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Title: Birds and Poets
Author: John Burroughs
Release Date: March 19, 2009 [EBook #5177]
Last Updated: February 1, 2013
Language: English
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIRDS AND POETS ***
Produced by Jack Eden, and David Widger
BIRDS AND POETS
WITH OTHER PAPERS
THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS,
VOLUME III WITH PORTRAITS AND MANY
ILLUSTRATIONS
By John Burroughs
PREFACE
I have deliberated a long time about coupling some of my sketches of
outdoor nature with a few chapters of a more purely literary character,
and thus confiding to my reader what absorbs and delights me inside my
four walls, as well as what pleases and engages me outside those walls;
especially since I have aimed to bring my outdoor spirit and method
within, and still to look upon my subject with the best naturalist's eye I
could command.
I hope, therefore, he will not be scared away when I boldly confront him
in the latter portions of my book with this name of strange portent, Walt
Whitman, for I assure him that in this misjudged man he may press the
strongest poetic pulse that has yet beaten in America, or perhaps in
modern times. Then, these chapters are a proper supplement or continuation
of my themes and their analogy in literature, because in them we shall
"follow out these lessons of the earth and air," and behold their
application to higher matters.
It is not an artificially graded path strewn with roses that invites us in
this part, but, let me hope, something better, a rugged trail through the
woods or along the beach where we shall now and then get a whiff of
natural air, or a glimpse of something to
"Make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs."
ESOPUS-ON-HUDSON, March, 1877.
Contents
PREFACE
BIRDS AND POETS
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I.
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BIRDS AND POETS
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II.
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TOUCHES OF NATURE
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III.
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A BIRD MEDLEY
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IV.
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APRIL
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V.
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SPRING POEMS
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VI.
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OUR RURAL DIVINITY
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VII.
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BEFORE GENIUS
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VIII.
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BEFORE BEAUTY
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IX.
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EMERSON
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X.
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THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE
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BIRDS AND POETS
I BIRDS AND POETS
"In summer, when the shawes be shene,
And leaves be large and long,
It is full merry in fair forest
To hear the fowlés' song.
The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease,
Sitting upon the spray;
So loud, it wakened Robin Hood
In the greenwood where he lay."
It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets and of
no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament that fully
responds to them. So true is this, that all the great ornithologists—original
namers and biographers of the birds—have been poets in deed if not
in word. Audubon is a notable case in point, who, if he had not the tongue
or the pen of the poet, certainly had the eye and ear and heart—"the
fluid and attaching character"—and the singleness of purpose, the
enthusiasm, the unworldliness, the love, that characterize the true and
divine race of bards.
So had Wilson, though perhaps not in as large a measure; yet he took fire
as only a poet can. While making a journey on foot to Philadelphia,
shortly after landing in this country, he caught sight of the red-headed
woodpecker flitting among the trees,—a bird that shows like a
tricolored scarf among the foliage,—and it so kindled his enthusiasm
that his life was devoted to the pursuit of the birds from that day. It
was a lucky hit. Wilson had already set up as a poet in Scotland, and was
still fermenting when the bird met his eye and suggested to his soul a new
outlet for its enthusiasm.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird
seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life,—large-brained,
large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart
with song. The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of
all climes, and knowing no bounds,—how many human aspirations are
realized in their free, holiday lives, and how many suggestions to the
poet in their flight and song!
Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet, and do
we not demand of the human lark or thrush that he "shake out his carols"
in the same free and spontaneous manner as his winged prototype? Kingsley
has shown how surely the old minnesingers and early ballad-writers have
learned of the birds, taking their key-note from the blackbird, or the
wood-lark, or the throstle, and giving utterance to a melody as simple and
unstudied. Such things as the following were surely caught from the fields
or the woods:—
"She sat down below a thorn,
Fine flowers in the valley,
And there has she her sweet babe borne,
And the green leaves they grow rarely."
Or the best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird-songs!—clear,
ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge and triumph which the
outpouring of the male bird contains. (Is not the genuine singing, lyrical
quality essentially masculine?) Keats and Shelley, perhaps more notably
than any other English poets, have the bird organization and the piercing
wild-bird cry. This, of course, is not saying that they are the greatest
poets, but that they have preëminently the sharp semi-tones of the
sparrows and the larks.
But when the general reader thinks of the birds of the poets, he very
naturally calls to mind the renowned birds, the lark and the nightingale,
Old World melodists, embalmed in Old World poetry, but occasionally
appearing on these shores, transported in the verse of some callow singer.
The very oldest poets, the towering antique bards, seem to make little
mention of the song-birds. They loved better the soaring, swooping birds
of prey, the eagle, the ominous birds, the vultures, the storks and
cranes, or the clamorous sea-birds and the screaming hawks. These suited
better the rugged, warlike character of the times and the simple, powerful
souls of the singers themselves. Homer must have heard the twittering of
the swallows, the cry of the plover, the voice of the turtle, and the
warble of the nightingale; but they were not adequate symbols to express
what he felt or to adorn his theme. Aeschylus saw in the eagle﹃the dog of
Jove,﹄and his verse cuts like a sword with such a conception.
It is not because the old bards were less as poets, but that they were
more as men. To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is not
confined to sweet sounds. The defiant scream of the hawk circling aloft,
the wild whinny of the loon, the whooping of the crane, the booming of the
bittern, the vulpine bark of the eagle, the loud trumpeting of the
migratory geese sounding down out of the midnight sky; or by the seashore,
the coast of New Jersey or Long Island, the wild crooning of the flocks of
gulls, repeated, continued by the hour, swirling sharp and shrill, rising
and falling like the wind in a storm, as they circle above the beach or
dip to the dash of the waves,—are much more welcome in certain moods
than any and all mere bird-melodies, in keeping as they are with the
shaggy and untamed features of ocean and woods, and suggesting something
like the Richard Wagner music in the ornithological orchestra.
"Nor these alone whose notes
Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain,
But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime
In still repeated circles, screaming loud,
The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl,
That hails the rising moon, have charms for me,"
says Cowper. "I never hear," says Burns in one of his letters, "the loud,
solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing
cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling
an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry."
Even the Greek minor poets, the swarm of them that are represented in the
Greek Anthology, rarely make affectionate mention of the birds, except
perhaps Sappho, whom Ben Jonson makes speak of the nightingale as—
"The dear glad angel of the spring."
The cicada, the locust, and the grasshopper are often referred to, but
rarely by name any of the common birds. That Greek grasshopper must have
been a wonderful creature. He was a sacred object in Greece, and is spoken
of by the poets as a charming songster. What we would say of birds the
Greek said of this favorite insect. When Socrates and Phaedrus came to the
fountain shaded by the plane-tree, where they had their famous discourse,
Socrates said:﹃Observe the freshness of the spot, how charming and very
delightful it is, and how summer-like and shrill it sounds from the choir
of grasshoppers.﹄One of the poets in the Anthology finds a grasshopper
struggling in a spider's web, which he releases with the words:—
"Go safe and free with your sweet voice of song."
Another one makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:—
"Me, the Nymphs' wayside minstrel whose sweet note
O'er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float."
Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken string on
his lyre, and "filled the cadence due."
"For while six chords beneath my fingers cried,
He with his tuneful voice the seventh supplied;
The midday songster of the mountain set
His pastoral ditty to my canzonet;
And when he sang, his modulated throat
Accorded with the lifeless string I smote."
While we are trying to introduce the lark in this country, why not try
this Pindaric grasshopper also?
It is to the literary poets and to the minstrels of a softer age that we
must look for special mention of the song-birds and for poetical
rhapsodies upon them. The nightingale is the most general favorite, and
nearly all the more noted English poets have sung her praises. To the
melancholy poet she is melancholy, and to the cheerful she is cheerful.
Shakespeare in one of his sonnets speaks of her song as mournful, while
Martial calls her the "most garrulous" of birds. Milton sang:—
"Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy,
Thee, chantress, oft the woods among
I woo, to hear thy evening song."
To Wordsworth she told another story:—
"O nightingale! thou surely art
A creature of ebullient heart;
These notes of thine,—they pierce and pierce,—
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
Thou sing'st as if the god of wine
Had helped thee to a valentine;
A song in mockery and despite
Of shades, and dews, and silent night,
And steady bliss, and all the loves
Now sleeping in these peaceful groves."
In a like vein Coleridge sang:—
"'T is the merry nightingale
That crowds and hurries and precipitates
With fast, thick warble his delicious notes."
Keats's poem on the nightingale is doubtless more in the spirit of the
bird's strain than any other. It is less a description of the song and
more the song itself. Hood called the nightingale
"The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell."
I mention the nightingale only to point my remarks upon its American
rival, the famous mockingbird of the Southern States, which is also a
nightingale,—a night-singer,—and which no doubt excels the Old
World bird in the variety and compass of its powers. The two birds belong
to totally distinct families, there being no American species which
answers to the European nightingale, as there are that answer to the
robin, the cuckoo, the blackbird, and numerous others. Philomel has the
color, manners, and habits of a thrush,—our hermit thrush,—but
it is not a thrush at all, but a warbler. I gather from the books that its
song is protracted and full rather than melodious,—a capricious,
long-continued warble, doubling and redoubling, rising and falling,
issuing from the groves and the great gardens, and associated in the minds
of the poets with love and moonlight and the privacy of sequestered walks.
All our sympathies and attractions are with the bird, and we do not forget
that Arabia and Persia are there back of its song.
Our nightingale has mainly the reputation of the caged bird, and is
famed mostly for its powers of mimicry, which are truly wonderful,
enabling the bird to exactly reproduce and even improve upon the notes of
almost any other songster. But in a state of freedom it has a song of its
own which is infinitely rich and various. It is a garrulous polyglot when
it chooses to be, and there is a dash of the clown and the buffoon in its
nature which too often flavors its whole performance, especially in
captivity; but in its native haunts, and when its love-passion is upon it,
the serious and even grand side of its character comes out. In Alabama and
Florida its song may be heard all through the sultry summer night, at
times low and plaintive, then full and strong. A friend of Thoreau and a
careful observer, who has resided in Florida, tells me that this bird is a
much more marvelous singer than it has the credit of being. He describes a
habit it has of singing on the wing on moonlight nights, that would be
worth going South to hear. Starting from a low bush, it mounts in the air
and continues its flight apparently to an altitude of several hundred
feet, remaining on the wing a number of minutes, and pouring out its song
with the utmost clearness and abandon,—a slowly rising musical
rocket that fills the night air with harmonious sounds. Here are both the
lark and nightingale in one; and if poets were as plentiful down South as
they are in New England, we should have heard of this song long ago, and
had it celebrated in appropriate verse. But so far only one Southern poet,
Wilde, has accredited the bird this song. This he has done in the
following admirable sonnet:—
TO THE MOCKINGBIRD
Winged mimic of the woods! thou motley fool!
Who shall thy gay buffoonery describe?
Thine ever-ready notes of ridicule
Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe.
Wit—sophist—songster—Yorick of thy tribe,
Thou sportive satirist of Nature's school,
To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe,
Arch scoffer, and mad Abbot of Misrule!
For such thou art by day—but all night long
Thou pour'st a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain,
As if thou didst in this, thy moonlight song,
Like to the melancholy Jaques, complain,
Musing on falsehood, violence, and wrong,
And sighing for thy motley coat again.
Aside from this sonnet, the mockingbird has got into poetical literature,
so far as I know, in only one notable instance, and that in the page of a
poet where we would least expect to find him,—a bard who habitually
bends his ear only to the musical surge and rhythmus of total nature, and
is as little wont to turn aside for any special beauties or points as the
most austere of the ancient masters. I refer to Walt Whitman's﹃Out of the
cradle endlessly rocking,﹄in which the mockingbird plays a part. The
poet's treatment of the bird is entirely ideal and eminently
characteristic. That is to say, it is altogether poetical and not at all
ornithological; yet it contains a rendering or free translation of a
bird-song—the nocturne of the mockingbird, singing and calling
through the night for its lost mate—that I consider quite unmatched
in our literature:—
Once, Paumanok,
When the snows had melted, and the Fifth-month grass was growing,
Up this seashore, in some briers,
Two guests from Alabama—two together,
And their nest, and four light green eggs, spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird, to and fro, near at hand,
And every day the she-bird, crouched on her nest, silent, with bright
eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.
Shine! Shine! Shine!
Pour down your warmth, great Sun!
While we bask—we two together.
Two together!
Winds blow South, or winds blow North,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
If we two but keep together.
Till of a sudden,
Maybe killed unknown to her mate,
One forenoon the she-bird crouched not on the nest,
Nor returned that afternoon, nor the next,
Nor ever appeared again.
And thenceforward all summer, in the sound of the sea,
And at night, under the full of the moon, in calmer weather,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama.
Blow! blow! blow!
Blow up, sea-winds, along Paumanok's shore!
I wait and I wait, till you blow my mate to me.
Yes, when the stars glistened,
All night long, on the prong of a moss-scalloped stake,
Down, almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears.
He called on his mate:
He poured forth the meanings which I, of all men, know.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind, embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.
Low hangs the moon—it rose late.
Oh it is lagging—oh I think it is heavy with love, with love.
Oh madly the sea pushes, pushes upon the land,
With love—with love.
O night! do I not see my love fluttering out there among the breakers!
What is that little black thing I see there in the white?
Loud! loud! loud!
Loud I call to you, my love!
High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves:
Surely you must know who is here, is here;
You must know who I am, my love.
Low-hanging moon!
What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
Oh it is the shape, the shape of my mate!
O moon, do not keep her from me any longer.
Land! land! O land!
Whichever way I turn, oh I think you could give my mate back again,
if you only would;
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.
O rising stars!
Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.
O throat! O trembling throat!
Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
Pierce the woods, the earth;
Somewhere listening to catch you, must be the one I want.
Shake out, carols!
Solitary here—the night's carols!
Carols of lonesome love! Death's carols!
Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
Oh, under that moon, where she droops almost down into the sea!
O reckless, despairing carols.
But soft! sink low! Soft! let me just murmur;
And do you wait a moment, you husky-noised sea;
For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint—I must be still, be still to listen!
But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately
to me.
Hither, my love!
Here I am! Here!
With this just-sustained note I announce myself to you;
This gentle call is for you, my love, for you.
Do not be decoyed elsewhere!
That is the whistle of the wind—it is not my voice;
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray;
Those are the shadows of leaves.
O darkness! Oh in vain!
Oh I am very sick and sorrowful.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The bird that occupies the second place to the nightingale in British
poetical literature is the skylark, a pastoral bird as the Philomel is an
arboreal,—a creature of light and air and motion, the companion of
the plowman, the shepherd, the harvester,—whose nest is in the
stubble and whose tryst is in the clouds. Its life affords that kind of
contrast which the imagination loves,—one moment a plain pedestrian
bird, hardly distinguishable from the ground, the next a soaring, untiring
songster, reveling in the upper air, challenging the eye to follow him and
the ear to separate his notes.
The lark's song is not especially melodious, but is blithesome, sibilant,
and unceasing. Its type is the grass, where the bird makes its home,
abounding, multitudinous, the notes nearly all alike and all in the same
key, but rapid, swarming, prodigal, showering down as thick and fast as
drops of rain in a summer shower.
Many noted poets have sung the praises of the lark, or been kindled by his
example. Shelley's ode and Wordsworth's "To a Skylark" are well known to
all readers of poetry, while every schoolboy will recall Hogg's poem,
beginning:—
"Bird of the wilderness,
Blithesome and cumberless,
Sweet be thy matin o'er moorland and lea!
Emblem of happiness,
Blest is thy dwelling-place—
Oh to abide in the desert with thee!"
I heard of an enthusiastic American who went about English fields hunting
a lark with Shelley's poem in his hand, thinking no doubt to use it as a
kind of guide-book to the intricacies and harmonies of the song. He
reported not having heard any larks, though I have little doubt they were
soaring and singing about him all the time, though of course they did not
sing to his ear the song that Shelley heard. The poets are the best
natural historians, only you must know how to read them. They translate
the facts largely and freely. A celebrated lady once said to Turner,﹃I
confess I cannot see in nature what you do.﹄"Ah, madam," said the
complacent artist, "don't you wish you could!"
Shelley's poem is perhaps better known, and has a higher reputation among
literary folk, than Wordsworth's; it is more lyrical and lark-like; but it
is needlessly long, though no longer than the lark's song itself, but the
lark can't help it, and Shelley can. I quote only a few stanzas:—
"In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
"The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
"Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there;
"All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when Night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed."
Wordsworth has written two poems upon the lark, in one of which he calls
the bird "pilgrim of the sky." This is the one quoted by Emerson in
"Parnassus." Here is the concluding stanza:—
"Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine,
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam,
True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
The other poem I give entire:—
"Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
For thy song, Lark, is strong;
Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
Singing, singing,
With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
Lift me, guide me till I find
That spot which seems so to thy mind!
"I have walked through wilderness dreary,
And to-day my heart is weary;
Had I now the wings of a Faery
Up to thee would I fly.
There is madness about thee, and joy divine
In that song of thine;
Lift me, guide me high and high
To thy banqueting-place in the sky.
"Joyous as morning
Thou art laughing and scorning;
Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest,
And, though little troubled with sloth,
Drunken Lark! thou wouldst be loth
To be such a traveler as I.
Happy, happy Liver!
With a soul as strong as a mountain river,
Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver,
Joy and jollity be with us both!
"Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,
Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;
But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,
As full of gladness and as free of heaven,
I, with my fate contented, will plod on,
And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done."
But better than either—better and more than a hundred pages—is
Shakespeare's simple line,—
"Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,"
or John Lyly's, his contemporary,—
"Who is't now we hear?
None but the lark so shrill and clear;
Now at heaven's gate she claps her wings,
The morn not waking till she sings."
We have no well-known pastoral bird in the Eastern States that answers to
the skylark. The American pipit or titlark and the shore lark, both birds
of the far north, and seen in the States only in fall and winter, are said
to sing on the wing in a similar strain. Common enough in our woods are
two birds that have many of the habits and manners of the lark—the
water-thrush and the golden-crowned thrush, or oven-bird. They are both
walkers, and the latter frequently sings on the wing up aloft after the
manner of the lark. Starting from its low perch, it rises in a spiral
flight far above the tallest trees, and breaks out in a clear, ringing,
ecstatic song, sweeter and more richly modulated than the skylark's, but
brief, ceasing almost before you have noticed it; whereas the skylark goes
singing away after you have forgotten him and returned to him half a dozen
times.
But on the Great Plains, of the West there; is a bird whose song resembles
the skylark's quite closely and is said to be not at all inferior. This is
Sprague's pipit, sometimes called the Missouri skylark, an excelsior
songster, which from far up in the transparent blue rains down its notes
for many minutes together. It is, no doubt, destined to figure in the
future poetical literature of the West.
Throughout the northern and eastern parts of the Union the lark would find
a dangerous rival in the bobolink, a bird that has no European prototype,
and no near relatives anywhere, standing quite alone, unique, and, in the
qualities of hilarity and musical tintinnabulation, with a song unequaled.
He has already a secure place in general literature, having been laureated
by no less a poet than Bryant, and invested with a lasting human charm in
the sunny page of Irving, and is the only one of our songsters, I believe,
that the mockingbird cannot parody or imitate. He affords the most marked
example of exuberant pride, and a glad, rollicking, holiday spirit, that
can be seen among our birds. Every note expresses complacency and glee. He
is a beau of the first pattern, and, unlike any other bird of my
acquaintance, pushes his gallantry to the point of wheeling gayly into the
train of every female that comes along, even after the season of courtship
is over and the matches are all settled; and when she leads him on too
wild a chase, he turns, lightly about and breaks out with a song is
precisely analogous to a burst of gay and self-satisfied laughter, as much
as to say, "Ha! ha! ha! I must have my fun, Miss Silverthimble,
thimble, thimble, if I break every heart in the meadow, see, see, see!"
At the approach of the breeding season the bobolink undergoes a complete
change; his form changes, his color changes, his flight changes. From
mottled brown or brindle he becomes black and white, earning, in some
localities, the shocking name of "skunk bird;" his small, compact form
becomes broad and conspicuous, and his ordinary flight is laid aside for a
mincing, affected gait, in which he seems to use only the very tips of his
wings. It is very noticeable what a contrast he presents to his mate at
this season, not only in color but in manners, she being as shy and
retiring as he is forward and hilarious. Indeed, she seems disagreeably
serious and indisposed to any fun or jollity, scurrying away at his
approach, and apparently annoyed at every endearing word and look. It is
surprising that all this parade of plumage and tinkling of cymbals should
be gone through with and persisted in to please a creature so coldly
indifferent as she really seems to be. If Robert O'Lincoln has been
stimulated into acquiring this holiday uniform and this musical gift by
the approbation of Mrs. Robert, as Darwin, with his sexual selection
principle, would have us believe, then there must have been a time when
the females of this tribe were not quite so chary of their favors as they
are now. Indeed, I never knew a female bird of any kind that did not
appear utterly indifferent to the charms of voice and plumage that the
male birds are so fond of displaying. But I am inclined to believe that
the males think only of themselves and of outshining each other, and not
at all of the approbation of their mates, as, in an analogous case in a
higher species, it is well known whom the females dress for, and whom they
want to kill with envy!
I know of no other song-bird that expresses so much self-consciousness and
vanity, and comes so near being an ornithological coxcomb. The red-bird,
the yellowbird, the indigo-bird, the oriole, the cardinal grosbeak, and
others, all birds of brilliant plumage and musical ability, seem quite
unconscious of self, and neither by tone nor act challenge the admiration
of the beholder.
By the time the bobolink reaches the Potomac, in September, he has
degenerated into a game-bird that is slaughtered by tens of thousands in
the marshes. I think the prospects now are of his gradual extermination,
as gunners and sportsmen are clearly on the increase, while the limit of
the bird's productivity in the North has no doubt been reached long ago.
There are no more meadows to be added to his domain there, while he is
being waylaid and cut off more and more on his return to the South. It is
gourmand eat gourmand, until in half a century more I expect the blithest
and merriest of our meadow songsters will have disappeared before the
rapacity of human throats.
But the poets have had a shot at him in good time, and have preserved some
of his traits. Bryant's poem on this subject does not compare with his
lines "To a Water-Fowl,"—a subject so well suited to the peculiar,
simple, and deliberate motion of his mind; at the same time it is fit that
the poet who sings of "The Planting of the Apple-Tree" should render into
words the song of "Robert of Lincoln." I subjoin a few stanzas:—
ROBERT OF LINCOLN
Merrily swinging on brier and weed,
Near to the nest of his little dame,
Over the mountain-side or mead,
Robert of Lincoln is telling his name:
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink:
Snug and safe is that nest of ours,
Hidden among the summer flowers.
Chee, chee, chee.
Robert of Lincoln is gayly drest,
Wearing a bright black wedding-coat,
White are his shoulders and white his crest,
Hear him call in his merry note:
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink:
Look what a nice new coat is mine,
Sure there was never a bird so fine.
Chee, chee, chee.
Robert of Lincoln's Quaker wife,
Pretty and quiet, with plain brown wings,
Passing at home a patient life,
Broods in the grass while her husband sings.
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink:
Brood, kind creature; you need not fear
Thieves and robbers while I am here.
Chee, chee, chee.
But it has been reserved for a practical ornithologist, Mr. Wilson Flagg,
to write by far the best poem on the bobolink that I have yet seen. It is
much more in the mood and spirit of the actual song than Bryant's poem:—
THE O'LINCOLN FAMILY
A flock of merry singing-birds were sporting in the grove;
Some were warbling cheerily, and some were making love:
There were Bobolincon, Wadolincon, Winterseeble, Conquedle,—
A livelier set was never led by tabor, pipe, or fiddle,—
Crying, "Phew, shew, Wadolincon, see, see, Bobolincon,
Down among the tickletops, hiding in the buttercups!
I know the saucy chap, I see his shining cap
Bobbing in the clover there—see, see, see!"
Up flies Bobolincon, perching on an apple-tree,
Startled by his rival's song, quickened by his raillery.
Soon he spies the rogue afloat, curveting in the air,
And merrily he turns about, and warns him to beware!
"'T is you that would a-wooing go, down among the rushes O!
But wait a week, till flowers are cheery,—wait a week,and,
ere you marry,
Be sure of a house wherein to tarry!
Wadolink, Whiskodink, Tom Denny, wait, wait, wait!"
Every one's a funny fellow; every one's a little mellow;
Follow, follow, follow, follow, o'er the hill and in the hollow!
Merrily, merrily, there they hie; now they rise and now they fly;
They cross and turn, and in and out, and down in the middle,
and wheel about,—
With a "Phew, shew, Wadolincon! listen to me, Bobolincon!—
Happy's the wooing that's speedily doing, that's speedily doing,
That's merry and over with the bloom of the clover!
Bobolincon, Wadolincon, Winterseeble, follow, follow me!"
Many persons, I presume, have admired Wordsworth's poem on the cuckoo,
without recognizing its truthfulness, or how thoroughly, in the main, the
description applies to our own species. If the poem had been written in
New England or New York, it could not have suited our case better:—
"O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice,
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
"While I am lying on the grass,
Thy twofold shout I hear,
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off, and near.
"Though babbling only to the Vale,
Of sunshine and of flowers,
Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.
"Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;
"The same whom in my schoolboy days
I listened to; that Cry
Which made me look a thousand ways
In bush, and tree, and sky.
"To seek thee did I often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen.
"And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
"O blesséd Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, faery place;
That is fit home for thee!"
Logan's stanzas, "To the Cuckoo," have less merit both as poetry and
natural history, but they are older, and doubtless the latter poet
benefited by them. Burke admired them so much that, while on a visit to
Edinburgh, he sought the author out to compliment him:—
"Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove!
Thou messenger of spring!
Now Heaven repairs thy rural seat,
And woods thy welcome sing.
"What time the daisy decks the green,
Thy certain voice we hear;
Hast thou a star to guide thy path,
Or mark the rolling year?
. . . . . . . .
"The schoolboy, wandering through the wood
To pull the primrose gay,
Starts, the new voice of spring to hear,
And imitates thy lay.
. . . . . . . .
"Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green,
Thy sky is ever clear;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year."
The European cuckoo is evidently a much gayer bird than ours, and much
more noticeable.
"Hark, how the jolly cuckoos sing
'Cuckoo!' to welcome in the spring,"
says John Lyly three hundred years agone. Its note is easily imitated, and
boys will render it so perfectly as to deceive any but the shrewdest ear.
An English lady tells me its voice reminds one of children at play, and is
full of gayety and happiness. It is a persistent songster, and keeps up
its call from morning to night. Indeed, certain parts of Wordsworth's poem—those
that refer to the bird as a mystery, a wandering, solitary voice—seem
to fit our bird better than the European species. Our cuckoo is in fact a
solitary wanderer, repeating its loud, guttural call in the depths of the
forest, and well calculated to arrest the attention of a poet like
Wordsworth, who was himself a kind of cuckoo, a solitary voice, syllabling
the loneliness that broods over streams and woods,—
"And once far off, and near."
Our cuckoo is not a spring bird, being seldom seen or heard in the North
before late in May. He is a great devourer of canker-worms, and, when
these pests appear, he comes out of his forest seclusion and makes
excursions through the orchards stealthily and quietly, regaling himself
upon those pulpy, fuzzy titbits. His coat of deep cinnamon brown has a
silky gloss and is very beautiful. His note or call is not musical but
loud, and has in a remarkable degree the quality of remoteness and
introvertedness. It is like a vocal legend, and to the farmer bodes rain.
It is worthy of note, and illustrates some things said farther back, that
birds not strictly denominated songsters, but criers like the cuckoo, have
been quite as great favorites with the poets, and have received as
affectionate treatment at their hands, as have the song-birds. One readily
recalls Emerson's "Titmouse," Trowbridge's "Pewee," Celia Thaxter's
"Sandpiper," and others of a like character.
It is also worthy of note that the owl appears to be a greater favorite
with the poets than the proud, soaring hawk. The owl is doubtless the more
human and picturesque bird; then he belongs to the night and its weird
effects. Bird of the silent wing and expansive eye, grimalkin in feathers,
feline, mousing, haunting ruins" and towers, and mocking the midnight
stillness with thy uncanny cry! The owl is the great bugaboo of the
feathered tribes. His appearance by day is hailed by shouts of alarm and
derision from nearly every bird that flies, from crows down to sparrows.
They swarm about him like flies, and literally mob him back into his dusky
retreat. Silence is as the breath of his nostrils to him, and the uproar
that greets him when he emerges into the open day seems to alarm and
confuse him as it does the pickpocket when everybody cries Thief.
But the poets, I say, have not despised him:—
"The lark is but a bumpkin fowl;
He sleeps in his nest till morn;
But my blessing upon the jolly owl
That all night blows his horn."
Both Shakespeare and Tennyson have made songs about him. This is
Shakespeare's, from "Love's Labor's Lost," and perhaps has reference to
the white or snowy owl:—
"When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
"When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw;
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot."
There is, perhaps, a slight reminiscence of this song in Tennyson's "Owl:"—
"When cats run home and light is come,
And dew is cold upon the ground,
And the far-off stream is dumb,
And the whirring sail goes round,
And the whirring sail goes round;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.
"When merry milkmaids click the latch,
And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch
Twice or thrice his roundelay,
Twice or thrice his roundelay;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits."
Tennyson has not directly celebrated any of the more famous birds, but his
poems contain frequent allusions to them. The
"Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden through the budded quicks,
Oh, tell me where the senses mix,
Oh, tell me where the passions meet,"
of "In Memoriam," is doubtless the nightingale. And here we have the lark:—
"Now sings the woodland loud and long,
And distance takes a lovelier hue,
And drowned in yonder living blue
The lark becomes a sightless song."
