Chapter III: Part 3

The hilltop offered beauty of another kind: the blue ocean, the broad, brown marshes, dotted with haycocks innumerable, the hills landward, a distant town, with its spires showing, the inlet yonder, whitened with swimming gulls. Crickets chirped in the grass, herds of cattle and sheep grazed peacefully on all sides, and when I turned my head, there behind me, a mile away, perhaps, were the shining Ipswich dunes, wave on wave of dazzling white sand. I ought to have stayed with the picture, perhaps; but there were no longspurs, and somehow this was a day for birds rather than for a landscape. I would return to the muddy flats, and spend my time with the sandpipers and the plover. The telltale yellow-legs were whistling, and who could guess what I might see?

At the little pool I must stop for another visit with my single sandpiper. He would be there, I felt certain. And he was; as pretty as before, and no more alarmed at my presence, though as he balanced himself on one leg his body shook with a constant rhythmical pulsation, as if his heart were beating more violently than a bird’s heart should. He did not look happy, I thought. And why should he, far from home, with a wounded foot, no company, and an unknown number of guns yet to face before reaching the end of his long journey? He was hardly bigger than a sparrow, but he was one of the creatures which lordly man, endowed with “godlike reason,” a being of “large discourse,” so wise and good that he naturally thinks of the Creator of all things as a person very like himself, finds it amusing to kill.

And when I came to the few rods of beach, there stood my seven sandpipers, exactly as before. They stirred uneasily under my gaze, whispering a few words to one another (“Will he shoot, do you think?”), but they kept their places, bunched closely together for safety. Did they know anything about their lonely brother--or sister--up yonder on the hillside? If they noticed her absence, they probably supposed her dead. Death is so common and so sudden, especially in migration time.

Now I am back again on a grassy mound by the muddy flats, and the big plover is still here. How alert he looks as he sees me approach! Yet now, as an hour ago, he shows no inclination to fly. The tide is coming in fast. He steps about in the deepening water with evident discomfort, and whether he will or not, he must soon take to wing or wade ashore. And while I am eyeing his motions my glass falls unexpectedly on two sandpipers near him in the grass; pectoral sandpipers--grass-birds--I soon say to myself, with acute satisfaction. It is many years since I saw one. How small their heads look,--in contrast with the plover’s,--and how thickly and finely their breasts are streaked! I remember the portrait in Nelson’s “Birds of Alaska,” with its inflated throat, a monstrous vocal sac, half as large as the bird itself. A graceful wooer!

They, too, are finding the tide a trouble, and no doubt are wishing the human intruder would take himself off. Now, in spite of my presence, one of them follows the other toward the land, scurrying from one bit of tussock to another, half wading, half swimming. Time and tide wait for no bird. Both they and the plover have given up all thoughts of eating. They have enough to do to keep their eyes upon me and the water.

The sandpipers, being smaller, make their retreat first. One, as he finds himself so near a stranger, is smitten with sudden fright, and runs by at full speed on his pretty dark-green legs. Yet both presently become reassured, and fall to feeding with all composure almost about my feet. I have been still so long that I must be harmless. And now the plover himself takes wing (I am glad to find he can), but only for a rod or two, alighting on a conical bit of island. There is nothing for him to eat there, apparently, but at least the place will keep his feet dry. He stands quiet, waiting. And so he continues to do for the hour and more that I still remain.

My own stay, I should mention, is by this time compulsory. I, too, am on an island (I have just discovered the fact), and not choosing to turn wader on my own account, must wait till the tide goes down. It is no hardship. Every five minutes brings me something new. I have only now noticed (a slight cry having drawn my attention) that there are sandpipers of another kind here--a little flock of dunlins, or redbacks. They are bunched on the pebbly edge of a second island (which was not an island a quarter of an hour ago), nearer to me even than the plover’s, and are making the best of the high tide, which has driven them from their feeding-grounds, by taking a siesta. Once, when I look that way,--which I can do only now and then, there are so many distractions,--I find the whole eight with their bills tucked under their wings. Now, isn’t that a pretty sight! Their name, as I say, is the red-backed sandpiper; but at this season their upper parts are of a uniform mouse color, or soft, dark gray--I hardly know how to characterize it. It is very distinctive, whatever word we use, and equally so is the shape of the bill, long and stout, with a downward inflection at the tip. Eight birds, did I say? No, there are nine, for I have just discovered another, not on the island, but under the very edge of the grassy bank on which I am standing. He has a broken leg, poor fellow, and seems to prefer being by himself; but by and by, with a sudden cry of alarm, for which I can see no occasion, he flies to rejoin his mates.

