this
     I see in bridles of rock
     Exposed? By what crime's
     Penalty dost thou perish? Show, to what part
     Of earth I miserable have wandered.
     Ah! ah! alas! alas!
     Again some fly doth sting me wretched,
     Image of earth-born Argus, cover it, earth;
     I fear the myriad-eyed herdsman beholding;
     For he goes having a treacherous eye,
     Whom not e'en dead the earth conceals.
     But me, wretched from the Infernals passing,
     He pursues, and drives fasting along the seaside
     Sand, while low resounds a wax-compacted reed,
     Uttering sleep-giving law; alas! alas! O gods!
     Where, gods! where lead me far-wandering courses?
     In what sin, O son of Kronos,
     In what sin ever having taken,
     To these afflictions hast thou yoked me? alas! alas!
     With fly-driven fear a wretched
     Frenzied one dost thus afflict?
     With fire burn, or with earth cover, or
     To sea monsters give for food, nor
     Envy me my prayers, king.
     Enough much-wandered wanderings
     Have exercised me, nor can I learn where
     I shall escape from sufferings.

     _Ch._ Hear'st thou the address of the cow-horned virgin?

     _Pr._ And how not hear the fly-whirled virgin,
     Daughter of Inachus, who Zeus' heart warmed
     With love, and now the courses over long,
     By Here hated, forcedly performs?

     _Io._ Whence utterest thou my father's name?
     Tell me, miserable, who thou art,
     That to me, O suffering one, me born to suffer,
     Thus true things dost address?
     The god-sent ail thou'st named,
     Which wastes me stinging
     With maddening goads, alas! alas!
     With foodless and unseemly leaps
     Rushing headlong, I came,
     By wrathful plots subdued.
     Who of the wretched, who, alas! alas! suffers like me?
     But to me clearly show
     What me awaits to suffer,
     What not necessary; what remedy of ill,
     Teach, if indeed thou know'st; speak out,
     Tell the ill-wandering virgin.

     _Pr._ I'll clearly tell thee all you wish to learn.
     Not weaving in enigmas, but in simple speech,
     As it is just to open the mouth to friends.
     Thou seest the giver of fire to men, Prometheus.

     _Io._ O thou who didst appear a common help to mortals,
     Wretched Prometheus, to atone for what do you endure this?

     _Pr._ I have scarce ceased my sufferings lamenting.

     _Io._ Would you not grant this favor to me?

     _Pr._ Say what you ask; for you'd learn all from me.

     _Io._ Say who has bound thee to the cliff.

     _Pr._ The will, indeed, of Zeus, Hephaistus' hand.

     _Io._ And penalty for what crimes dost thou pay?

     _Pr._ Thus much only can I show thee.

     _Io._ But beside this, declare what time will be
     To me unfortunate the limit of my wandering.

     _Pr._ Not to learn is better for thee than to learn these things.

     _Io._ Conceal not from me what I am to suffer.

     _Pr._ Indeed, I grudge thee not this favor.

     _Io._ Why, then, dost thou delay to tell the whole?

     _Pr._ There's no unwillingness, but I hesitate to vex thy mind.

     _Io._ Care not for me more than is pleasant to me.

     _Pr._ Since you are earnest, it behooves to speak; hear then.

     _Ch._ Not yet, indeed; but a share of pleasure also give to me.
     First we'll learn the malady of this one,
     Herself relating her destructive fortunes,
     And the remainder of her trials let her learn from thee.

     _Pr._ 'T is thy part, Io, to do these a favor,
     As well for every other reason, and as they are sisters of thy
          father.
     Since to weep and to lament misfortunes,
     There where one will get a tear
     From those attending, is worthy the delay.

     _Io._ I know not that I need distrust you,
     But in plain speech you shall learn
     All that you ask for; and yet e'en telling I lament
     The god-sent tempest, and dissolution
     Of my form--whence to me miserable it came.
     For always visions in the night, moving about
     My virgin chambers, enticed me
     With smooth words: "O greatly happy virgin,
     Why be a virgin long? is permitted to obtain
     The greatest marriage. For Zeus with love's dart
     Has been warmed by thee, and wishes to unite
     In love; but do thou, O child, spurn not the couch
     Of Zeus, but go out to Lerna's deep
     Morass, and stables of thy father's herds,
     That the divine eye may cease from desire."
     With such dreams every night
     Was I unfortunate distressed, till I dared tell
     My father of the night-wandering visions.
     And he to Pytho and Dodona frequent
     Prophets sent, that he might learn what it was necessary
     He should say or do, to do agreeably to the gods.
     And they came bringing ambiguous
     Oracles, darkly and indistinctly uttered.
     But finally a plain report came to Inachus,
     Clearly enjoining him and telling
     Out of my home and country to expel me,
     Discharged to wander to the earth's last bounds;
     And if he was not willing, from Zeus would come
     A fiery thunderbolt, which would annihilate all his race.
     Induced by such predictions of the Loxian,
     Against his will he drove me out,
     And shut me from the houses; but Zeus' rein
     Compelled him by force to do these things.
     Immediately my form and mind were
     Changed, and horned, as you behold, stung
     By a sharp-mouthed fly, with frantic leaping
     Rushed I to Cenchrea's palatable stream,
     And Lerna's source; but a herdsman born-of-earth
     Of violent temper, Argus, accompanied, with numerous
     Eyes my steps observing.
     But unexpectedly a sudden fate
     Robbed him of life; and I, fly-stung,
     By lash divine am driven from land to land.
     You hear what has been done; and if you have to say aught,
     What's left of labors, speak; nor pitying me
     Comfort with false words; for an ill
     The worst of all, I say, are made-up words.

     _Ch._ Ah! ah! enough, alas!
     Ne'er, ne'er did I presume such cruel words
     Would reach my ears, nor thus unsightly
     And intolerable hurts, sufferings, fears with a two-edged
     Goad would chill my soul;
     Alas! alas! fate! fate!
     I shudder, seeing the state of Io.

     _Pr._ Beforehand sigh'st thou, and art full of fears,
     Hold till the rest also thou learn'st.

     _Ch._ Tell, teach; for to the sick 't is sweet
     To know the remaining pain beforehand clearly.

     _Pr._ Your former wish ye got from me
     With ease; for first ye asked to learn from her
     Relating her own trials;
     The rest now hear, what sufferings 't is necessary
     This young woman should endure from Here.
     But do thou, offspring of Inachus, my words
     Cast in thy mind, that thou may'st learn the boundaries of
          the way.
     First, indeed, hence towards the rising of the sun
     Turning thyself, travel uncultivated lands,
     And to the Scythian nomads thou wilt come, who woven roofs
     On high inhabit, on well-wheeled carts,
     With far-casting bows equipped;
     Whom go not near, but to the sea-resounding cliffs
     Bending thy feet, pass from the region.
     On the left hand the iron-working
     Chalybes inhabit, whom thou must needs beware,
     For they are rude and inaccessible to strangers.
     And thou wilt come to the Hybristes river, not ill named,
     Which pass not, for not easy is 't to pass,
     Before you get to Caucasus itself, highest
     Of mountains, where the stream spurts out its tide
     From the very temples; and passing over
     The star-neighbored summits, 't is necessary to go
     The southern way, where thou wilt come to the man-hating
     Army of the Amazons, who Themiscyra one day
     Will inhabit, by the Thermedon, where's
     Salmydessia, rough jaw of the sea,
     Inhospitable to sailors, stepmother of ships;
     They will conduct thee on thy way, and very cheerfully.
     And to the Cimmerian isthmus thou wilt come,
     Just on the narrow portals of a lake, which leaving
     It behooves thee with stout heart to pass the Mœotic straits;
     And there will be to mortals ever a great fame
     Of thy passage, and Bosphorus from thy name
     'T will be called. And leaving Europe's plain
     The continent of Asia thou wilt reach.--Seemeth to thee,
          forsooth,
     The tyrant of the gods in everything to be
     Thus violent? For he a god, with this mortal
     Wishing to unite, drove her to these wanderings.
     A bitter wooer didst thou find, O virgin,
     For thy marriage. For the words you now have heard
     Think not yet to be the prelude.