And again in this from "A Dream of Fair Women:"—
"Then I heard
A noise of some one coming through the lawn,
And singing clearer than the crested bird
That claps his wings at dawn."
The swallow is a favorite bird with Tennyson, and is frequently mentioned,
beside being the principal figure in one of those charming love-songs in
"The Princess." His allusions to the birds, as to any other natural
feature, show him to be a careful observer, as when he speaks of
"The swamp, where hums the dropping snipe."
His single bird-poem, aside from the song I have quoted, is﹃The
Blackbird,﹄the Old World prototype of our robin, as if our bird had
doffed the aristocratic black for a more democratic suit on reaching these
shores. In curious contrast to the color of its plumage is its beak, which
is as yellow as a kernel of Indian corn. The following are the two middle
stanzas of the poem:—
"Yet, though I spared thee all the spring,
Thy sole delight is, sitting still,
With that gold dagger of thy bill
To fret the summer jenneting.
"A golden bill! the silver tongue
Cold February loved is dry;
Plenty corrupts the melody
That made thee famous once, when young."
Shakespeare, in one of his songs, alludes to the blackbird as the
ouzel-cock; indeed, he puts quite a flock of birds in this song:—
"The ouzel-cock so black of hue,
With orange tawny bill;
The throstle with his note so true,
The wren with little quill;
The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain song cuckoo gray,
Whose note full many a man doth mark,
And dares not answer nay."
So far as external appearances are concerned,—form, plumage, grace
of manner,—no one ever had a less promising subject than had
Trowbridge in the "Pewee." This bird, if not the plainest dressed, is the
most unshapely in the woods. It is stiff and abrupt in its manners and
sedentary in its habits, sitting around all day, in the dark recesses of
the woods, on the dry twigs and branches, uttering now and then its
plaintive cry, and "with many a flirt and flutter" snapping up its insect
game.
The pewee belongs to quite a large family of birds, all of whom have
strong family traits, and who are not the most peaceable and harmonious of
the sylvan folk. They are pugnacious, harsh-voiced, angular in form and
movement, with flexible tails and broad, flat, bristling beaks that stand
to the face at the angle of a turn-up nose, and most of them wear a black
cap pulled well down over their eyes. Their heads are large, neck and legs
short, and elbows sharp. The wild Irishman of them all is the great
crested flycatcher, a large, leather-colored or sandy-complexioned bird
that prowls through the woods, uttering its harsh, uncanny note and waging
fierce warfare upon its fellows. The exquisite of the family, and the
braggart of the orchard, is the kingbird, a bully that loves to strip the
feathers off its more timid neighbors such as the bluebird, that feeds on
the stingless bees of the hive, the drones, and earns the reputation of
great boldness by teasing large hawks, while it gives a wide berth to
little ones.
The best beloved of them all is the phoebe-bird, one of the firstlings of
the spring, of whom so many of our poets have made affectionate mention.
The wood pewee is the sweetest voiced, and, notwithstanding the ungracious
things I have said of it and of its relations, merits to the full all
Trowbridge's pleasant fancies. His poem is indeed a very careful study of
the bird and its haunts, and is good poetry as well as good ornithology:—
"The listening Dryads hushed the woods;
The boughs were thick, and thin and few
The golden ribbons fluttering through;
Their sun-embroidered, leafy hoods
The lindens lifted to the blue;
Only a little forest-brook
The farthest hem of silence shook;
When in the hollow shades I heard—
Was it a spirit or a bird?
Or, strayed from Eden, desolate,
Some Peri calling to her mate,
Whom nevermore her mate would cheer?
'Pe-ri! pe-ri! peer!'
. . . . . . . .
"To trace it in its green retreat
I sought among the boughs in vain;
And followed still the wandering strain,
So melancholy and so sweet,
The dim-eyed violets yearned with pain.
'T was now a sorrow in the air,
Some nymph's immortalized despair
Haunting the woods and waterfalls;
And now, at long, sad intervals,
Sitting unseen in dusky shade,
His plaintive pipe some fairy played,
With long-drawn cadence thin and clear,—
'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'
"Long-drawn and clear its closes were—
As if the hand of Music through
The sombre robe of Silence drew
A thread of golden gossamer;
So pure a flute the fairy blew.
Like beggared princes of the wood,
In silver rags the birches stood;
The hemlocks, lordly counselors,
Were dumb; the sturdy servitors,
In beechen jackets patched and gray,
Seemed waiting spellbound all the day
That low, entrancing note to hear,—
'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'
"I quit the search, and sat me down
Beside the brook, irresolute,
And watched a little bird in suit
Of sober olive, soft and brown,
Perched in the maple branches, mute;
With greenish gold its vest was fringed,
Its tiny cap was ebon-tinged,
With ivory pale its wings were barred,
And its dark eyes were tender-starred.
"Dear bird," I said, "what is thy name?"
And thrice the mournful answer came,
So faint and far, and yet so near,—
'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'
"For so I found my forest bird,—
The pewee of the loneliest woods,
Sole singer in these solitudes,
Which never robin's whistle stirred,
Where never bluebird's plume intrudes.
Quick darting through the dewy morn,
The redstart trilled his twittering horn
And vanished in thick boughs; at even,
Like liquid pearls fresh showered from heaven,
The high notes of the lone wood thrush
Fell on the forest's holy hush;
But thou all day complainest here,—
'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'"
Emerson's best natural history poem is the "Humble-Bee,"—a poem as
good in its way as Burns's poem on the mouse; but his later poem,﹃The
Titmouse,﹄has many of the same qualities, and cannot fail to be
acceptable to both poet and naturalist.
The chickadee is indeed a truly Emersonian bird, and the poet shows him to
be both a hero and a philosopher. Hardy, active, social, a winter bird no
less than a summer, a defier of both frost and heat, lover of the
pine-tree, and diligent searcher after truth in the shape of eggs and
larvae of insects, preëminently a New England bird, clad in black and
ashen gray, with a note the most cheering and reassuring to be heard in
our January woods,—I know of none other of our birds so well
calculated to captivate the Emersonian muse.
Emerson himself is a northern hyperborean genius,—a winter bird with
a clear, saucy, cheery call, and not a passionate summer songster. His
lines have little melody to the ear, but they have the vigor and
distinctness of all pure and compact things. They are like the needles of
the pine—"the snow loving pine"—more than the emotional
foliage of the deciduous trees, and the titmouse becomes them well:—
"Up and away for life! be fleet!—
The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,
Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,
Curdles the blood to the marble bones,
Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,
And hems in life with narrowing fence.
Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,—
The punctual stars will vigil keep,—
Embalmed by purifying cold;
The wind shall sing their dead march old,
The snow is no ignoble shroud,
The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.
"Softly,—but this way fate was pointing,
'T was coming fast to such anointing,
When piped a tiny voice hard by,
Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,
Chick-chickadeedee! saucy note,
Out of sound heart and merry throat,
As if it said 'Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places,
Where January brings few faces.'
"This poet, though he lived apart,
Moved by his hospitable heart,
Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort,
To do the honors of his court,
As fits a feathered lord of land;
Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hands
Hopped on the bough, then darting low,
Prints his small impress on the snow,
Shows feats of his gymnastic play,
Head downward, clinging to the spray.
"Here was this atom in full breath,
Hurling defiance at vast death;
This scrap of valor just for play
Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,
As if to shame my weak behavior;
I greeted loud my little savior,
'You pet! what dost here? and what for?
In these woods, thy small Labrador,
At this pinch, wee San Salvador!
What fire burns in that little chest,
So frolic, stout, and self-possest?
Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;
Ashes and jet all hues outshine.
Why are not diamonds black and gray,
To ape thy dare-devil array?
And I affirm, the spacious North
Exists to draw thy virtue forth.
I think no virtue goes with size;
The reason of all cowardice
Is, that men are overgrown,
And, to be valiant, must come down
To the titmouse dimension.'
. . . . . . . .
"I think old Caesar must have heard
In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,
And, echoed in some frosty wold,
Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.
And I will write our annals new
And thank thee for a better clew.
I, who dreamed not when I came here
To find the antidote of fear,
Now hear thee say in Roman key,
Poean! Veni, vidi, vici."
A late bird-poem, and a good one of its kind, is Celia Thaxter's
"Sandpiper," which recalls Bryant's "Water-Fowl" in its successful
rendering of the spirit and atmosphere of the scene, and the distinctness
with which the lone bird, flitting along the beach, is brought before the
mind. It is a woman's or a feminine poem, as Bryant's is
characteristically a man's.
The sentiment or feeling awakened by any of the aquatic fowls is
preëminently one of loneliness. The wood duck which your approach starts
from the pond or the marsh, the loon neighing down out of the April sky,
the wild goose, the curlew, the stork, the bittern, the sandpiper, awaken
quite a different train of emotions from those awakened by the land-birds.
They all have clinging to them some reminiscence and suggestion of the
sea. Their cries echo its wildness and desolation; their wings are the
shape of its billows.
Of the sandpipers there are many varieties, found upon the coast and
penetrating inland along the rivers and water-courses, one of the most
interesting of the family, commonly called the "tip-up," going up all the
mountain brooks and breeding in the sand along their banks; but the
characteristics are the same in all, and the eye detects little difference
except in size.
The walker on the beach sees it running or flitting before him, following
up the breakers and picking up the aquatic insects left on the sands; and
the trout-fisher along the farthest inland stream likewise intrudes upon
its privacy. Flitting along from stone to stone seeking its food, the hind
part of its body "teetering" up and down, its soft gray color blending it
with the pebbles and the rocks, or else skimming up or down the stream on
its long, convex wings, uttering its shrill cry, the sandpiper is not a
bird of the sea merely; and Mrs. Thaxter's poem is as much for the dweller
inland as for the dweller upon the coast:—
THE SANDPIPER
Across the narrow beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I;
And fast I gather, bit by bit,
The scattered driftwood bleached and dry.
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,—
One little sandpiper and I.
Above our heads the sullen clouds
Scud black and swift across the sky;
Like silent ghosts in misty shrouds
Stand out the white lighthouses high.
Almost as far as eye can reach
I see the close-reefed vessels fly,
As fast we flit along the beach,—
One little sandpiper and I.
I watch him as he skims along,
Uttering his sweet and mournful cry;
He starts not at my fitful song,
Or flash of fluttering drapery;
He has no thought of any wrong;
He scans me with a fearless eye.
Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong,
The little sandpiper and I.
Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night
When the loosed storm breaks furiously?
My driftwood fire will burn so bright!
To what warm shelter canst thou fly?
I do not fear for thee, though wroth
The tempest rushes through the sky;
For are we not God's children both,
Thou, little sandpiper, and I?
Others of our birds have been game for the poetic muse, but in most cases
the poets have had some moral or pretty conceit to convey, and have not
loved the bird first. Mr. Lathrop preaches a little in his pleasant poem,
"The Sparrow," but he must some time have looked upon the bird with
genuine emotion to have written the first two stanzas:—
"Glimmers gay the leafless thicket
Close beside my garden gate,
Where, so light, from post to wicket,
Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate:
Who, with meekly folded wing,
Comes to sun himself and sing.
"It was there, perhaps, last year,
That his little house he built;
For he seems to perk and peer,
And to twitter, too, and tilt
The bare branches in between,
With a fond, familiar mien."
The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Halleek, Longfellow, and Mrs.
Sigourney have written poems upon him, but from none of them does there
fall that first note of his in early spring,—a note that may be
called the violet of sound, and as welcome to the ear, heard above the
cold, damp earth; as is its floral type to the eye a few weeks later
Lowell's two lines come nearer the mark:—
"The bluebird, shifting his light load of song
From post to post along the cheerless fence."
Or the first swallow that comes twittering up the southern valley,
laughing a gleeful, childish laugh, and awakening such memories in the
heart, who has put him in a poem? So the hummingbird, too, escapes through
the finest meshes of rhyme.
The most melodious of our songsters, the wood thrush and the hermit
thrush,—birds whose strains, more than any others, express harmony
and serenity,—have not yet, that I am aware, had reared to them their
merited poetic monument, unless, indeed, Whitman has done this service
for the hermit thrush in his "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn." Here
the threnody is blent of three chords, the blossoming lilac, the evening
star, and the hermit thrush, the latter playing the most prominent part
throughout the composition. It is the exalting and spiritual utterance
of the "solitary singer" that calms and consoles the poet when the
powerful shock of the President's assassination comes upon him, and he
flees from the stifling atmosphere and offensive lights and conversation
of the house,—
"Forth to hiding, receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still."
Numerous others of our birds would seem to challenge attention by their
calls and notes. There is the Maryland yellowthroat, for instance,
standing in the door of his bushy tent, and calling out as you approach,
"which way, sir! which way, sir!" If he says this to the ear of
common folk, what would he not say to the poet? One of the peewees says "stay
there!" with great emphasis. The cardinal grosbeak calls out "what
cheer" "what cheer;" " the bluebird says "purity," "purity,"
"purity;" the brown thrasher, or ferruginous thrush, according to
Thoreau, calls out to the farmer planting his corn, "drop it,"﹃drop
it,﹄"cover it up," "cover it up" The yellow-breasted chat says "who,"
"who" and "tea-boy" What the robin says, caroling that simple
strain from the top of the tall maple, or the crow with his hardy haw-haw,
or the pedestrain meadowlark sounding his piercing and long-drawn note in
the spring meadows, the poets ought to be able to tell us. I only know the
birds all have a language which is very expressive, and which is easily
translatable into the human tongue.
II TOUCHES OF NATURE
I
WHEREVER Nature has commissioned one creature to prey upon another, she
has preserved the balance by forewarning that other creature of what she
has done. Nature says to the cat, "Catch the mouse," and she equips her
for that purpose; but on the selfsame day she says to the mouse,﹃Be wary,—the
cat is watching for you.﹄Nature takes care that none of her creatures
have smooth sailing, the whole voyage at least. Why has she not made the
mosquito noiseless and its bite itchless? Simply because in that case the
odds would be too greatly in its favor. She has taken especial pains to
enable the owl to fly softly and silently, because the creatures it preys
upon are small and wary, and never venture far from their holes. She has
not shown the same caution in the case of the crow, because the crow feeds
on dead flesh, or on grubs and beetles, or fruit and grain, that do not
need to be approached stealthily. The big fish love to cat up the little
fish, and the little fish know it, and, on the very day they are hatched,
seek shallow water, and put little sandbars between themselves and their
too loving parents.
How easily a bird's tail, or that of any fowl, or in fact any part of the
plumage, comes out when the hold of its would-be capturer is upon this
alone; and how hard it yields in the dead bird! No doubt there is
relaxation in the former case. Nature says to the pursuer, "Hold on," and
to the pursued, "Let your tail go." What is the tortuous, zigzag course of
those slow-flying moths for but to make it difficult for the birds to snap
them up? The skunk is a slow, witless creature, and the fox and lynx love
its meat; yet it carries a bloodless weapon that neither likes to face.
I recently heard of an ingenious method a certain other simple and
slow-going creature has of baffling its enemy. A friend of mine was
walking in the fields when he saw a commotion in the grass a few yards
off. Approaching the spot, he found a snake—the common garter snake—trying
to swallow a lizard. And how do you suppose the lizard was defeating the
benevolent designs of the snake? By simply taking hold of its own tail and
making itself into a hoop. The snake went round and round, and could find
neither beginning nor end. Who was the old giant that found himself
wrestling with Time? This little snake had a tougher customer the other
day in the bit of eternity it was trying to swallow.
The snake itself has not the same wit, because I lately saw a black snake
in the woods trying to swallow the garter snake, and he had made some
headway, though the little snake was fighting every inch of the ground,
hooking his tail about sticks and bushes, and pulling back with all his
might, apparently not liking the look of things down there at all. I
thought it well to let him have a good taste of his own doctrines, when I
put my foot down against further proceedings.
This arming of one creature against another is often cited as an evidence
of the wisdom of Nature, but it is rather an evidence of her impartiality.
She does not care a fig more for one creature than for another, and is
equally on the side of both, or perhaps it would be better to say she does
not care a fig for either. Every creature must take its chances, and man
is no exception. We can ride if we know how and are going her way, or we
can be run over if we fall or make a mistake. Nature does not care whether
the hunter slay the beast or the beast the hunter; she will make good
compost of them both, and her ends are prospered whichever succeeds.
"If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again."
What is the end of Nature? Where is the end of a sphere? The sphere
balances at any and every point. So everything in Nature is at the top,
and yet no one thing is at the top.
She works with reference to no measure of time, no limit of space, and
with an abundance of material, not expressed by exhaustless. Did you think
Niagara a great exhibition of power? What is that, then, that withdraws
noiseless and invisible in the ground about, and of which Niagara is but
the lifting of the finger?
Nature is thoroughly selfish, and looks only to her own ends. One thing
she is bent upon, and that is keeping up the supply, multiplying endlessly
and scattering as she multiplies. Did Nature have in view our delectation
when she made the apple, the peach, the plum, the cherry? Undoubtedly; but
only as a means to her own private ends. What a bribe or a wage is the
pulp of these delicacies to all creatures to come and sow their seed! And
Nature has taken care to make the seed indigestible, so that, though the
fruit be eaten, the germ is not, but only planted.
God made the crab, but man made the pippin; but the pippin cannot
propagate itself, and exists only by violence and usurpation. Bacon says,
"It is easier to deceive Nature than to force her," but it seems to me the
nurserymen really force her. They cut off the head of a savage and clap on
the head of a fine gentleman, and the crab becomes a Swaar or a Baldwin.
Or is it a kind of deception practiced upon Nature, which succeeds only by
being carefully concealed? If we could play the same tricks upon her in
the human species, how the great geniuses could be preserved and
propagated, and the world stocked with them! But what a frightful
condition of things that would be! No new men, but a tiresome and endless
repetition of the old ones,—a world perpetually stocked with Newtons
and Shakespeares!
We say Nature knows best, and has adapted this or that to our wants or to
our constitution,—sound to the ear, light and color to the eye; but
she has not done any such thing, but has adapted man to these things. The
physical cosmos is the mould, and man is the molten metal that is poured
into it. The light fashioned the eye, the laws of sound made the ear; in
fact, man is the outcome of Nature and not the reverse. Creatures that
live forever in the dark have no eyes; and would not any one of our senses
perish and be shed, as it were, in a world where it could not be used?
II
It is well to let down our metropolitan pride a little. Man thinks himself
at the top, and that the immense display and prodigality of Nature are for
him. But they are no more for him than they are for the birds and beasts,
and he is no more at the top than they are. He appeared upon the stage
when the play had advanced to a certain point, and he will disappear from
the stage when the play has reached another point, and the great drama
will go on without him. The geological ages, the convulsions and
parturition throes of the globe, were to bring him forth no more than the
beetles. Is not all this wealth of the seasons, these solar and sidereal
influences, this depth and vitality and internal fire, these seas, and
rivers, and oceans, and atmospheric currents, as necessary to the life of
the ants and worms we tread under foot as to our own? And does the sun
shine for me any more than for yon butterfly? What I mean to say is, we
cannot put our finger upon this or that and say, Here is the end of
Nature. The Infinite cannot be measured. The plan of Nature is so immense,—but
she has no plan, no scheme, but to go on and on forever. What is size,
what is time, distance, to the Infinite? Nothing. The Infinite knows no
time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.
I sometimes think that the earth and the worlds are a kind of nervous
ganglia in an organization of which we can form no conception, or less
even than that. If one of the globules of blood that circulate in our
veins were magnified enough million times, we might see a globe teeming
with life and power. Such is this earth of ours, coursing in the veins of
the Infinite. Size is only relative, and the imagination finds no end to
the series either way.
III
Looking out of the car window one day, I saw the pretty and unusual sight
of an eagle sitting upon the ice in the river, surrounded by half a dozen
or more crows. The crows appeared as if looking up to the noble bird and
attending his movements. "Are those its young?" asked a gentleman by my
side. How much did that man know—not about eagles, but about Nature?
If he had been familiar with geese or hens, or with donkeys, he would not
have asked that question. The ancients had an axiom that he who knew one
truth knew all truths; so much else becomes knowable when one vital fact
is thoroughly known. You have a key, a standard, and cannot be deceived.
Chemistry, geology, astronomy, natural history, all admit one to the same
measureless interiors.
I heard a great man say that he could see how much of the theology of the
day would fall before the standard of him who had got even the insects.
And let any one set about studying these creatures carefully, and he will
see the force of the remark. We learn the tremendous doctrine of
metamorphosis from the insect world; and have not the bee and the ant
taught man wisdom from the first? I was highly edified the past summer by
observing the ways and doings of a colony of black hornets that
established themselves under one of the projecting gables of my house.
This hornet has the reputation of being a very ugly customer, but I found
it no trouble to live on the most friendly terms with her. She was as
little disposed to quarrel as I was. She is indeed the eagle among
hornets, and very noble and dignified in her bearing. She used to come
freely into the house and prey upon the flies. You would hear that deep,
mellow hum, and see the black falcon poising on wing, or striking here and
there at the flies, that scattered on her approach like chickens before a
hawk. When she had caught one, she would alight upon some object and
proceed to dress and draw her game. The wings were sheared off, the legs
cut away, the bristles trimmed, then the body thoroughly bruised and
broken. When the work was completed, the fly was rolled up into a small
pellet, and with it under her arm the hornet flew to her nest, where no
doubt in due time it was properly served up on the royal board. Every
dinner inside these paper walls is a state dinner, for the queen is always
present.
I used to mount the ladder to within two or three feet of the nest and
observe the proceedings. I at first thought the workshop must be inside,—a
place where the pulp was mixed, and perhaps treated with chemicals; for
each hornet, when she came with her burden of materials, passed into the
nest, and then, after a few moments, emerged again and crawled to the
place of building. But I one day stopped up the entrance with some cotton,
when no one happened to be on guard, and then observed that, when the
loaded hornet could not get inside, she, after some deliberation,
proceeded to the unfinished part and went forward with her work. Hence I
inferred that maybe the hornet went inside to report and to receive
orders, or possibly to surrender her material into fresh hands. Her career
when away from the nest is beset with dangers; the colony is never large,
and the safe return of every hornet is no doubt a matter of solicitude to
the royal mother.
The hornet was the first paper-maker, and holds the original patent. The
paper it makes is about like that of the newspaper; nearly as firm, and
made of essentially the same material,—woody fibres scraped from old
rails and boards. And there is news on it, too, if one could make out the
characters.
When I stopped the entrance with cotton, there was no commotion or
excitement, as there would have been in the case of yellow-jackets. Those
outside went to pulling, and those inside went to pushing and chewing.
Only once did one of the outsiders come down and look me suspiciously in
the face, and inquire very plainly what my business might be up there. I
bowed my head, being at the top of a twenty-foot ladder, and had nothing
to say.
The cotton was chewed and moistened about the edges till every fibre was
loosened, when the mass dropped. But instantly the entrance was made
smaller, and changed so as to make the feat of stopping it more difficult.
IV
There are those who look at Nature from the standpoint of conventional and
artificial life,—from parlor windows and through gilt-edged poems,—the
sentimentalists. At the other extreme are those who do not look at Nature
at all, but are a grown part of her, and look away from her toward the
other class,—the backwoodsmen and pioneers, and all rude and simple
persons. Then there are those in whom the two are united or merged,—the
great poets and artists. In them the sentimentalist is corrected and
cured, and the hairy and taciturn frontiersman has had experience to some
purpose. The true poet knows more about Nature than the naturalist because
he carries her open secrets in his heart. Eckermann could instruct Goethe
in ornithology, but could not Goethe instruct Eckermann in the meaning and
mystery of the bird? It is my privilege to number among my friends a man
who has passed his life in cities amid the throngs of men, who never goes
to the woods or to the country, or hunts or fishes, and yet he is the true
naturalist. I think he studies the orbs. I think day and night and the
stars, and the faces of men and women, have taught him all there is worth
knowing.
We run to Nature because we are afraid of man. Our artists paint the
landscape because they cannot paint the human face. If we could look into
the eyes of a man as coolly as we can into the eyes of an animal, the
products of our pens and brushes would be quite different from what they
are.
V
But I suspect, after all, it makes but little difference to which school
you go, whether to the woods or to the city. A sincere man learns pretty
much the same things in both places. The differences are superficial, the
resemblances deep and many. The hermit is a hermit, and the poet a poet,
whether he grow up in the town or the country. I was forcibly reminded of
this fact recently on opening the works of Charles Lamb after I had been
reading those of our Henry Thoreau. Lamb cared nothing for nature, Thoreau
for little else. One was as attached to the city and the life of the
street and tavern as the other to the country and the life of animals and
plants. Yet they are close akin. They give out the same tone and are
pitched in about the same key. Their methods are the same; so are their
quaintness and scorn of rhetoric. Thoreau has the drier humor, as might be
expected, and is less stomachic. There is more juice and unction in Lamb,
but this he owes to his nationality. Both are essayists who in a less
reflective age would have been poets pure and simple. Both were spare,
high-nosed men, and I fancy a resemblance even in their portraits. Thoreau
is the Lamb of New England fields and woods, and Lamb is the Thoreau of
London streets and clubs. There was a willfulness and perversity about
Thoreau, behind which he concealed his shyness and his thin skin, and
there was a similar foil in Lamb, though less marked, on account of his
good-nature; that was a part of his armor, too.
VI
Speaking of Thoreau's dry humor reminds me how surely the old English
unctuous and sympathetic humor is dying out or has died out of our
literature. Our first notable crop of authors had it,—Paulding,
Cooper, Irving, and in a measure Hawthorne,—but our later humorists
have it not at all, but in its stead an intellectual quickness and
perception of the ludicrous that is not unmixed with scorn.
One of the marks of the great humorist, like Cervantes, or Sterne, or
Scott, is that he approaches his subject, not through his head merely, but
through his heart, his love, his humanity. His humor is full of
compassion, full of the milk of human kindness, and does not separate him
from his subject, but unites him to it by vital ties. How Sterne loved
Uncle Toby and sympathized with him, and Cervantes his luckless knight! I
fear our humorists would have made fun of them, would have shown them up
and stood aloof superior, and "laughed a laugh of merry scorn." Whatever
else the great humorist or poet, or any artist, may be or do, there is no
contempt in his laughter. And this point cannot be too strongly insisted
on in view of the fact that nearly all our humorous writers seem impressed
with the conviction that their own dignity and self-respect require them
to look down upon what they portray. But it is only little men who
look down upon anything or speak down to anybody. One sees every day how
clear it is that specially fine, delicate, intellectual persons cannot
portray satisfactorily coarse, common, uncultured characters. Their
attitude is at once scornful and supercilious. The great man, like
Socrates, or Dr. Johnson, or Abraham Lincoln, is just as surely coarse as
he is fine, but the complaint I make with our humorists is that they are
fine and not coarse in any healthful and manly sense. A great part of the
best literature and the best art is of the vital fluids, the bowels, the
chest, the appetites, and is to be read and judged only through love and
compassion. Let us pray for unction, which is the marrowfat of humor, and
for humility, which is the badge of manhood.
As the voice of the American has retreated from his chest to his throat
and nasal passages, so there is danger that his contribution to literature
will soon cease to imply any blood or viscera, or healthful carnality, or
depth of human and manly affection, and will be the fruit entirely of our
toploftical brilliancy and cleverness.
What I complain of is just as true of the essayists and the critics as of
the novelists. The prevailing tone here also is born of a feeling of
immense superiority. How our lofty young men, for instance, look down upon
Carlyle, and administer their masterly rebukes to him! But see how Carlyle
treats Burns, or Scott, or Johnson, or Novalis, or any of his heroes. Ay,
there's the rub; he makes heroes of them, which is not a trick of small
natures. He can say of Johnson that he was "moonstruck," but it is from no
lofty height of fancied superiority, but he uses the word as a naturalist
uses a term to describe an object he loves.
What we want, and perhaps have got more of than I am ready to admit, is a
race of writers who affiliate with their subjects, and enter into them
through their blood, their sexuality and manliness, instead of standing
apart and criticising them and writing about them through mere
intellectual cleverness and "smartness."
VII
There is a feeling in heroic poetry, or in a burst of eloquence, that I
sometimes catch in quite different fields. I caught it this morning, for
instance, when I saw the belated trains go by, and knew how they had been
battling with storm, darkness, and distance, and had triumphed. They were
due at my place in the night, but did not pass till after eight o'clock in
the morning. Two trains coupled together,—the fast mail and the
express,—making an immense line of coaches hauled by two engines.
They had come from the West, and were all covered with snow and ice, like
soldiers with the dust of battle upon them. They had massed their forces,
and were now moving with augmented speed, and with a resolution that was
epic and grand. Talk about the railroad dispelling the romance from the
landscape; if it does, it brings the heroic element in. The moving train
is a proud spectacle, especially on stormy and tempestuous nights. When I
look out and see its light, steady and unflickering as the planets, and
hear the roar of its advancing tread, or its sound diminishing in the
distance, I am comforted and made stout of heart. O night, where is thy
stay! O space, where is thy victory! Or to see the fast mail pass in the
morning is as good as a page of Homer. It quickens one's pulse for all
day. It is the Ajax of trains. I hear its defiant, warning whistle, hear
it thunder over the bridges, and its sharp, rushing ring among the rocks,
and in the winter mornings see its glancing, meteoric lights, or in summer
its white form bursting through the silence and the shadows, its plume of
smoke lying flat upon its roofs and stretching far behind,—a sight
better than a battle. It is something of the same feeling one has in
witnessing any wild, free careering in storms, and in floods in nature; or
in beholding the charge of an army; or in listening to an eloquent man, or
to a hundred instruments of music in full blast,—it is triumph,
victory. What is eloquence but mass in motion,—a flood, a cataract,
an express train, a cavalry charge? We are literally carried away, swept
from our feet, and recover our senses again as best we can.