Meanwhile, seven white-rumps have come and settled near them; the same flock that I saw yonder on the roadside beach, I have little question. Probably the encroaching tide has disturbed them also. At the same time I hear distant voices of yellow-legs, and presently six birds are seen flying in this direction. They wheel doubtfully at the unexpected sight of a man, and drop to the ground beyond range; but I can see them well enough. How tall they are, and how wide-awake they look, with their necks stretched out; and how silly they are,--“telltales” and “tattlers” indeed,--to publish their movements and whereabouts to every gunner within a mile! While my head is turned they disappear, and I hear them whistling again across the marsh. They are all gone, I think; but as I look again toward my sandpipers’ island, behold! there stands a tall fellow, his yellow legs shining, and his eye fastened upon me. Either he has lost his reason, if he ever had any, or he knows I have no gun. Perfectly still he keeps (he is not an absolute fool, I rejoice to see) as long as I am looking at him. Then I look elsewhere, and when my eye returns to his place, he is not there. He has only moved behind the corner of the islet, however, as I find when I shift my own position by a rod or two. He seems to be dazed, and for a wonder he holds his tongue.

Titlarks are about me in crowds. One is actually wading along the shore, with the water up to his belly. Yes, he is doing it again. I look twice to be sure of him. A flock of dusky ducks fly just above my head, showing me the lining of their wings. Truly this is a birdy spot; and luckily, though there are two or three “blinds” near, and guns are firing every few minutes up and down the marshes, there is no one here to disturb me and my friends. I could stay with them till night; but what is that? A buggy is coming down the road out of the hills with only one passenger. This is my opportunity. I pack up my glass, betake myself to the roadside, and when the man responds to my question politely, I take a seat beside him. As he gets out to unlatch the gate, a minute afterward, a light-colored--dry-sand-colored--bird flies up and perches on a low fence-rail. This is no wader, but is none the less welcome. It is an Ipswich sparrow, I explain to my benefactor, who waits for me to take an observation. The species was discovered here, I tell him, and was named in the town’s honor. He seems interested. “I shouldn’t have known it,” he says. So I have done some good to-day, though I have thought only of enjoying myself.

ON THE NORTH SHORE AGAIN

If you have once seen a picture, says Emerson somewhere, never look at it again. He means that hours of insight are so rare that a really high and satisfying experience with a book, picture, landscape, or other object of beauty is to be accepted as final, a favor of Providence which we have no warrant to expect repeated. If you have seen a thing, therefore, really seen it and communed with the soul of it, let that suffice you. Attempts to live the hour over a second time will only result in failure, or, worse yet, will cast a shadow over what ought to have been a permanently luminous recollection.

There is a modicum of sound philosophy in the advice. We must take it as the counsel of an idealist, and follow it or not as occasion bids. The words of such men, as one of them was given to saying, are only for those who have ears to hear. We may be sure of one thing: poems, landscapes, pictures, and all other works of art (art human or superhuman) are never to be exhausted by one look, or by a hundred. If a man is good for anything, and the poem or the landscape is good for anything, he will find new meanings with new perusals. In other words, we may turn upon Emerson and say: “Yes, but then, you know, we never _do_ see a picture--a picture that _is_ a picture.”

As was related a week ago, I spent the 12th of October on the North Shore. I brought back the remembrance of a glorious piece of the world’s beauty. In outline, I had it in my mind. But I knew perfectly, both at the time and afterward, that I had not really made it my own. I had been too much taken up with other things. The eye does not see the landscape; nor does the mind see it. The eye is the lens, the mind is the plate. The landscape prints itself upon the mind, through the eye. But the mind must be sensitive and still, and--what is oftener forgotten--the exposure must be sufficiently prolonged. The clearest-eyed genius ever born never saw a landscape in ten minutes.

On all grounds, then, I was entitled to another look. And this time, perhaps, the Lapland longspurs would be there to be enjoyed with the rest. I would go again, therefore; and on the morning of the 18th, long before daylight, judging by the quietness of the trees outside that the wind had gone down (for wind is a serious hindrance to quiet pleasure at the seashore in autumn, and visits must be timed accordingly), I determined to set out in good season and secure a longish day. Venus and the old moon were growing pale in the east when I started forth, and three hours afterward I was footing it through Ipswich village toward East Street and the sea.

As I crossed the marsh and approached the gate, a stranger overtook me. We managed the business together, one pulling the gate to, the other tending the hook and staple, and we spoke of the unusual greenness of the hills before us, on which flocks and herds were grazing. “There’s better feed now than there’s been all summer,” the stranger said. It was easy to believe it. Those broad-backed, grassy hills are one of the glories of the North Shore.

I followed the road as it led me among them. A savanna sparrow had been dodging along the edge of a ditch near the gate; titlark voices at once became common, and after a turn or two I saw before me a bunch of shore larks dusting themselves in the sandy middle of the track. They were making thorough work of it, crowding their breasts and necks, and even the sides of their heads into the soil, with much shaking of feathers afterward.

The road brought me to a beach, where were two or three houses, and, across the way, a pond stocked with wooden geese and ducks, with an underground blind for gunners in the side of the hill. Some delights are so keen that it is worth elaborate preparations to enjoy them. Here the titlarks were in extraordinary force, and I lingered about the spot for half an hour, awaiting the longspurs that might be hoped for in their company. Hoped for, but nothing more. I was still too early, perhaps.