     _Io._ Ah! me! me! alas! alas!

     _Pr._ Again dost shriek and heave a sigh? What
     Wilt thou do when the remaining ills thou learn'st?

     _Ch._ And hast thou any further suffering to tell her?

     _Pr._ Ay, a tempestuous sea of baleful woe.

     _Io._ What profit, then, for me to live, and not in haste
     To cast myself from this rough rock,
     That rushing down upon the plain I may be released
     From every trouble? For better once for all to die,
     Than all my days to suffer evilly.

     _Pr._ Unhappily my trials would'st thou hear,
     To whom to die has not been fated;
     For this would be release from sufferings;
     But now there is no end of ills lying
     Before me, until Zeus falls from sovereignty.

     _Io._ And is Zeus ever to fall from power?

     _Pr._ Thou would'st be pleased, I think, to see this accident.

     _Io._ How should I not, who suffer ill from Zeus?

     _Pr._ That these things then are so, be thou assured.

     _Io._ By what one will the tyrant's power be robbed?

     _Pr._ Himself, by his own senseless counsels.

     _Io._ In what way show, if there's no harm.

     _Pr._ He will make such a marriage as one day he'll repent.

     _Io._ Of god or mortal? If to be spoken, tell.

     _Pr._ What matters which? For these things are not to be told.

     _Io._ By a wife will he be driven from the throne?

     _Pr._ Ay, she will bring forth a son superior to his father.

     _Io._ Is there no refuge for him from this fate?

     _Pr._ None, surely, till I may be released from bonds.

     _Io._ Who, then, is to release thee, Zeus unwilling?

     _Pr._ He must be some one of thy descendants.

     _Io._ How sayest thou? that my child will deliver thee from ills?

     _Pr._ Third of thy race after ten other births.

     _Io._ This oracle is not yet easy to be guessed.

     _Pr._ But do not seek to understand thy sufferings.

     _Io._ First proffering gain to me, do not then withhold it.

     _Pr._ I'll grant thee one of two relations.

     _Io._ What two propose, and give to me my choice.

     _Pr._ I give; choose whether thy remaining troubles
     I shall tell thee clearly, or him that will release me.

     _Ch._ Consent to do her the one favor,
     Me the other, nor deem us undeserving of thy words;
     To her indeed tell what remains of wandering,
     And to me, who will release; for I desire this.

     _Pr._ Since ye are earnest, I will not resist
     To tell the whole, as much as ye ask for.
     To thee first, Io, vexatious wandering I will tell,
     Which engrave on the remembering tablets of the mind.
     When thou hast passed the flood boundary of continents,
     Towards the flaming orient sun-traveled ...
     Passing through the tumult of the sea, until you reach
     The Gorgonian plains of Cisthene, where
     The Phorcides dwell, old virgins,
     Three, swan-shaped, having a common eye,
     One-toothed, whom neither the sun looks on
     With his beams, nor nightly moon ever.
     And near, their winged sisters three,
     Dragon-scaled Gorgons, odious to men,
     Whom no mortal beholding will have breath;
     Such danger do I tell thee.
     But hear another odious sight;
     Beware the gryphons, sharp-mouthed
     Dogs of Zeus, which bark not, and the one-eyed Arimaspian
     Host, going on horseback, who dwell about
     The golden-flowing flood of Pluto's channel;
     These go not near. But to a distant land
     Thou 'lt come, a dusky race, who near the fountains
     Of the sun inhabit, where is the Æthiopian river.
     Creep down the banks of this, until thou com'st
     To a descent, where from Byblinian mounts
     The Nile sends down its sacred palatable stream.
     This will conduct thee to the triangled land
     Nilean, where, Io, 't is decreed
     Thou and thy progeny shall form the distant colony.
     If aught of this is unintelligible to thee, and hard to be
          found out,
     Repeat thy questions, and learn clearly;
     For more leisure than I want is granted me.

     _Ch._ If to her aught remaining or omitted
     Thou hast to tell of her pernicious wandering,
     Speak; but if thou hast said all, give us
     The favor which we ask, for surely thou remember'st.

     _Pr._ The whole term of her traveling has she heard.
     But that she may know that not in vain she hears me,
     I'll tell what before coming hither she endured,
     Giving this as proof of my relations.
     The great multitude of words I will omit,
     And proceed unto the very limit of thy wanderings.
     When, then, you came to the Molossian ground,
     And near the high-ridged Dodona, where
     Oracle and seat is of Thesprotian Zeus,
     And prodigy incredible, the speaking oaks,
     By whom you clearly, and naught enigmatically,
     Were called the illustrious wife of Zeus
     About to be, if aught of these things soothes thee;
     Thence, driven by the fly, you came
     The seaside way to the great gulf of Rhea,
     From which by courses retrograde you are now tempest-tossed.
     But for time to come the sea gulf,
     Clearly know, will be called Ionian,
     Memorial of thy passage to all mortals.
     Proofs to thee are these of my intelligence,
     That it sees somewhat more than the apparent.
     But the rest to you and her in common I will tell,
     Having come upon the very track of former words.
     There is a city Canopus, last of the land,
     By Nile's very mouth and bank;
     There at length Zeus makes thee sane,
     Stroking with gentle hand, and touching only.
     And, named from Zeus' begetting,
     Thou wilt bear dark Epaphus, who will reap
     As much land as broad-flowing Nile doth water;
     And fifth from him, a band of fifty children
     Again to Argos shall unwilling come,
     Of female sex, avoiding kindred marriage
     Of their cousins; but they, with minds inflamed,
     Hawks by doves not far left behind,
     Will come pursuing marriages
     Not to be pursued, but heaven will take vengeance on their bodies;
     For them Pelasgia shall receive by Mars
     Subdued with woman's hand with night-watching boldness.
     For each wife shall take her husband's life,
     Staining a two-edged dagger in his throat.
     Such 'gainst my foes may Cypris come.--
     But one of the daughters shall love soften
     Not to slay her bedfellow, but she will waver
     In her mind; and one of two things will prefer,
     To hear herself called timid, rather than stained with blood;
     She shall in Argos bear a royal race.--
     Of a long speech is need this clearly to discuss.
     From this seed, however, shall be born a brave,
     Famed for his bow, who will release me
     From these sufferings. Such oracle my ancient
     Mother told me, Titanian Themis;
     But how and by what means, this needs long speech
     To tell, and nothing, learning, wilt thou gain.

     _Io._ Ah me! ah wretched me!
     Spasms again and brain-struck
     Madness burn me within, and a fly's dart
     Stings me,--not wrought by fire.
     My heart with fear knocks at my breast,
     And my eyes whirl round and round,
     And from my course I'm borne by madness'
     Furious breath, unable to control my tongue;
     While confused words dash idly
     'Gainst the waves of horrid woe.

     _Ch._ Wise, wise indeed was he,
     Who first in mind
     This weighed, and with the tongue expressed,
     To marry according to one's degree is best by far;
     Nor, being a laborer with the hands,
     To woo those who are by wealth corrupted,
     Nor, those by birth made great.
     Never, never me
     Fates ...
     May you behold the sharer of Zeus' couch.
     Nor may I be brought near to any husband among those from heaven,
     For I fear, seeing the virginhood of Io,
     Not content with man, through marriage vexed
     With these distressful wanderings by Here.
     But for myself, since an equal marriage is without fear,
     I am not concerned lest the love of the almighty
     Gods cast its inevitable eye on me.
     Without war, indeed, this war, producing
     Troubles; nor do I know what would become of me;
     For I see not how I should escape the subtlety of Zeus.