I experienced the same emotion when I saw them go by with the sunken
steamer. The procession moved slowly and solemnly. It was like a funeral
cortege,—a long line of grim floats and barges and boxes, with their
bowed and solemn derricks, the pall-bearers; and underneath in her watery
grave, where she had been for six months, the sunken steamer, partially
lifted and borne along. Next day the procession went back again, and the
spectacle was still more eloquent. The steamer had been taken to the flats
above and raised till her walking-beam was out of water; her bell also was
exposed and cleaned and rung, and the wreckers' Herculean labor seemed
nearly over. But that night the winds and the storms held high carnival.
It looked like preconcerted action on the part of tide, tempest, and rain
to defeat these wreckers, for the elements all pulled together and pulled
till cables and hawser snapped like threads. Back the procession started,
anchors were dragged or lost, immense new cables were quickly taken ashore
and fastened to trees; but no use: trees were upturned, the cables
stretched till they grew small and sang like harp-strings, then parted;
back, back against the desperate efforts of the men, till within a few
feet of her old grave, when there was a great commotion among the craft,
floats were overturned, enormous chains parted, colossal timbers were
snapped like pipestems, and, with a sound that filled all the air, the
steamer plunged to the bottom again in seventy feet of water.
VIII
I am glad to observe that all the poetry of the midsummer harvesting has
not gone out with the scythe and the whetstone. The line of mowers was a
pretty sight, if one did not sympathize too deeply with the human backs
turned up there to the sun, and the sound of the whetstone, coming up from
the meadows in the dewy morning, was pleasant music. But I find the sound
of the mowing-machine and the patent reaper is even more in tune with the
voices of Nature at this season. The characteristic sounds of midsummer
are the sharp, whirring crescendo of the cicada or harvest fly, and the
rasping, stridulous notes of the nocturnal insects. The mowing-machine
repeats and imitates these sounds. 'T is like the hum of a locust or the
shuffling of a mighty grasshopper. More than that, the grass and the grain
at this season have become hard. The timothy stalk is like a file; the rye
straw is glazed with flint; the grasshoppers snap sharply as they fly up
in front of you; the bird-songs have ceased; the ground crackles under
foot; the eye of day is brassy and merciless; and in harmony with all
these things is the rattle of the mower and the hay-tedder.
IX
'T is an evidence of how directly we are related to Nature, that we more
or less sympathize with the weather, and take on the color of the day.
Goethe said he worked easiest on a high barometer. One is like a chimney
that draws well some days and won't draw at all on others, and the secret
is mainly in the condition of the atmosphere. Anything positive and
decided with the weather is a good omen. A pouring rain may be more
auspicious than a sleeping sunshine. When the stove draws well, the fogs
and fumes will leave your mind. I find there is great virtue in the bare
ground, and have been much put out at times by those white angelic days we
have in winter, such as Whittier has so well described in these lines:—
"Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament;
No cloud above, no earth below,
A universe of sky and snow."
On such days my spirit gets snow-blind; all things take on the same color,
or no color; my thought loses its perspective; the inner world is a blank
like the outer, and all my great ideals are wrapped in the same monotonous
and expressionless commonplace. The blackest of black days are better.
Why does snow so kill the landscape and blot out our interest in it? Not
merely because it is cold, and the symbol of death,—for I imagine as
many inches of apple blossoms would have about the same effect,—but
because it expresses nothing. White is a negative; a perfect blank. The
eye was made for color, and for the earthy tints, and, when these are
denied it, the mind is very apt to sympathize and to suffer also.
Then when the sap begins to mount in the trees, and the spring languor
comes, does not one grow restless indoors? The sun puts out the fire, the
people say, and the spring sun certainly makes one's intellectual light
grow dim. Why should not a man sympathize with the seasons and the moods
and phases of Nature? He is an apple upon this tree, or rather he is a
babe at this breast, and what his great mother feels affects him also.
X
I have frequently been surprised, in late fall and early winter, to see
how unequal or irregular was the encroachment of the frost upon the earth.
If there is suddenly a great fall in the mercury, the frost lays siege to
the soil and effects a lodgment here and there, and extends its conquests
gradually. At one place in the field you can easily run your staff through
into the soft ground, when a few rods farther on it will be as hard as a
rock. A little covering of dry grass or leaves is a great protection. The
moist places hold out long, and the spring runs never freeze. You find the
frost has gone several inches into the plowed ground, but on going to the
woods, and poking away the leaves and debris under the hemlocks and
cedars, you find there is no frost at all. The Earth freezes her ears and
toes and naked places first, and her body last.
If heat were visible, or if we should represent it say by smoke, then the
December landscape would present a curious spectacle. We should see the
smoke lying low over the meadows, thickest in the hollows and moist
places, and where the turf is oldest and densest. It would cling to the
fences and ravines. Under every evergreen tree we should see the vapor
rising and filling the branches, while the woods of pine and hemlock would
be blue with it long after it had disappeared from the open country. It
would rise from the tops of the trees, and be carried this way and that
with the wind. The valleys of the great rivers, like the Hudson, would
overflow with it. Large bodies of water become regular magazines in which
heat is stored during the summer, and they give it out again during the
fall and early winter. The early frosts keep well back from the Hudson,
skulking behind the ridges, and hardly come over in sight at any point.
But they grow bold as the season advances, till the river's fires, too, I
are put out and Winter covers it with his snows.
XI
One of the strong and original strokes of Nature was when she made the
loon. It is always refreshing to contemplate a creature so positive and
characteristic. He is the great diver and flyer under water. The loon is
the genius loci of the wild northern lakes, as solitary as they are. Some
birds represent the majesty of nature, like the eagles; others its
ferocity, like the hawks; others its cunning, like the crow; others its
sweetness and melody, like the song-birds. The loon represents its
wildness and solitariness. It is cousin to the beaver. It has the feathers
of a bird and the fur of an animal, and the heart of both. It is as quick
and cunning as it is bold and resolute. It dives with such marvelous
quickness that the shot of the gunner get there just in time﹃to cut
across a circle of descending tail feathers and a couple of little jets of
water flung upward by the web feet of the loon.﹄When disabled so that it
can neither dive nor fly, it is said to face its foe, look him in the face
with its clear, piercing eye, and fight resolutely till death. The gunners
say there is something in its wailing, piteous cry, when dying, almost
human in its agony. The loon is, in the strictest sense, an aquatic fowl.
It can barely walk upon the land, and one species at least cannot take
flight from the shore. But in the water its feet are more than feet, and
its wings more than wings. It plunges into this denser air and flies with
incredible speed. Its head and beak form a sharp point to its tapering
neck. Its wings are far in front and its legs equally far in the rear, and
its course through the crystal depths is like the speed of an arrow. In
the northern lakes it has been taken forty feet under water upon hooks
baited for the great lake trout. I had never seen one till last fall, when
one appeared on the river in front of my house. I knew instantly it was
the loon. Who could not tell a loon a half mile or more away, though he
had never seen one before? The river was like glass, and every movement of
the bird as it sported about broke the surface into ripples, that revealed
it far and wide. Presently a boat shot out from shore, and went ripping up
the surface toward the loon. The creature at once seemed to divine the
intentions of the boatman, and sidled off obliquely, keeping a sharp
lookout as if to make sure it was pursued. A steamer came down and passed
between them, and when the way was again clear, the loon was still
swimming on the surface. Presently it disappeared under the water, and the
boatman pulled sharp and hard. In a few moments the bird reappeared some
rods farther on, as if to make an observation. Seeing it was being
pursued, and no mistake, it dived quickly, and, when it came up again, had
gone many times as far as the boat had in the same space of time. Then it
dived again, and distanced its pursuer so easily that he gave over the
chase and rested upon his oars. But the bird made a final plunge, and,
when it emerged upon the surface again, it was over a mile away. Its
course must have been, and doubtless was, an actual flight under water,
and half as fast as the crow flies in the air.
The loon would have delighted the old poets. Its wild, demoniac laughter
awakens the echoes on the solitary lakes, and its ferity and hardiness are
kindred to those robust spirits.
XII
One notable difference between man and the four-footed animals which has
often occurred to me is in the eye, and the greater perfection, or rather
supremacy, of the sense of sight in the human species. All the animals—the
dog, the fox, the wolf, the deer, the cow, the horse—depend mainly
upon the senses of hearing and smell. Almost their entire powers of
discrimination are confined to these two senses. The dog picks his master
out of the crowd by smell, and the cow her calf out of the herd. Sight is
only partial recognition. The question can only be settled beyond all
doubt by the aid of the nose. The fox, alert and cunning as he is, will
pass within a few yards of the hunter and not know him from a stump. A
squirrel will run across your lap, and a marmot between your feet, if you
are motionless. When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not
satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his
fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be
induced to smell it. There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an
animal, but very little science. Then you cannot catch an animal's eye; he
looks at you, but not into your eye. The dog directs his gaze toward your
face, but, for aught you can tell, it centres upon your mouth or nose. The
same with your horse or cow. Their eye is vague and indefinite.
Not so with the birds. The bird has the human eye in its clearness, its
power, and its supremacy over the other senses. How acute their sense of
smell may be is uncertain; their hearing is sharp enough, but their vision
is the most remarkable. A crow or a hawk, or any of the larger birds, will
not mistake you for a stump or a rock, stand you never so still amid the
bushes. But they cannot separate you from your horse or team. A hawk reads
a man on horseback as one animal, and reads it as a horse. None of the
sharp-scented animals could be thus deceived.
The bird has man's brain also in its size. The brain of a song-bird is
even much larger in proportion than that of the greatest human monarch,
and its life is correspondingly intense and high-strung. But the bird's
eye is superficial. It is on the outside of his head. It is round, that it
may take in a full circle at a glance.
All the quadrupeds emphasize their direct forward gaze by a corresponding
movement of the ears, as if to supplement and aid one sense with another.
But man's eye seldom needs the confirmation of his ear, while it is so
set, and his head so poised, that his look is forcible and pointed without
being thus seconded.
XIII
I once saw a cow that had lost her cud. How forlorn and desolate and sick
at heart that cow looked! No more rumination, no more of that second and
finer mastication, no more of that sweet and juicy reverie under the
spreading trees, or in the stall. Then the farmer took an elder and
scraped the bark and put something with it, and made the cow a cud, and,
after due waiting, the experiment took, a response came back, and the
mysterious machinery was once more in motion, and the cow was herself
again.
Have you, O poet, or essayist, or story-writer, never lost your cud, and
wandered about days and weeks without being able to start a single thought
or an image that tasted good,—your literary appetite dull or all
gone, and the conviction daily growing that it was all over with you in
that direction? A little elder-bark, something fresh and bitter from the
woods, is about the best thing you can take.
XIV
Notwithstanding what I have elsewhere said about the desolation of snow,
when one looks closely it is little more than a thin veil after all, and
takes and repeats the form of whatever it covers. Every path through the
fields is just as plain as before. On every hand the ground sends tokens,
and the curves and slopes are not of the snow, but of the earth beneath.
In like manner the rankest vegetation hides the ground less than we think.
Looking across a wide valley in the month of July, I have noted that the
fields, except the meadows, had a ruddy tinge, and that corn, which near
at hand seemed to completely envelop the soil, at that distance gave only
a slight shade of green. The color of the ground everywhere predominated,
and I doubt not that, if we could see the earth from a point sufficiently
removed, as from the moon, its ruddy hue, like that of Mars, would alone
be visible.
What is a man but a miniature earth, with many disguises in the way of
manners, possessions, dissemblances? Yet through all—through all the
work of his hands and all the thoughts of his mind—how surely the
ground quality of him, the fundamental hue, whether it be this or that,
makes itself felt and is alone important!
XV
Men follow their noses, it is said. I have wondered why the Greek did not
follow his nose in architecture,—did not copy those arches that
spring from it as from a pier, and support his brow,—but always and
everywhere used the post and the lintel. There was something in that face
that has never reappeared in the human countenance. I am thinking
especially of that straight, strong profile. Is it really godlike, or is
this impression the result of association? But any suggestion or
reminiscence of it in the modern face at once gives one the idea of
strength. It is a face strong in the loins, or it suggests a high, elastic
instep. It is the face of order and proportion. Those arches are the
symbols of law and self-control. The point of greatest interest is the
union of the nose with the brow,—that strong, high embankment; it
makes the bridge from the ideal to the real sure and easy. All the Greek's
ideas passed readily into form. In the modern face the arches are more or
less crushed, and the nose is severed from the brow,—hence the
abstract and the analytic; hence the preponderance of the speculative
intellect over creative power.
XVI
I have thought that the boy is the only true lover of Nature, and that we,
who make such a dead set at studying and admiring her, come very wide of
the mark. "The nonchalance of a boy who is sure of his dinner," says our
Emerson, "is the healthy attitude of humanity." The boy is a part of
Nature; he is as indifferent, as careless, as vagrant as she. He browses,
he digs, he hunts, he climbs, he halloes, he feeds on roots and greens and
mast. He uses things roughly and without sentiment. The coolness with
which boys will drown dogs or cats, or hang them to trees, or murder young
birds, or torture frogs or squirrels, is like Nature's own mercilessness.
Certain it is that we often get some of the best touches of nature from
children. Childhood is a world by itself, and we listen to children when
they frankly speak out of it with a strange interest. There is such a
freedom from responsibility and from worldly wisdom,—it is heavenly
wisdom. There is no sentiment in children, because there is no ruin;
nothing has gone to decay about them yet,—not a leaf or a twig.
Until he is well into his teens, and sometimes later, a boy is like a
bean-pod before the fruit has developed,—indefinite, succulent, rich
in possibilities which are only vaguely outlined. He is a pericarp merely.
How rudimental are all his ideas! I knew a boy who began his school
composition on swallows by saying there were two kinds of swallows,—chimney
swallows and swallows.
Girls come to themselves sooner; are indeed, from the first, more definite
and "translatable."
XVII
Who will write the natural history of the boy? One of the first points to
be taken account of is his clannishness. The boys of one neighborhood are
always pitted against those of an adjoining neighborhood, or of one end of
the town against those of the other end. A bridge, a river, a railroad
track, are always boundaries of hostile or semi-hostile tribes. The boys
that go up the road from the country school hoot derisively at those that
go down the road, and not infrequently add the insult of stones; and the
down-roaders return the hooting and the missiles with interest.
Often there is open war, and the boys meet and have regular battles. A few
years since, the boys of two rival towns on opposite sides of the Ohio
River became so belligerent that the authorities had to interfere.
Whenever an Ohio boy was caught on the West Virginia side of the river, he
was unmercifully beaten; and when a West Virginia boy was discovered on
the Ohio side, he was pounced upon in the same manner. One day a vast
number of boys, about one hundred and fifty on a side, met by appointment
upon the ice and engaged in a pitched battle. Every conceivable missile
was used, including pistols. The battle, says the local paper, raged with
fury for about two hours. One boy received a wound behind the ear, from
the effects of which he died the next morning. More recently the boys of a
large manufacturing town of New Jersey were divided into two hostile clans
that came into frequent collision. One Saturday both sides mustered their
forces, and a regular fight ensued, one boy here also losing his life from
the encounter.
Every village and settlement is at times the scene of these youthful
collisions When a new boy appears in the village, or at the country
school, how the other boys crowd around him and take his measure, or pick
at him and insult him to try his mettle!
I knew a boy, twelve or thirteen years old, who was sent to help a drover
with some cattle as far as a certain village ten miles from his home.
After the place was reached, and while the boy was eating his cracker and
candies, he strolled about the village, and fell in with some other boys
playing upon a bridge. In a short time a large number of children of all
sizes had collected upon the bridge. The new-comer was presently
challenged by the boys of his own age to jump with them. This he readily
did, and cleared their farthest mark. Then he gave them a sample of his
stone-throwing, and at this pastime he also far surpassed his competitors.
Before long, the feeling of the crowd began to set against him, showing
itself first in the smaller fry, who began half playfully to throw pebbles
and lumps of dry earth at him. Then they would run up slyly and strike him
with sticks. Presently the large ones began to tease him in like manner,
till the contagion of hostility spread, and the whole pack was arrayed
against the strange boy. He kept them at bay for a few moments with his
stick, till, the feeling mounting higher and higher, he broke through
their ranks, and fled precipitately toward home, with the throng of little
and big at his heels. Gradually the girls and smaller boys dropped behind,
till at the end of the first fifty rods only two boys of about his own
size, with wrath and determination in their faces, kept up the pursuit.
But to these he added the final insult of beating them at running also,
and reached, much blown, a point beyond which they refused to follow.
The world the boy lives in is separate and distinct from the world the man
lives in. It is a world inhabited only by boys. No events are important or
of any moment save those affecting boys. How they ignore the presence of
their elders on the street, shouting out their invitations, their
appointments, their pass-words from our midst, as from the veriest
solitude! They have peculiar calls, whistles, signals, by which they
communicate with each other at long distances, like birds or wild
creatures. And there is as genuine a wildness about these notes and calls
as about those of a fox or a coon.
The boy is a savage, a barbarian, in his taste,—devouring roots,
leaves, bark, unripe fruit; and in the kind of music or discord he
delights in,—of harmony he has no perception. He has his fashions
that spread from city to city. In one of our large cities the rage at one
time was an old tin can with a string attached, out of which they tortured
the most savage and ear-splitting discords. The police were obliged to
interfere and suppress the nuisance. On another occasion, at Christmas,
they all came forth with tin horns, and nearly drove the town distracted
with the hideous uproar.
Another savage trait of the boy is his untruthfulness. Corner him, and the
chances are ten to one he will lie his way out. Conscience is a plant of
slow growth in the boy. If caught in one lie, he invents another. I know a
boy who was in the habit of eating apples in school. His teacher finally
caught him in the act, and, without removing his eye from him, called him
to the middle of the floor.
"I saw you this time," said the teacher.
"Saw me what?" said the boy innocently.
"Bite that apple," replied the teacher.
"No, sir," said the rascal.
"Open your mouth;" and from its depths the teacher, with his thumb and
finger, took out the piece of apple.
"Did n't know it was there," said the boy, unabashed.
Nearly all the moral sentiment and graces are late in maturing in the boy.
He has no proper self-respect till past his majority. Of course there are
exceptions, but they are mostly windfalls. The good boys die young. We
lament the wickedness and thoughtlessness of the young vagabonds at the
same time that we know it is mainly the acridity and bitterness of the
unripe fruit that we are lamenting.
III A BIRD MEDLEY
People who have not made friends with the birds do not know how much they
miss. Especially to one living in the country, of strong local attachments
and an observing turn of mind, does an acquaintance with the birds form a
close and invaluable tie. The only time I saw Thomas Carlyle, I remember
his relating, apropos of this subject, that in his earlier days he was
sent on a journey to a distant town on some business that gave him much
bother and vexation, and that on his way back home, forlorn and dejected,
he suddenly heard the larks singing all about him,—soaring and
singing, just as they did about his father's fields, and it comforted him
and cheered him up amazingly.
Most lovers of the birds can doubtless recall similar experiences from
their own lives. Nothing wonts me to a new place more than the birds. I
go, for instance, to take up my abode in the country,—to plant
myself upon unfamiliar ground. I know nobody, and nobody knows me. The
roads, the fields, the hills, the streams, the woods, are all strange. I
look wistfully upon them, but they know me not. They give back nothing to
my yearning gaze. But there, on every hand, are the long-familiar birds,—the
same ones I left behind me, the same ones I knew in my youth,—robins,
sparrows, swallows, bobolinks, crows, hawks, high-holes, meadowlarks, all
there before me, and ready to renew and perpetuate the old associations.
Before my house is begun, theirs is completed; before I have taken root at
all, they are thoroughly established. I do not yet know what kind of
apples my apple-trees bear, but there, in the cavity of a decayed limb,
the bluebirds are building a nest, and yonder, on that branch, the social
sparrow is busy with hairs and straws. The robins have tasted the quality
of my cherries, and the cedar-birds have known every red cedar on the
place these many years. While my house is yet surrounded by its
scaffoldings, the phoebe-bird has built her exquisite mossy nest on a
projecting stone beneath the eaves, a robin has filled a niche in the wall
with mud and dry grass, the chimney swallows are going out and in the
chimney, and a pair of house wrens are at home in a snug cavity over the
door, and, during an April snowstorm, a number of hermit thrushes have
taken shelter in my unfinished chambers. Indeed, I am in the midst of
friends before I fairly know it. The place is not so new as I had thought.
It is already old; the birds have supplied the memories of many decades of
years.
There is something almost pathetic in the fact that the birds remain
forever the same. You grow old, your friends die or move to distant lands,
events sweep on, and all things are changed. Yet there in your garden or
orchard are the birds of your boyhood, the same notes, the same calls,
and, to all intents and purposes, the identical birds endowed with
perennial youth. The swallows, that built so far out of your reach beneath
the eaves of your father's barn, the same ones now squeak and chatter
beneath the eaves of your barn. The warblers and shy wood-birds you
pursued with such glee ever so many summers ago, and whose names you
taught to some beloved youth who now, perchance, sleeps amid his native
hills, no marks of time or change cling to them; and when you walk out to
the strange woods, there they are, mocking you with their ever-renewed and
joyous youth. The call of the high-holes, the whistle of the quail, the
strong piercing note of the meadowlark, the drumming of the grouse,—how
these sounds ignore the years, and strike on the ear with the melody of
that springtime when the world was young, and life was all holiday and
romance!
During any unusual tension of the feelings or emotions, how the note or
song of a single bird will sink into the memory, and become inseparably
associated with your grief or joy! Shall I ever again be able to hear the
song of the oriole without being pierced through and through? Can it ever
be other than a dirge for the dead to me? Day after day, and week after
week, this bird whistled and warbled in a mulberry by the door, while
sorrow, like a pall, darkened my day. So loud and persistent was the
singer that his note teased and worried my excited ear.
"Hearken to yon pine warbler,
Singing aloft in the tree!
Hearest thou, O traveler!
What he singeth to me?
"Not unless God made sharp thine ear
With sorrow such as mine,
Out of that delicate lay couldst thou
Its heavy tale divine."
It is the opinion of some naturalists that birds never die what is called
a natural death, but come to their end by some murderous or accidental
means; yet I have found sparrows and vireos in the fields and woods dead
or dying, that bore no marks of violence; and I remember that once in my
childhood a redbird fell down in the yard exhausted, and was brought in by
the girl; its bright scarlet image is indelibly stamped upon my
recollection. It is not known that birds have any distempers like the
domestic fowls, but I saw a social sparrow one day quite disabled by some
curious malady that suggested a disease that sometimes attacks poultry;
one eye was nearly put out by a scrofulous-looking sore, and on the last
joint of one wing there was a large tumorous or fungous growth that
crippled the bird completely. On another occasion I picked up one that
appeared well, but could not keep its centre of gravity when in flight,
and so fell to the ground.
One reason why dead birds and animals are so rarely found is, that on the
approach of death their instinct prompts them to creep away in some hole
or under some cover, where they will be least liable to fall a prey to
their natural enemies. It is doubtful if any of the game-birds, like the
pigeon and grouse, ever die of old age, or the semi-game-birds, like the
bobolink, or the "century living" crow; but in what other form can death
overtake the hummingbird, or even the swift and the barn swallow? Such are
true birds of the air; they may be occasionally lost at sea during their
migrations, but, so far as I know, they are not preyed upon by any other
species.
The valley of the Hudson, I find, forms a great natural highway for the
birds, as do doubtless the Connecticut, the Susquehanna, the Delaware, and
all other large water-courses running north and south. The birds love an
easy way, and in the valleys of the rivers they find a road already graded
for them; and they abound more in such places throughout the season than
they do farther inland. The swarms of robins that come to us in early
spring are a delight to behold. In one of his poems Emerson speaks of
"April's bird,
Blue-coated, flying before from tree to tree;"
but April's bird with me is the robin, brisk, vociferous, musical, dotting
every field, and larking it in every grove; he is as easily atop at this
season as the bobolink is a month or two later. The tints of April are
ruddy and brown,—the new furrow and the leafless trees,—and
these are the tints of its dominant bird.
From my dining-room window I look, or did look, out upon a long stretch of
smooth meadow, and as pretty a spring sight as I ever wish to behold was
this field, sprinkled all over with robins, their red breasts turned
toward the morning sun, or their pert forms sharply outlined against
lingering patches of snow. Every morning for weeks I had those robins for
breakfast; but what they had I never could find out.
After the leaves are out, and gayer colors come into fashion, the robin
takes a back seat. He goes to housekeeping in the old apple-tree, or, what
he likes better, the cherry-tree. A pair reared their domestic altar (of
mud and dry grass) in one of the latter trees, where I saw much of them.
The cock took it upon himself to keep the tree free of all other robins
during cherry time, and its branches were the scene of some lively tussles
every hour in the day. The innocent visitor would scarcely alight before
the jealous cock was upon him; but while he was thrusting the intruder out
at one side, a second would be coming in on the other. He managed,
however, to protect his cherries very well, but had so little time to eat
the fruit himself that we got fully our share.
I have frequently seen the robin courting, and have always been astonished
and amused at the utter coldness and indifference of the female. The
females of every species of bird, however, I believe, have this in common,—they
are absolutely free from coquetry, or any airs and wiles whatever. In most
cases, Nature has given the song and the plumage to the other sex, and all
the embellishing and acting is done by the male bird.
I am always at home when I see the passenger pigeon. Few spectacles please
me more than to see clouds of these birds sweeping across the sky, and few
sounds are more agreeable to my ear than their lively piping and calling
in the spring woods. They come in such multitudes, they people the whole
air; they cover townships, and make the solitary places gay as with a
festival. The naked woods are suddenly blue as with fluttering ribbons and
scarfs, and vocal as with the voices of children. Their arrival is always
unexpected. We know April will bring the robins and May the bobolinks, but
we do not know that either they or any other month will bring the
passenger pigeon. Sometimes years elapse and scarcely a flock is seen.
Then, of a sudden, some March or April they come pouring over the horizon
from the south or southwest, and for a few days the land is alive with
them.
The whole race seems to be collected in a few vast swarms or assemblages.
Indeed, I have sometimes thought there was only one such in the United
States, and that it moved in squads, and regiments, and brigades, and
divisions, like a giant army. The scouting and foraging squads are not
unusual, and every few years we see larger bodies of them, but rarely
indeed do we witness the spectacle of the whole vast tribe in motion.
Sometimes we hear of them in Virginia, or Kentucky and Tennessee; then in
Ohio or Pennsylvania; then in New York; then in Canada or Michigan or
Missouri. They are followed from point to point, and from State to State,
by human sharks, who catch and shoot them for market.
A year ago last April, the pigeons flew for two or three days up and down
the Hudson. In long bowing lines, or else in dense masses, they moved
across the sky. It was not the whole army, but I should think at least one
corps of it; I had not seen such a flight of pigeons since my boyhood. I
went up to the top of the house, the better to behold the winged
procession. The day seemed memorable and poetic in which such sights
occurred.
[Footnote: This proved to be the last flight of the pigeons
in the valley of the Hudson. The whole tribe has now (1895)
been nearly exterminated by pot-hunters. The few that still
remain appear to be scattered through the Northern States
in small, loose flocks.]
While I was looking at the pigeons, a flock of wild geese went by,
harrowing the sky northward. The geese strike a deeper chord than the
pigeons. Level and straight they go as fate to its mark. I cannot tell
what emotions these migrating birds awaken in me,—the geese
especially. One seldom sees more than a flock or two in a season, and what
a spring token it is! The great bodies are in motion. It is like the
passage of a victorious army. No longer inch by inch does spring come, but
these geese advance the standard across zones at one pull. How my desire
goes with them; how something in me, wild and migratory, plumes itself and
follows fast!
"Steering north, with raucous cry,
Through tracts and provinces of sky,
Every night alighting down
In new landscapes of romance,
Where darkling feed the clamorous clans
By lonely lakes to men unknown."
Dwelling upon these sights, I am reminded that the seeing of spring
come, not only upon the great wings of the geese and the lesser wings
of the pigeons and birds, but in the many more subtle and indirect
signs and mediums, is also a part of the compensation of living in
the country. I enjoy not less what may be called the negative side of
spring,—those dark, dank, dissolving days,
yellow sposh and mud and water everywhere,—yet who can stay long
indoors? The humidity is soft and satisfying to the smell, and to the
face and hands, and, for the first time for months, there is the fresh
odor of the earth. The air is full of the notes and calls of the first
birds. The domestic fowls refuse their accustomed food and wander far
from the barn. Is it something winter has left, or spring has dropped,
that they pick up? And what is it that holds me so long standing in the
yard or in the fields? Something besides the ice and snow melts and runs
away with the spring floods.
The little sparrows and purple finches are so punctual in announcing
spring, that some seasons one wonders how they know without looking in the
almanac, for surely there are no signs of spring out of doors. Yet they
will strike up as cheerily amid the driving snow as if they had just been
told that to-morrow is the first day of March. About the same time I
notice the potatoes in the cellar show signs of sprouting. They, too, find
out so quickly when spring is near. Spring comes by two routes,—in
the air and underground, and often gets here by the latter course first.
She undermines Winter when outwardly his front is nearly as bold as ever.
I have known the trees to bud long before, by outward appearances, one
would expect them to. The frost was gone from the ground before the snow
was gone from the surface.
But Winter hath his birds also; some of them such tiny bodies that one
wonders how they withstand the giant cold,—but they do. Birds live
on highly concentrated food,—the fine seeds of weeds and grasses,
and the eggs and larvae of insects. Such food must be very stimulating and
heating. A gizzard full of ants, for instance, what spiced and seasoned
extract is equal to that? Think what virtue there must be in an ounce of
gnats or mosquitoes, or in the fine mysterious food the chickadee and the
brown creeper gather in the winter woods! It is doubtful if these birds
ever freeze when fuel enough can be had to keep their little furnaces
going. And, as they get their food entirely from the limbs and trunks of
trees, like the woodpeckers, their supply is seldom interfered with by the
snow. The worst annoyance must be the enameling of ice our winter woods
sometimes get.