Well, their absence, the fact of it once accepted, left me free-minded for the main object of my trip. I would go up the hill, over the grass, and take the prospect northward. A narrow depression, down which a brook trickled with a pleasant, companionable noise, as if it were talking to itself, afforded me shelter from the wind, and at the same time bounded my outlook on either side, as a frame bounds a picture. The hill fell away sharply to the water just beyond my feet, and up and down the inlet gulls were flying. Once, to my pleasure, two black-backed “coffin-bearers” passed, the only ones I was able to discover among the thousands of herring gulls that filled the air and the water, and crowded the sand-bars, the whole day long. Across the blue water were miles of brown marsh, and beyond the marsh rose wooded hills veiled with haze, the bright autumnal colors shining through. Crickets were still musical, buttercups and dandelions starred the turf, and once a yellow butterfly (Philodice) flitted near. The summer was gone, but here were some of its children to keep it remembered. Titlarks walked daintily about the grass, or balanced themselves upon the boulders, and once I turned my head just in time to see a marsh hawk sailing over the hill at my back, his white rump showing.

When I had left the hills behind me, and was again skirting the muddy flats, I found myself all at once near a few sandpipers,--a dozen, more or less, of white-rumps,--one with a foot dragging, one with a leg held up, and beside them a single red-back, or dunlin, staggering on one leg, the same bird, it seemed likely, that I had pitied a week ago. I pitied him still. Ornithology, studied under such conditions, was no longer the cheerful, exhilarating science to which I am accustomed. It was more like sociology.

Perhaps I am sentimental. If so, may I be forgiven. There is no man but has his weakness. The dunlin was nothing, I knew; one among thousands; a few ounces of flesh with feathers on it; what if he did suffer? It was none of my business. Why should I take other men’s amusements sadly? The bird was greatly inferior to the being who shot him; at least that is the commonly accepted theory; and the superior, as every one but an anarchist must admit, has the rights of superiority. And for all that, the dunlin seemed a pretty innocent, and I wished that he had two good legs. As for his being only one of thousands, so am I--and no very fine one either; but I shouldn’t like to be shot at from behind a wall; and when I have a toothache, the sense of my personal insignificance is of small use in dulling the pain. Poor dunlin!

I allowed myself two hours from the gate back to the railroad station, though it is less than an hour’s walk. Some of the fairest views are to be obtained from the road; and there, I told myself, I should be sheltered from the wind and could sit still at my ease. The first half of the distance, too, would take me between pleasant hedgerows, in which are many things worthy of a stroller’s notice.

For some time, indeed, I did little but stop and look behind. The marshes pulled me about: so level, so expansive, so richly brown, so pointed with haycocks (once, the notion taking me, I counted far enough to see that there were more than two hundred in sight), and so beautifully backed by the golden autumnal hills. I can see them yet, though I have nothing to say about them.

“The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!”

Trains of gulls went flying up the inlet as the tide went out. They live by the sea’s almanac as truly as the clam-diggers, two of whom I had watched, an hour before, sailing across the inlet in a rude boat (more picturesque by half than a gentleman’s yacht), and setting about their day’s work on a shoal newly uncovered. Thank Heaven, there are still some occupations that cannot be carried on in a factory.

The roadsides were bright with gay-colored fruits: barberries, thorn apples, Roxbury waxwork, and rose-hips. Of thorn bushes there were at least two kinds; one already bare-branched, with scattered small fruit; the other still in leaf, and loaded with gorgeous clusters of large red apples. More interesting to me than any of these were the frost grapes; familiar acquaintances of an Old Colony boyhood, but now grown to be strangers. They were shining black, ripe and juicy (of the size of peas), and if their sweetness failed to tempt the palate, that, for aught I know, may have been the eater’s fault rather than theirs. Why might not their quality be of a too excellent sort, beyond his too effeminate powers of appreciation? Is there any certainty that man’s taste is final in such matters? Was my own criticism of them anything more than a piece of unscientific, inconclusive impressionism?

Surely they were not without a tang. The most exacting mouth could not deny them individuality. I tried them, and retried them; but after all, they seemed most in place on the vines. To me, in the old days, they were known only as frost grapes. Others, it appears, have called them chicken grapes, possum grapes, and winter grapes. No doubt they find customers before the season is over. Thoreau should have liked them and praised them, but I do not recall them in his books. Probably they do not grow in Concord. They are of his kin, at all events, wildings of the wild. I wish I had brought a bunch or two home with me. In my present mood I believe they would “go to the spot.”