     _Pr._ Surely shall Zeus, though haughty now,
     Yet be humble, such marriage
     He prepares to make, which from sovereignty
     And the throne will cast him down obscure; and Father Kronos'
     Curse will then be all fulfilled,
     Which falling from the ancient seats he imprecated.
     And refuge from such ills none of the gods
     But I can show him clearly.
     I know these things, and in what manner. Now, therefore,
     Being bold, let him sit trusting to lofty
     Sounds, and brandishing with both hands his fire-breathing weapon,
     For naught will these avail him, not
     To fall disgracefully intolerable falls;
     Such wrestler does he now prepare,
     Himself against himself, a prodigy most hard to be withstood;
     Who, indeed, will invent a better flame than lightning,
     And a loud sound surpassing thunder;
     And shiver the trident, Neptune's weapon,
     The marine earth-shaking ail.
     Stumbling upon this ill he'll learn
     How different to govern and to serve.

     _Ch._ Ay, as you hope you vent this against Zeus.

     _Pr._ What will be done, and also what I hope, I say.

     _Ch._ And are we to expect that any will rule Zeus?

     _Pr._ Even than these more grievous ills he'll have.

     _Ch._ How fear'st thou not, hurling such words?

     _Pr._ What should I fear, to whom to die has not been fated?

     _Ch._ But suffering more grievous still than this he may inflict.

     _Pr._ Then let him do it; all is expected by me.

     _Ch._ Those reverencing Adrastia are wise.

     _Pr._ Revere, pray, flatter each successive ruler.
     Me less than nothing Zeus concerns.
     Let him do, let him prevail this short time
     As he will, for long he will not rule the gods,--
     But I see here, indeed, Zeus' runner,
     The new tryant's drudge;
     Doubtless he brings some new message.

PROMETHEUS, CHORUS, _and_ HERMES.

     _Her._ To thee, the sophist, the bitterly bitter,
     The sinner against gods, the giver of honors
     To ephemerals, the thief of fire, I speak;
     The Father commands thee to tell the marriage
     Which you boast, by which he falls from power;
     And that, too, not enigmatically,
     But each particular declare; nor cause me
     Double journeys, Prometheus; for thou see'st that
     Zeus is not appeased by such.

     _Pr._ Solemn-mouthed and full of wisdom
     Is thy speech, as of the servant of the gods.
     Ye newly rule, and think forsooth
     To dwell in griefless citadels; have I not seen
     Two tyrants fallen from these?
     And third I shall behold him ruling now,
     Basest and speediest. Do I seem to thee
     To fear and shrink from the new gods?
     Nay, much and wholly I fall short of this.
     The way thou cam'st go through the dust again;
     For thou wilt learn naught which thou ask'st of me.

     _Her._ Ay, by such insolence before
     You brought yourself into these woes.

     _Pr._ Plainly know, I would not change
     My ill fortune for thy servitude,
     For better, I think, to serve this rock
     Than be the faithful messenger of Father Zeus.
     Thus to insult the insulting it is fit.

     _Her._ Thou seem'st to enjoy thy present state.

     _Pr._ I enjoy? Enjoying thus my enemies
     Would I see; and thee 'mong them I count.

     _Her._ Dost thou blame me for aught of thy misfortunes?

     _Pr._ In plain words, all gods I hate,
     As many as well treated wrong me unjustly.

     _Her._ I hear thee raving, no slight ail.

     _Pr._ Ay, I should ail, if ail one's foes to hate.

     _Her._ If prosperous, thou couldst not be borne.

     _Pr._ Ah me!

     _Her._ This word Zeus does not know.

     _Pr._ But time growing old teaches all things.

     _Her._ And still thou know'st not yet how to be prudent.

     _Pr._ For I should not converse with thee a servant.

     _Her._ Thou seem'st to say naught which the Father wishes.

     _Pr._ And yet his debtor I'd requite the favor.

     _Her._ Thou mock'st me verily as if I were a child.

     _Pr._ And art thou not a child, and simpler still than this,
     If thou expectest to learn aught from me?
     There is not outrage nor expedient, by which
     Zeus will induce me to declare these things,
     Before he loose these grievous bonds.
     Let there be hurled, then, flaming fire,
     And the white-winged snows, and thunders
     Of the earth, let him confound and mingle all.
     For none of these will bend me till I tell
     By whom 't is necessary he should fall from sovereignty.

     _Her._ Consider now if these things seem helpful.

     _Pr._ Long since these were considered and resolved.

     _Her._ Venture, O vain one, venture, at length,
     In view of present sufferings to be wise.

     _Pr._ In vain you vex me, as a wave, exhorting.
     Ne'er let it come into thy mind that I, fearing
     Zeus' anger, shall become woman-minded,
     And beg him, greatly hated,
     With womanish upturnings of the hands,
     To loose me from these bonds. I am far from it.

     _Her._ Though saying much I seem in vain to speak;
     For thou art nothing softened nor appeased
     By prayers; but champing at the bit like a new-yoked
     Colt, thou strugglest and contend'st against the reins.
     But thou art violent with feeble wisdom.
     For stubbornness to him who is not wise,
     Itself alone, is less than nothing strong.
     But consider, if thou art not persuaded by my words,
     What storm and triple surge of ills
     Will come upon thee, not to be avoided; for first this rugged
     Cliff with thunder and lightning flame
     The Father'll rend, and hide
     Thy body, and a strong arm will bury thee.
     When thou hast spent a long length of time,
     Thou wilt come back to light; and Zeus'
     Winged dog, a bloodthirsty eagle, ravenously
     Shall tear the great rag of thy body,
     Creeping an uninvited guest all day,
     And banquet on thy liver black by eating.
     Of such suffering expect not any end,
     Before some god appear
     Succeeding to thy labors, and wish to go to rayless
     Hades, and the dark depths of Tartarus.
     Therefore deliberate; since this is not made
     Boasting, but in earnest spoken;
     For to speak falsely does not know the mouth
     Of Zeus, but every word he does. So
     Look about thee, and consider, nor ever think
     Obstinacy better than prudence.

     _Ch._ To us indeed Hermes appears to say not unseasonable things,
     For he directs thee, leaving off
     Self-will, to seek prudent counsel.
     Obey; for it is base to err, for a wise man.

     _Pr._ To me foreknowing these messages
     He has uttered, but for a foe to suffer ill
     From foes is naught unseemly.
     Therefore 'gainst me let there be hurled
     Fire's double-pointed curl, and air
     Be provoked with thunder, and a tumult
     Of wild winds; and earth from its foundations
     Let a wind rock, and its very roots,
     And with a rough surge mingle
     The sea waves with the passages
     Of the heavenly stars, and to black
     Tartarus let him quite cast down my
     Body, by necessity's strong eddies.
     Yet after all he will not kill me.

     _Her._ Such words and counsels you may hear
     From the brain-struck.
     For what lacks he of being mad?
     And if prosperous, what does he cease from madness?
     Do you, therefore, who sympathize
     With this one's suffering,
     From these places quick withdraw somewhere,
     Lest the harsh bellowing thunder
     Stupefy your minds.

     _Ch._ Say something else, and exhort me
     To some purpose; for surely
     Thou hast intolerably abused this word.
     How direct me to perform a baseness?
     I wish to suffer with him whate'er is necessary,
     For I have learned to hate betrayers;
     Nor is the pest
     Which I abominate more than this.

     _Her._ Remember, then, what I foretell;
     Nor by calamity pursued
     Blame fortune, nor e'er say
     That Zeus into unforeseen
     Ill has cast you; surely not, but yourselves
     You yourselves; for knowing,
     And not suddenly nor clandestinely,
     You'll be entangled through your folly
     In an impassable net of woe.