Indeed, the food question seems to be the only serious one with the birds.
Give them plenty to eat, and no doubt the majority of them would face our
winters. I believe all the woodpeckers are winter birds, except the
high-hole or yellow-hammer, and he obtains the greater part of his
subsistence from the ground, and is not a woodpecker at all in his habits
of feeding. Were it not that it has recourse to budding, the ruffed grouse
would be obliged to migrate. The quail—a bird, no doubt, equally
hardy, but whose food is at the mercy of the snow—is frequently cut
off by our severe winters when it ventures to brave them, which is not
often. Where plenty of the berries of the red cedar can be had, the
cedar-bird will pass the winter in New York. The old ornithologists say
the bluebird migrates to Bermuda; but in the winter of 1874-75, severe as
it was, a pair of them wintered with me eighty miles north of New York
city. They seem to have been decided in their choice by the attractions of
my rustic porch and the fruit of a sugar-berry tree (celtis—a kind
of tree-lotus) that stood in front of it. They lodged in the porch and
took their meals in the tree. Indeed, they became regular lotus-eaters.
Punctually at dusk they were in their places on a large laurel root in the
top of the porch, whence, however, they were frequently routed by an
indignant broom that was jealous of the neatness of the porch floor. But
the pair would not take any hints of this kind, and did not give up their
quarters in the porch or their lotus berries till spring.
Many times during the winter the sugar-berry tree was visited by a flock
of cedar-birds that also wintered in the vicinity. At such times it was
amusing to witness the pretty wrath of the bluebirds, scolding and
threatening the intruders, and begrudging them every berry they ate. The
bluebird cannot utter a harsh or unpleasing note. Indeed, he seems to have
but one language, one speech, for both love and war, and the expression of
his indignation is nearly as musical as his song. The male frequently made
hostile demonstrations toward the cedar-birds, but did not openly attack
them, and, with his mate, appeared to experience great relief when the
poachers had gone.
I had other company in my solitude also, among the rest a distinguished
arrival from the far north, the pine grosbeak, a bird rarely seen in these
parts, except now and then a single specimen. But in the winter of 1875,
heralding the extreme cold weather, and no doubt in consequence of it,
there was a large incursion of them into this State and New England. They
attracted the notice of the country people everywhere. I first saw them
early in December about the head of the Delaware. I was walking along a
cleared ridge with my gun, just at sundown, when I beheld two strange
birds sitting in a small maple. On bringing one of them down, I found it
was a bird I had never before seen; in color and shape like the purple
finch, but quite as large again in size. From its heavy beak, I at once
recognized it as belonging to the family of grosbeaks. A few days later I
saw large numbers of them in the woods, on the ground, and in the trees.
And still later, and on till February, they were very numerous on the
Hudson, coming all about my house,—more familiar even than the
little snowbird, hopping beneath the windows, and looking up at me
apparently with as much curiosity as I looked down upon them. They fed on
the buds of the sugar maples and upon frozen apples in the orchard. They
were mostly young birds and females, colored very much like the common
sparrow, with now and then visible the dull carmine-colored head and neck
of an old male.
Other northern visitors that tarried with me the same winter were the tree
or Canada sparrow and the redpoll, the former a bird larger than the
social sparrow or hair-bird, but otherwise much resembling it, and
distinguishable by a dark spot in the middle of its breast; the latter a
bird the size and shape of the common goldfinch, with the same manner of
flight and nearly the same note or cry, but darker than the winter plumage
of the goldfinch, and with a red crown and a tinge of red on the breast.
Little bands of these two species lurked about the barnyard all winter,
picking up the hayseed, the sparrow sometimes venturing in on the haymow
when the supply outside was short. I felt grateful to them for their
company. They gave a sort of ornithological air to every errand I had to
the barn.
Though a number of birds face our winters, and by various shifts worry
through till spring, some of them permanent residents, and some of them
visitors from the far north, yet there is but one genuine snow bird,
nursling of the snow, and that is the snow bunting, a bird that seems
proper to this season, heralding the coming storm, sweeping by on bold and
rapid wing, and calling and chirping as cheerily as the songsters of May.
In its plumage it reflects the winter landscape,—an expanse of white
surmounted or streaked with gray and brown; a field of snow with a line of
woods or a tinge of stubble. It fits into the scene, and does not appear
to lead a beggarly and disconsolate life, like most of our winter
residents. During the ice-harvesting on the river, I see them flitting
about among the gangs of men, or floating on the cakes of ice, picking and
scratching amid the droppings of the horses. They love the stack and
hay-barn in the distant field, where the farmer fodders his cattle upon
the snow, and every red-root, ragweed, or pigweed left standing in the
fall adds to their winter stores.
Though this bird, and one or two others, like the chickadee and nuthatch,
are more or less complacent and cheerful during the winter, yet no bird
can look our winters in the face and sing, as do so many of the English
birds. Several species in Great Britain, their biographers tell us, sing
the winter through, except during the severest frosts; but with us, as far
south as Virginia, and, for aught I know, much farther, the birds are
tuneless at this season. The owls, even, do not hoot, nor the hawks
scream.
Among the birds that tarry briefly with us in the spring on their way to
Canada and beyond, there is none I behold with so much pleasure as the
white-crowned sparrow. I have an eye out for him all through April and the
first week in May. He is the rarest and most beautiful of the sparrow
kind. He is crowned, as some hero or victor in the games. He is usually in
company with his congener, the white-throated sparrow, but seldom more
than in the proportion of one to twenty of the latter. Contrasted with
this bird, he looks like its more fortunate brother, upon whom some
special distinction has been conferred, and who is, from the egg, of finer
make and quality. His sparrow color of ashen gray and brown is very clear
and bright, and his form graceful. His whole expression, however,
culminates in a singular manner in his crown. The various tints of the
bird are brought to a focus here and intensified, the lighter ones
becoming white, and the deeper ones nearly black. There is the suggestion
of a crest, also, from a habit the bird has of slightly elevating this
part of its plumage, as if to make more conspicuous its pretty markings.
They are great scratchers, and will often remain several minutes
scratching in one place, like a hen. Yet, unlike the hen and like all
hoppers, they scratch with both feet at once, which is by no means the
best way to scratch.
The white-throats often sing during their sojourning both in fall and
spring; but only on one occasion have I ever heard any part of the song of
the white-crowned, and that proceeded from what I took to be a young male,
one October morning, just as the sun was rising. It was pitched very low,
like a half-forgotten air, but it was very sweet. It was the song of the
vesper sparrow and the white-throat in one. In his breeding haunts he must
be a superior songster, but he is very chary of his music while on his
travels.
The sparrows are all meek and lowly birds. They are of the grass, the
fences, the low bushes, the weedy wayside places. Nature has denied them
all brilliant tints, but she has given them sweet and musical voices.
Theirs are the quaint and simple lullaby songs of childhood. The
white-throat has a timid, tremulous strain, that issues from the low
bushes or from behind the fence, where its cradle is hid. The song sparrow
modulates its simple ditty as softly as the lining of its own nest. The
vesper sparrow has only peace and gentleness in its strain.
What pretty nests, too, the sparrows build! Can anything be more exquisite
than a sparrow's nest under a grassy or mossy bank? What care the bird has
taken not to disturb one straw or spear of grass, or thread of moss! You
cannot approach it and put your hand into it without violating the place
more or less, and yet the little architect has wrought day after day and
left no marks. There has been an excavation, and yet no grain of earth
appears to have been moved. If the nest had slowly and silently grown like
the grass and the moss, it could not have been more nicely adjusted to its
place and surroundings. There is absolutely nothing to tell the eye it is
there. Generally a few spears of dry grass fall down from the turf above
and form a slight screen before it. How commonly and coarsely it begins,
blending with the debris that lies about, and how it refines and comes
into form as it approaches the centre, which is modeled so perfectly and
lined so softly! Then, when the full complement of eggs is laid, and
incubation has fairly begun, what a sweet, pleasing little mystery the
silent old bank holds!
The song sparrow, whose nest I have been describing, displays a more
marked individuality in its song than any bird with which I am acquainted.
Birds of the same species generally all sing alike, but I have observed
numerous song sparrows with songs peculiarly their own. Last season, the
whole summer through, one sang about my grounds like this: swee-e-t,
swee-e-t, swee-e-t, bitter. Day after day, from May to September, I
heard this strain, which I thought a simple but very profound summing-up
of life, and wondered how the little bird had learned it so quickly. The
present season, I heard another with a song equally original, but not so
easily worded. Among a large troop of them in April, my attention was
attracted to one that was a master songster,—some Shelley or
Tennyson among his kind. The strain was remarkably prolonged, intricate,
and animated, and far surpassed anything I ever before heard from that
source.
But the most noticeable instance of departure from the standard song of a
species I ever knew of was in the case of a wood thrush. The bird sang, as
did the sparrow, the whole season through, at the foot of my lot near the
river. The song began correctly and ended correctly; but interjected into
it about midway was a loud, piercing, artificial note, at utter variance
with the rest of the strain. When my ear first caught this singular note,
I started out, not a little puzzled, to make, as I supposed, a new
acquaintance, but had not gone far when I discovered whence it proceeded.
Brass amid gold, or pebbles amid pearls, are not more out of place than
was this discordant scream or cry in the melodious strain of the wood
thrush. It pained and startled the ear. It seemed as if the instrument of
the bird was not under control, or else that one note was sadly out of
tune, and, when its turn came, instead of giving forth one of those sounds
that are indeed like pearls, it shocked the ear with a piercing discord.
Yet the singer appeared entirely unconscious of the defect; or had he
grown used to it, or had his friends persuaded him that it was a variation
to be coveted? Sometimes, after the brood had hatched and the bird's pride
was at its full, he would make a little triumphal tour of the locality,
coming from under the hill quite up to the house, and flaunting his
cracked instrument in the face of whoever would listen. He did not return
again the next season; or, if he did, the malformation of his song was
gone.
I have noticed that the bobolink does not sing the same in different
localities. In New Jersey it has one song; on the Hudson, a slight
variation of the same; and on the high grass-lands of the interior of the
State, quite a different strain,—clearer, more distinctly
articulated, and running off with more sparkle and liltingness. It reminds
one of the clearer mountain air and the translucent spring-water of those
localities. I never could make out what the bobolink says in New Jersey,
but in certain districts in this State his enunciation is quite distinct.
Sometimes he begins with the word gegue, gegue. Then again, more
fully, be true to me, Clarsy, be true to me, Clarsy, Clarsy, thence
full tilt into his inimitable song, interspersed in which the words kick
your slipper, kick your slipper, and temperance, temperance (the last
with a peculiar nasal resonance), are plainly heard. At its best, it is a
remarkable performance, a unique performance, as it contains not the
slightest hint or suggestion, either in tone or manner or effect, of any
other bird-song to be heard. The bobolink has no mate or parallel in any
part of the world. He stands alone. There is no closely allied species. He
is not a lark, nor a finch, nor a warbler, nor a thrush, nor a starling
(though classed with the starlings by late naturalists). He is an
exception to many well-known rules. He is the only ground-bird known to me
of marked and conspicuous plumage. He is the only black and white
field-bird we have east of the Mississippi, and, what is still more odd,
he is black beneath and white above,—the reverse of the fact in all
other cases. Preëminently a bird of the meadow during the breeding season,
and associated with clover and daisies and buttercups as no other bird is,
he yet has the look of an interloper or a newcomer, and not of one to the
manner born.
The bobolink has an unusually full throat, which may help account for his
great power of song. No bird has yet been found that could imitate him, or
even repeat or suggest a single note, as if his song were the product of a
new set of organs. There is a vibration about it, and a rapid running over
the keys, that is the despair of other songsters. It is said that the
mockingbird is dumb in the presence of the bobolink. My neighbor has an
English skylark that was hatched and reared in captivity. The bird is a
most persistent and vociferous songster, and fully as successful a mimic
as the mockingbird. It pours out a strain that is a regular mosaic of
nearly all the bird-notes to be heard, its own proper lark song forming a
kind of bordering for the whole. The notes of the phoebe-bird, the purple
finch, the swallow, the yellowbird, the kingbird, the robin, and others,
are rendered with perfect distinctness and accuracy, but not a word of the
bobolink's, though the lark must have heard its song every day for four
successive summers. It was the one conspicuous note in the fields around
that the lark made no attempt to plagiarize. He could not steal the
bobolink's thunder.
The lark is a more marvelous songster than the bobolink only on account of
his soaring flight and the sustained copiousness of his song. His note is
rasping and harsh, in point of melody, when compared with the bobolink's.
When caged and near at hand, the lark's song is positively disagreeable,
it is so loud and full of sharp, aspirated sounds. But high in air above
the broad downs, poured out without interruption for many minutes
together, it is very agreeable.
The bird among us that is usually called a lark, namely, the meadowlark,
but which our later classifiers say is no lark at all, has nearly the same
quality of voice as the English skylark,—loud, piercing, z-z-ing;
and during the mating season it frequently indulges while on the wing in a
brief song that is quite lark-like. It is also a bird of the stubble, and
one of the last to retreat on the approach of winter.
The habits of many of our birds are slowly undergoing a change. Their
migrations are less marked. With the settlement and cultivation of the
country, the means of subsistence of nearly every species are vastly
increased. Insects are more numerous, and seeds of weeds and grasses more
abundant. They become more and more domestic, like the English birds. The
swallows have nearly all left their original abodes—hollow trees,
and cliffs, and rocks—for human habitations and their environments.
Where did the barn swallow nest before the country was settled? The
chimney swallow nested in hollow trees, and, perhaps, occasionally resorts
thither yet. But the chimney, notwithstanding the smoke, seems to suit his
taste best. In the spring, before they have paired, I think these swallows
sometimes pass the night in the woods, but not if an old, disused chimney
is handy.
One evening in early May, my attention was arrested by a band of them
containing several hundreds, perhaps a thousand, circling about near a
large, tall, disused chimney in a secluded place in the country. They were
very lively, and chippering, and diving in a most extraordinary manner.
They formed a broad continuous circle many rods in diameter. Gradually the
circle contracted and neared the chimney. Presently some of the birds as
they came round began to dive toward it, and the chippering was more
animated than ever. Then a few ventured in; in a moment more, the air at
the mouth of the chimney was black with the stream of descending swallows.
When the passage began to get crowded, the circle lifted and the rest of
the birds continued their flight, giving those inside time to dispose of
themselves. Then the influx began again, and was kept up till the crowd
became too great, when it cleared as before. Thus by installments, or in
layers, the swallows were packed into the chimney until the last one was
stowed away. Passing by the place a few days afterward, I saw a board
reaching from the roof of the building to the top of the chimney, and
imagined some curious person or some predaceous boy had been up to take a
peep inside, and see how so many swallows could dispose of themselves in
such a space. It would have been an interesting spectacle to see them
emerge from the chimney in the morning.
IV APRIL
If we represent the winter of our northern climate by a rugged snow-clad
mountain, and summer by a broad fertile plain, then the intermediate belt,
the hilly and breezy uplands, will stand for spring, with March reaching
well up into the region of the snows, and April lapping well down upon the
greening fields and unloosened currents, not beyond the limits of winter's
sallying storms, but well within the vernal zone,—within the reach
of the warm breath and subtle, quickening influences of the plain below.
At its best, April is the tenderest of tender salads made crisp by ice or
snow water. Its type is the first spear of grass. The senses—sight,
hearing, smell—are as hungry for its delicate and almost spiritual
tokens as the cattle are for the first bite of its fields. How it touches
one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the
migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling
the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the
middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at
sundown, the campfire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over
the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny knolls
and slopes, the full translucent streams, the waxing and warming sun,—how
these things and others like them are noted by the eager eye and ear!
April is my natal month, and I am born again into new delight and new
surprises at each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me.
Its two syllables are like the calls of the first birds,—like that
of the phoebe-bird, or of the meadowlark. Its very snows are fertilizing,
and are called the poor man's manure.
Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and indescribable odors,—the
perfume of the bursting sod, of the quickened roots and rootlets, of the
mould under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No other month has odors
like it. The west wind the other day came fraught with a perfume that was
to the sense of smell what a wild and delicate strain of music is to the
ear. It was almost transcendental. I walked across the hill with my nose
in the air taking it in. It lasted for two days. I imagined it came from
the willows of a distant swamp, whose catkins were affording the bees
their first pollen: or did it come from much farther,—from beyond
the horizon, the accumulated breath of innumerable farms and budding
forests? The main characteristic of these April odors is their uncloying
freshness. They are not sweet, they are oftener bitter, they are
penetrating and lyrical. I know well the odors of May and June, of the
world of meadows and orchards bursting into bloom, but they are not so
ineffable and immaterial and so stimulating to the sense as the incense of
April.
The season of which I speak does not correspond with the April of the
almanac in all sections of our vast geography. It answers to March in
Virginia and Maryland, while in parts of New York and New England it laps
well over into May. It begins when the partridge drums, when the hyla
pipes, when the shad start up the rivers, when the grass greens in the
spring runs, and it ends when the leaves are unfolding and the last
snowflake dissolves in midair. It may be the first of May before the first
swallow appears, before the whip-poor-will is heard, before the wood
thrush sings; but it is April as long as there is snow upon the mountains,
no matter what the almanac may say. Our April is, in fact, a kind of
Alpine summer, full of such contrasts and touches of wild, delicate beauty
as no other season affords. The deluded citizen fancies there is nothing
enjoyable in the country till June, and so misses the freshest, tenderest
part. It is as if one should miss strawberries and begin his fruit-eating
with melons and peaches. These last are good,—supremely so, they are
melting and luscious,—but nothing so thrills and penetrates the
taste, and wakes up and teases the papillae of the tongue, as the
uncloying strawberry. What midsummer sweetness half so distracting as its
brisk sub-acid flavor, and what splendor of full-leaved June can stir the
blood like the best of leafless April?
One characteristic April feature, and one that delights me very much, is
the perfect emerald of the spring runs while the fields are yet brown and
sere,—strips and patches of the most vivid velvet green on the
slopes and in the valleys. How the eye grazes there, and is filled and
refreshed! I had forgotten what a marked feature this was until I recently
rode in an open wagon for three days through a mountainous, pastoral
country, remarkable for its fine springs. Those delicious green patches
are yet in my eye. The fountains flowed with May. Where no springs
occurred, there were hints and suggestions of springs about the fields and
by the roadside in the freshened grass,—sometimes overflowing a
space in the form of an actual fountain. The water did not quite get to
the surface in such places, but sent its influence.
The fields of wheat and rye, too, how they stand out of the April
landscape,—great green squares on a field of brown or gray!
Among April sounds there is none more welcome or suggestive to me than the
voice of the little frogs piping in the marshes. No bird-note can surpass
it as a spring token; and as it is not mentioned, to my knowledge, by the
poets and writers of other lands, I am ready to believe it is
characteristic of our season alone. You may be sure April has really come
when this little amphibian creeps out of the mud and inflates its throat.
We talk of the bird inflating its throat, but you should see this tiny
minstrel inflate its throat, which becomes like a large bubble, and
suggests a drummer-boy with his drum slung very high. In this drum, or by
the aid of it, the sound is produced. Generally the note is very feeble at
first, as if the frost was not yet all out of the creature's throat, and
only one voice will be heard, some prophet bolder than all the rest, or
upon whom the quickening ray of spring has first fallen. And it often
happens that he is stoned for his pains by the yet unpacified element, and
is compelled literally to "shut up" beneath a fall of snow or a heavy
frost. Soon, however, he lifts up his voice again with more confidence,
and is joined by others and still others, till in due time, say toward the
last of the month, there is a shrill musical uproar, as the sun is
setting, in every marsh and bog in the land. It is a plaintive sound, and
I have heard people from the city speak of it as lonesome and depressing,
but to the lover of the country it is a pure spring melody. The little
piper will sometimes climb a bulrush, to which he clings like a sailor to
a mast, and send forth his shrill call. There is a Southern species, heard
when you have reached the Potomac, whose note is far more harsh and
crackling. To stand on the verge of a swamp vocal with these, pains and
stuns the ear. The call of the Northern species is far more tender and
musical. [Footnote: The Southern species is called the green hyla. I have
since heard them in my neighborhood on the Hudson.]
Then is there anything like a perfect April morning? One hardly knows what
the sentiment of it is, but it is something very delicious. It is youth
and hope. It is a new earth and a new sky. How the air transmits sounds,
and what an awakening, prophetic character all sounds have! The distant
barking of a dog, or the lowing of a cow, or the crowing of a cock, seems
from out the heart of Nature, and to be a call to come forth. The great
sun appears to have been reburnished, and there is something in his first
glance above the eastern hills, and the way his eye-beams dart right and
left and smite the rugged mountains into gold, that quickens the pulse and
inspires the heart.
Across the fields in the early morning I hear some of the rare April
birds,—the chewink and the brown thrasher. The robin, the bluebird,
the song sparrow, the phoebe-bird, come in March; but these two
ground-birds are seldom heard till toward the last of April. The
ground-birds are all tree-singers or air-singers; they must have an
elevated stage to speak from. Our long-tailed thrush, or thrasher, like
its congeners the catbird and the mockingbird, delights in a high branch
of some solitary tree, whence it will pour out its rich and intricate
warble for an hour together. This bird is the great American chipper.
There is no other bird that I know of that can chip with such emphasis and
military decision as this yellow-eyed songster. It is like the click of a
giant gunlock. Why is the thrasher so stealthy? It always seems to be
going about on tiptoe. I never knew it to steal anything, and yet it
skulks and hides like a fugitive from justice. One never sees it flying
aloft in the air and traversing the world openly, like most birds, but it
darts along fences and through bushes as if pursued by a guilty
conscience. Only when the musical fit is upon it does it come up into full
view, and invite the world to hear and behold.
The chewink is a shy bird also, but not stealthy. It is very inquisitive,
and sets up a great scratching among the leaves, apparently to attract
your attention. The male is perhaps the most conspicuously marked of all
the ground-birds except the bobolink, being black above, bay on the sides,
and white beneath. The bay is in compliment to the leaves he is forever
scratching among,—they have rustled against his breast and sides so
long that these parts have taken their color; but whence come the white
and the black? The bird seems to be aware that his color betrays him, for
there are few birds in the woods so careful about keeping themselves
screened from view. When in song, its favorite perch is the top of some
high bush near to cover. On being disturbed at such times, it pitches down
into the brush and is instantly lost to view.
This is the bird that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Wilson about, greatly
exciting the latter's curiosity. Wilson was just then upon the threshold
of his career as an ornithologist, and had made a drawing of the Canada
jay which he sent to the President. It was a new bird, and in reply
Jefferson called his attention to a "curious bird" which was everywhere to
be heard, but scarcely ever to be seen. He had for twenty years interested
the young sportsmen of his neighborhood to shoot one for him, but without
success. "It is in all the forests, from spring to fall," he says in his
letter,﹃and never but on the tops of the tallest trees, from which it
perpetually serenades us with some of the sweetest notes, and as clear as
those of the nightingale. I have followed it for miles, without ever but
once getting a good view of it. It is of the size and make of the
mockingbird, lightly thrush-colored on the back, and a grayish white on
the breast and belly. Mr. Randolph, my son-in-law, was in possession of
one which had been shot by a neighbor,﹄etc. Randolph pronounced it a
flycatcher, which was a good way wide of the mark. Jefferson must have
seen only the female, after all his tramp, from his description of the
color; but he was doubtless following his own great thoughts more than the
bird, else he would have had an earlier view. The bird was not a new one,
but was well known then as the ground-robin. The President put Wilson on
the wrong scent by his erroneous description, and it was a long time
before the latter got at the truth of the case. But Jefferson's letter is
a good sample of those which specialists often receive from intelligent
persons who have seen or heard something in their line very curious or
entirely new, and who set the man of science agog by a description of the
supposed novelty,—a description that generally fits the facts of the
case about as well as your coat fits the chair-back. Strange and curious
things in the air, and in the water, and in the earth beneath, are seen
every day except by those who are looking for them, namely, the
naturalists. When Wilson or Audubon gets his eye on the unknown bird, the
illusion vanishes, and your phenomenon turns out to be one of the
commonplaces of the fields or woods.
A prominent April bird, that one does not have to go to the woods or away
from his own door to see and hear, is the hardy and ever-welcome
meadowlark. What a twang there is about this bird, and what vigor! It
smacks of the soil. It is the winged embodiment of the spirit of our
spring meadows. What emphasis in its "z-d-t, z-d-t" and what
character in its long, piercing note! Its straight, tapering, sharp beak
is typical of its voice. Its note goes like a shaft from a crossbow; it is
a little too sharp and piercing when near at hand, but, heard in the
proper perspective, it is eminently melodious and pleasing. It is one of
the major notes of the fields at this season. In fact, it easily dominates
all others. "Spring o' the year! spring o' the year!" it says, with
a long-drawn breath, a little plaintive, but not complaining or
melancholy. At times it indulges in something much more intricate and
lark-like while hovering on the wing in midair, but a song is beyond the
compass of its instrument, and the attempt usually ends in a breakdown. A
clear, sweet, strong, high-keyed note, uttered from some knoll or rock, or
stake in the fence, is its proper vocal performance. It has the build and
walk and flight of the quail and the grouse. It gets up before you in much
the same manner, and falls an easy prey to the crack shot. Its yellow
breast, surmounted by a black crescent, it need not be ashamed to turn to
the morning sun, while its coat of mottled gray is in perfect keeping with
the stubble amid which it walks. The two lateral white quills in its tail
seem strictly in character. These quills spring from a dash of scorn and
defiance in the bird's make-up. By the aid of these, it can almost emit a
flash as it struts about the fields and jerks out its sharp notes. They
give a rayed, a definite and piquant expression to its movements. This
bird is not properly a lark, but a starling, say the ornithologists,
though it is lark-like in its habits, being a walker and entirely a
ground-bird. Its color also allies it to the true lark. I believe there is
no bird in the English or European fields that answers to this hardy
pedestrian of our meadows. He is a true American, and his note one of our
characteristic April sounds.
Another marked April note, proceeding sometimes from the meadows, but more
frequently from the rough pastures and borders of the woods, is the call
of the high-hole, or golden-shafted woodpecker. It is quite as strong as
that of the meadowlark, but not so long-drawn and piercing. It is a
succession of short notes rapidly uttered, as if the bird said "if-if-if-if-if-if-if."
The notes of the ordinary downy and hairy woodpeckers suggest, in some
way, the sound of a steel punch; but that of the high-hole is much softer,
and strikes on the ear with real springtime melody. The high-hole is not
so much a wood-pecker as he is a ground-pecker. He subsists largely on
ants and crickets, and does not appear till they are to be found.
In Solomon's description of spring, the voice of the turtle is prominent,
but our turtle, or mourning dove, though it arrives in April, can hardly
be said to contribute noticeably to the open-air sounds. Its call is so
vague, and soft, and mournful,—in fact, so remote and diffused,—that
few persons ever hear it at all.
Such songsters as the cow blackbird are noticeable at this season, though
they take a back seat a little later. It utters a peculiarly liquid April
sound. Indeed, one would think its crop was full of water, its notes so
bubble up and regurgitate, and are delivered with such an apparent
stomachic contraction. This bird is the only feathered polygamist we have.
The females are greatly in excess of the males, and the latter are usually
attended by three or four of the former. As soon as the other birds begin
to build, they are on the qui vive, prowling about like gypsies,
not to steal the young of others, but to steal their eggs into other
birds' nests, and so shirk the labor and responsibility of hatching and
rearing their own young. As these birds do not mate, and as therefore
there can be little or no rivalry or competition between the males, one
wonders—in view of Darwin's teaching—why one sex should have
brighter and richer plumage than the other, which is the fact. The males
are easily distinguished from the dull and faded females by their deep
glossy-black coats.
The April of English literature corresponds nearly to our May. In Great
Britain, the swallow and the cuckoo usually arrive by the middle of April;
with us, their appearance is a week or two later. Our April, at its best,
is a bright, laughing face under a hood of snow, like the English March,
but presenting sharper contrasts, a greater mixture of smiles and tears
and icy looks than are known to our ancestral climate. Indeed, Winter
sometimes retraces his steps in this month, and unburdens himself of the
snows that the previous cold has kept back; but we are always sure of a
number of radiant, equable days,—days that go before the bud, when
the sun embraces the earth with fervor and determination. How his beams
pour into the woods till the mould under the leaves is warm and emits an
odor! The waters glint and sparkle, the birds gather in groups, and even
those unused to singing find a voice. On the streets of the cities, what a
flutter, what bright looks and gay colors! I recall one preëminent day of
this kind last April. I made a note of it in my note-book. The earth
seemed suddenly to emerge from a wilderness of clouds and chilliness into
one of these blue sunlit spaces. How the voyagers rejoiced! Invalids came
forth, old men sauntered down the street, stocks went up, and the
political outlook brightened.
Such days bring out the last of the hibernating animals. The woodchuck
unrolls and creeps out of his den to see if his clover has started yet.
The torpidity leaves the snakes and the turtles, and they come forth and
bask in the sun. There is nothing so small, nothing so great, that it does
not respond to these celestial spring days, and give the pendulum of life
a fresh start.
April is also the month of the new furrow. As soon as the frost is gone
and the ground settled, the plow is started upon the hill, and at each
bout I see its brightened mould-board flash in the sun. Where the last
remnants of the snowdrift lingered yesterday the plow breaks the sod
to-day. Where the drift was deepest the grass is pressed flat, and there
is a deposit of sand and earth blown from the fields to windward. Line
upon line the turf is reversed, until there stands out of the neutral
landscape a ruddy square visible for miles, or until the breasts of the
broad hills glow like the breasts of the robins.