But if I was glad to see the frost grapes, I was gladder still to see a certain hickory tree. I was scarcely off the marsh before I came to it, and had hardly put my eye upon it before I said to myself (although so far as I could have specified, it looked like any other hickory; but there is a kind of knowledge, or half knowledge, that does not rest upon specifications), “There! That should be a bitternut tree.” Now the bitternut is not to be called a rarity, I am assured; but somehow I had never found it, notwithstanding I was a nut-gatherer in my youth, and have continued to be one to this day, an early taste for wild forage being one of the virtues that are seldom outgrown. Well, something distracted my attention just then, and I contented myself with putting a leaf and a handful of nuts into my pocket. Only on getting home did I crack one and find it bitter. Now, several days afterward, I have cracked another, and tested it more fully. The shell is extremely thin,--like a pecan nut’s for fragility,--and the meat, which is large and full, is both bitter and puckery, suggesting the brown inner partitions of a pecan shell, which the eater learns so carefully to avoid. In outward appearance the nut is a pig-nut pure and simple, the reader being supposed to be enough of a countryman to know that pig-nuts, like wild fruits in general, vary interminably in size, shape, and goodness.

Pretty butter-and-eggs still bloomed beside the stone wall, and the “folksy mayweed” was plentiful about a barnyard. Out from the midst of it scampered a rabbit as I approached the fence to look over. He disappeared in the cornfield, his white tailtip showing last, and I wondered where he belonged, as there seemed to be neither wood nor shrubbery within convenient distance.

Just beyond this point (after noticing a downy woodpecker in a Balm-o’-Gilead tree, if the careful compositor will allow me that euphonious Old Colony contraction), I had stopped to pick up a shagbark when five children, the oldest a girl of nine or ten, came down the road together.

“Out of school, so early?” said I.

“No,” was the instantaneous response; “we’ve got the whooping cough.”

“Ah, that’s better than going to school, isn’t it?” said I, not so careful of my moral influence as a descendant of the Puritans ought to have been, perhaps; but I spoke from impulse, remembering myself how I also was tempted.

“Yes,” said one of the children; “No,” said another; and the reader may believe which he will, looking into his own childish heart, if he can still find it, as I hope he can.

Apple trees were loaded; hollyhocks, marigolds, and even tender cannas and dahlias, still brightened the gardens (so much for being near the sea, even on the North Shore), but what I most admired were the handsome yellow quinces in many of the dooryards. Quince preserve must be a favorite dish in Ipswich. I thought I should like to live here. I could smell the golden fruit--in my mind’s nose--clean across the way. And when I reached the village square I stopped (no, I walked slowly) to watch a real Old Colony game that I had not seen played for many a day. Two young men had stuck a jackknife into the hard earthen sidewalk and were “pitching cents.” It was like an old daguerreotype. One of the gamesters was having hard luck, but was taking it merrily. “I owe you six,” I heard him say, as his coin stood on edge and rolled perversely away from the knife-blade.

This was very near to “Meeting-house Green.” I hope I am doing no harm to speak of it.

AUTUMNAL MORALITIES

For the month past my weekly talk has been more or less a traveler’s tale--of things among the mountains and at the seaside. Now, on this bright afternoon in the last week of October, a month that every outdoor man saddens to see coming to an end (like May, it is never half long enough), let me note a little of what is passing in the lanes and by-roads nearer home.

Leaves are rustling below and above. As is true sometimes in higher circles, they seem to grow loquacious with age; the slightest occasion, the merest nudge of suggestion, the faintest puff of the spirit sets them off. For me they will never talk too much. I love their preaching seven days in the week. The driest of them never teased my ears with a dry sermon. I scuff along the path on purpose to stir them up. “Your turn will come next,” I hear them saying; but the message does not sound like bad news. I listen to it with a kind of pleasure, as to solemn music. If the doctor or the clergyman had brought me the same word, my spirit might have risen in rebellion; but the falling leaf may say what it likes. It has poet’s leave.

How gracefully they come to the ground, here one and there another; slowly, slowly, with leisurely dips and turns, as if the breeze loved them and would buoy them up till the last inevitable moment. Children of air and sunshine, they must return to the dust. So all things move in circles,--life and death, death and life. Happy leaves! they depart without formalities, with no funereal trappings. The wind whispers to them, and they follow.

As I watch them falling, a gray squirrel startles me. I rejoice to see him. He, too, is a falling leaf. In truth, his living presence takes me by surprise. So many gunners have been in this wood of late, all so murderously equipped, that I had thought every squirrel must before this time have gone into the game-bag. Be careful, young fellow; you will need all your spryness and cunning, all your knack of keeping on the invisible side of the trunk, or your frolic will end in sudden blackness. This is autumn, the sickly season for squirrels and birds. “The law is off,” and the gun is loaded to kill you. Take a friend’s advice, and fight shy of everything that walks upright “in the image of God.”

Yonder round-topped sweet birch tree is one of October’s masterpieces; a sheaf of yellow leaves with the sun on them. How they shine! Yet it is not so much they as the sunlight. Nay, it is both. Let the leaves have the honor that belongs to them. In a week they will all be under foot. To-day they are bright as the sun, and airy and frolicsome as so many butterflies. Blessed are my eyes that see them. And look! how the light (what a painter it is!) glorifies the lower trunk of the white oak just beyond. The furrowed gray bark is so perfect a piece of absolute beauty that, if it were framed and set up in a gallery, the crowd--or the few that are better than a crowd--would be always before it. So cheap and universal are visual delights, so little dependent upon place or season--sunlight and the bark of a tree!