     _Pr._ Surely indeed, and no more in word,
     Earth is shaken;
     And a hoarse sound of thunder
     Bellows near; and wreaths of lightning
     Flash out fiercely blazing, and whirlwinds dust
     Whirl up; and leap the blasts
     Of all winds, 'gainst one another
     Blowing in opposite array;
     And air with sea is mingled;
     Such impulse against me from Zeus,
     Producing fear, doth plainly come.
     O revered Mother, O Ether
     Revolving common light to all,
     You see me, how unjust things I endure!




TRANSLATIONS FROM PINDAR


ELYSIUM

OLYMPIA II, 109-150

     Equally by night always,
     And by day, having the sun, the good
     Lead a life without labor, not disturbing the earth
     With violent hands, nor the sea water,
     For a scanty living; but honored
     By the gods, who take pleasure in fidelity to oaths,
     They spend a tearless existence;
     While the others suffer unsightly pain.
     But as many as endured threefold
     Probation, keeping the mind from all
     Injustice, going the way of Zeus to Kronos' tower,
     Where the ocean breezes blow around
     The island of the blessed; and flowers of gold shine,
     Some on the land from dazzling trees,
     And the water nourishes others;
     With garlands of these they crown their hands and hair,
     According to the just decrees of Rhadamanthus,
     Whom Father Kronos, the husband of Rhea,
     Having the highest throne of all, has ready by himself as his
          assistant judge.
     Peleus and Kadmus are regarded among these;
     And his mother brought Achilles, when she had
     Persuaded the heart of Zeus with prayers,
     Who overthrew Hector, Troy's
     Unconquered, unshaken column, and gave Cycnus
     To death, and Morning's Æthiop son.

OLYMPIA V, 34-39

     Always around virtues labor and expense strive toward a work
     Covered with danger; but those succeeding seem to be wise even
          to the citizens.

OLYMPIA VI, 14-17

                     Dangerless virtues,
     Neither among men, nor in hollow ships,
     Are honorable; but many remember if a fair deed is done.


ORIGIN OF RHODES

OLYMPIA VII, 100-129

     Ancient sayings of men relate,
     That when Zeus and the Immortals divided earth,
     Rhodes was not yet apparent in the deep sea;
     But in salt depths the island was hid.
     And, Helios being absent, no one claimed for him his lot;
     So they left him without any region for his share,
     The pure god. And Zeus was about to make a second drawing of lots
     For him warned. But he did not permit him;
     For he said that within the white sea he had seen a certain land
          springing up from the bottom,
     Capable of feeding many men, and suitable for flocks.
     And straightway he commanded golden-filleted Lachesis
     To stretch forth her hands, and not contradict
     The great oath of the gods, but with the son of Kronos
     Assent that, to the bright air being sent by his nod,
     It should hereafter be his prize. And his words were fully
          performed,
     Meeting with truth. The island sprang from the watery
     Sea; and the genial Father of penetrating beams,
     Ruler of fire-breathing horses, has it.

OLYMPIA VIII, 95, 96

     A man doing fit things
     Forgets Hades.


HERCULES NAMES THE HILL OF KRONOS

OLYMPIA X, 59-68

     He named the Hill of Kronos, for before nameless,
     While Œnomaus ruled, it was moistened with much snow;
     And at this first rite the Fates stood by,
     And Time, who alone proves
     Unchanging truth.


OLYMPIA AT EVENING

OLYMPIA X, 85-92

     With the javelin Phrastor struck the mark;
     And Eniceus cast the stone afar,
     Whirling his hand, above them all,
     And with applause it rushed
     Through a great tumult;
     And the lovely evening light
     Of the fair-faced moon shone on the scene.


FAME

OLYMPIA X, 109-117

     When, having done fair things, O Agesidamus,
     Without the reward of song, a man may come
     To Hades' rest, vainly aspiring
     He obtains with toil some short delight.
     But the sweet-voiced lyre
     And the sweet flute bestow some favor;
     For Zeus' Pierian daughters
     Have wide fame.


TO ASOPICHUS OF ORCHOMENOS, ON HIS VICTORY IN THE STADIC COURSE

OLYMPIA XIV

     O ye, who inhabit for your lot the seat of the Cephisian
     Streams, yielding fair steeds, renowned Graces,
     Ruling bright Orchomenos,
     Protectors of the ancient race of Minyæ,
     Hear, when I pray.
     For with you are all pleasant
     And sweet things to mortals;
     If wise, if fair, if noble,
     Any man. For neither do the gods,
     Without the august Graces,
     Rule the dance,
     Nor feasts; but stewards
     Of all works in heaven,
     Having placed their seats
     By golden-bowed Pythian Apollo,
     They reverence the eternal power
     Of the Olympian Father.
     August Aglaia and song-loving
     Euphrosyne, children of the mightiest god,
     Hear now, and Thalia loving song,
     Beholding this band, in favorable fortune
     Lightly dancing; for in Lydian
     Manner meditating,
     I come celebrating Asopichus,
     Since Minya by thy means is victor at the Olympic games.
     Now to Persephone's
     Black-walled house go, Echo,
     Bearing to his father the famous news;
     That seeing Cleodamus thou mayest say,
     That in renowned Pisa's vale
     His son crowned his young hair
     With plumes of illustrious contests.


TO THE LYRE

PYTHIA I, 8-11

     Thou extinguishest even the spear-like bolt
     Of everlasting fire. And the eagle sleeps on the sceptre of Zeus,
     Drooping his swift wings on either side,
     The king of birds.

PYTHIA I, 25-28

     Whatever things Zeus has not loved
     Are terrified, hearing
     The voice of the Pierians,
     On earth and the immeasurable sea.

PYTHIA II, 159-161

     A plain-spoken man brings advantage to every government,--
     To a monarchy, and when the
     Impetuous crowd, and when the wise, rule a city.

As a whole, the third Pythian Ode, to Hiero, on his victory in the
single-horse race, is one of the most memorable. We extract first the
account of


ÆSCULAPIUS

PYTHIA III, 83-110

     As many, therefore, as came suffering
     From spontaneous ulcers, or wounded
     In their limbs with glittering steel,
     Or with the far-cast stone,
     Or by the summer's heat o'ercome in body,
     Or by winter, relieving he saved from
     Various ills; some cherishing
     With soothing strains,
     Others having drunk refreshing draughts, or applying
     Remedies to the limbs, others by cutting off he made erect.
     But even wisdom is bound by gain,
     And gold appearing in the hand persuaded even him, with its
          bright reward,
     To bring a man from death
     Already overtaken. But the Kronian, smiting
     With both hands, quickly took away
     The breath from his breasts;
     And the rushing thunderbolt hurled him to death.
     It is necessary for mortal minds
     To seek what is reasonable from the divinities,
     Knowing what is before the feet, of what destiny we are.
     Do not, my soul, aspire to the life
     Of the Immortals, but exhaust the practicable means.

In the conclusion of the ode, the poet reminds the victor, Hiero, that
adversity alternates with prosperity in the life of man, as in the
instance of


PELEUS AND CADMUS

PYTHIA III, 145-205

     The Immortals distribute to men
     With one good two
     Evils. The foolish, therefore,
     Are not able to bear these with grace,
     But the wise, turning the fair outside.