Then who would not have a garden in April? to rake together the rubbish
and burn it up, to turn over the renewed soil, to scatter the rich
compost, to plant the first seed, or bury the first tuber! It is not the
seed that is planted, any more than it is I that is planted; it is not the
dry stalks and weeds that are burned up, any more than it is my gloom and
regrets that are consumed. An April smoke makes a clean harvest.
I think April is the best month to be born in. One is just in time, so to
speak, to catch the first train, which is made up in this month. My April
chickens always turn out best. They get an early start; they have rugged
constitutions. Late chickens cannot stand the heavy dews, or withstand the
predaceous hawks. In April all nature starts with you. You have not come
out of your hibernaculum too early or too late; the time is ripe, and, if
you do not keep pace with the rest, why, the fault is not in the season.
V SPRING POEMS
There is no month oftener on the tongues of the poets than April. It is
the initiative month; it opens the door of the seasons; the interest and
expectations of the untried, the untasted, lurk in it,
"From you have I been absent in the spring,"
says Shakespeare in one of his sonnets,—
"When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him."
The following poem, from Tennyson's "In Memoriam," might be headed
"April," and serve as descriptive of parts of our season:—
"Now fades the last long streak of snow,
Now bourgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow.
"Now rings the woodland loud and long,
The distance takes a lovelier hue,
And drowned in yonder living blue
The lark becomes a sightless song.
"Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,
The flocks are whiter down the vale,
And milkier every milky sail
On winding stream or distant sea;
"Where now the sea-mew pipes, or dives
In yonder greening gleam, and fly
The happy birds, that change their sky
To build and brood; that live their lives
"From land to land; and in my breast
Spring wakens too; and my regret
Becomes an April violet,
And buds and blossoms like the rest."
In the same poem the poet asks:—
"Can trouble live with April days?"
Yet they are not all jubilant chords that this season awakens.
Occasionally there is an undertone of vague longing and sadness, akin to
that which one experiences in autumn. Hope for a moment assumes the
attitude of memory and stands with reverted look. The haze, that in spring
as well as in fall sometimes descends and envelops all things, has in it
in some way the sentiment of music, of melody, and awakens pensive
thoughts. Elizabeth Akers, in her "April," has recognized and fully
expressed this feeling. I give the first and last stanzas:—
"The strange, sweet days are here again,
The happy-mournful days;
The songs which trembled on our lips
Are half complaint, half praise.
"Swing, robin, on the budded sprays,
And sing your blithest tune;—
Help us across these homesick days
Into the joy of June!"
This poet has also given a touch of spring in her "March," which, however,
should be written "April" in the New England climate:—
"The brown buds thicken on the trees,
Unbound, the free streams sing,
As March leads forth across the leas
The wild and windy spring.
"Where in the fields the melted snow
Leaves hollows warm and wet,
Ere many days will sweetly blow
The first blue violet."
But on the whole the poets have not been eminently successful in depicting
spring. The humid season, with its tender, melting blue sky, its fresh,
earthy smells, its new furrow, its few simple signs and awakenings here
and there, and its strange feeling of unrest,—how difficult to put
its charms into words! None of the so-called pastoral poets have succeeded
in doing it. That is the best part of spring which escapes a direct and
matter-of-fact description of her. There is more of spring in a line or
two of Chaucer and Spenser than in the elaborate portraits of her by
Thomson or Pope, because the former had spring in their hearts, and the
latter only in their inkhorns. Nearly all Shakespeare's songs are spring
songs,—full of the banter, the frolic, and the love-making of the
early season. What an unloosed current, too, of joy and fresh new life and
appetite in Burns!
In spring everything has such a margin! there are such spaces of silence!
The influences are at work underground. Our delight is in a few things.
The drying road is enough; a single wild flower, the note of the first
bird, the partridge drumming in the April woods, the restless herds, the
sheep steering for the uplands, the cow lowing in the highway or hiding
her calf in the bushes, the first fires, the smoke going up through the
shining atmosphere, from the burning of rubbish in gardens and old fields,—each
of these simple things fills the breast with yearning and delight, for
they are tokens of the spring. The best spring poems have this singleness
and sparseness. Listen to Solomon:﹃For lo, the winter is past, the rain
is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing
of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.﹄In
Wordsworth are some things that breathe the air of spring. These lines,
written in early spring, afford a good specimen:—
"I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind."
"To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
"Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 't is my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
"The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure."
Or these from another poem, written in his usual study, "Out-of-Doors,"
and addressed to his sister:—
"It is the first mild day of March,
Each minute sweeter than before;
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside the door.
"There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.
. . . . . . . . .
"Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth;
It is the hour of feeling.
"One moment now may give us more
Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season."
It is the simplicity of such lines, like the naked branches of the trees
or the unclothed fields, and the spring-like depth of feeling and
suggestion they hold, that make them so appropriate to this season.
At this season I often find myself repeating these lines of his also:—
"My heart leaps up, when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it, when my life began;
So is it, now I am a man;
So be it, when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!"
Though there are so few good poems especially commemorative of the spring,
there have no doubt been spring poets,—poets with such newness and
fullness of life, and such quickening power, that the world is re-created,
as it were, beneath their touch. Of course this is in a measure so with
all real poets. But the difference I would indicate may exist between
poets of the same or nearly the same magnitude. Thus, in this light
Tennyson is an autumnal poet, mellow and dead-ripe, and was so from the
first; while Wordsworth has much more of the spring in him, is nearer the
bone of things and to primitive conditions.
Among the old poems, one which seems to me to have much of the charm of
springtime upon it is the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. The
songs, gambols, and wooings of the early birds are not more welcome and
suggestive. How graceful and airy, and yet what a tender, profound, human
significance it contains! But the great vernal poem, doubly so in that it
is the expression of the springtime of the race, the boyhood of man as
well, is the Iliad of Homer. What faith, what simple wonder, what
unconscious strength, what beautiful savagery, what magnanimous enmity,—a
very paradise of war!
Though so young a people, there is not much of the feeling of spring in
any of our books. The muse of our poets is wise rather than joyous. There
is no excess or extravagance or unruliness in her. There are spring sounds
and tokens in Emerson's "May-Day:"—
"April cold with dropping rain
Willows and lilacs brings again,
The whistle of returning birds,
And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
The scarlet maple-keys betray
What potent blood hath modest May,
What fiery force the earth renews,
The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;
What joy in rosy waves outpoured
Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord."
But this is not spring in the blood. Among the works of our young and
rising poets, I am not certain but that Mr. Gilder's "New Day" is entitled
to rank as a spring poem in the sense in which I am speaking. It is full
of gayety and daring, and full of the reckless abandon of the male bird
when he is winning his mate. It is full also of the tantalizing
suggestiveness, the half-lights and shades, of April and May.
Of prose poets who have the charm of the springtime upon them, the best
recent example I know of is Björnson, the Norwegian romancist. What
especially makes his books spring-like is their freshness and sweet good
faith. There is also a reticence and an unwrought suggestiveness about
them that is like the promise of buds and early flowers. Of Turgenieff,
the Russian, much the same thing might be said. His stories are simple and
elementary, and have none of the elaborate hair-splitting and forced
hot-house character of the current English or American novel. They spring
from stronger, more healthful and manly conditions, and have a force in
them that is like a rising, incoming tide.
VI OUR RURAL DIVINITY
I wonder that Wilson Flagg did not include the cow among his﹃Picturesque
Animals,﹄for that is where she belongs. She has not the classic beauty of
the horse, but in picture-making qualities she is far ahead of him. Her
shaggy, loose-jointed body; her irregular, sketchy outlines, like those of
the landscape,—the hollows and ridges, the slopes and prominences;
her tossing horns, her bushy tail, tier swinging gait, her tranquil,
ruminating habits,—all tend to make her an object upon which the
artist eye loves to dwell. The artists are forever putting her into
pictures, too. In rural landscape scenes she is an important feature.
Behold her grazing in the pastures and on the hillsides, or along banks of
streams, or ruminating under wide-spreading trees, or standing belly-deep
in the creek or pond, or lying upon the smooth places in the quiet summer
afternoon, the day's grazing done, and waiting to be summoned home to be
milked; and again in the twilight lying upon the level summit of the hill,
or where the sward is thickest and softest; or in winter a herd of them
filing along toward the spring to drink, or being "foddered" from the
stack in the field upon the new snow,—surely the cow is a
picturesque animal, and all her goings and comings are pleasant to behold.
I looked into Hamerton's clever book on the domestic animals also,
expecting to find my divinity duly celebrated, but he passes her by and
contemplates the bovine qualities only as they appear in the ox and the
bull.
Neither have the poets made much of the cow, but have rather dwelt upon
the steer, or the ox yoked to the plow. I recall this touch from Emerson:—
"The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm."
But the ear is charmed, nevertheless, especially if it be not too near,
and the air be still and dense, or hollow, as the farmer says. And again,
if it be springtime and she task that powerful bellows of hers to its
utmost capacity, how round the sound is, and how far it goes over the
hills!
The cow has at least four tones or lows. First, there is her alarmed or
distressed low when deprived of her calf, or when separated from her
mates,—her low of affection. Then there is her call of hunger, a
petition for food, sometimes full of impatience, or her answer to the
farmer's call, full of eagerness. Then there is that peculiar frenzied
bawl she utters on smelling blood, which causes every member of the herd
to lift its head and hasten to the spot,—the native cry of the clan.
When she is gored or in great danger she bawls also, but that is
different. And lastly, there is the long, sonorous volley she lets off on
the hills or in the yard, or along the highway, and which seems to be
expressive of a kind of unrest and vague longing,—the longing of the
imprisoned Io for her lost identity. She sends her voice forth so that
every god on Mount Olympus can hear her plaint. She makes this sound in
the morning, especially in the spring, as she goes forth to graze.
One of our rural poets, Myron Benton, whose verse often has the flavor of
sweet cream, has written some lines called "Rumination," in which the cow
is the principal figure, and with which I am permitted to adorn my theme.
The poet first gives his attention to a little brook that﹃breaks its
shallow gossip﹄at his feet and "drowns the oriole's voice:"—
"But moveth not that wise and ancient cow,
Who chews her juicy cud so languid now
Beneath her favorite elm, whose drooping bough
Lulls all but inward vision fast asleep:
But still, her tireless tail a pendulum sweep
Mysterious clock-work guides, and some hid pulley
Her drowsy cud, each moment, raises duly.
"Of this great, wondrous world she has seen more
Than you, my little brook, and cropped its store
Of succulent grass on many a mead and lawn;
And strayed to distant uplands in the dawn.
And she has had some dark experience
Of graceless man's ingratitude; and hence
Her ways have not been ways of pleasantness,
Nor all her paths of peace. But her distress
And grief she has lived past; your giddy round
Disturbs her not, for she is learned profound
In deep brahminical philosophy.
She chews the cud of sweetest revery
Above your worldly prattle, brooklet merry,
Oblivious of all things sublunary."
The cow figures in Grecian mythology, and in the Oriental literature is
treated as a sacred animal. "The clouds are cows and the rain milk." I
remember what Herodotus says of the Egyptians' worship of heifers and
steers; and in the traditions of the Celtic nations the cow is regarded as
a divinity. In Norse mythology the milk of the cow Andhumbla afforded
nourishment to the Frost giants, and it was she that licked into being and
into shape a god, the father of Odin. If anything could lick a god into
shape, certainly the cow could do it. You may see her perform this office
for young Taurus any spring. She licks him out of the fogs and
bewilderments and uncertainties in which he finds himself on first landing
upon these shores, and up onto his feet in an incredibly short time.
Indeed, that potent tongue of hers can almost make the dead alive any day,
and the creative lick of the old Scandinavian mother cow is only a
large-lettered rendering of the commonest facts.
The horse belongs to the fiery god Mars. He favors war, and is one of its
oldest, most available, and most formidable engines. The steed is clothed
with thunder, and smells the battle from afar; but the cattle upon a
thousand hills denote that peace and plenty bear sway in the land. The
neighing of the horse is a call to battle; but the lowing of old
Brockleface in the valley brings the golden age again. The savage tribes
are never without the horse; the Scythians are all mounted; but the cow
would tame and humanize them. When the Indians will cultivate the cow, I
shall think their civilization fairly begun. Recently, when the horses
were sick with the epizoötic, and the oxen came to the city and helped to
do their work, what an Arcadian air again filled the streets! But the dear
old oxen,—how awkward and distressed they looked! Juno wept in the
face of every one of them. The horse is a true citizen, and is entirely at
home in the paved streets; but the ox,—what a complete embodiment of
all rustic and rural things! Slow, deliberate, thick-skinned, powerful,
hulky, ruminating, fragrant-breathed, when he came to town the spirit and
suggestion of all Georgics and Bucolics came with him. O citizen, was it
only a plodding, unsightly brute that went by? Was there no chord in your
bosom, long silent, that sweetly vibrated at the sight of that patient,
Herculean couple? Did you smell no hay or cropped herbage, see no summer
pastures with circles of cool shade, hear no voice of herds among the
hills? They were very likely the only horses your grandfather ever had.
Not much trouble to harness and unharness them. Not much vanity on the
road in those days. They did all the work on the early pioneer farm. They
were the gods whose rude strength first broke the soil. They could live
where the moose and the deer could. If there was no clover or timothy to
be had, then the twigs of the basswood and birch would do. Before there
were yet fields given up to grass, they found ample pasturage in the
woods. Their wide-spreading horns gleamed in the duskiness, and their
paths and the paths of the cows became the future roads and highways, or
even the streets of great cities.
All the descendants of Odin show a bovine trace, and cherish and cultivate
the cow. In Norway she is a great feature. Professor Boyesen describes
what he calls the saeter, the spring migration of the dairy and
dairymaids, with all the appurtenances of butter and cheese making, from
the valleys to the distant plains upon the mountains, where the grass
keeps fresh and tender till fall. It is the great event of the year in all
the rural districts. Nearly the whole family go with the cattle and remain
with them. At evening the cows are summoned home with a long horn, called
the loor, in the hands of the milkmaid. The whole herd comes
winding down the mountain-side toward the saeter in obedience to
the mellow blast.
What were those old Vikings but thick-hided bulls that delighted in
nothing so much as goring each other? And has not the charge of beefiness
been brought much nearer home to us than that? But about all the northern
races there is something that is kindred to cattle in the best sense,—something
in their art and literature that is essentially pastoral, sweet-breathed,
continent, dispassionate, ruminating, wide-eyed, soft-voiced,—a
charm of kine, the virtue of brutes.
The cow belongs more especially to the northern peoples, to the region of
the good, green grass. She is the true grazing animal. That broad,
smooth, always dewy nose of hers is just the suggestion of greensward. She
caresses the grass; she sweeps off the ends of the leaves; she reaps it
with the soft sickle of her tongue. She crops close, but she does not
bruise or devour the turf like the horse. She is the sward's best friend,
and will make it thick and smooth as a carpet.
"The turfy mountains where live the nibbling sheep"
are not for her. Her muzzle is too blunt; then she does not bite as
do the sheep; she has no upper teeth; she crops. But on the lower
slopes, and margins, and rich bottoms, she is at home. Where the daisy and
the buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will grow, is her proper
domain. The agriculture of no country can long thrive without her. Not
only a large part of the real, but much of the potential, wealth of the
land is wrapped up in her.
Then the cow has given us some good words and hints. How could we get
along without the parable of the cow that gave a good pail of milk and
then kicked it over? One could hardly keep house without it. Or the
parable of the cream and the skimmed milk, or of the buttered bread? We
know, too, through her aid, what the horns of the dilemma mean, and what
comfort there is in the juicy cud of reverie.
I have said the cow has not been of much service to the poets, and yet I
remember that Jean Ingelow could hardly have managed her "High Tide"
without "Whitefoot" and "Lightfoot" and "Cusha! Cusha! Cusha! calling;" or
Trowbridge his "Evening at the Farm," in which the real call of the
American farm-boy of "Co', boss! Co', boss! Co', Co'," makes a very
musical refrain.
Tennyson's charming "Milking Song" is another flower of poesy that has
sprung up in my divinity's footsteps.
What a variety of individualities a herd of cows presents when you have
come to know them all, not only in form and color, but in manners and
disposition! Some are timid and awkward, and the butt of the whole herd.
Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression in the face like certain
persons you have known. A petted and well-fed cow has a benevolent and
gracious look; an ill-used and poorly fed one, a pitiful and forlorn look.
Some cows have a masculine or ox expression; others are extremely
feminine. The latter are the ones for milk. Some cows will kick like a
horse; some jump fences like deer. Every herd has its ringleader, its
unruly spirit,—one that plans all the mischief, and leads the rest
through the fences into the grain or into the orchard. This one is usually
quite different from the master spirit, the "boss of the yard." The latter
is generally the most peaceful and law-abiding cow in the lot, and the
least bullying and quarrelsome. But she is not to be trifled with; her
will is law; the whole herd give way before her, those that have crossed
horns with her and those that have not, but yielded their allegiance
without crossing. I remember such a one among my father's milkers when I
was a boy,—a slender-horned, deep-shouldered, large-uddered,
dewlapped old cow that we always put first in the long stable, so she
could not have a cow on each side of her to forage upon; for the master is
yielded to no less in the stanchions than in the yard. She always had the
first place anywhere. She had her choice of standing-room in the
milking-yard, and when she wanted to lie down there or in the fields the
best and softest spot was hers. When the herd were foddered from the stack
or barn, or fed with pumpkins in the fall, she was always first served.
Her demeanor was quiet but impressive. She never bullied or gored her
mates, but literally ruled them with the breath of her nostrils. If any
new-comer or ambitious younger cow, however, chafed under her supremacy,
she was ever ready to make good her claims. And with what spirit she would
fight when openly challenged! She was a whirlwind of pluck and valor; and
not after one defeat or two defeats would she yield the championship. The
boss cow, when overcome, seems to brood over her disgrace, and day after
day will meet her rival in fierce combat.
A friend of mine, a pastoral philosopher, whom I have consulted in regard
to the master cow, thinks it is seldom the case that one rules all the
herd, if it number many, but that there is often one that will rule nearly
all. "Curiously enough," he says,﹃a case like this will often occur: No.
1 will whip No. 2; No. 2 whips No. 3; and No. 3 whips No. 1; so around in
a circle. This is not a mistake; it is often the case. I remember,﹄he
continued, "we once had feeding out of a large bin in the centre of the
yard six cows who mastered right through in succession from No. 1 to No.
6; but No. 6 paid off the score by whipping No. 1. I often
watched them when they were all trying to feed out of the box, and of
course trying, dog-in-the-manger fashion, each to prevent any other she
could. They would often get in the order to do it very systematically,
since they could keep rotating about the box till the chain happened to
get broken somewhere, when there would be confusion. Their mastership, you
know, like that between nations, is constantly changing. There are always
Napoleons who hold their own through many vicissitudes; but the ordinary
cow is continually liable to lose her foothold. Some cow she has always
despised, and has often sent tossing across the yard at her horns' ends,
some pleasant morning will return the compliment and pay off old scores."
But my own observation has been that, in herds in which there have been no
important changes for several years, the question of might gets pretty
well settled, and some one cow becomes the acknowledged ruler.
The bully of the yard is never the master, but usually a second or third
rate pusher that never loses an opportunity to hook those beneath her, or
to gore the masters if she can get them in a tight place. If such a one
can get loose in the stable, she is quite certain to do mischief. She
delights to pause in the open bars and turn and keep those behind her at
bay till she sees a pair of threatening horns pressing toward her, when
she quickly passes on. As one cow masters all, so there is one cow that is
mastered by all. These are the two extremes of the herd, the head and the
tail. Between them are all grades of authority, with none so poor but hath
some poorer to do her reverence.
The cow has evidently come down to us from a wild or semi-wild state;
perhaps is a descendant of those wild, shaggy cattle of which a small band
is still preserved in some nobleman's park in Scotland. Cuvier seems to
have been of this opinion. One of the ways in which her wild instincts
still crop out is the disposition she shows in spring to hide her calf,—a
common practice among the wild herds. Her wild nature would be likely to
come to the surface at this crisis if ever; and I have known cows that
practiced great secrecy in dropping their calves. As their time
approached, they grew restless, a wild and excited look was upon them; and
if left free, they generally set out for the woods, or for some other
secluded spot. After the calf is several hours old, and has got upon its
feet and had its first meal, the dam by some sign commands it to lie down
and remain quiet while she goes forth to feed. If the calf is approached
at such time, it plays "possum," pretends to be dead or asleep, till, on
finding this ruse does not succeed, it mounts to its feet, bleats loudly
and fiercely, and charges desperately upon the intruder. But it recovers
from this wild scare in a little while, and never shows signs of it again.
The habit of the cow, also, in eating the placenta, looks to me like a
vestige of her former wild instincts,—the instinct to remove
everything that would give the wild beasts a clew or a scent, and so
attract them to her helpless young.
How wise and sagacious the cows become that run upon the street, or pick
their living along the highway! The mystery of gates and bars is at last
solved to them. They ponder over them by night, they lurk about them by
day, till they acquire a new sense,—till they become en rapport
with them and know when they are open and unguarded. The garden gate, if
it open into the highway at any point, is never out of the mind of these
roadsters, or out of their calculations. They calculate upon the chances
of its being left open a certain number of times in the season; and if it
be but once, and only for five minutes, your cabbage and sweet corn
suffer. What villager, or countryman either, has not been awakened at
night by the squeaking and crunching of those piratical jaws under the
window, or in the direction of the vegetable patch? I have had the cows,
after they had eaten up my garden, break into the stable where my own
milcher was tied, and gore her and devour her meal. Yes, life presents but
one absorbing problem to the street cow, and that is how to get into your
garden. She catches glimpses of it over the fence or through the pickets,
and her imagination or her epigastrium is inflamed. When the spot is
surrounded by a high board fence, I think I have seen her peeping at the
cabbages through a knothole. At last she learns to open the gate. It is a
great triumph of bovine wit. She does it with her horn or her nose, or may
be with her ever-ready tongue. I doubt if she has ever yet penetrated the
mystery of the newer patent fastenings; but the old-fashioned thumb-latch
she can see through, give her time enough.
A large, lank, muley or polled cow used to annoy me in this way when I was
a dweller in a certain pastoral city. I more than half suspected she was
turned in by some one; so one day I watched. Presently I heard the
gate-latch rattle; the gate swung open, and in walked the old buffalo. On
seeing me she turned and ran like a horse. I then fastened the gate on the
inside and watched again. After long waiting the old cow came quickly
round the corner and approached the gate. She lifted the latch with her
nose. Then, as the gate did not move, she lifted it again and again. Then
she gently nudged it. Then, the obtuse gate not taking the hint, she
butted it gently, then harder and still harder, till it rattled again. At
this juncture I emerged from my hiding-place, when the old villain
scampered off with great precipitation. She knew she was trespassing, and
she had learned that there were usually some swift penalties attached to
this pastime.
I have owned but three cows and loved but one. That was the first one,
Chloe, a bright red, curly-pated, golden-skinned Devonshire cow, that an
ocean steamer landed for me upon the banks of the Potomac one bright May
Day many clover summers ago. She came from the north, from the pastoral
regions of the Catskills, to graze upon the broad commons of the national
capital. I was then the fortunate and happy lessee of an old place with an
acre of ground attached, almost within the shadow of the dome of the
Capitol. Behind a high but aged and decrepit board fence I indulged my
rural and unclerical tastes. I could look up from my homely tasks and cast
a potato almost in the midst of that cataract of marble steps that flows
out of the north wing of the patriotic pile. Ah! when that creaking and
sagging back gate closed behind me in the evening, I was happy; and when
it opened for my egress thence in the morning, I was not happy. Inside
that gate was a miniature farm, redolent of homely, primitive life, a
tumble-down house and stables and implements of agriculture and
horticulture, broods of chickens, and growing pumpkins, and a thousand
antidotes to the weariness of an artificial life. Outside of it were the
marble and iron palaces, the paved and blistering streets, and the high,
vacant mahogany desk of a government clerk. In that ancient inclosure I
took an earth bath twice a day. I planted myself as deep in the soil as I
could, to restore the normal tone and freshness of my system, impaired by
the above-mentioned government mahogany. I have found there is nothing
like the earth to draw the various social distempers out of one. The blue
devils take flight at once if they see you mean to bury them and make
compost of them. Emerson intimates that the scholar had better not try to
have two gardens; but I could never spend an hour hoeing up dock and
red-root and twitch-grass without in some way getting rid of many weeds
and fungi, unwholesome growths, that a petty indoor life is forever
fostering in my moral and intellectual nature.
But the finishing touch was not given till Chloe came. She was the jewel
for which this homely setting waited. My agriculture had some object then.
The old gate never opened with such alacrity as when she paused before it.
How we waited for her coming! Should I send Drewer, the colored patriarch,
for her? No; the master of the house himself should receive Juno at the
capital.
"One cask for you," said the clerk, referring to the steamer bill of
lading.
"Then I hope it's a cask of milk," I said. "I expected a cow."
"One cask, it says here."
"Well, let's see it; I'll warrant it has horns and is tied by a rope;"
which proved to be the case, for there stood the only object that bore my
name, chewing its cud, on the forward deck. How she liked the voyage I
could not find out; but she seemed to relish so much the feeling of solid
ground beneath her feet once more, that she led me a lively step all the
way home. She cut capers in front of the White House, and tried twice to
wind me up in the rope as we passed the Treasury. She kicked up her heels
on the broad avenue, and became very coltish as she came under the walls
of the Capitol. But that night the long-vacant stall in the old stable was
filled, and the next morning the coffee had met with a change of heart. I
had to go out twice with the lantern and survey my treasure before I went
to bed. Did she not come from the delectable mountains, and did I not have
a sort of filial regard for her as toward my foster-mother?
This was during the Arcadian age at the capital, before the easy-going
Southern ways had gone out and the prim new Northern ways had come in, and
when the domestic animals were treated with distinguished consideration
and granted the freedom of the city. There was a charm of cattle in the
street and upon the commons; goats cropped your rosebushes through the
pickets, and nooned upon your front porch; and pigs dreamed Arcadian
dreams under your garden fence, or languidly frescoed it with pigments
from the nearest pool. It was a time of peace; it was the poor man's
golden age. Your cow, your goat, your pig, led vagrant, wandering lives,
and picked up a subsistence wherever they could, like the bees, which was
almost everywhere. Your cow went forth in the morning and came home
fraught with milk at night, and you never troubled yourself where she went
or how far she roamed.
Chloe took very naturally to this kind of life. At first I had to go with
her a few times and pilot her to the nearest commons, and then I left her
to her own wit, which never failed her. What adventures she had, what
acquaintances she made, how far she wandered, I never knew. I never came
across her in my walks or rambles. Indeed, on several occasions I thought
I would look her up and see her feeding in national pastures, but I never
could find her. There were plenty of cows, but they were all strangers.
But punctually, between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, her white
horns would be seen tossing above the gate and her impatient low be heard.
Sometimes, when I turned her forth in the morning, she would pause and
apparently consider which way she would go. Should she go toward Kendall
Green to-day, or follow the Tiber, or over by the Big Spring, or out
around Lincoln Hospital? She seldom reached a conclusion till she had
stretched forth her neck and blown a blast on her trumpet that awoke the
echoes in the very lantern on the dome of the Capitol. Then, after one or
two licks, she would disappear around the corner. Later in the season,
when the grass was parched or poor on the commons, and the corn and
cabbage tempting in the garden, Chloe was loath to depart in the morning,
and her deliberations were longer than ever, and very often I had to aid
her in coming to a decision.
For two summers she was a wellspring of pleasure and profit in my farm of
one acre, when, in an evil moment, I resolved to part with her and try
another. In an evil moment I say, for from that time my luck in cattle
left me. The goddess never forgave me the execution of that rash and cruel
resolve.
The day is indelibly stamped on my memory when I exposed my Chloe for sale
in the public market-place. It was in November, a bright, dreamy, Indian
summer day. A sadness oppressed me, not unmixed with guilt and remorse. An
old Irish woman came to the market also with her pets to sell, a sow and
five pigs, and took up a position next me. We condoled with each other; we
bewailed the fate of our darlings together; we berated in chorus the
white-aproned but blood-stained fraternity who prowled about us. When she
went away for a moment I minded the pigs, and when I strolled about she
minded my cow. How shy the innocent beast was of those carnal marketmen!
How she would shrink away from them! When they put out a hand to feel her
condition she would "scrooch" down her back, or bend this way or that, as
if the hand were a branding-iron. So long as I stood by her head she felt
safe—deluded creature!—and chewed the cud of sweet content;
but the moment I left her side she seemed filled with apprehension, and
followed me with her eyes, lowing softly and entreatingly till I returned.
At last the money was counted out for her, and her rope surrendered to the
hand of another. How that last look of alarm and incredulity, which I
caught as I turned for a parting glance, went to my heart!
Her stall was soon filled, or partly filled, and this time with a native,—a
specimen of what may be called the cornstalk breed of Virginia; a slender,
furtive, long-geared heifer just verging on cowhood, that in spite of my
best efforts would wear a pinched and hungry look. She evidently inherited
a humped back. It was a family trait, and evidence of the purity of her
blood. For the native blooded cow of Virginia, from shivering over half
rations of cornstalks in the open air during those bleak and windy
winters, and roaming over those parched fields in summer, has come to have
some marked features. For one thing, her pedal extremities seem
lengthened; for another, her udder does not impede her traveling; for a
third, her backbone inclines strongly to the curve; then, she despiseth
hay. This last is a sure test. Offer a thorough-bred Virginia cow hay, and
she will laugh in your face; but rattle the husks or shucks, and she knows
you to be her friend.