In the branches overhead are chestnut-loving blackbirds, every one with a crack in his voice. Far away a crow is cawing, and from another direction a jay screams. These speak to the world at large. Half the township may hear what they have to offer. I like them; may their speech never be a whit softer or more musical; but if comparisons are in order, I give my first vote for less public--more intimate--birds, such as speak only to the grove or the copse. And even as I confess my preference, a bluebird’s note confirms it: a voice that caresses the ear; such a tone as no human mouth or humanly invented instrument can ever produce the like of. He has no need to sing. His simplest talk is music.

Here, by the wayside, a few asters have sprung up after the scythe, and are freshly in flower. How blue they are! And how much handsomer a few stalks of them look now than a full acre did two months ago. So acceptable is scarcity. There is nothing to equal it for the heightening of values. It is only the poor who know what money is worth. It is only in October and November that we feel all the charm of _Aster lævis_. I think of Bridget Elia’s lament over the “good old times” when she and her cousin were “not quite so rich.” Then the spending of a few shillings had a zest about it. A purchase was an event, a kind of festival. I believe in Bridget’s philosophy; for the asters teach the same; yes, and the goldenrods also. They, too, have come up in the wake of the scythe, and still dwarfed, having no time to attain their natural growth, as if they knew that winter was upon them, are already topped with yellow. I carry home a scanty half handful of the two, asters and goldenrods, as treasure-trove. They are sure to be welcome. When all the fields were bright with such things, they seemed hardly worth house-room. This late harvest of blossoms is one small compensation for all the ugliness inflicted upon the landscape by the habit--inveterate with highway “commissioners”--of mowing back-country roadsides. As if stubble were prettier than a hedge!

Now I pass two long-armed white oaks, which I never come near without thinking of a friend of mine and of theirs who used to walk hereabouts with me; a real tree lover, who loves not species, not white oaks and red oaks, but individual trees, and goes to see them as one goes to see a man or a woman. This pair he always called the twins. They have summered and wintered each other for a hundred years. Who knows--putting the matter on grounds of pure science--whether they do not enjoy each other’s companionship? Who knows that trees have no kind of sentience? Not I. We take a world of things for granted; and if all our neighbors chance to do the same, we let the general assumption pass for certainty. If trees _do_ know anything, I would wager that it is something worth knowing, something quite as good as is to be found in any newspaper.

Here are red maples as bare as December, and yonder is one that is almost in full leaf; and by some freak of originality every leaf is bright yellow. Three days more and it will be naked also. Under it are white-alder bushes (_Clethra_) clothed in dark purple, and tall blueberry bushes all in red, with yellow shadings by way of contrast. This is in a swampy spot, where a lonesome hyla is peeping. Just beyond, the drier ground is reddened--under the trees--with huckleberry and dangleberry. Nobody who has not attended to the matter would imagine how much of the brightness of our New England autumn--one of the pageants of the world--is due to these lowly bushes, which most people think of solely as useful in the production of pies and puddings. Without being mown, the huckleberry bears a second crop--a crop of color. It is twice blest; it blesses him that eats and him that looks. In many parts of New England, at least, the autumnal landscape could better spare the maples than the blueberries and the huckleberries. Rum-cherry trees and shrubs--more shrubs than trees--are dressed in lovely shades of yellow and salmon. Spicebushes wear plain yellow of a peculiarly delicate cast. I roll a leaf in my hand and find it still spicy. A bush looks handsomer, I believe, if it is known to smell good. The same thought came to me a week ago while I was admiring the sassafras leaves. They were then just at the point of ripeness. Now they have turned to a dead brown. The maple’s way is in better taste--to shed its leaves while they are still bright and fresh. They are under my feet now, a carpet of red and yellow.

One of the oddest bits of fall coloration (I cannot profess greatly to like it) is the ghostly white--greenish white--of Roxbury waxwork leaves. It is unique in these parts, so far as I can recall, but is almost identical with the pallor of striped maple foliage (_Acer Pennsylvanicum_) as one sees it in the White Mountains. Waxwork pigments all go to the berries, it appears. These are showy enough to suit the most barbaric taste, and are among the things that speak to me strongest of far-away times, when my childish feet were just beginning to wander in nature’s garden. The sight of them reminds me of what a long time I have lived.

A gust of wind strikes a tall willow just as I approach it. See the leaves tumble! Thick and fast they come, a leafy shower, with none of those pretty, hesitating, parachute-like reluctances which we noticed the rounder and lighter birch leaves practicing half an hour ago. The willow leaves, narrow and pointed, fall more like arrows. I am put in mind, I cannot tell why, of an early morning hour, years ago, when I happened to cross a city garden after the first killing frost, and stopped near a Kentucky coffee-tree. Its foliage had been struck with death. Not a breath was stirring, but the leaves, already blackened and curled, dropped in one continuous rain. The tree was out of its latitude, and had been caught with its year’s work half done. The frost was a tragedy. This breeze among the willow branches is nothing so bad as that. Its errand is all in the order of nature. It calls those who are ready.