     But thee the lot of good fortune follows,
     or surely great Destiny
     Looks down upon a king ruling the people,
     If on any man. But a secure life
     Was not to Peleus, son of Æacus,
     Nor to godlike Cadmus,
     Who yet are said to have had
     The greatest happiness
     Of mortals, and who heard
     The song of the golden-filleted Muses,
     On the mountain, and in seven-gated Thebes,
     When the one married fair-eyed Harmonia,
     And the other Thetis, the illustrious daughter of wise-counseling
          Nereus.
     And the gods feasted with both;
     And they saw the royal children of Kronos
     On golden seats, and received
     Marriage gifts; and having exchanged
     Former toils for the favor of Zeus,
     They made erect the heart.
     But in course of time
     His three daughters robbed the one
     Of some of his serenity by acute
     Sufferings; when Father Zeus, forsooth, came
     To the lovely couch of white-armed Thyone.
     And the other's child, whom only the immortal
     Thetis bore in Phthia, losing
     His life in war by arrows,
     Being consumed by fire excited
     The lamentation of the Danaans.
     But if any mortal has in his
     Mind the way of truth,
     It is necessary to make the best
     Of what befalls from the blessed.
     For various are the blasts
     Of high-flying winds.
     The happiness of men stays not a long time,
     Though fast it follows rushing on.

     Humble in humble estate, lofty in lofty,
     I will be; and the attending dæmon
     I will always reverence in my mind,
     Serving according to my means.
     But if Heaven extend to me kind wealth,
     I have hope to find lofty fame hereafter.
     Nestor and Lycian Sarpedon--
     They are the fame of men--
     From resounding words which skillful artists
     Sung, we know.
     For virtue through renowned
     Song is lasting.
     But for few is it easy to obtain.


APOLLO

PYTHIA V, 87-90

                           He bestowed the lyre,
     And he gives the muse to whom he wishes,
     Bringing peaceful serenity to the breast.


MAN

PYTHIA VIII, 136

     The phantom of a shadow are men.


HYPSEUS' DAUGHTER CYRENE

PYTHIA IX, 31-44

     He reared the white-armed child Cyrene,
     Who loved neither the alternating motion of the loom,
     Nor the superintendence of feasts,
     With the pleasures of companions;
     But, with javelins of steel
     And the sword contending,
     To slay wild beasts;
     Affording surely much
     And tranquil peace to her father's herds;
     Spending little sleep
     Upon her eyelids,
     As her sweet bedfellow, creeping on at dawn.


THE HEIGHT OF GLORY

PYTHIA X, 33-48

             Fortunate and celebrated
     By the wise is that man
     Who, conquering by his hands or virtue
     Of his feet, takes the highest prizes
     Through daring and strength,
     And living still sees his youthful son
     Deservedly obtaining Pythian crowns.
     The brazen heaven is not yet accessible to him.
     But whatever glory we
     Of mortal race may reach,
     He goes beyond, even to the boundaries
     Of navigation. But neither in ships, nor going on foot,
     Couldst thou find the wonderful way to the contests of the
          Hyperboreans.


TO ARISTOCLIDES, VICTOR AT THE NEMEAN GAMES

NEMEA III, 32-37

             If, being beautiful,
     And doing things like to his form,
     The child of Aristophanes
     Went to the height of manliness, no further
     Is it easy to go over the untraveled sea,
     Beyond the Pillars of Hercules.


THE YOUTH OF ACHILLES

NEMEA III, 69-90

     One with native virtues
     Greatly prevails; but he who
     Possesses acquired talents, an obscure man,
     Aspiring to various things, never with fearless
     Foot advances, but tries
     A myriad virtues with inefficient mind.
     Yellow-haired Achilles, meanwhile, remaining in the house of
          Philyra,
     Being a boy played
     Great deeds; often brandishing
     Iron-pointed javelins in his hands,
     Swift as the winds, in fight he wrought death to savage lions;
     And he slew boars, and brought their bodies
     Palpitating to Kronian Centaurus,
     As soon as six years old. And all the while
     Artemis and bold Athene admired him,
     Slaying stags without dogs or treacherous nets;
     For he conquered them on foot.

NEMEA IV, 66-70

     Whatever virtues sovereign destiny has given me,
     I well know that time, creeping on,
     Will fulfill what was fated.

NEMEA V, 1-8

The kindred of Pytheas, a victor in the Nemean games, had wished to
procure an ode from Pindar for less than three drachmæ, asserting that
they could purchase a statue for that sum. In the following lines he
nobly reproves their meanness, and asserts the value of his labors,
which, unlike those of the statuary, will bear the fame of the hero to
the ends of the earth.

     No image-maker am I, who being still make statues
     Standing on the same base. But on every
     Merchant-ship and in every boat, sweet song,
     Go from Ægina to announce that Lampo's son,
     Mighty Pytheas,
     Has conquered the pancratian crown at the Nemean games.


THE DIVINE IN MAN

NEMEA VI, 1-13

     One the race of men and of gods;
     And from one mother
     We all breathe.
     But quite different power
     Divides us, so that the one is nothing,
     But the brazen heaven remains always
     A secure abode. Yet in some respect we are related,
     Either in mighty mind or form, to the Immortals;
     Although not knowing
     To what resting-place,
     By day or night, Fate has written that we shall run.


THE TREATMENT OF AJAX

NEMEA VIII, 44-51

     In secret votes the Danaans aided Ulysses;
     And Ajax, deprived of golden arms, struggled with death.
     Surely, wounds of another kind they wrought
     In the warm flesh of their foes, waging war
     With the man-defending spear.


THE VALUE OF FRIENDS

NEMEA VIII, 68-75

     Virtue increases, being sustained by wise men and just,
     As when a tree shoots up with gentle dews into the liquid air.
     There are various uses of friendly men;
     But chiefest in labors; and even pleasure
     Requires to place some pledge before the eyes.


DEATH OF AMPHIARAUS

NEMEA IX, 41-66

     Once they led to seven-gated Thebes an army of men, not according
     To the lucky flight of birds. Nor did the Kronian,
     Brandishing his lightning, impel to march
     From home insane, but to abstain from the way.
     But to apparent destruction
     The host made haste to go, with brazen arms
     And horse equipments, and on the banks
     Of Ismenus, defending sweet return,
     Their white-flowered bodies fattened fire.
     For seven pyres devoured young-limbed
     Men. But to Amphiaraus
     Zeus rent the deep-bosomed earth
     With his mighty thunderbolt,
     And buried him with his horses,
     Ere, being struck in the back
     By the spear of Periclymenus, his warlike
     Spirit was disgraced.
     For in dæmonic fears
     Flee even the sons of gods.


CASTOR AND POLLUX

NEMEA X, 153-171

Pollux, son of Zeus, shared his immortality with his brother Castor,
son of Tyndarus, and while one was in heaven, the other remained in
the infernal regions, and they alternately lived and died every day,
or, as some say, every six months. While Castor lies mortally wounded
by Idas, Pollux prays to Zeus, either to restore his brother to life,
or permit him to die with him, to which the god answers,--

             Nevertheless, I give thee
     Thy choice of these: if, indeed, fleeing
     Death and odious age,
     You wish to dwell on Olympus,
     With Athene and black-speared Mars,
     Thou hast this lot;
     But if thou thinkest to fight
     For thy brother, and share
     All things with him,
     Half the time thou mayest breathe, being beneath the earth,
     And half in the golden halls of heaven.
     The god thus having spoken, he did not
     Entertain a double wish in his mind.
     And he released first the eye, and then the voice,
     Of brazen-mitred Castor.


TOIL

ISTHMIA I, 65-71

     One reward of labors is sweet to one man, one to another,--
     To the shepherd, and the plower, and the bird-catcher,
     And whom the sea nourishes.
     But every one is tasked to ward off
     Grievous famine from the stomach.


THE VENALITY OF THE MUSE

ISTHMIA II, 9-18

     Then the Muse was not
     Fond of gain, nor a laboring woman;
     Nor were the sweet-sounding,
     Soothing strains
     Of Terpsichore sold,
     With silvered front.
     But now she directs to observe the saying
     Of the Argive, coming very near the truth,
     Who cried, "Money, money, man,"
     Being bereft of property and friends.