The new-comer even declined corn-meal at first. She eyed it furtively,
then sniffed it suspiciously, but finally discovered that it bore some
relation to her native "shucks," when she fell to eagerly.
I cherish the memory of this cow, however, as the most affectionate brute
I ever knew. Being deprived of her calf, she transferred her affections to
her master, and would fain have made a calf of him, lowing in the most
piteous and inconsolable manner when he was out of her sight, hardly
forgetting her grief long enough to eat her meal, and entirely neglecting
her beloved husks. Often in the middle of the night she would set up that
sonorous lamentation, and continue it till sleep was chased from every eye
in the household. This generally had the effect of bringing the object of
her affection before her, but in a mood anything but filial or comforting.
Still, at such times a kick seemed a comfort to her, and she would gladly
have kissed the rod that was the instrument of my midnight wrath.
But her tender star was destined soon to a fatal eclipse. Being tied with
too long a rope on one occasion during my temporary absence, she got her
head into the meal-barrel, and stopped not till she had devoured nearly
half a bushel of dry meal. The singularly placid and benevolent look that
beamed from the meal-besmeared face when I discovered her was something to
be remembered. For the first time, also, her spinal column came near
assuming a horizontal line. But the grist proved too much for her frail
mill, and her demise took place on the third day, not of course without
some attempt to relieve her on my part. I gave her, as is usual in such
emergencies, everything I "could think of," and everything my neighbors
could think of, besides some fearful prescriptions which I obtained from a
German veterinary surgeon, but to no purpose. I imagined her poor maw
distended and inflamed with the baking sodden mass which no physic could
penetrate or enliven.
Thus ended my second venture in live-stock. My third, which followed sharp
upon the heels of this disaster, was scarcely more of a success. This time
I led to the altar a buffalo cow, as they call the "muley" down South,—a
large, spotted, creamy-skinned cow, with a fine udder, that I persuaded a
Jew drover to part with for ninety dollars. "Pag like a dish rack (rag),"
said he, pointing to her udder after she had been milked.﹃You vill come
pack and gif me the udder ten tollar﹄(for he had demanded an even
hundred), he continued, "after you have had her a gouple of days." True, I
felt like returning to him after a "gouple of days," but not to pay the
other ten dollars. The cow proved to be as blind as a bat, though capable
of counterfeiting the act of seeing to perfection. For did she not lift up
her head and follow with her eyes a dog that scaled the fence and ran
through the other end of the lot, and the next moment dash my hopes thus
raised by trying to walk over a locust-tree thirty feet high? And when I
set the bucket before her containing her first mess of meal, she missed it
by several inches, and her nose brought up against the ground. Was it a
kind of far-sightedness and near blindness? That was it, I think; she had
genius, but not talent; she could see the man in the moon, but was quite
oblivious to the man immediately in her front. Her eyes were telescopic
and required a long range.
As long as I kept her in the stall, or confined to the inclosure, this
strange eclipse of her sight was of little consequence. But when spring
came, and it was time for her to go forth and seek her livelihood in the
city's waste places, I was embarrassed. Into what remote corners or into
what terra incognita might she not wander! There was little doubt
but that she would drift around home in the course of the summer, or
perhaps as often as every week or two; but could she be trusted to find
her way back every night? Perhaps she could be taught. Perhaps her other
senses were acute enough to compensate in a measure for her defective
vision. So I gave her lessons in the topography of the country. I led her
forth to graze for a few hours each day and led her home again. Then I
left her to come home alone, which feat she accomplished very
encouragingly. She came feeling her way along, stepping very high, but
apparently a most diligent and interested sight-seer. But she was not sure
of the right house when she got to it, though she stared at it very hard.
Again I turned her forth, and again she came back, her telescopic eyes
apparently of some service to her. On the third day, there was a fierce
thunder-storm late in the afternoon, and old buffalo did not come home. It
had evidently scattered and bewildered what little wits she had. Being
barely able to navigate those streets on a calm day, what could she be
expected to do in a tempest?
After the storm had passed, and near sundown, I set out in quest of her,
but could get no clew. I heard that two cows had been struck by lightning
about a mile out on the commons. My conscience instantly told me that one
of them was mine. It would be a fit closing of the third act of this
pastoral drama. Thitherward I bent my steps, and there upon the smooth
plain I beheld the scorched and swollen forms of two cows slain by
thunderbolts, but neither of them had ever been mine.
The next day I continued the search, and the next, and the next. Finally I
hoisted an umbrella over my head, for the weather had become hot, and set
out deliberately and systematically to explore every foot of open common
on Capitol Hill. I tramped many miles, and found every man's cow but my
own,—some twelve or fifteen hundred, I should think. I saw many
vagrant boys and Irish and colored women, nearly all of whom had seen a
buffalo cow that very day that answered exactly to my description, but in
such diverse and widely separate places that I knew it was no cow of mine.
And it was astonishing how many times I was myself deceived; how many
rumps or heads, or line backs or white flanks, I saw peeping over knolls,
or from behind fences or other objects, that could belong to no cow but
mine!
Finally I gave up the search, concluded the cow had been stolen, and
advertised her, offering a reward. But days passed, and no tidings were
obtained. Hope began to burn pretty low,—was indeed on the point of
going out altogether,—when one afternoon, as I was strolling over
the commons (for in my walks I still hovered about the scenes of my lost
milcher), I saw the rump of a cow, over a grassy knoll, that looked
familiar. Coming nearer, the beast lifted up her head; and, behold! it was
she! only a few squares from home, where doubtless she had been most of
the time. I had overshot the mark in my search. I had ransacked the
far-off, and had neglected the near-at-hand, as we are so apt to do. But
she was ruined as a milcher, and her history thenceforward was brief and
touching!
VII BEFORE GENIUS
If there did not something else go to the making of literature besides
mere literary parts, even the best of them, how long ago the old bards and
the Biblical writers would have been superseded by the learned professors
and the gentlemanly versifiers of later times! Is there to-day a popular
poet, using the English language, who does not, in technical acquirements
and in the artificial adjuncts of poetry,—rhyme, metre, melody, and
especially sweet, dainty fancies,—surpass Europe's and Asia's
loftiest and oldest? Indeed, so marked is the success of the latter-day
poets in this respect, that any ordinary reader may well be puzzled, and
ask, if the shaggy antique masters are poets, what are the refined and
euphonious producers of our own day?
If we were to inquire what this something else is which is prerequisite to
any deep and lasting success in literature, we should undoubtedly find
that it is the man behind the book. It is the fashion of the day to
attribute all splendid results to genius and culture. But genius and
culture are not enough.﹃All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not
the science of honesty and goodness,﹄says Montaigne. The quality of
simple manhood, and the universal human traits which form the bond of
union between man and man,—which form the basis of society, of the
family, of government, of friendship,—are quite overlooked; and the
credit is given to some special facility, or to brilliant and lucky hit.
Does any one doubt that the great poets and artists are made up mainly of
the most common universal human and heroic characteristics?—that in
them, though working to other ends, is all that construct the soldier, the
sailor, the farmer, the discoverer, the bringer-to-pass in any field, and
that their work is good and enduring in proportion as it is saturated and
fertilized by the qualities of these? Good human stock is the main
dependence. No great poet ever appeared except from a race of good
fighters, good eaters, good sleepers, good breeders. Literature dies with
the decay of the un-literary element. It is not in the spirit of
something far away in the clouds or under the moon, something ethereal,
visionary, and anti-mundane, that Angelo, Dante, and Shakespeare work, but
in the spirit of common Nature and of the homeliest facts; through these,
and not away from them, the path of the creator lies.
It is no doubt this tendency, always more or less marked in highly refined
and cultivated times, to forget or overlook the primary basic qualities,
and to parade and make much of verbal and technical acquirements, that led
Huxley to speak with such bitter scorn of the﹃sensual caterwauling of the
literary classes,﹄for this is not the only country in which books are
produced that are a mere skin of elegant words blown up by copious
literary gas.
In imaginative works, especially, much depends upon the quality of mere
weight. A stern, material inertia is indispensable. It is like the
immobility and the power of resistance of a piece of ordnance, upon which
the force and efficacy of the projectile finally depend. In the most
daring flights of the master, there is still something which remains
indifferent and uncommitted, and which acts as reserve power, making the
man always superior to his work. He must always leave the impression that
if he wanted to pull harder or to fly higher he could easily do so. In
Homer there is much that is not directly available for Homer's purposes as
poet. This is his personality,—the real Homer,—which lies
deeper than his talents and skill, and which works through these by
indirections. This gives the authority; this is the unseen backer, which
makes every promise good.
What depths can a man sound but his own, or what heights explore?﹃We
carry within us,﹄says Sir Thomas Browne, "the wonders we seek without
us."
Indeed, there is a strict moral or ethical dependence of the capacity to
conceive or to project great things upon the capacity to be or to do them.
It is as true as any law of hydraulics or of statics, that the workmanship
of a man can never rise above the level of his character. He can never
adequately say or do anything greater than he himself is. There is no such
thing, for instance, as deep insight into the mystery of Creation, without
integrity and simplicity of character.
In the highest mental results and conditions the whole being sympathizes.
The perception of a certain range of truth, such as is indicated by Plato,
Hegel, Swedenborg, and which is very far from what is called "religious"
or "moral," I should regard as the best testimonial that could be offered
of a man's probity and essential nobility of soul. Is it possible to
imagine a fickle, inconstant, or a sly, vain, mean person reading and
appreciating Emerson? Think of the real men of science, the great
geologists and astronomers, one opening up time, the other space! Shall
mere intellectual acumen be accredited with these immense results? What
noble pride, self-reliance, and continuity of character underlie Newton's
deductions!
Only those books are for the making of men into which a man has gone in
the making. Mere professional skill and sleight of hand, of themselves,
are to be apprized as lightly in letters as in war or in government, or in
any kind of leadership. Strong native qualities only avail in the long
run; and the more these dominate over the artificial endowments, sloughing
or dropping the latter in the final result, the more we are refreshed and
enlarged. Who has not, at some period of his life, been captivated by the
rhetoric and fine style of nearly all the popular authors of a certain
sort, but at last waked up to discover that behind these brilliant names
was no strong, loving man, but only a refined taste, a fertile invention,
or a special talent of one kind or another.
Think of the lather of the modern novel, and the fashion-plate men and
women that figure in it! What noble person has Dickens sketched, or has
any novelist since Scott? The utter poverty of almost every current
novelist, in any grand universal human traits in his own character, is
shown in nothing more clearly than in the kind of interest the
reader takes in his books. We are led along solely by the ingenuity of the
plot, and a silly desire to see how the affair came out. What must be the
effect, long continued, of this class of jugglers working upon the
sympathies and the imagination of a nation of gestating women?
How the best modern novel collapses before the homely but immense human
significance of Homer's celestial swineherd entertaining divine Ulysses,
or even the solitary watchman in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon," crouched, like a
night-dog, on the roofs of the Atreidae, waiting for the signal fires that
should announce the fall of sacred Ilion!
But one need not look long, even in contemporary British literature, to
find a man. In the author of "Characteristics" and "Sartor Resartus" we
surely encounter one of the true heroic cast. We are made aware that here
is something more than a littérateur, something more than genius.
Here is veracity, homely directness and sincerity, and strong primary
idiosyncrasies. Here the man enters into the estimate of the author. There
is no separating them, as there never is in great examples. A curious
perversity runs through all, but in no way vitiates the result. In both
his moral and intellectual nature, Carlyle seems made with a sort of stub
and twist, like the best gun-barrels. The knotty and corrugated character
of his sentences suits well the peculiar and intense activity of his mind.
What a transition from his terse and sharply articulated pages, brimming
with character and life, and a strange mixture of rage, humor, tenderness,
poetry, philosophy, to the cold disbelief and municipal splendor of
Macaulay! Nothing in Carlyle's contributions seems fortuitous. It all
flows from a good and sufficient cause in the character of the man.
Every great man is, in a certain way, an Atlas, with the weight of the
world upon him. And if one is to criticise at all, he may say that, if
Carlyle had not been quite so conscious of this weight, his work would
have been better done. Yet to whom do we owe more, even as Americans?
Anti-democratic in his opinions, he surely is not so in spirit, or in the
quality of his make. The nobility of labor and the essential nobility of
man were never so effectively preached before. The deadliest enemy of
democracy is not the warning or dissenting voice, but it is the spirit,
rife among us, which would engraft upon our hardy Western stock the sickly
and decayed standards of the expiring feudal world.
With two or three exceptions, there is little as yet in American
literature that shows much advance beyond the merely conventional and
scholastic,—little, I mean, in which one gets a whiff of the strong,
unbreathed air of mountain or prairie, or a taste of rude, new power that
is like the tonic of the sea. Thoreau occupies a niche by himself. Thoreau
was not a great personality, yet his writings have a strong characteristic
flavor. He is anti-scorbutic, like leeks and onions. He has reference,
also, to the highest truths.
It is very likely true that our most native and original characters do not
yet take to literature. It is, perhaps, too early in the day. Iron and
lime have to pass through the vegetable before they can reach the higher
organization of the animal, and maybe this Western nerve and heartiness
will yet emerge on the intellectual plane. Let us hope that it will indeed
be Western nerve and heartiness when it gets there, and not Eastern wit
and epigram!
In Abraham Lincoln we had a character of very marked and lofty type, the
most suggestive study or sketch of the future American man that has yet
appeared in our history. How broad, unconventional, and humane! How
democratic! how adhesive! No fine arabesque carvings, but strong, unhewn,
native traits, and deep lines of care, toil, and human sympathy. Lincoln's
Gettysburg speech is one of the most genuine and characteristic utterances
in our annals. It has the true antique simplicity and impressiveness. It
came straight from the man, and is as sure an index of character as the
living voice, or the physiognomy, or the personal presence. Indeed, it may
be said of Mr. Lincoln's entire course while at the head of the nation,
that no President, since the first, ever in his public acts allowed the
man so fully to appear, or showed so little disposition to retreat behind
the featureless political mask which seems to adhere to the idea of
gubernatorial dignity.
It would be hardly fair to cite Everett's speech on the same occasion as a
specimen of the opposite style, wherein ornate scholarship and the pride
of talents dominate. Yet a stern critic would be obliged to say that, as
an author, Everett allowed, for the most part, only the expurgated,
complimenting, drawing-room man to speak; and that, considering the need
of America to be kept virile and broad at all hazards, his contribution,
both as man and writer, falls immeasurably short of Abraham Lincoln's.
What a noble specimen of its kind, and how free from any verbal tricks or
admixture of literary sauce, is Thoreau's "Maine Woods"! And what a marked
specimen of the opposite style is a certain other book I could mention in
which these wild and grand scenes serve but as a medium to advertise the
author's fund of classic lore!
Can there be any doubt about the traits and outward signs of a noble
character, and is not the style of an author the manners of his soul?
Is there a lyceum lecturer in the country who is above manoeuvring for the
applause of his audience? or a writer who is willing to make himself of no
account for the sake of what he has to say? Even in the best there is
something of the air and manners of a performer on exhibition. The
newspaper, or magazine, or book is a sort of raised platform upon which
the advertiser advances before a gaping and expectant crowd. Truly, how
well he handles his subject! He turns it over, and around, and
inside out, and top-side down. He tosses it about; he twirls it; he takes
it apart and puts it together again, and knows well beforehand where the
applause will come in. Any reader, in taking up the antique authors, must
be struck by the contrast.
"In Aeschylus," says Landor, "there is no trickery, no trifling, no delay,
no exposition, no garrulity, no dogmatism, no declamation, no prosing,...
but the loud, clear challenge, the firm, unstealthy step, of an erect,
broad-breasted soldier."
On the whole, the old authors are better than the new. The real question
of literature is not simplified by culture or a multiplication of books,
as the conditions of life are always the same, and are not made one whit
easier by all the myriads of men and women who have lived upon the globe.
The standing want is never for more skill, but for newer, fresher power,—a
more plentiful supply of arterial blood. The discoverer, or the historian,
or the man of science, may begin where his predecessor left off, but the
poet or any artist must go back for a fresh start. With him it is always
the first day of creation, and he must begin at the stump or nowhere.
VIII BEFORE BEAUTY
I
Before genius is manliness, and before beauty is power. The Russian
novelist and poet, Turgenieff, scattered all through whose works you will
find unmistakable traits of greatness, makes one of his characters say,
speaking of beauty, "The old masters,—they never hunted after it; it
comes of itself into their compositions, God knows whence, from heaven or
elsewhere. The whole world belonged to them, but we are unable to clasp
its broad spaces; our arms are too short."
From the same depth of insight come these lines from "Leaves of Grass,"
apropos of true poems:—
"They do not seek beauty—they are sought; Forever touching them, or
close upon them, follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick."
The Roman was perhaps the first to separate beauty from use, and to pursue
it as ornament merely. He built his grand edifice,—its piers, its
vaults, its walls of brick and concrete,—and then gave it a marble
envelope copied from the Greek architecture. The latter could be stripped
away, as in many cases it was by the hand of time, and leave the
essentials of the structure nearly complete. Not so with the Greek: he did
not seek the beautiful, he was beauty; his building had no ornament, it
was all structure; in its beauty was the flower of necessity, the charm of
inborn fitness and proportion. In other words,﹃his art was structure
refined into beautiful forms, not beautiful forms superimposed upon
structure,﹄as with the Roman. And it is in Greek mythology, is it not,
that Beauty is represented as riding upon the back of a lion? as she
assuredly always does in their poetry and art,—rides upon power, or
terror, or savage fate; not only rides upon, but is wedded and
incorporated with it; hence the athletic desire and refreshment her coming
imparts.
This is the invariable order of nature. Beauty without a rank material
basis enfeebles. The world is not thus made; man is not thus begotten and
nourished.
It comes to me there is something implied or understood when we look upon
a beautiful object, that has quite as much to do with the impression made
upon the mind as anything in the object itself; perhaps more. There is
somehow an immense and undefined background of vast and unconscionable
energy, as of earthquakes, and ocean storms, and cleft mountains, across
which things of beauty play, and to which they constantly defer; and when
this background is wanting, as it is in much current poetry, beauty
sickens and dies, or at most has only a feeble existence.
Nature does nothing merely for beauty; beauty follows as the inevitable
result; and the final impression of health and finish which her works make
upon the mind is owing as much to those things which are not technically
called beautiful as to those which are. The former give identity to the
latter. The one is to the other what substance is to form, or bone to
flesh. The beauty of nature includes all that is called beautiful, as its
flower; and all that is not called beautiful, as its stalk and roots.
Indeed, when I go to the woods or the fields, or ascend to the hilltop, I
do not seem to be gazing upon beauty at all, but to be breathing it like
the air. I am not dazzled or astonished; I am in no hurry to look lest it
be gone. I would not have the litter and debris removed, or the banks
trimmed, or the ground painted. What I enjoy is commensurate with the
earth and sky itself. It clings to the rocks and trees; it is kindred to
the roughness and savagery; it rises from every tangle and chasm; it
perches on the dry oak-stubs with the hawks and buzzards; the crows shed
it from their wings and weave it into their nests of coarse sticks; the
fox barks it, the cattle low it, and every mountain path leads to its
haunts. I am not a spectator of, but a participator in it. It is not an
adornment; its roots strike to the centre of the earth.
All true beauty in nature or in art is like the iridescent hue of
mother-of-pearl, which is intrinsic and necessary, being the result of the
arrangement of the particles,—the flowering of the mechanism of the
shell; or like the beauty of health which comes out of and reaches back
again to the bones and the digestion. There is no grace like the grace of
strength. What sheer muscular gripe and power lie back of the firm,
delicate notes of the great violinist! "Wit," says Heine,—and the
same thing is true of beauty,—"isolated, is worthless. It is only
endurable when it rests on a solid basis."
In fact, beauty as a separate and distinct thing does not exist. Neither
can it be reached by any sorting or sifting or clarifying process. It is
an experience of the mind, and must be preceded by certain conditions,
just as light is an experience of the eye, and sound of the ear.
To attempt to manufacture beauty is as vain as to attempt to manufacture
truth; and to give it to us in poems or any form of art, without a lion of
some sort, a lion of truth or fitness or power, is to emasculate it and
destroy its volition.
But current poetry is, for the most part, an attempt to do this very
thing, to give us beauty without beauty's antecedents and foil. The poets
want to spare us the annoyance of the beast. Since beauty is the chief
attraction, why not have this part alone, pure and unadulterated,—why
not pluck the plumage from the bird, the flower from its stalk, the moss
from the rock, the shell from the shore, the honey-bag from the bee, and
thus have in brief what pleases us? Hence, with rare exceptions, one
feels, on opening the latest book of poems, like exclaiming, Well, here is
the beautiful at last divested of everything else,—of truth, of
power, of utility,—and one may add of beauty, too. It charms as
color, or flowers, or jewels, or perfume charms—and that is the end
of it.
It is ever present to the true artist, in his attempt to report nature,
that every object as it stands in the circuit of cause and effect has a
history which involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the
interest which it awakens in us is in proportion as its integrity in this
respect is preserved. In nature we are prepared for any opulence of color
or of vegetation, or freak of form, or display of any kind, because of the
preponderance of the common, ever-present feature of the earth. The foil
is always at hand. In like manner in the master poems we are never
surfeited with mere beauty.
Woe to any artist who disengages Beauty from the wide background of
rudeness, darkness, and strength,—and disengages her from absolute
nature! The mild and beneficent aspects of nature,—what gulfs and
abysses of power underlie them! The great shaggy, barbaric earth,—yet
the summing-up, the plenum, of all we know or can know of beauty! So the
orbic poems of the world have a foundation as of the earth itself, and are
beautiful because they are something else first. Homer chose for his
groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; in Dante, it is Hell; in
Milton, Satan and the Fall; in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal world,
with its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it is Revolt and
diabolic passion. When we get to Tennyson, the lion is a good deal tamed,
but he is still there in the shape of the proud, haughty, and manly
Norman, and in many forms yet stimulates the mind.
The perception of cosmical beauty comes by a vital original process. It is
in some measure a creative act, and those works that rest upon it make
demands—perhaps extraordinary ones—upon the reader or the
beholder. We regard mere surface glitter, or mere verbal sweetness, in a
mood entirely passive, and with a pleasure entirely profitless. The beauty
of excellent stage scenery seems much more obvious and easy of
apprehension than the beauty of trees and hills themselves, inasmuch as
the act of association in the mind is much easier and cheaper than the act
of original perception.
Only the greatest works in any department afford any explanation of this
wonder we call nature, or aid the mind in arriving at correct notions
concerning it. To copy here and there a line or a trait is no explanation;
but to translate nature into another language—to bridge it to us, to
repeat in some sort the act of creation itself—is the crowning
triumph of poetic art.
II
After the critic has enumerated all the stock qualities of the poet, as
taste, fancy, melody, it remains to be said that unless there is something
in him that is living identity, something analogous to the growing,
pushing, reproducing forces of nature, all the rest in the end pass for
but little.
This is perhaps what the German critic, Lessing, really means by action,
for true poems are more like deeds, expressive of something behind, more
like acts of heroism or devotion, or like personal character, than like
thoughts or intellections.
All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical,
assimilative property, a sort of gastric juice which dissolves thought and
form, and holds in vital fusion religions, times, races, and the theory of
their own construction, naming up with electric and defiant power,—power
without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living organism.
There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal. One
means the organic, the other the inorganic; one means growth, development,
life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The hint and model
of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical
works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature
that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a
measure touches and includes both. But crystallic beauty or cut and
polished gems of thought, the result of the reflex rather than the direct
action of the mind, we do not expect to find in the best poems, though
they may be most prized by specially intellectual persons. In the immortal
poems the solids are very few, or do not appear at all as solids,—as
lime and iron,—any more than they do in organic nature, in the flesh
of the peach or the apple. The main thing in every living organism is the
vital fluids: seven tenths of man is water; and seven tenths of
Shakespeare is passion, emotion,—fluid humanity. Out of this arise
his forms, as Venus arose out of the sea, and as man is daily built up out
of the liquids of the body. We cannot taste, much less assimilate, a solid
until it becomes a liquid; and your great idea, your sermon or moral, lies
upon your poem a dead, cumbrous mass unless there is adequate heat and
solvent, emotional power. Herein I think Wordsworth's "Excursion" fails as
a poem. It has too much solid matter. It is an over-freighted bark that
does not ride the waves buoyantly and lifelike; far less so than
Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which is just as truly a philosophical poem as
the "Excursion." (Wordsworth is the fresher poet; his poems seem really to
have been written in the open air, and to have been brought directly under
the oxygenating influence of outdoor nature; while in Tennyson this
influence seems tempered or farther removed.)
The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects
do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft, which
have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature is
perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no pause,
no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly, without
ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without committing
herself to any end, is the law of Nature.
These considerations bring us very near the essential difference between
prose and poetry, or rather between the poetic and the didactic treatment
of a subject. The essence of creative art is always the same; namely,
interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic
treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and define; but
the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to mount, to escape.
We can conceive of life only as something constantly becoming. It
plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in
transitu. Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your
hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.
The antithesis of art in method is science, as Coleridge has intimated. As
the latter aims at the particular, so the former aims at the universal.
One would have truth of detail, the other truth of ensemble. The
method of science may be symbolized by the straight line, that of art by
the curve. The results of science, relatively to its aim, must be parts
and pieces; while art must give the whole in every act; not quantitively
of course, but qualitively,—by the integrity of the spirit in which
it works.
The Greek mind will always be the type of the artist mind, mainly because
of its practical bent, its healthful objectivity. The Greek never looked
inward, but outward. Criticism and speculation were foreign to him. His
head shows a very marked predominance of the motive and perceptive powers
over the reflective. The expression of the face is never what we call
intellectual or thoughtful, but commanding. His gods are not philosophers,
but delight in deeds, justice, rulership.
Among the differences between the modern and the classical aesthetic mind
is the greater precision and definiteness of the latter. The modern genius
is Gothic, and demands in art a certain vagueness and spirituality like
that of music, refusing to be grasped and formulated. Hence for us (and
this is undoubtedly an improvement) there must always be something about a
poem, or any work of art, besides the evident intellect or plot of it, or
what is on its surface, or what it tells. This something is the Invisible,
the Undefined, almost Unexpressed, and is perhaps the best part of any
work of art, as it is of a noble personality. To amuse, to exhibit
culture, to formulate the aesthetic, or even to excite the emotions, is by
no means all,—is not even the deepest part. Beside these, and
inclosing all, is the general impalpable effect, like good air, or the
subtle presence of good spirits, wordless but more potent far than words.
As, in the superbest person, it is not merely what he says or knows or
shows, or even how he behaves, but the silent qualities, like gravitation,
that insensibly but resistlessly hold us; so in a good poem, or in any
other expression of art.
IX EMERSON
Wherein the race has so far lost and gained, in being transplanted from
Europe to the New England soil and climate, is well illustrated by the
writings of Emerson. There is greater refinement and sublimation of
thought, greater clearness and sharpness of outline, greater audacity of
statement, but, on the other hand, there is a loss of bulk, of unction, of
adipose tissue, and shall we say of power?
Emerson is undoubtedly a master on the New England scale,—such a
master as the land and race are capable of producing. He stands out clear
and undeniable. The national type, as illustrated by that section of the
country, is the purest and strongest in him of any yet. He can never
suffer eclipse. Compared with the English or German master, he is
undoubtedly deficient in viscera, in moral and intellectual stomach; but,
on the other hand, he is of a fibre and quality hard to match in any age
or land. From first to last he strikes one as something extremely pure and
compact, like a nut or an egg. Great matters and tendencies lie folded in
him, or rather are summarized in his pages. He writes short but pregnant
chapters on great themes, as in his "English Traits," a book like rich
preserves put up pound for pound, a pound of Emerson to every pound of
John Bull. His chapter on Swedenborg in "Representative Men" is a good
sample of his power to abbreviate and restate with added force. His mind
acts like a sun-lens in gathering the cold pale beams of that luminary to
a focus which warms and stimulates the reader in a surprising manner. The
gist of the whole matter is here; and how much weariness and dullness and
plodding is left out!
In fact, Emerson is an essence, a condensation; more so, perhaps, than any
other man who has appeared in literature. Nowhere else is there such a
preponderance of pure statement, of the very attar of thought, over the
bulkier, circumstantial, qualifying, or secondary elements. He gives us
net results. He is like those strong artificial fertilizers. A pinch of
him is equivalent to a page or two of Johnson, and he is pitched many
degrees higher as an essayist than even Bacon. He has had an immediate
stimulating effect upon all the best minds of the country; how deep or
lasting this influence will be remains to be seen.
This point and brevity has its convenience and value especially in certain
fields of literature. I by no means would wish to water Emerson; yet it
will not do to lose sight of the fact that mass and inertia are
indispensable to the creator. Considering him as poet alone, I have no
doubt of his irremediable deficiency here. You cannot have broad, massive
effect, deep light and shade, or a torrent of power, with such extreme
refinement and condensation. The superphosphates cannot take the place of
the coarser, bulkier fertilizers. Especially in poetry do we require pure
thought to be well diluted with the human, emotional qualities. In the
writing most precious to the race, how little is definition and
intellectual formula, and how much is impulse, emotion, will, character,
blood, chyle! We must have liquids and gases and solvents. We perhaps get
more of them in Carlyle. Emerson's page has more serene astral beauty than
Carlyle's, but not that intense blast-furnace heat that melts down the
most obdurate facts and characters into something plastic and poetical.
Emerson's ideal is always the scholar, the man of books and ready wit;
Carlyle's hero is a riding or striding ruler, or a master worker in some
active field.