My meditations are still running with the season, still playing with mortality, when a blue jay quits a branch near by (I had not seen him) and flies off in silence. The jay is a knowing bird. No need to tell _him_ that there is a time for everything under the sun. He has proverbial philosophy to spare. Hark! he has found his voice; like a saucy schoolboy, who waits till he is at a safe distance and then puts his thumb to his nose, and cries “Yaah, yaah!”

Well, the reader may thank him for one thing. He has made an end of my autumnal sermon, the text of which, if any one cares to look for it, may be found in the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, at the sixth verse.

A TEXT FROM THOREAU

“There is no more tempting novelty than this new November. No going to Europe or to another world is to be named with it. Give me the old familiar walk, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith which does not know when it is beaten. We’ll go nutting once more. We’ll pluck the nut of the world and crack it in the winter evenings. Theatres and all other sight-seeing are puppet shows in comparison. I will take another walk to the cliff, another row on the river, another skate on the meadow, be out in the first snow, and associate with the winter birds. Here I am at home. In the bare and bleached crust of the earth, I recognize my friend.”

Thus bravely did Thoreau enter upon the gray month. It was in 1858, when he was forty-one years old. He wants nothing new, he assures himself. He will “take the shortest way round and stay at home.” “Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from _here_,” he says, underscoring the final word. As if whatever place a man might move to would not be “here” to him! As if he could run away from his own shadow! So I interpret the italics.

His protestations, characteristically unqualified and emphatic, imply that thoughts of travel have beset him. Probably they beset every outdoor philosopher at this short-day season. They are part of the autumnal crop. Our northern world begins to look--in cloudy moods--like a place to escape from. The birds have gone, the leaves have fallen, the year is done. “Let us arise and go also,” an inward voice seems to whisper. Not unlikely there is in us all the dormant remainder of an outworn migratory instinct. Civilization has caged us and tamed us; “hungry generations” have trodden us down; but below consciousness and memory there still persists the blind stirring of ancestral impulse. The fathers were nomads, and the children’s feet are still not quite content with day’s work in a treadmill.

Let our preferences be what they may, however, the greater number of us must stay where we are put, and play the hand that is dealt to us, happy if we can face the dark side of the year with a measure of philosophy. If there is a new self, as Thoreau says, there will be a new world and a new season. If we carry the tropics within us, we need not dream of Florida. And even if there is no constraint upon our going and coming, we need not be in haste to run away. We may safely wait a week or two, at least. November is often not half so bad as it is painted--not half so bad, indeed, as Thoreau himself sometimes painted it. For the eleventh month was not one of his favorites. “November Eat-Heart,” he is more than once moved to call it. The experience of it puts his equanimity to the proof. Even his bravest words about it sound rather like a defiance than a welcome,--a little as if he were whistling to keep up his courage. With the month at its worst, he confesses, he has almost to drive himself afield. He can hardly decide upon any route; “all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking and fronting the cold wind.” “Surface-walking.” How excellent that is! Every contemplative outdoor man knows what is meant, but only Thoreau could have hit it off to such perfection in a word.

I must admit that I am not sorry to find the Walden stoic once in a long while overtaken by such a comparatively unheroic mood. He boasted so often and so well (with all the rest he boasted of his boasting) that it pleases me to hear him complain. So the weather could be too much even for him, I say to myself, with something like a chuckle. He was mortal, after all; and the day was sometimes dark, even in Concord.

Not that he ever whimpered. And had he done so, in any moment of weakness, it should never have been for me to lay a public finger upon the fact. Nobody shall be more loyal to Thoreau than I am, though others may understand him better and praise him more adequately. If he complained, he did it “man-fashion,” and was within a man’s right. To say that the worst of Massachusetts weather is never to be spoken against is to say too much; it is stretching the doctrine of non-resistance to the point of absurdity. As well forbid us to carry umbrellas, or to put up lightning-rods. There is plenty of weather that deserves to be spoken against.

Only let it be done, as I say, “man-fashion;” and having said our say, let us go about our business again, making the best of things as they are--as Thoreau did. For, having owned his disrelish for what the gods provided, he quickly recovered himself, and proceeded to finish his entry in a cheerier strain. Matters are not so desperate with him, after all. He has to force himself out-of-doors, it is true, but once in the woods he often finds himself “unexpectedly compensated.” “The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of.” He meets with something that interests him, and immediately the day is as warm as July--as if the wind had shifted from northwest to south. There is the secret, in November as in May--to be interested. Then there is no longer a question of “surface-walking.” The soul is concerned, and life has begun anew.

Thus far, the present November (I write on the 4th) has been unusually mild; some days have been really summer-like, too warm for comfort; but the sun has shone only by minutes--now and then an hour, at the most. Deciduous trees are nearly bare, the oaks excepted; flowers are few and mostly out of condition, though it would be easy to make a pretty high-sounding list of names; and birds are getting to be almost as scarce as in winter. There is no longer any quiet strolling in the woods. If you wish to listen for small sounds you must stand still. The ground is so thick with crackling leaves that it is impossible to go silently. Everything prophesies of the death of the year. It is almost time for the snow to fall and bury what remains of it.