HERCULES' PRAYER CONCERNING AJAX, SON OF TELAMON

ISTHMIA VI, 62-73

     "If ever, O Father Zeus, thou hast heard
     My supplication with willing mind,
     Now I beseech thee, with prophetic
     Prayer, grant a bold son from Eribœa
     To this man, my fated guest;
     Rugged in body
     As the hide of this wild beast
     Which now surrounds me, which, first of all
     My contests, I slew once in Nemea; and let his mind agree."
     To him thus having spoken, Heaven sent
     A great eagle, king of birds,
     And sweet joy thrilled him inwardly.


THE FREEDOM OF GREECE

                   First at Artemisium
     The children of the Athenians laid the shining
     Foundation of freedom,
     And at Salamis and Mycale,
     And in Platæa, making it firm
     As adamant.


FROM STRABO[7]

APOLLO

             Having risen he went
     Over land and sea,
     And stood over the vast summits of mountains,
     And threaded the recesses, penetrating to the foundations of
          the groves.


FROM PLUTARCH

     Heaven being willing, even on an osier thou mayest sail.
[Thus rhymed by the old translator of Plutarch:

     "Were it the will of heaven, an osier bough
     Were vessel safe enough the seas to plough."]


FROM SEXTUS EMPIRICUS

     Honors and crowns of the tempest-footed
     Horses delight one;
     Others live in golden chambers;
     And some even are pleased traversing securely
     The swelling of the sea in a swift ship.


FROM STOBÆUS

     This I will say to thee:
     The lot of fair and pleasant things
     It behooves to show in public to all the people;
     But if any adverse calamity sent from heaven befall
     Men, this it becomes to bury in darkness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pindar said of the physiologists, that they "plucked the unripe fruit
of wisdom."

       *       *       *       *       *

Pindar said that "hopes were the dreams of those awake."


FROM CLEMENS OF ALEXANDRIA

     To Heaven it is possible from black
     Night to make arise unspotted light,
     And with cloud-blackening darkness to obscure
     The pure splendor of day.

     First, indeed, the Fates brought the wise-counseling
     Uranian Themis, with golden horses,
     By the fountains of Ocean to the awful ascent
     Of Olympus, along the shining way,
     To be the first spouse of Zeus the Deliverer.
     And she bore the golden-filleted, fair-wristed
     Hours, preservers of good things.

     Equally tremble before God
     And a man dear to God.


FROM ÆLIUS ARISTIDES

Pindar used such exaggerations [in praise of poetry] as to say that
even the gods themselves, when at his marriage Zeus asked if they
wanted anything, "asked him to make certain gods for them who should
celebrate these great works and all his creation with speech and
song."

FOOTNOTE:

[7] [This and the following are fragments of Pindar found in ancient
authors.]




POEMS


NATURE

     O Nature! I do not aspire
     To be the highest in thy quire,--
     To be a meteor in the sky,
     Or comet that may range on high;
     Only a zephyr that may blow
     Among the reeds by the river low;
     Give me thy most privy place
     Where to run my airy race.

     In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
     Let me sigh upon a reed,
     Or in the woods, with leafy din,
     Whisper the still evening in:
     Some still work give me to do,--
     Only--be it near to you!

     For I'd rather be thy child
     And pupil, in the forest wild,
     Than be the king of men elsewhere,
     And most sovereign slave of care:
     To have one moment of thy dawn,
     Than share the city's year forlorn.


INSPIRATION[8]

     Whate'er we leave to God, God does,
       And blesses us;
     The work we choose should be our own,
       God leaves alone.

            *       *       *       *       *

     If with light head erect I sing,
       Though all the Muses lend their force,
     From my poor love of anything,
       The verse is weak and shallow as its source.

     But if with bended neck I grope,
       Listening behind me for my wit,
     With faith superior to hope,
       More anxious to keep back than forward it,

     Making my soul accomplice there
       Unto the flame my heart hath lit,
     Then will the verse forever wear,--
       Time cannot bend the line which God hath writ.

     Always the general show of things
       Floats in review before my mind,
     And such true love and reverence brings,
       That sometimes I forget that I am blind.

     But now there comes unsought, unseen,
       Some clear divine electuary,
     And I, who had but sensual been,
       Grow sensible, and as God is, am wary.

     I hearing get, who had but ears,
       And sight, who had but eyes before;
     I moments live, who lived but years,
       And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.

     I hear beyond the range of sound,
       I see beyond the range of sight,
     New earths and skies and seas around,
       And in my day the sun doth pale his light.

     A clear and ancient harmony
       Pierces my soul through all its din,
     As through its utmost melody,--
       Farther behind than they, farther within.

     More swift its bolt than lightning is.
       Its voice than thunder is more loud,
     It doth expand my privacies
       To all, and leave me single in the crowd.

     It speaks with such authority,
       With so serene and lofty tone,
     That idle Time runs gadding by,
       And leaves me with Eternity alone.

     Then chiefly is my natal hour,
       And only then my prime of life;
     Of manhood's strength it is the flower,
       'T is peace's end, and war's beginning strife.

     'T hath come in summer's broadest noon,
       By a gray wall or some chance place,
     Unseasoned time, insulted June,
       And vexed the day with its presuming face.

     Such fragrance round my couch it makes,
       More rich than are Arabian drugs,
     That my soul scents its life and wakes
       The body up beneath its perfumed rugs.

     Such is the Muse, the heavenly maid,
       The star that guides our mortal course,
     Which shows where life's true kernel's laid,
       Its wheat's fine flour, and its undying force.

     She with one breath attunes the spheres,
       And also my poor human heart,
     With one impulse propels the years
       Around, and gives my throbbing pulse its start.

     I will not doubt for evermore,
       Nor falter from a steadfast faith,
     For though the system be turned o'er,
       God takes not back the word which once he saith.

     I will, then, trust the love untold
       Which not my worth nor want has bought,
     Which wooed me young, and wooes me old,
       And to this evening hath me brought.

     My memory I'll educate
       To know the one historic truth,
     Remembering to the latest date
       The only true and sole immortal youth.

     Be but thy inspiration given,
       No matter through what danger sought,
     I'll fathom hell or climb to heaven,
       And yet esteem that cheap which love has bought.

            *       *       *       *       *

     Fame cannot tempt the bard
       Who's famous with his God,
     Nor laurel him reward
       Who hath his Maker's nod.


THE AURORA OF GUIDO[9]

A FRAGMENT

     The god of day his car rolls up the slopes,
       Reining his prancing steeds with steady hand;
     The lingering moon through western shadows gropes,
       While morning sheds its light o'er sea and land.

     Castles and cities by the sounding main
       Resound with all the busy din of life;
     The fisherman unfurls his sails again;
       And the recruited warrior bides the strife.

     The early breeze ruffles the poplar leaves;
       The curling waves reflect the unseen light;
     The slumbering sea with the day's impulse heaves,
       While o'er the western hill retires the drowsy night.

     The seabirds dip their bills in Ocean's foam,
       Far circling out over the frothy waves,--

       *       *       *       *       *


TO THE MAIDEN IN THE EAST[10]

     Low in the eastern sky
     Is set thy glancing eye;
     And though its gracious light
     Ne'er riseth to my sight,
     Yet every star that climbs
     Above the gnarlèd limbs
         Of yonder hill,
     Conveys thy gentle will.

     Believe I knew thy thought,
     And that the zephyrs brought
     Thy kindest wishes through,
     As mine they bear to you;
     That some attentive cloud
     Did pause amid the crowd
         Over my head,
     While gentle things were said.

     Believe the thrushes sung,
     And that the flower-bells rung,
     That herbs exhaled their scent,
     And beasts knew what was meant,
     The trees a welcome waved,
     And lakes their margins laved,
         When thy free mind
     To my retreat did wind.