The antique mind no doubt affords the true type of health and wholeness in
this respect. The Greek could see, and feel, and paint, and carve, and
speak nothing but emotional man. In nature he saw nothing but personality,—nothing
but human or superhuman qualities; to him the elements all took the human
shape. Of that vague, spiritual, abstract something which we call Nature
he had no conception. He had no sentiment, properly speaking, but impulse
and will-power. And the master minds of the world, in proportion to their
strength, their spinal strength, have approximated to this type. Dante,
Angelo, Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, saw mainly man, and him not abstractly
but concretely. And this is the charm of Burns and the glory of Scott.
Carlyle has written the best histories and biographies of modern times,
because he sees man with such fierce and steadfast eyes. Emerson sees him
also, but he is not interested in him as a man, but mainly as a spirit, as
a demigod, or as a wit or a philosopher.
Emerson's quality has changed a good deal in his later writings. His corn
is no longer in the milk; it has grown hard, and we that read have grown
hard, too. He has now ceased to be an expansive, revolutionary force, but
he has not ceased to be a writer of extraordinary gripe and unexpected
resources of statement. His startling piece of advice,﹃Hitch your wagon
to a star,﹄is typical of the man, as combining the most unlike and widely
separate qualities. Because not less marked than his idealism and
mysticism is his shrewd common sense, his practical bent, his
definiteness,—in fact, the sharp New England mould in which he is
cast. He is the master Yankee, the centennial flower of that thrifty and
peculiar stock. More especially in his later writings and speakings do we
see the native New England traits,—the alertness, eagerness,
inquisitiveness, thrift, dryness, archness, caution, the nervous energy as
distinguished from the old English unction and vascular force. How he
husbands himself,—what prudence, what economy, always spending up,
as he says, and not down! How alert, how attentive; what an inquisitor;
always ready with some test question, with some fact or idea to match or
to verify, ever on the lookout for some choice bit of adventure or
information, or some anecdote that has pith and point! No tyro basks and
takes his ease in his presence, but is instantly put on trial and must
answer or be disgraced. He strikes at an idea like a falcon at a bird. His
great fear seems to be lest there be some fact or point worth knowing that
will escape him. He is a close-browed miser of the scholar's gains. He
turns all values into intellectual coin. Every book or person or
experience is an investment that will or will not warrant a good return in
ideas. He goes to the Radical Club, or to the literary gathering, and
listens with the closest attention to every word that is said, in hope
that something will be said, some word dropped, that has the ring of the
true metal. Apparently he does not permit himself a moment's indifference
or inattention. His own pride is always to have the ready change, to speak
the exact and proper word, to give to every occasion the dignity of wise
speech. You are bartered with for your best. There is no profit in life
but in the interchange of ideas, and the chief success is to have a head
well filled with them. Hard cash at that; no paper promises satisfy him;
he loves the clink and glint of the real coin.
His earlier writings were more flowing and suggestive, and had reference
to larger problems; but now everything has got weighed and stamped and
converted into the medium of wise and scholarly conversation. It is of
great value; these later essays are so many bags of genuine coin, which it
has taken a lifetime to hoard; not all gold, but all good, and the fruit
of wise industry and economy.
I know of no other writing that yields the reader so many strongly stamped
medallion-like sayings and distinctions. There is a perpetual refining and
recoining of the current wisdom of life and conversation. It is the old
gold or silver or copper, but how bright and new it looks in his pages!
Emerson loves facts, things, objects, as the workman his tools. He makes
everything serve. The stress of expression is so great that he bends the
most obdurate element to his purpose; as the bird, under her keen
necessity, weaves the most contrary and diverse materials into her nest.
He seems to like best material that is a little refractory; it makes his
page more piquant and stimulating. Within certain limits he loves
roughness, but not at the expense of harmony. He has wonderful hardiness
and push. Where else in literature is there a mind, moving in so rare a
medium, that gives one such a sense of tangible resistance and force? It
is a principle in mechanics that velocity is twice as great as mass:
double your speed and you double your heat, though you halve your weight.
In like manner this body we are considering is not the largest, but its
speed is great, and the intensity of its impact with objects and
experience is almost without parallel. Everything about a man like Emerson
is important. I find his phrenology and physiognomy more than ordinarily
typical and suggestive. Look at his picture there,—large, strong
features on a small face and head,—no blank spaces; all given up to
expression; a high predaceous nose, a sinewy brow, a massive, benevolent
chin. In most men there is more face than feature, but here is a vast deal
more feature than face, and a corresponding alertness and emphasis of
character. Indeed, the man is made after this fashion. He is all type; his
expression is transcendent. His mind has the hand's pronounced anatomy,—its
cords and sinews and multiform articulations and processes, its opposing
and coordinating power. If his brain is small, its texture is fine and its
convolutions are deep. There have been broader and more catholic natures,
but few so towering and audacious in expression and so rich in
characteristic traits. Every scrap and shred of him is important and
related. Like the strongly aromatic herbs and simples,—sage, mint,
wintergreen, sassafras,—the least part carries the flavor of the
whole. Is there one indifferent or equivocal or unsympathizing drop of
blood in him? Where he is at all, he is entirely,—nothing
extemporaneous; his most casual word seems to have lain in pickle a long
time, and is saturated through and through with the Emersonian brine.
Indeed, so pungent and penetrating is his quality that even his quotations
seem more than half his own.
He is a man who occupies every inch of his rightful territory; he is there
in proper person to the farthest bound. Not every man is himself and his
best self at all times and to his finger points. Many great characters,
perhaps the greatest, have more or less neutral or waste ground. You must
penetrate a distance before you reach the real quick. Or there is a good
wide margin of the commonplace which is sure to put them on good terms
with the mass of their fellow-citizens. And one would think Emerson could
afford to relax a little; that he had earned the right to a dull page or
two now and then. The second best or third best word sometimes would make
us appreciate his first best all the more. Even his god-father Plato nods
occasionally, but Emerson's good breeding will not for a moment permit
such a slight to the reader.
Emerson's peculiar quality is very subtle, but very sharp and firm and
unmistakable. It is not analogous to the commoner, slower-going elements,
as heat, air, fire, water, but is nearer akin to that elusive but potent
something we call electricity. It is abrupt, freaky, unexpected, and
always communicates a little wholesome shock. It darts this way and that,
and connects the far and the near in every line. There is always a leaping
thread of light, and there is always a kind of answering peal or
percussion. With what quickness and suddenness extremes are brought
together! The reader is never prepared for what is to come next; the spark
will most likely leap from some source or fact least thought of. His page
seldom glows and burns, but there is a never-ceasing crackling and
discharge of moral and intellectual force into the mind.
His chief weapon, and one that he never lays down, is identical with that
of the great wits, namely, surprise. The point of his remark or idea is
always sprung upon the reader, never quietly laid before him. He has a
mortal dread of tameness and flatness, and would make the very water we
drink bite the tongue.
He has been from the first a speaker and lecturer, and his style has been
largely modeled according to the demand of those sharp, heady New England
audiences for ceaseless intellectual friction and chafing. Hence every
sentence is braided hard, and more or less knotted, and, though of silk,
makes the mind tingle. He startles by overstatement, by understatement, by
paradox, by antithesis, and by synthesis. Into every sentence enters the
unexpected,—the congruous leaping from the incongruous, the high
coming down, the low springing up, likeness or relation suddenly coming
into view where before was only difference or antagonism. How he delights
to bring the reader up with a short turn, to impale him on a knotty point,
to explode one of his verbal bombshells under his very nose! Yet there is
no trickery or rhetorical legerdemain. His heroic fibre always saves him.
The language in which Taine describes Bacon applies with even more force
to Emerson:—
"Bacon," he says, "is a producer of conceptions and of sentences. The
matter being explored, he says to us: 'Such it is; touch it not on that
side; it must be approached from the other.' Nothing more; no proof, no
effort to convince; he affirms, and nothing more; he has thought in the
manner of artists and poets, and he speaks after the manner of prophets
and seers. 'Cogita et visa,'—this title of one of his books might be
the title of all. His process is that of the creators; it is intuition,
not reasoning.... There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy, than
this mode of thought when it is not checked by natural and good strong
common sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural divination,
the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the true,
like the needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the highest degree.
He has a preëminently practical, even an utilitarian mind."
It is significant, and is indeed the hidden seed or root out of which
comes the explanation of much, if not the main part, of his life and
writings, that Emerson comes of a long line of clergymen; that the blood
in his veins has been teaching, and preaching, and thinking, and growing
austere, these many generations. One wonders that it is still so bounding
and strong, so red with iron and quick with oxygen. But in him seems to be
illustrated one of those rare cases in the genealogy of families where the
best is carried forward each time, and steadily recruited and intensified.
It does not seem possible for any man to become just what Emerson is from
the stump, though perhaps great men have been the fruit of one generation;
but there is a quality in him, an aroma of fine manners, a propriety, a
chivalry in the blood, that dates back, and has been refined and
transmitted many times. Power is born with a man, and is always first
hand, but culture, genius, noble instincts, gentle manners, or the easy
capacity for these things, may be, and to a greater or a lesser extent
are, the contribution of the past. Emerson's culture is radical and
ante-natal, and never fails him. The virtues of all those New England
ministers and all those tomes of sermons are in this casket. One fears
sometimes that he has been too much clarified, or that there is not enough
savage grace or original viciousness and grit in him to save him. How he
hates the roysterers, and all the rank, turbulent, human passions, and is
chilled by the thought that perhaps after all Shakespeare led a vulgar
life!
When Tyndall was here, he showed us how the dark, coarse, invisible heat
rays could be strained out of the spectrum; or, in other words, that every
solar beam was weighted with a vast, nether, invisible side, which made it
a lever of tremendous power in organic nature. After some such analogy,
one sees how the highest order of power in the intellectual world draws
upon and is nourished by those rude, primitive, barbaric human qualities
that our culture and pietism tend to cut off and strain out. Our culture
has its eye on the other end of the spectrum, where the fine violet and
indigo rays are; but all the lifting, rounding, fructifying powers of the
system are in the coarse, dark rays—the black devil—at the
base. The angel of light is yoked with the demon of darkness, and the pair
create and sustain the world.
In rare souls like Emerson, the fruit of extreme culture, it is inevitable
that at least some of the heat rays should be lost, and we miss them
especially when we contrast him with the elder masters. The elder masters
did not seem to get rid of the coarse or vulgar in human life, but royally
accepted it, and struck their roots into it, and drew from it sustenance
and power: but there is an ever-present suspicion that Emerson prefers the
saints to the sinners; prefers the prophets and seers to Homer,
Shakespeare, and Dante. Indeed, it is to be distinctly stated and
emphasized, that Emerson is essentially a priest, and that the key to all
he has said and written is to be found in the fact that his point of view
is not that of the acceptor, the creator,—Shakespeare's point of
view,—but that of the refiner and selector, the priest's point of
view. He described his own state rather than that of mankind when he said,
"The human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding
sanctity, impatient equally of each without the other."
Much surprise has been expressed in literary circles in this country that
Emerson has not followed up his first off-hand indorsement of Walt Whitman
with fuller and more deliberate approval of that poet, but has rather
taken the opposite tack. But the wonder is that he should have been
carried off his feet at all in the manner he was; and it must have been no
ordinary breeze that did it. Emerson shares with his contemporaries the
vast preponderance of the critical and discerning intellect over the
fervid, manly qualities and faith. His power of statement is enormous; his
scope of being is not enormous. The prayer he uttered many years ago for a
poet of the modern, one who could see in the gigantic materialism of the
times the carnival of the same deities we so much admire in Greece and
Rome, seems to many to have even been explicitly answered in Whitman; but
Emerson is balked by the cloud of materials, the din and dust of action,
and the moving armies, in which the god comes enveloped.
But Emerson has his difficulties with all the poets. Homer is too literal,
Milton too literary, and there is too much of the whooping savage in
Whitman. He seems to think the real poet is yet to appear; a poet on new
terms, the reconciler, the poet-priest,—one who shall unite the
whiteness and purity of the saint with the power and unction of the
sinner; one who shall bridge the chasm between Shakespeare and St. John.
For when our Emerson gets on his highest horse, which he does only on two
or three occasions, he finds Shakespeare only a half man, and that it
would take Plato and Manu and Moses and Jesus to complete him.
Shakespeare, he says, rested with the symbol, with the festal beauty of
the world, and did not take the final step, and explore the essence of
things, and ask, "Whence? What? and Whither?" He was not wise for himself;
he did not lead a beautiful, saintly life, but ate, and drank, and
reveled, and affiliated with all manner of persons, and quaffed the cup of
life with gusto and relish. The elect, spotless souls will always look
upon the heat and unconscious optimism of the great poet with deep regret.
But if man would not become emasculated, if human life is to continue, we
must cherish the coarse as well as the fine, the root as well as the top
and flower. The poet-priest in the Emersonian sense has never yet
appeared, and what reason have we to expect him? The poet means life, the
whole of life,—all your ethics and philosophies, and essences and
reason of things, in vital play and fusion, clothed with form and color,
and throbbing with passion: the priest means a part, a thought, a precept;
he means suppression, expurgation, death. To have gone farther than
Shakespeare would have been to cease to be a poet, and to become a mystic
or a seer.
Yet it would be absurd to say, as a leading British literary journal
recently did, that Emerson is not a poet. He is one kind of a poet. He has
written plenty of poems that are as melodious as the hum of a wild bee in
the air,—chords of wild aeolian music.
Undoubtedly his is, on the whole, a bloodless kind of poetry. It suggests
the pale gray matter of the cerebrum rather than flesh and blood. Mr.
William Rossetti has made a suggestive remark about him. He is not so
essentially a poet, says this critic, as he is a Druid that wanders among
the bards, and strikes the harp with even more than bardic stress.
Not in the poetry of any of his contemporaries is there such a burden of
the mystery of things, nor are there such round wind-harp tones, nor lines
so tense and resonant, and blown upon by a breeze from the highest heaven
of thought. In certain respects he has gone beyond any other. He has gone
beyond the symbol to the thing signified. He has emptied poetic forms of
their meaning and made poetry of that. He would fain cut the world up into
stars to shine in the intellectual firmament. He is more and he is less
than the best.
He stands among other poets like a pine-tree amid a forest of oak and
maple. He seems to belong to another race, and to other climes and
conditions. He is great in one direction, up; no dancing leaves, but rapt
needles; never abandonment, never a tossing and careering, never an
avalanche of emotion; the same in sun and snow, scattering his cones, and
with night and obscurity amid his branches. He is moral first and last,
and it is through his impassioned and poetic treatment of the moral law
that he gains such an ascendency over his reader. He says, as for other
things he makes poetry of them, but the moral law makes poetry of him. He
sees in the world only the ethical, but he sees it through the aesthetic
faculty. Hence his page has the double charm of the beautiful and the
good.
II
One of the penalties Emerson pays for his sharp decision, his mental
pertinence and resistance, is the curtailment of his field of vision and
enjoyment. He is one of those men whom the gods drive with blinders on, so
that they see fiercely in only a few directions. Supreme lover as he is of
poetry,—Herrick's poetry,—yet from the whole domain of what
may be called emotional poetry, the poetry of fluid humanity, tallied by
music, he seems to be shut out. This may be seen by his reference to
Shelley in his last book, "Letters and Social Aims," and by his preference
of the metaphysical poet throughout his writings. Wordsworth's famous
"Ode" is, he says, the high-water mark of English literature. What he
seems to value most in Shakespeare is the marvelous wit, the pregnant
sayings. He finds no poet in France, and in his "English Traits" credits
Tennyson with little but melody and color. (In our last readings, do we
not surely come to feel the manly and robust fibre beneath Tennyson's
silken vestments?) He demands of poetry that it be a kind of spiritual
manna, and is at last forced to confess that there are no poets, and that
when such angels do appear, Homer and Milton will be tin pans.
One feels that this will not do, and that health, and wholeness, and the
well-being of man are more in the keeping of Shakespeare than in the hands
of Zoroaster or any of the saints. I doubt if that rarefied air will make
good red blood and plenty of it.
But Emerson makes his point plain, and is not indebted to any of his
teachers for it. It is the burden of all he writes upon the subject. The
long discourse that opens his last volume [footnote: Letters and Social
Aims] has numerous subheadings, as "Poetry," "Imagination,"
"Creation," "Morals," and "Transcendency;" but it's all a plea for
transcendency. I am reminded of the story of an old Indian chief who was
invited to some great dinner where the first course was "succotash." When
the second course was ready the old Indian said he would have a little
more succotash, and when the third was ready he called for more succotash
and so with the fourth and fifth, and on to the end. In like manner
Emerson will have nothing but the "spiritual law" in poetry, and he has an
enormous appetite for that. Let him have it, but why should he be so sure
that mankind all want succotash? Mankind finally comes to care little for
what any poet has to say, but only for what he has to sing.
We want the pearl of thought dissolved in the wine of life. How much
better are sound bones and a good digestion in poetry than all the
philosophy and transcendentalism in the world!
What one comes at last to want is power, mastery; and, whether it be
mastery over the subtleties of the intellect, as in Emerson himself, or
over the passions and the springs of action, as in Shakespeare, or over
our terrors and the awful hobgoblins of hell and Satan, as in Dante, or
over vast masses and spaces of nature and the abysms of aboriginal man, as
in Walt Whitman, what matters it? Are we not refreshed by all? There is
one mastery in Burns, another in Byron, another in Rabelais, and in Victor
Hugo, and in Tennyson; and though the critic has his preferences, though
he affect one more than another, yet who shall say this one is a poet and
that one is not? "There may be any number of supremes," says the master,
and "one by no means contravenes another." Every gas is a vacuum to every
other gas, says Emerson, quoting the scientist; and every great poet
complements and leaves the world free to every other great poet.
Emerson's limitation or fixity is seen also in the fact that he has taken
no new step in his own direction, if indeed another step could be taken in
that direction and not step off. He is a prisoner on his peak. He cannot
get away from the old themes. His later essays are upon essentially the
same subjects as his first. He began by writing on nature, greatness,
manners, art, poetry, and he is still writing on them. He is a husbandman
who practices no rotation of crops, but submits to the exhaustive process
of taking about the same things from his soil year after year. Some
readers think they detect a falling off. It is evident there is not the
same spontaneity, and that the soil has to be more and more stirred and
encouraged, which is not at all to be wondered at.
But if Emerson has not advanced, he has not receded, at least in
conviction and will, which is always the great danger with our bold
prophets. The world in which he lives, the themes upon which he writes,
never become hackneyed to him. They are always fresh and new. He has
hardened, but time has not abated one jot or tittle his courage and hope,—no
cynicism and no relaxing of his hold, no decay of his faith, while the
nobleness of his tone, the chivalry of his utterance, is even more marked
than at first. Better a hundred-fold than his praise of fine manners is
the delicacy and courtesy and the grace of generous breeding displayed on
every page. Why does one grow impatient and vicious when Emerson writes of
fine manners and the punctilios of conventional life, and feel like
kicking into the street every divinity enshrined in the drawing-room? It
is a kind of insult to a man to speak the word in his presence. Purify the
parlors indeed by keeping out the Choctaws, the laughers! Let us go and
hold high carnival for a week, and split the ears of the groundlings with
our "contemptible squeals of joy." And when he makes a dead set at
praising eloquence, I find myself instantly on the side of the old
clergyman he tells of who prayed that he might never be eloquent; or when
he makes the test of a man an intellectual one, as his skill at repartee,
and praises the literary crack shot, and defines manliness to be
readiness, as he does in this last volume and in the preceding one, I am
filled with a perverse envy of all the confused and stammering heroes of
history. Is Washington faltering out a few broken and ungrammatical
sentences, in reply to the vote of thanks of the Virginia legislature,
less manly than the glib tongue in the court-room or in the club that can
hit the mark every time? The test of a wit or of a scholar is one thing;
the test of a man, I take it, is quite another. In this and some other
respects Emerson is well antidoted by Carlyle, who lays the stress on the
opposite qualities, and charges his hero to hold his tongue. But one
cheerfully forgives Emerson the way he puts his thumb-nail on the bores.
He speaks feelingly, and no doubt from as deep an experience as any man in
America.
I really hold Emerson in such high esteem that I think I can safely
indulge myself in a little more fault-finding with him.
I think it must be admitted that he is deficient in sympathy. This
accounts in a measure for his coolness, his self-possession, and that kind
of uncompromising rectitude or inflexibleness that marks his career, and
that he so lauds in his essays. No man is so little liable to be warped or
compromised in any way as the unsympathetic man. Emerson's ideal is the
man who stands firm, who is unmoved, who never laughs, or apologizes, or
deprecates, or makes concessions, or assents through good-nature, or goes
abroad; who is not afraid of giving offense; "who answers you without
supplication in his eye,"—in fact, who stands like a granite pillar
amid the slough of life. You may wrestle with this man, he says, or swim
with him, or lodge in the same chamber with him, or eat at the same table,
and yet he is a thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish with you.
He is a sheer precipice, is this man, and not to be trifled with. You
shrinking, quivering, acquiescing natures, avaunt! You sensitive plants,
you hesitating, indefinite creatures, you uncertain around the edges, you
non-resisting, and you heroes, whose courage is quick, but whose wit is
tardy, make way, and let the human crustacean pass. Emerson is moulded
upon this pattern. It is no mush and milk that you get at this table.﹃A
great man is coming to dine with me; I do not wish to please him; I wish
that he should wish to please me.﹄On the lecture stand he might be of
wood, so far as he is responsive to the moods and feelings of his
auditors. They must come to him; he will not go to them: but they do not
always come. Latterly the people have felt insulted, the lecturer showed
them so little respect. Then, before a promiscuous gathering, and in
stirring and eventful times like ours, what anachronisms most of his
lectures are, even if we take the high ground that they are pearls before
swine! The swine may safely demand some apology of him who offers them
pearls instead of corn.
Emerson's fibre is too fine for large public uses. He is what he is, and
is to be accepted as such, only let us know what he is. He does not
speak to universal conditions, or to human nature in its broadest,
deepest, strongest phases. His thought is far above the great sea level of
humanity, where stand most of the world's masters. He is like one of those
marvelously clear mountain lakes whose water-line runs above all the salt
seas of the globe. He is very precious, taken at his real worth. Why find
fault with the isolation and the remoteness in view of the sky-like purity
and depth?
Still I must go on sounding and exploring him, reporting where I touch
bottom and where I do not. He reaps great advantage from his want of
sympathy. The world makes no inroads upon him through this channel. He is
not distracted by the throng or maybe the mob of emotions that find
entrance here. He shines like a star undimmed by current events. He speaks
as from out the interstellar spaces. 'T is vulgar sympathy makes mortals
of us all, and I think Emerson's poetry finally lacks just that human
coloring and tone, that flesh tint of the heart, which vulgar sympathy
with human life as such imparts.
But after we have made all possible deductions from Emerson, there remains
the fact that he is a living force, and, tried by home standards, a
master. Wherein does the secret of his power lie? He is the prophet and
philosopher of young men. The old man and the man of the world make little
of him, but of the youth who is ripe for him he takes almost an unfair
advantage. One secret of his charm I take to be the instant success with
which he transfers our interest in the romantic, the chivalrous, the
heroic, to the sphere of morals and the intellect. We are let into another
realm unlooked for, where daring and imagination also lead. The secret and
suppressed heart finds a champion. To the young man fed upon the penny
precepts and staple Johnsonianism of English literature, and upon what is
generally doled out in the schools and colleges, it is a surprise; it is a
revelation. A new world opens before him. The nebulae of his spirit are
resolved or shown to be irresolvable. The fixed stars of his inner
firmament are brought immeasurably near. He drops all other books. He will
gaze and wonder. From Locke or Johnson or Wayland to Emerson is like a
change from the school history to the Arabian Nights. There may be
extravagances and some jugglery, but for all that the lesson is a genuine
one, and to us of this generation immense.
Emerson is the knight-errant of the moral sentiment. He leads, in our time
and country, one illustrious division, at least, in the holy crusade of
the affections and the intuitions against the usurpations of tradition and
theological dogma. He marks the flower, the culmination, under American
conditions and in the finer air of the New World, of the reaction begun by
the German philosophers, and passed along by later French and English
thinkers, of man against circumstance, of spirit against form, of the
present against the past. What splendid affirmation, what inspiring
audacity, what glorious egoism, what generous brag, what sacred impiety!
There is an eclat about his words, and a brave challenging of
immense odds, that is like an army with banners. It stirs the blood like a
bugle-call: beauty, bravery, and a sacred cause,—the three things
that win with us always. The first essay is a forlorn hope. See what the
chances are:﹃The world exists for the education of each man.... He should
see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at
home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know
that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the
world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly
read from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and not deny his
conviction that he is the court, and, if England or Egypt have anything to
say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them forever be silent.﹄In
every essay that follows, there are the same great odds and the same
electric call to the youth to face them. It is, indeed, as much a world of
fable and romance that Emerson introduces us to as we get in Homer or
Herodotus. It is true, all true,—true as Arthur and his knights, or
Pilgrim's Progress, and I pity the man who has not tasted its
intoxication, or who can see nothing in it.
The intuitions are the bright band, without armor or shield, that slay the
mailed and bucklered giants of the understanding. Government,
institutions, religions, fall before the glance of the hero's eye. Art and
literature, Shakespeare, Angelo, Aeschylus, are humble suppliants before
you, the king. The commonest fact is idealized, and the whole relation of
man to the universe is thrown into a kind of gigantic perspective. It is
not much to say there is exaggeration; the very start makes Mohammed's
attitude toward the mountain tame. The mountain shall come to
Mohammed, and, in the eyes of all born readers of Emerson, the mountain
does come, and comes with alacrity.
Some shrewd judges apprehend that Emerson is not going to last; basing
their opinion upon the fact, already alluded to, that we outgrow him, or
pass through him as through an experience that we cannot repeat. He is but
a bridge to other things; he gets you over. He is an exceptional fact in
literature, say they, and does not represent lasting or universal
conditions. He is too fine for the rough wear and tear of ages. True, we
do not outgrow Dante, or Cervantes, or Bacon; and I doubt if the
Anglo-Saxon stock at least ever outgrows that king of romancers, Walter
Scott. These men and their like appeal to a larger audience, and in some
respects a more adult one, at least one more likely to be found in every
age and people. Their achievement was more from the common level of human
nature than are Emerson's astonishing paradoxes. Yet I believe his work
has the seal of immortality upon it as much as that of any of them. No
doubt he has a meaning to us now and in this country that will be lost to
succeeding time. His religious significance will not be so important to
the next generation. He is being or has been so completely absorbed by his
times, that readers and hearers hereafter will get him from a thousand
sources, or his contribution will become the common property of the race.
All the masters probably had some peculiar import or tie to their
contemporaries that we at a distance miss. It is thought by scholars that
we have lost the key, or one key, to Dante, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare,—the
key or the insight that people living under the same roof get of each
other.
But, aside from and over and above everything else, Emerson appeals to
youth and to genius. If you have these, you will understand him and
delight in him; if not, or neither of them, you will make little of him.
And I do not see why this should not be just as true any time hence as at
present.
X THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE
TO WALT WHITMAN
"'I, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.'"
CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.
"They say that thou art sick, art growing old,
Thou Poet of unconquerable health,
With youth far-stretching, through the golden wealth
Of autumn, to Death's frostful, friendly cold.
The never-blenching eyes, that did behold
Life's fair and foul, with measureless content,
And gaze ne'er sated, saddened as they bent
Over the dying soldier in the fold
Of thy large comrade love;—then broke the tear!
War-dream, field-vigil, the bequeathed kiss,
Have brought old age to thee; yet, Master, now,
Cease not thy song to us; lest we should miss
A death-chant of indomitable cheer,
Blown as a gale from God;—oh sing it thou!"
ARRAN LEIGH (England).
I
Whoever has witnessed the flight of any of the great birds, as the eagle,
the condor, the sea-gulls, the proud hawks, has perhaps felt that the
poetic suggestion of the feathered tribes is not all confined to the sweet
and tiny songsters,—the thrushes, canaries, and mockingbirds of the
groves and orchards, or of the gilded cage in my lady's chamber. It is by
some such analogy that I would indicate the character of the poetry I am
about to discuss, compared with that of the more popular and melodious
singer,—the poetry of the strong wing and the daring flight.
Well and profoundly has a Danish critic said, in "For Ide og Virkelighed"
("For the Idea and the Reality"), a Copenhagen magazine:—
"It may be candidly admitted that the American poet has not the elegance,
special melody, nor recherché aroma of the accepted poets of Europe
or his own country; but his compass and general harmony are infinitely
greater. The sweetness and spice, the poetic ennui, the tender
longings, the exquisite art-finish of those choice poets are mainly unseen
and unmet in him,—perhaps because he cannot achieve them, more
likely because he disdains them. But there is an electric living soul
in his poetry, far more fermenting and bracing. His wings do not glitter
in their movement from rich and varicolored plumage, nor are his notes
those of the accustomed song-birds; but his flight is the flight of the
eagle."
Yes, there is not only the delighting of the ear with the outpouring of
sweetest melody and its lessons, but there is the delighting of the eye
and soul through that soaring and circling in the vast empyrean of "a
strong bird on pinions free,"—lessons of freedom, power, grace, and
spiritual suggestion,—vast, unparalleled, formless lessons.
It is now upwards of twenty years since Walt Whitman printed (in 1855) his
first thin beginning volume of "Leaves of Grass;" and, holding him to the
test which he himself early proclaimed, namely,﹃that the proof of the
poet shall be sternly deferred till his country has absorb'd him as
affectionately as he has absorb'd it,﹄he is yet on trial, yet makes his
appeal to an indifferent or to a scornful audience. That his complete
absorption, however, by his own country and by the world, is ultimately to
take place, is one of the beliefs that grows stronger and stronger within
me as time passes, and I suppose it is with a hope to help forward this
absorption that I write of him now. Only here and there has he yet
effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and more virile minds. But
considering the unparalleled audacity of his undertaking, and the absence
in most critics and readers of anything like full-grown and robust
aesthetic perception, the wonder really is not that he should have made
such slow progress, but that he should have gained any foothold at all.