Yet in warm days one may still see dragon-flies on the wing. Yesterday meadow larks were singing with the greatest abandon and in something like a chorus. I must have seen a dozen, and most if not all of them were in tune. On the 1st of the month a grouse drummed again and again; an unseasonable piece of lyrical enthusiasm, one might think; but I doubt if it was anything so very exceptional. Once, indeed, a few years ago, I heard a grouse drum repeatedly in January, on a cloudy day, when the ground in the woods was deep under snow. That, I believe, was an event much out of the common, though by no means without precedent. I wish Thoreau could have been there; he would have improved the occasion so admirably. So long as the partridge can keep his spirits up to the drumming point, why should the rest of us outdoor people pull a long face over hard times and short rations? Shall we be less manly than a bird?

The partridge will neither migrate nor hibernate, but looks winter in the eye and bids the wind whistle. It is too bad if we who command the services of coal dealers and plumbers, tailors and butchers, doctors and clergymen, cannot stand our ground with a creature that knows neither house nor fuel, and has nothing for it, summer and winter, but to live by his wits. To the partridge man must look like a weak brother, a coddler of himself, ruined by civilization and “modern improvements;” a lubber who would freeze to death where a chickadee bubbles over with the very joy of living.

With weather-braving souls like these Thoreau would associate; and so will I. It is true, what all the moralists have told us, that it is good for a man to keep company with his superiors. Not that in my own case I look for their example and tuition to make me inherently better; it is getting late for that; “nothing that happens after we are twelve counts for very much;” I shall be content if they make me happier. And so much I surely depend upon. Good spirits are contagious. It is the great advantage of keeping a dog, that he has happiness to spare, and gives to his master. So a flock of chickadees, or snowbirds, or kinglets, or tree sparrows, or goldfinches brighten a man’s day. He comes away smiling. I will go out now and prove it.

THE PLEASURES OF MELANCHOLY

This wintry November forenoon I was on a sea beach; the sky clouded, the wind high and cold, cutting to the marrow; a bleak and comfortless place. A boy, dragging a child’s cart, was gathering chips of driftwood along the upper edge of the sand,--one human figure, such as painters use to make a lonesome scene more lonesome. A loon, well offshore, sat rocking upon the water, now lifted into sight for an instant, now lost behind a wave. Distant sails and a steamship were barely visible through the fog. So much for the world on its seaward side. There was little to cheer a man’s soul in that quarter.

On the landward side were thickets of leafless rosebushes covered with scarlet hips; groves of tall, tree-like, smooth-barked alders; swampy tracts, wherein were ilex bushes bright with red Christmas berries, and blueberry bushes scarcely less bright with red leaves. Sometimes it was necessary to put up an opera-glass before I could tell one from the other. Here was a marshy spot; dry, shivering sedges standing above the ice, and among them four or five mud-built domes of muskrat houses. Shrewd muskrats! They knew better than to be stirring abroad on a day like this. “If you haven’t a house, why don’t you build one?” they might have said to the man hurrying past, with his neck drawn down into his coat collar. Here I skirted a purple cranberry bog, having tufts of dwarfed, stubby bayberry bushes scattered over it, each with its winter crop of pale-blue, densely packed, tightly held berry clusters.

Not a flower; not a bird. Not so much as a crow or a robin in one of the stunted savin trees. I remembered winter days here, a dozen years ago, when the alder clumps were lively with tree sparrows, myrtle warblers, and goldfinches. Now the whole peninsula was a place forsaken. I had better have stayed away myself. Here, as so often elsewhere, memory was the better sight.

By a summer cottage upon the rocks was a ledge matted over with the Japanese trailing white rose. There were no blossoms, of course, but what with the leaves, still of a glossy green, and the bunches of handsome, high-colored hips, the vine could hardly have been more beautiful, I was ready to say, even when the roses were thickest upon it. Beside another house a pink poppy still looked fresh. Frail, belated child of summer! I could hardly believe my eyes. All its human admirers were gone long since. Every cottage stood vacant. Nobody would live here in this icy wind, if he could find another place to flee to. I remembered Florida beaches, summery abodes, where every breath from the sea brought a welcome coolness. Why should I not take the next train southward? Shall a man be less sensible than a bird?

That was five or six hours ago. Now I am a dozen miles inland. The air is so still that the sifting snowflakes fall straight downward. Even the finest twigs of the gray-birches, so sensitive to the faintest breath, can hardly be seen to stir. A narrow foot-path under the window is a line of white running through the green grass. Beyond that is the brown hillside, brightened with a few pitch-pines; and then a veil shuts down upon the world, with a spray of bare treetops breaking through. It is the gray month in its grayest mood.