     It was a summer eve,
     The air did gently heave
     While yet a low-hung cloud
     Thy eastern skies did shroud;
     The lightning's silent gleam,
     Startling my drowsy dream,
         Seemed like the flash
     Under thy dark eyelash.

     From yonder comes the sun,
     But soon his course is run,
     Rising to trivial day
     Along his dusty way;
     But thy noontide completes
     Only auroral heats,
         Nor ever sets,
     To hasten vain regrets.

     Direct thy pensive eye
     Into the western sky;
     And when the evening star
     Does glimmer from afar
     Upon the mountain line,
     Accept it for a sign
         That I am near,
     And thinking of thee here.

     I'll be thy Mercury,
     Thou Cytherea to me,
     Distinguished by thy face
     The earth shall learn my place;
     As near beneath thy light
     Will I outwear the night,
         With mingled ray
     Leading the westward way.

     Still will I strive to be
     As if thou wert with me;
     Whatever path I take,
     It shall be for thy sake,
     Of gentle slope and wide,
     As thou wert by my side,
         Without a root
     To trip thy gentle foot.

     I'll walk with gentle pace,
     And choose the smoothest place,
     And careful dip the oar,
     And shun the winding shore,
     And gently steer my boat
     Where water-lilies float,
         And cardinal-flowers
     Stand in their sylvan bowers.


TO MY BROTHER

     Brother, where dost thou dwell?
       What sun shines for thee now?
     Dost thou indeed fare well,
       As we wished thee here below?

     What season didst thou find?
       'Twas winter here.
     Are not the Fates more kind
       Than they appear?

     Is thy brow clear again
       As in thy youthful years?
     And was that ugly pain
       The summit of thy fears?

     Yet thou wast cheery still;
       They could not quench thy fire;
     Thou didst abide their will,
       And then retire.

     Where chiefly shall I look
       To feel thy presence near?
     Along the neighboring brook
       May I thy voice still hear?

     Dost thou still haunt the brink
       Of yonder river's tide?
     And may I ever think
       That thou art by my side?

     What bird wilt thou employ
       To bring me word of thee?
     For it would give them joy--
       'T would give them liberty--
     To serve their former lord
       With wing and minstrelsy.

     A sadder strain mixed with their song,
       They've slowlier built their nests;
     Since thou art gone
       Their lively labor rests.

     Where is the finch, the thrush,
       I used to hear?
     Ah, they could well abide
       The dying year.

     Now they no more return,
       I hear them not;
     They have remained to mourn,
       Or else forgot.


GREECE[11]

     When life contracts into a vulgar span,
     And human nature tires to be a man,
         I thank the gods for Greece,
         That permanent realm of peace.
     For as the rising moon far in the night
     Checkers the shade with her forerunning light,
     So in my darkest hour my senses seem
     To catch from her Acropolis a gleam.

     Greece, who am I that should remember thee,
     Thy Marathon and thy Thermopylæ?
     Is my life vulgar, my fate mean,
     Which on such golden memories can lean?


THE FUNERAL BELL

     One more is gone
     Out of the busy throng
       That tread these paths;
     The church-bell tolls,
     Its sad knell rolls
       To many hearths.

     Flower-bells toll not,
     Their echoes roll not
       Upon my ear;
     There still, perchance,
     That gentle spirit haunts
       A fragrant bier.

     Low lies the pall,
     Lowly the mourners all
       Their passage grope;
     No sable hue
     Mars the serene blue
       Of heaven's cope.

     In distant dell
     Faint sounds the funeral bell;
       A heavenly chime;
     Some poet there
     Weaves the light-burthened air
       Into sweet rhyme.


THE MOON

     Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;
       Mortality below her orb is placed.

     RALEIGH.

     The full-orbed moon with unchanged ray
       Mounts up the eastern sky,
     Not doomed to these short nights for aye,
       But shining steadily.

     She does not wane, but my fortune,
       Which her rays do not bless;
     My wayward path declineth soon,
       But she shines not the less.

     And if she faintly glimmers here,
       And palèd is her light,
     Yet alway in her proper sphere
       She's mistress of the night.


THE FALL OF THE LEAF[12]

     Thank God who seasons thus the year,
       And sometimes kindly slants his rays;
     For in his winter he's most near
       And plainest seen upon the shortest days.

     Who gently tempers now his heats.
       And then his harsher cold, lest we
     Should surfeit on the summer's sweets,
       Or pine upon the winter's crudity.

     A sober mind will walk alone,
       Apart from nature, if need be,
     And only its own seasons own:
       For nature leaving its humanity.

     Sometimes a late autumnal thought
       Has crossed my mind in green July,
     And to its early freshness brought
       Late ripened fruits, and an autumnal sky.

     The evening of the year draws on,
       The fields a later aspect wear;
     Since Summer's garishness is gone,
       Some grains of night tincture the noontide air.

     Behold! the shadows of the trees
       Now circle wider 'bout their stem,
     Like sentries that by slow degrees
       Perform their rounds, gently protecting them.

     And as the year doth decline,
       The sun allows a scantier light;
     Behind each needle of the pine
       There lurks a small auxiliar to the night.

     I hear the cricket's slumbrous lay
       Around, beneath me, and on high;
     It rocks the night, it soothes the day,
       And everywhere is Nature's lullaby.

     But most he chirps beneath the sod,
       When he has made his winter bed;
     His creak grown fainter but more broad,
       A film of autumn o'er the summer spread.

     Small birds, in fleets migrating by,
       Now beat across some meadow's bay,
     And as they tack and veer on high,
       With faint and hurried click beguile the way.

     Far in the woods, these golden days,
       Some leaf obeys its Maker's call;
     And through their hollow aisles it plays
       With delicate touch the prelude of the Fall.

     Gently withdrawing from its stem,
       It lightly lays itself along
     Where the same hand hath pillowed them,
       Resigned to sleep upon the old year's throng.

     The loneliest birch is brown and sere,
       The farthest pool is strewn with leaves,
     Which float upon their watery bier,
       Where is no eye that sees, no heart that grieves.

     The jay screams through the chestnut wood;
       The crisped and yellow leaves around
     Are hue and texture of my mood,
       And these rough burs my heirlooms on the ground.

     The threadbare trees, so poor and thin,
       They are no wealthier than I;
     But with as brave a core within
       They rear their boughs to the October sky.

     Poor knights they are which bravely wait
       The charge of Winter's cavalry,
     Keeping a simple Roman state,
       Discumbered of their Persian luxury.


THE THAW

     I saw the civil sun drying earth's tears,
     Her tears of joy that only faster flowed.[13]

     Fain would I stretch me by the highway-side
     To thaw and trickle with the melting snow;
     That mingled, soul and body, with the tide,
     I too may through the pores of nature flow.


A WINTER SCENE[14]

     The rabbit leaps,
     The mouse out-creeps,
     The flag out-peeps
       Beside the brook;
     The ferret weeps,
     The marmot sleeps,
     The owlet keeps
       In his snug nook.

     The apples thaw,
     The ravens caw,
     The squirrels gnaw
       The frozen fruit.
     To their retreat
     I track the feet
     Of mice that eat
       The apple's root.

     The snow-dust falls,
     The otter crawls,
     The partridge calls,
       Far in the wood.
     The traveler dreams,
     The tree-ice gleams,
     The blue jay screams
       In angry mood.

     The willows droop,
     The alders stoop,
     The pheasants group
       Beneath the snow.
     The catkins green
     Cast o'er the scene
     A summer's sheen,
       A genial glow.


TO A STRAY FOWL

         Poor bird! destined to lead thy life
           Far in the adventurous west,
         And here to be debarred to-night
           From thy accustomed nest;
     Must thou fall back upon old instinct now,
     Well-nigh extinct under man's fickle care?
     Did heaven bestow its quenchless inner light,
     So long ago, for thy small want to-night?
     Why stand'st upon thy toes to crow so late?
     The moon is deaf to thy low feathered fate;
     Or dost thou think so to possess the night,
     And people the drear dark with thy brave sprite?
     And now with anxious eye thou look'st about,
     While the relentless shade draws on its veil,
     For some sure shelter from approaching dews,
     And the insidious steps of nightly foes.
     I fear imprisonment has dulled thy wit,
     Or ingrained servitude extinguished it.
     But no; dim memory of the days of yore,
     By Brahmapootra and the Jumna's shore,
     Where thy proud race flew swiftly o'er the heath,
     And sought its food the jungle's shade beneath,
     Has taught thy wings to seek yon friendly trees,
     As erst by Indus' banks and far Ganges.


POVERTY

A FRAGMENT

               If I am poor,
           It is that I am proud;
     If God has made me naked and a boor,
       He did not think it fit his work to shroud.

     The poor man comes direct from heaven to earth,
       As stars drop down the sky, and tropic beams;
     The rich receives in our gross air his birth,
       As from low suns are slanted golden gleams.

     Yon sun is naked, bare of satellite,
       Unless our earth and moon that office hold;
     Though his perpetual day feareth no night,
       And his perennial summer dreads no cold.

     Mankind may delve, but cannot my wealth spend;
       If I no partial wealth appropriate,
     No armèd ships unto the Indies send,
       None robs me of my Orient estate.


PILGRIMS

     "Have you not seen,
     In ancient times,
     Pilgrims pass by
     Toward other climes,
     With shining faces,
     Youthful and strong,
     Mounting this hill
     With speech and with song?"

     "Ah, my good sir,
     I know not those ways;
     Little my knowledge,
     Tho' many my days.
     When I have slumbered,
     I have heard sounds
     As of travelers passing
     These my grounds.

     "'T was a sweet music
     Wafted them by,
     I could not tell
     If afar off or nigh.
     Unless I dreamed it,
     This was of yore:
     I never told it
     To mortal before,
     Never remembered
     But in my dreams
     What to me waking
     A miracle seems."


THE DEPARTURE

     In this roadstead I have ridden,
     In this covert I have hidden;
     Friendly thoughts were cliffs to me,
     And I hid beneath their lee.

     This true people took the stranger,
     And warm-hearted housed the ranger;
     They received their roving guest,
     And have fed him with the best;

     Whatsoe'er the land afforded
     To the stranger's wish accorded;
     Shook the olive, stripped the vine,
     And expressed the strengthening wine.

     And by night they did spread o'er him
     What by day they spread before him;--
     That good-will which was repast
     Was his covering at last.

     The stranger moored him to their pier
     Without anxiety or fear;
     By day he walked the sloping land,
     By night the gentle heavens he scanned.

     When first his bark stood inland
     To the coast of that far Finland,
     Sweet-watered brooks came tumbling to the shore
     The weary mariner to restore.

     And still he stayed from day to day
     If he their kindness might repay;
         But more and more
     The sullen waves came rolling toward the shore.

     And still the more the stranger waited,
     The less his argosy was freighted,
     And still the more he stayed,
     The less his debt was paid.

     So he unfurled his shrouded mast
     To receive the fragrant blast;
     And that sane refreshing gale
     Which had wooed him to remain
         Again and again,
     It was that filled his sail
       And drove him to the main.

     All day the low-hung clouds
       Dropt tears into the sea;
     And the wind amid the shrouds
       Sighed plaintively.


INDEPENDENCE[15]

     My life more civil is and free
       Than any civil polity.

     Ye princes, keep your realms
       And circumscribèd power,
     Not wide as are my dreams,
       Nor rich as is this hour.

     What can ye give which I have not?
     What can ye take which I have got?
       Can ye defend the dangerless?
       Can ye inherit nakedness?

     To all true wants Time's ear is deaf,
     Penurious states lend no relief
         Out of their pelf:
       But a free soul--thank God--
         Can help itself.

       Be sure your fate
     Doth keep apart its state,
     Not linked with any band,
     Even the noblest of the land;

     In tented fields with cloth of gold
       No place doth hold,
     But is more chivalrous than they are,
     And sigheth for a nobler war;
     A finer strain its trumpet sings,
     A brighter gleam its armor flings.

     The life that I aspire to live
       No man proposeth me;
     No trade upon the street[16]
       Wears its emblazonry.


DING DONG[17]

     When the world grows old by the chimney-side
     Then forth to the youngling nooks I glide,
     Where over the water and over the land
     The bells are booming on either hand.

     Now up they go ding, then down again dong,
     And awhile they ring to the same old song,
     For the metal goes round at a single bound,
     A-cutting the fields with its measured sound,
     While the tired tongue falls with a lengthened boom
     As solemn and loud as the crack of doom.

     Then changed is their measure to tone upon tone,
     And seldom it is that one sound comes alone,
     For they ring out their peals in a mingled throng,
     And the breezes waft the loud ding-dong along.

     When the echo hath reached me in this lone vale,
     I am straightway a hero in coat of mail,
     I tug at my belt and I march on my post,
     And feel myself more than a match for a host.


OMNIPRESENCE

     Who equaleth the coward's haste,
     And still inspires the faintest heart;
     Whose lofty fame is not disgraced,
     Though it assume the lowest part.


INSPIRATION

     If thou wilt but stand by my ear,
     When through the field thy anthem's rung,
     When that is done I will not fear
     But the same power will abet my tongue.


MISSION

     I've searched my faculties around,
     To learn why life to me was lent:
     I will attend the faintest sound,
     And then declare to man what God hath meant.


DELAY

     No generous action can delay
     Or thwart our higher, steadier aims;
     But if sincere and true are they,
     It will arouse our sight, and nerve our frames.


PRAYER

     Great God! I ask thee for no meaner pelf
     Than that I may not disappoint myself;
     That in my action I may soar as high
     As I can now discern with this clear eye;

     And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
     That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
     Howe'er they think or hope it that may be,
     They may not dream how thou 'st distinguished me;

     That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,
     And my life practice more than my tongue saith;
       That my low conduct may not show,
       Nor my relenting lines,
       That I thy purpose did not know,
       Or overrated thy designs.


FOOTNOTES:

[8] [Eighteen lines of this poem appear in _Week_, pp. 181, 182, 351,
372.]

[9] ["Suggested by the print of Guido's 'Aurora' sent by Mrs. Carlyle
as a wedding gift to Mrs. Emerson." (Note in _Poems of Nature_.)]

[10] [Five stanzas of this poem appear in _Week_, pp. 46, 47.]

[11] [The last four lines appear in _Week_, p. 54.]

[12] ["The first four of these stanzas (unnamed by Thoreau) were
published in the Boston _Commonwealth_ in 1863, under the title of
'The Soul's Season,' the remainder as 'The Fall of the Leaf.' There
can be little doubt that they are parts of one complete poem." (Note
in _Poems of Nature_.)]

[13] [See p. 120.]

[14] ["These stanzas formed part of the original manuscript of the
essay on 'A Winter Walk,' but were excluded by Emerson." (Note in
_Poems of Nature_.)]

[15] ["First printed in full in the Boston _Commonwealth_, October 30,
1863. The last fourteen lines had appeared in _The Dial_ under the
title of 'The Black Knight,' and are so reprinted in the Riverside
Edition." (Note in _Poems of Nature_.)]

[16] [In _The Dial_ this line reads, "Only the promise of my heart."]

[17] ["A copy of this hitherto unpublished poem has been kindly
furnished by Miss A. J. Ward." (Note in _Poems of Nature_.)]