Be it so. I will sit at my window and enjoy the world as it is. This sombre day has a beauty and charm of its own--the charm of melancholy. The wise course is to tune our thought to nature’s mood of soberness, rather than to force a different note, profaning the hour, and cheating ourselves with shallow talk and laughter. There is a time for everything under the sun--L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso, each in its turn.

Now is a time to think of what has been and of what will be. Only the other day the year was young; grass was greening, violets were budding, birds were mating and singing. Now the birds are gone, the flowers are dead, the year is ending as all the years have ended before it.

And as the year is, so are we. A few days ago we were children, just venturing to run alone. We knew nothing, had seen nothing, looked forward to nothing. Life for us was only a day in a house and a dooryard, a span of playtime between two sleeps.

A few days ago, I say. Yet what a weary distance we have traveled since then, and what an infinity of things we have seen and dealt with. How many thoughts we have had, coming we know not whence, how many hopes, one making way for the other, how many dreams. We have made friends; friends that were to be friends forever; and long, long ago, with no fault on either side, the currents of the world carrying us, they and we have drifted apart. It is all we can do now to recall their names and their manner of being. Some of them we should pass for strangers if we met them face to face.

What a long procession of things and events have gone by us and been forgotten. Almost we have forgotten our own childish names, it is so many years since any one called us by them. Should we know ourselves, even, if we met in the street the boy or girl of thirty or forty or fifty years ago? Was it indeed we who lived then? who believed such things, enjoyed such things, concerned ourselves with such things, trembled with such fears, were lifted up by such hopes, felt ourselves enriched by such havings? How shadowy and unreal they look now; and once they were as substantial as life and death. Nay, it is some one else whose past we are remembering. The boy and the man cannot be the same.

Shall we rejoice or be sad that we have outgrown ourselves thus completely? Something of both, perhaps. It matters not. The year is ending, the night is falling. The past is as if it had never been; the future is nothing; and the present is less than either of them. Life is a vapor; nothing, and less than nothing, and vanity.

So we say to ourselves, not sadly, but with a kind of satisfaction to have it so. Yet we love to live over the past, and, with less assurance, to dream of the future.

“The flower that once has blown forever dies.”

Yes, we have heard that, and we will not dispute; this is not an hour for disputing; but the flowers that bloomed forty years ago--the iris and the four-o’clocks in a child’s garden--we can still see in recollection’s magic glass. And they are brighter than any rose that opened this morning. We have forgotten things without number; but other things--we shall never forget them. A friend or two that died when they and we were young; “the loveliest and the best;” we can see them more plainly than most of those whose empty, conventionalized faces, each like the other, each wearing its mask, we meet day by day in the common round of business and pleasure. Death, which seemed to destroy them, has but set them beyond the risk of alteration and forgetfulness.

After all, the past is our one sure possession. There is our miser’s chest. With that, while memory holds for us the key, we shall still be rich. There we will spend our gray hours, with friends that have kept their youth; one of the best of them our own true self, not as we were, nor as we are, but as we meant to be.

“These pleasures, Melancholy, give;
And I with thee will choose to live.”

IN THE OLD PATHS

For men who know how to bear themselves company there are few better ways of improving a holiday, especially a home-keeping, home-coming, family feast, like our autumnal Thanksgiving, than to walk in one’s own childish steps--up through the old cattle pasture behind the old homestead, into the old woods. Every jutting stone in the path--and there are many--is just where it was. Your feet remember them perfectly (as your hand remembers which way the door-knob turns, though you yourself might be puzzled to tell), and of their own accord take a zigzag course among them, coming down without fail in the clear intermediary spaces. Or if, by chance, in some peculiarly awkward spot, the toe of your boot forgets itself, the jar only helps you to feel the more at home. You say with the poet, “I have been here before.” Some things are unaltered, you are glad to find. The largest of the trees have been felled, but nobody has dug out the protruding boulders or blasted away the outcropping ledges. One good word we may say for death. It lasts well. It is nothing like a vapor.

Not a rod of the way but talks to you of something. Here, on the left, down in the hollow by the swamp, you used to set snares. Once--fateful day!--you found a partridge in the noose. Then what a fury possessed you! If you had shot your first elephant you could hardly have been more completely beside yourself. It was a cruel sight; you felt it so; but you had caught a partridge! With all your boyish unskillfulness you had lured the unhappy bird to his death. A spray of red barberries had been too bright for his resistance. He discovered his mistake when the cord began to pull. “Oh, why was I such a fool!” he thought; just as you have thought more than once since then, when you have run your own neck into some snare of the fowler.

Yonder, on the right, grew little scattered patches of trailing arbutus. Every spring you gathered a few blossoms, going thither day after day, watching for them to open. And the patches are there still. Some of them are no broader than a dinner plate, and the largest of them would not cover the top of a bushel basket. For more than fifty years--perhaps for more than five hundred--they have looked as they do now; a few score of leaves and an annual crop of a dozen or two of flowers. Their endurance, with so many greedy hands after them, is one of the miracles. Probably they are older than any tree in the township. It isn’t the tall things that live longest.