The whole literary technique of the race for the last two hundred
years has been squarely against him, laying, as it does, the emphasis upon
form and scholarly endowments instead of upon aboriginal power and
manhood.
My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, has doubtless been much
facilitated by contact—talks, meals, and jaunts—with him,
stretching through a decade of years, and by seeing how everything in his
personnel was resumed and carried forward in his literary
expression; in fact, how the one was a living commentary upon the other.
After the test of time, nothing goes home like the test of actual
intimacy; and to tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine, fresh,
magnetic personality, making you love him and want always to be with him,
were to tell me that my whole past life is a deception, and all the
impression of my perceptive faculties a fraud. I have studied him as I
have studied the birds, and have found that the nearer I got to him the
more I saw. Nothing about a first-class man can be overlooked; he is to be
studied in every feature,—in his physiology and phrenology, in the
shape of his head, in his brow, his eye, his glance, his nose, his ear
(the ear is as indicative in a man as in a horse), his voice. In Whitman
all these things are remarkably striking and suggestive. His face exhibits
a rare combination of harmony and sweetness with strength,—strength
like the vaults and piers of the Roman architecture. Sculptor never carved
a finer ear or a more imaginative brow. Then his heavy-lidded, absorbing
eye, his sympathetic voice, and the impression which he makes of starting
from the broad bases of the universal human traits. (If Whitman was grand
in his physical and perfect health, I think him far more so now (1877),
cheerfully mastering paralysis, penury, and old age.) You know, on seeing
the man and becoming familiar with his presence, that, if he achieve the
height at all, it will be from where every man stands, and not from some
special genius, or exceptional and adventitious point. He does not make
the impression of the scholar or artist or littérateur, but such as
you would imagine the antique heroes to make,—that of a
sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic man, with, further
than that, a look about him that is best suggested by the word elemental
or cosmical. It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau to write, after an
hour's interview, that he suggested "something a little more than human."
In fact, the main clew to Walt Whitman's life and personality, and the
expression of them in his poems, is to be found in about the largest
emotional element that has appeared anywhere. This, if not controlled by a
potent rational balance, would either have tossed him helplessly forever,
or wrecked him as disastrously as ever storm and gale drove ship to ruin.
These volcanic emotional fires appear everywhere in his books; and it is
really these, aroused to intense activity and unnatural strain during the
four years of the war and his persistent labors in the hospitals, that
have resulted in his illness and paralysis since.
It has been impossible, I say, to resist these personal impressions and
magnetisms, and impossible with me not to follow them up in the poems, in
doing which I found that his "Leaves of Grass" was really the drama of
himself, played upon various and successive stages of nature, history,
passion, experience, patriotism, and that he had not made, nor had he
intended to make, mere excellent "poems," tunes, statues, or statuettes,
in the ordinary sense.
Before the man's complete acceptance and assimilation by America, he may
have to be first passed down through the minds of critics and
commentators, and given to the people with some of his rank new quality
taken off,—a quality like that which adheres to objects in the open
air, and makes them either forbidding or attractive, as one's mood is
healthful and robust or feeble and languid. The processes are silently at
work. Already seen from a distance, and from other atmospheres and
surroundings, he assumes magnitude and orbic coherence; for in curious
contrast to the general denial of Whitman in this country (though he has
more lovers and admirers here than is generally believed) stands the
reception accorded him in Europe. The poets there, almost without
exception, recognize his transcendent quality, the men of science his
thorough scientific basis, the republicans his inborn democracy, and all
his towering picturesque personality and modernness. Professor Clifford
says he is more thoroughly in harmony with the spirit and letter of
advanced scientism than any other living poet. Professor Tyrrell and Mr.
Symonds find him eminently Greek, in the sense in which to be natural and
"self-regulated by the law of perfect health" is to be Greek. The French
"Revue des Deux Mondes" pronounces his war poems the most vivid, the most
humanly passionate, and the most modern, of all the verse of the
nineteenth century. Freiligrath translated him into German, and hailed him
as the founder of a new democratic and modern order of poetry, greater
than the old. But I do not propose to go over the whole list here; I only
wish to indicate that the absorption is well commenced abroad, and that
probably her poet will at last reach America by way of those far-off,
roundabout channels. The old mother will first masticate and moisten the
food which is still too tough for her offspring.
When I first fell in with "Leaves of Grass," I was taken by isolated
passages scattered here and there through the poems; these I seized upon,
and gave myself no concern about the rest. Single lines in it often went
to the bottom of the questions that were vexing me. The following, though
less here than when encountered in the frame of mind which the poet begets
in you, curiously settled and stratified a certain range of turbid,
fluctuating inquiry:—
"There was never any more inception than there is now,—
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."
These lines, also, early had an attraction for me I could not define, and
were of great service:—
"Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
The whole universe indicates that it is good,
The past and the present indicate that it is good."
In the following episode, too, there was to me something far deeper than
the words or the story:—
"The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside;
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the wood-pile;
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in, and assured him,
And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and
bruis'd feet,
And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some
coarse clean clothes;
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles:
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd North;
(I had him sit next me at table—my firelock lean'd in the corner.)"
But of the book as a whole I could form no adequate conception, and it was
not for many years, and after I had known the poet himself, as already
stated, that I saw in it a teeming, rushing globe well worthy my best days
and strength to surround and comprehend.
One thing that early took me in the poems was (as before alluded to) the
tremendous personal force back of them, and felt through them as the sun
through vapor; not merely intellectual grasp or push, but a warm,
breathing, towering, magnetic Presence that there was no escape from.
Another fact I was quick to perceive, namely, that this man had almost in
excess a quality in which every current poet was lacking,—I mean the
faculty of being in entire sympathy with actual nature, and the objects;
and shows of nature, and of rude, abysmal man; and appalling directness of
utterance therefrom, at first hand, without any intermediate agency or
modification.
The influence of books and works of art upon an author may be seen in all
respectable writers. If knowledge alone made literature, or culture
genius, there would be no dearth of these things among the moderns. But I
feel bound to say that there is something higher and deeper than the
influence or perusal of any or all books, or all other productions of
genius,—a quality of information which the masters can never impart,
and which all the libraries do not hold. This is the absorption by an
author, previous to becoming so, of the spirit of nature, through the
visible objects of the universe, and his affiliation with them
subjectively and objectively. Not more surely is the blood quickened and
purified by contact with the unbreathed air than is the spirit of man
vitalized and made strong by intercourse with the real things of the
earth. The calm, all-permitting, wordless spirit of nature,—yet so
eloquent to him who hath ears to hear! The sunrise, the heaving sea, the
woods and mountains, the storm and the whistling winds, the gentle summer
day, the winter sights and sounds, the night and the high dome of stars,—to
have really perused these, especially from childhood onward, till what
there is in them, so impossible to define, finds its full mate and echo in
the mind,—this only is the lore which breathes the breath of life
into all the rest. Without it, literary productions may have the superb
beauty of statues, but with it only can they have the beauty of life.
I was never troubled at all by what the critics called Whitman's want of
art, or his violation of art. I saw that he at once designedly swept away
all which the said critics have commonly meant by that term. The dominant
impression was of the living presence and voice. He would have no
curtains, he said, not the finest, between himself and his reader; and in
thus bringing me face to face with his subject I perceived he not only did
not escape conventional art, but I perceived an enlarged, enfranchised art
in this very abnegation of art. "When half-gods go, whole gods arrive." It
was obvious to me that the new style gained more than it lost, and that in
this fullest operatic launching forth of the voice, though it sounded
strange at first, and required the ear to get used to it, there might be
quite as much science, and a good deal more power, than in the tuneful but
constricted measures we were accustomed to.
To the eye the page of the new poet presented about the same contrast with
the page of the popular poets that trees and the free, unbidden growths of
nature do with a carefully clipped hedge; and to the spirit the contrast
was about the same. The hedge is the more studiedly and obviously
beautiful, but, ah! there is a kind of beauty and satisfaction in trees
that one would not care to lose. There are symmetry and proportion in the
sonnet, but to me there is something I would not exchange for them in the
wild swing and balance of many free and unrhymed passages in Shakespeare;
like the one, for instance, in which these lines occur:—
"To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round
About the pendent world."
Here is the spontaneous grace and symmetry of a forest tree, or a soughing
mass of foliage.
And this passage from my poet I do not think could be improved by the
verse-maker's art:—
"This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded
heaven,
And I said to my Spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs
and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be
fill'd and satisfied then?
And my Spirit said, No, we but level that lift, to pass and continue
beyond."
Such breaking with the routine poetic, and with the grammar of verse, was
of course a dangerous experiment, and threw the composer absolutely upon
his intrinsic merits, upon his innately poetic and rhythmic quality. He
must stand or fall by these alone, since he discarded all artificial, all
adventitious helps. If interior, spontaneous rhythm could not be relied
on, and the natural music and flexibility of language, then there was
nothing to shield the ear from the pitiless hail of words,—not one
softly padded verse anywhere.
All poets, except those of the very first order, owe immensely to the
form, the art, the stereotyped metres, and stock figures they find ready
to hand. The form is suggestive,—it invites and aids expression, and
lends itself readily, like fashion, to conceal, or extenuate, or eke out
poverty of thought and feeling in the verse. The poet can "cut and cover,"
as the farmer says, in a way the prose-writer never can, nor one whose
form is essentially prose, like Whitman's.
I, too, love to see the forms worthily used, as they always are by the
master; and I have no expectation that they are going out of fashion right
away. A great deal of poetry that serves, and helps sweeten one's cup,
would be impossible without them,—would be nothing when separated
from them. It is for the ear, and for the sense of tune and of carefully
carved and modeled forms, and is not meant to arouse the soul with the
taste of power, and to start off on journeys for itself. But the great
inspired utterances, like the Bible,—what would they gain by being
cast in the moulds of metrical verse? In all that concerns art, viewed
from any high standpoint,—proportion, continence, self-control,
unfaltering adherence to natural standards, subordination of parts,
perfect adjustment of the means to the end, obedience to inward law, no
trifling, no levity, no straining after effect, impartially attending to
the back and loins as well as to the head, and even holding toward his
subject an attitude of perfect acceptance and equality,—principles
of art to which alone the great spirits are amenable,—in all these
respects, I say, this poet is as true as an orb in astronomy.
To his literary expression pitched on scales of such unprecedented breadth
and loftiness, the contrast of his personal life comes in with a foil of
curious homeliness and simplicity. Perhaps never before has the absolute
and average commonness of humanity been so steadily and
unaffectedly adhered to. I give here a glimpse of him in Washington on a
Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the war, one summer day at
sundown. The car is crowded and suffocatingly hot, with many passengers on
the rear platform, and among them a bearded, florid-faced man, elderly but
agile, resting against the dash, by the side of the young conductor, and
evidently his intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim white hat. Among
the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of the working class,
with two children, has had trouble all the way with the youngest, a
strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen months, who bids
fair to worry the mother completely out, besides becoming a howling
nuisance to everybody. As the car tugs around Capitol Hill the young one
is more demoniac than ever, and the flushed and perspiring mother is just
ready to burst into tears with weariness and vexation. The car stops at
the top of the hill to let off most of the rear platform passengers, and
the white-hatted man reaches inside, and, gently but firmly disengaging
the babe from its stifling place in the mother's arms, takes it in his
own, and out in the air. The astonished and excited child, partly in fear,
partly in satisfaction at the change, stops its screaming, and, as the man
adjusts it more securely to his breast, plants its chubby hands against
him, and, pushing off as far as it can, gives a good long look squarely in
his face,—then, as if satisfied, snuggles down with its head on his
neck, and in less than a minute is sound and peacefully asleep without
another whimper, utterly fagged out. A square or so more and the
conductor, who has had an unusually hard and uninterrupted day's work,
gets off for his first meal and relief since morning. And now the
white-hatted man, holding the slumbering babe, also acts as conductor the
rest of the distance, keeping his eye on the passengers inside, who have
by this time thinned out greatly. He makes a very good conductor, too,
pulling the bell to stop or to go on as needed, and seems to enjoy the
occupation. The babe meanwhile rests its fat cheeks close on his neck and
gray beard, one of his arms vigilantly surrounding it, while the other
signals, from time to time, with the strap; and the flushed mother inside
has a good half hour to breathe, and to cool and recover herself.
II
No poem of our day dates and locates itself as absolutely as﹃Leaves of
Grass;﹄but suppose it had been written three or four centuries ago, and
had located itself in mediaeval Europe, and was now first brought to
light, together with a history of Walt Whitman's simple and disinterested
life, can there be any doubt about the cackling that would at once break
out in the whole brood of critics over the golden egg that had been
uncovered? This reckon would be a favorite passage with all:—
"You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean;
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers;
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;
We must have a turn together—I undress—hurry me out of sight of
the land;
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse;
Dash me with amorous wet—I can repay you.
"Sea of stretch'd ground-swells!
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths!
Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovel'd yet always ready graves!
Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!
I am integral with you—I too am of one phase, and of all phases."
This other passage would afford many a text for the moralists and
essayists:—
"Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, scholarship,
and the like;
To me, all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them,
except as it results to their Bodies and Souls,
So that often, to me, they appear gaunt and naked,
And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself
or herself,
And of each one, the core of life, namely happiness, is full of
the rotten excrement of maggots;
And often, to me, those men and women pass unwittingly the true
realities of life, and go toward false realities,
And often, to me, they are alive after what custom has served
them, but nothing more,
And often, to me, they are sad, hasty, unwaked somnambules,
walking the dusk."
Ah, Time, you enchantress! what tricks you play with us! The old is
already proved,—the past and the distant hold nothing but the
beautiful.
Or let us take another view. Suppose Walt Whitman had never existed, and
some bold essayist, like Mr. Higginson or Matthew Arnold, had projected
him in abstract, outlined him on a scholarly ideal background, formulated
and put in harmless critical periods the principles of art which he
illustrates, and which are the inevitable logic of his poems,—said
essayist would have won great applause. "Yes, indeed, that were a poet to
cherish; fill those shoes and you have a god."
How different a critic's account of Shakespeare from Shakespeare himself,—the
difference between the hewn or sawed timber and the living tree! A few
years ago we had here a lecturer from over seas, who gave to our
well-dressed audiences the high, moral, and intellectual statement of the
poet Burns. It was very fine, and people were greatly pleased, vastly more
so, I fear, than they were with Burns himself. Indeed, I could not help
wondering how many of those appreciative listeners had any original
satisfaction in the Scotch poet at first hand, or would have accepted him
had he been their neighbor and fellow-citizen. But as he filtered through
the scholarly mind in trickling drops, oh, he was so sweet!
Everybody stirred with satisfaction as the lecturer said: "When literature
becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and
copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that
dying literature a man must be found not educated under its influence."
I applauded with the rest, for it was a bold saying; but I could not help
thinking how that theory, brought home to ourselves and illustrated in a
living example, would have sent that nodding millinery and faultless
tailory flying downstairs, as at an alarm of fire.
One great service of Walt Whitman is that he exerts a tremendous influence
to bring the race up on this nether side,—to place the emotional,
the assimilative, the sympathetic, the spontaneous, intuitive man, the man
of the fluids and of the affections, flush with the intellectual man. That
we moderns have fallen behind here is unquestionable, and we in this
country more than the Old World peoples. All the works of Whitman, prose
and verse, are embosomed in a sea of emotional humanity, and they float
deeper than they show; there is far more in what they necessitate and
imply than in what they say.
It is not so much of fatty degeneration that we are in danger in America,
but of calcareous. The fluids, moral and physical, are evaporating;
surfaces are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of flint in the veins
and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp and hard, nothing is held in
solution, all is precipitated in well-defined ideas and opinions.
But when I think of the type of character planted and developed by my
poet, I think of a man or a woman rich above all things in the genial
human attributes, one "nine times folded" in an atmosphere of tenderest,
most considerate humanity,—an atmosphere warm with the breath of a
tropic heart, that makes your buds of affection and of genius start and
unfold like a south wind in May. Your intercourse with such a character is
not merely intellectual; it is deeper and better than that. Walter Scott
carried such a fund of sympathy and goodwill that even the animals found
fellowship with him, and the pigs understood his great heart.
It was the large endowment of Whitman, in his own character in this
respect, that made his services in the army hospitals during the war so
ministering and effective, and that renders his "Drum-Taps" the tenderest
and most deeply yearning and sorrowful expression of the human heart in
poetry that ever war called forth. Indeed, from my own point of view,
there is no false or dangerous tendency among us, in life or in letters,
that this poet does not offset and correct. Fret and chafe as much as we
will, we are bound to gravitate, more or less, toward this mountain, and
feel its bracing, rugged air.
Without a certain self-surrender there is no greatness possible in
literature, any more than in religion, or in anything else. It is always a
trait of the master that he is not afraid of being compromised by the
company he keeps. He is the central and main fact in any company. Nothing
so lowly but he will do it reverence; nothing so high but he can stand in
its presence. His theme is the river, and he the ample and willing
channel. Little natures love to disparage and take down; they do it in
self-defense; but the master gives you all, and more than your due.
Whitman does not stand aloof, superior, a priest or a critic: he abandons
himself to all the strong human currents; he enters into and affiliates
with every phase of life; he bestows himself royally upon whoever and
whatever will receive him. There is no competition between himself and his
subject; he is not afraid of over-praising, or making too much of the
commonest individual. What exalts others exalts him.
We have had great help in Emerson in certain ways,—first-class
service. He probes the conscience and the moral purpose as few men have
done, and gives much needed stimulus there. But, after him, the need is
all the more pressing for a broad, powerful, opulent, human personality to
absorb these ideals, and to make something more of them than fine sayings.
With Emerson alone we are rich in sunlight, but poor in rain and dew,—poor,
too, in soil, and in the moist, gestating earth principle. Emerson's
tendency is not to broaden and enrich, but to concentrate and refine.
Then, is there not an excessive modesty, without warrant in philosophy or
nature, dwindling us in this country, drying us up in the viscera? Is
there not a decay—a deliberate, strange abnegation and dread—of
sane sexuality, of maternity and paternity, among us, and in our literary
ideals and social types of men and women? For myself, I welcome any
evidence to the contrary, or any evidence that deeper and counteracting
agencies are at work, as unspeakably precious. I do not know where this
evidence is furnished in such ample measure as in the pages of Walt
Whitman. The great lesson of nature, I take it, is that a sane sensuality
must be preserved at all hazards, and this, it seems to me, is also the
great lesson of his writings. The point is fully settled in him that,
however they may have been held in abeyance or restricted to other
channels, there is still sap and fecundity, and depth of virgin soil in
the race, sufficient to produce a man of the largest mould and the most
audacious and unconquerable egotism, and on a plane the last to be reached
by these qualities; a man of antique stature, of Greek fibre and gripe,
with science and the modern added, without abating one jot or tittle of
his native force, adhesiveness, Americanism, and democracy.
As I have already hinted, Whitman has met with by far his amplest
acceptance and appreciation in Europe. There is good reason for this,
though it is not what has been generally claimed, namely, that the
cultivated classes of Europe are surfeited with respectability, half dead
with ennui and routine, and find an agreeable change in the daring
unconventionality of the new poet. For the fact is, it is not the old and
jaded minds of London, or Paris, or Dublin, or Copenhagen, that have
acknowledged him, but the fresh, eager, young minds. Nine tenths of his
admirers there are the sturdiest men in the fields of art, science, and
literature.
In many respects, as a race, we Americans have been pampered and spoiled;
we have been brought up on sweets. I suppose that, speaking literally, no
people under the sun consume so much confectionery, so much pastry and
cake, or indulge in so many gassy and sugared drinks. The soda-fountain,
with its syrups, has got into literature, and furnishes the popular
standard of poetry. The old heroic stamina of our ancestors, that craved
the bitter but nourishing home-brewed, has died out, and in its place
there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be pampered and cosseted. Among
educated people here there is a mania for the bleached, the
double-refined,—white houses, white china, white marble, and white
skins. We take the bone and sinew out of the flour in order to have white
bread, and are bolting our literature as fast as possible.
It is for these and kindred reasons that Walt Whitman is more read abroad
than in his own country. It is on the rank, human, and emotional side—sex,
magnetism, health, physique,—that he is so full. Then his
receptivity and assimilative powers are enormous, and he demands these in
his reader. In fact, his poems are physiological as much as they are
intellectual. They radiate from his entire being, and are charged to
repletion with that blended quality of mind and body—psychic and
physiologic—which the living form and presence send forth. Never
before in poetry has the body received such ennoblement. The great theme
is IDENTITY, and identity comes through the body; and all that pertains to
the body, the poet teaches, is entailed upon the spirit. In his rapt gaze,
the body and the soul are one, and what debases the one debases the other.
Hence he glorifies the body. Not more ardently and purely did the great
sculptors of antiquity carve it in the enduring marble than this poet has
celebrated it in his masculine and flowing lines. The bearing of his work
in this direction is invaluable. Well has it been said that the man or the
woman who has "Leaves of Grass" for a daily companion will be under the
constant, invisible influence of sanity, cleanliness, strength, and a
gradual severance from all that corrupts and makes morbid and mean.
In regard to the unity and construction of the poems, the reader sooner or
later discovers the true solution to be, that the dependence, cohesion,
and final reconciliation of the whole are in the Personality of the poet
himself. As in Shakespeare everything is strung upon the plot, the play,
and loses when separated from it, so in this poet every line and sentence
refers to and necessitates the Personality behind it, and derives its
chief significance therefrom. In other words, "Leaves of Grass" is
essentially a dramatic poem, a free representation of man in his relation
to the outward world,—the play, the interchanges between him and it,
apart from social and artificial considerations,—in which we discern
the central purpose or thought to be for every man and woman his or her
Individuality, and around that, Nationality. To show rather than to tell,—to
body forth as in a play how these arise and blend; how the man is
developed and recruited, his spirit's descent; how he walks through
materials absorbing and conquering them; how he confronts the immensities
of time and space; where are the true sources of his power, the soul's
real riches,—that which﹃adheres and goes forward and is not dropped
by death;﹄how he is all defined and published and made certain through
his body; the value of health and physique; the great solvent, Sympathy,—to
show the need of larger and fresher types in art and in life, and then how
the state is compacted, and how the democratic idea is ample and
composite, and cannot fail us,—to show all this, I say, not as in a
lecture or a critique, but suggestively and inferentially,—to work
it out freely and picturesquely, with endless variations, with person and
picture and parable and adventure, is the lesson and object of﹃Leaves of
Grass.﹄From the first line, where the poet says,
"I loafe and invite my Soul,"
to the last, all is movement and fusion,—all is clothed in flesh and
blood. The scene changes, the curtain rises and falls, but the theme is
still Man,—his opportunities, his relations, his past, his future,
his sex, his pride in himself, his omnivorousness, his "great hands," his
yearning heart, his seething brain, the abysmal depths that underlie him
and open from him, all illustrated in the poet's own character,—he
the chief actor always. His personality directly facing you, and with its
eye steadily upon you, runs through every page, spans all the details, and
rounds and completes them, and compactly holds them. This gives the form
and the art conception, and gives homogeneousness.
When Tennyson sends out a poem, it is perfect, like an apple or a peach;
slowly wrought out and dismissed, it drops from his boughs holding a
conception or an idea that spheres it and makes it whole. It is completed,
distinct, and separate,—might be his, or might be any man's. It
carries his quality, but it is a thing of itself, and centres and depends
upon itself. Whether or not the world will hereafter consent, as in the
past, to call only beautiful creations of this sort poems, remains
to be seen. But this is certainly not what Walt Whitman does, or aims to
do, except in a few cases. He completes no poems apart and separate from
himself, and his pages abound in hints to that effect:—
"Let others finish specimens—I never finish specimens;
I shower them by exhaustless laws, as Nature does, fresh
and modern continually."
His lines are pulsations, thrills, waves of force, indefinite dynamics,
formless, constantly emanating from the living centre, and they carry the
quality of the author's personal presence with them in a way that is
unprecedented in literature.
Occasionally there is a poem or a short piece that detaches itself, and
assumes something like ejaculatory and statuesque proportion, as﹃O
Captain, my Captain,﹄"Pioneers," "Beat, Beat, Drums," and others in
"Drum-Taps;" but all the great poems, like "Walt Whitman,"﹃Song of the
Open Road,﹄"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "To Working Men," "Sleep-Chasings,"
etc., are out-flamings, out-rushings, of the pent fires of the poet's
soul. The first-named poem, which is the seething, dazzling sun of his
subsequent poetic system, shoots in rapid succession waves of almost
consuming energy. It is indeed a central orb of fiercest light and heat,
swept by wild storms of emotion, but at the same time of sane and
beneficent potentiality. Neither in it nor in either of the others is
there the building-up of a fair verbal structure, a symmetrical piece of
mechanism, whose last stone is implied and necessitated in the first.
"The critic's great error," says Heine, "lies in asking, 'What ought the
artist to do?' It would be far more correct to ask, 'What does the artist
intend?'"
It is probably partly because his field is so large, his demands so
exacting, his method so new (necessarily so), and from the whole standard
of the poems being what I may call an astronomical one, that the critics
complain so generally of want of form in him. And the critics are right
enough, as far as their objection goes. There is no deliberate form here,
any more than there is in the forces of nature. Shall we say, then, that
nothing but the void exists? The void is filled by a Presence. There is a
controlling, directing, overarching will in every page, every verse, that
there is no escape from. Design and purpose, natural selection, growth,
culmination, are just as pronounced as in any poet.
There is a want of form in the unfinished statue, because it is struggling
into form; it is nothing without form; but there is no want of form in the
elemental laws and effusions,—in fire, or water, or rain, or dew, or
the smell of the shore or the plunging waves. And may there not be the
analogue of this in literature,—a potent, quickening, exhilarating
quality in words, apart from and without any consideration of constructive
form? Under the influence of the expansive, creative force that plays upon
me from these pages, like sunlight or gravitation, the question of form
never comes up, because I do not for one moment escape the eye, the source
from which the power and action emanate.
I know that Walt Whitman has written many passages with reference far more
to their position, interpretation, and scanning ages hence, than for
current reading. Much of his material is too near us; it needs time. Seen
through the vista of long years, perhaps centuries, it will assume quite
different hues. Perhaps those long lists of trades, tools, and occupations
would not be so repellent if we could read them, as we read Homer's
catalogue of the ships, through the retrospect of ages. They are justified
in the poem aside from their historic value, because they are alive and
full of action,—panoramas of the whole mechanical and industrial
life of America, north, east, south, west,—bits of scenery,
bird's-eye views, glimpses of moving figures, caught as by a flash,
characteristic touches indoors and out, all passing in quick succession
before you. They have in the fullest measure what Lessing demands in
poetry,—the quality of ebbing and flowing action, as distinct from
the dead water of description; they are thoroughly dramatic, fused,
pliant, and obedient to the poet's will. No glamour is thrown over them,
no wash of sentiment; and if they have not the charm of novelty and
distance, why, that is an accident that bars them in a measure to us, but
not to the future. Very frequently in these lists or enumerations of
objects, actions, shows, there are sure to occur lines of perfect
description:—
"Where the heifers browse—where geese nip their food with short
jerks;
Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome
prairie;
Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles
far and near;
Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon;
Where the katydid works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree
over the well."
"Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown
apprentices,
The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log, shaping it toward
the shape of a mast,
The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,
The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,
The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes."
"Always these compact lands—lands tied at the hips with the belt
stringing the huge oval lakes."
"Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd!—the diverse!
the compact!"
Tried by the standards of the perfect statuesque poems, these pages will
indeed seem strange enough; but viewed as a part of the poetic compend of
America, the swift gathering-in, from her wide-spreading, multitudinous,
material life, of traits and points and suggestions that belong here and
are characteristic, they have their value. The poet casts his great seine
into events and doings and material progress, and these are some of the
fish, not all beautiful by any means, but all terribly alive, and all
native to these waters.
In the "Carol of Occupations" occur, too, those formidable inventories of
the more heavy and coarsegrained trades and tools that few if any readers
have been able to stand before, and that have given the scoffers and
caricaturists their favorite weapons. If you detach a page of these and
ask,﹃Is it poetry? have the 'hog-hook,' the 'killing-hammer,' 'the
cutter's cleaver,' 'the packer's maul,' met with a change of heart, and
been converted into celestial cutlery?﹄I answer, No, they are as barren
of poetry as a desert is of grass; but in their place in the poem, and in
the collection, they serve as masses of shade or neutral color in
pictures, or in nature, or in character,—a negative service, but
still indispensable. The point, the moral of the poem, is really backed up
and driven home by this list. The poet is determined there shall be no
mistake about it. He will not put in the dainty and pretty things merely,—he
will put in the coarse and common things also, and he swells the list till
even his robust muse begins to look uneasy. Remember, too, that Whitman
declaredly writes the lyrics of America, of the masses, of democracy, and
of the practical labor of mechanics, boatmen, and farmers:—
"The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are;
All doctrines, all politics and civilization, exude from you;
All sculpture and monuments, and anything inscribed anywhere, are
tallied in you;
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
reach, is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same:
If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they
all be?
The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and plays would
be vacuums.
"All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
the arches and cornices?)
"All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the
instruments;
It is not the violins and the cornets—it is not the oboe, nor
the beating drums—nor the score of the baritone singer singing
his sweet romanza—nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of
the women's chorus,
It is nearer and farther than they."
Out of this same spirit of reverence for man and all that pertains
essentially to him, and the steady ignoring of conventional and social
distinctions and prohibitions, and on the same plane as the universal
brotherhood of the poems, come those passages in "Leaves of Grass" that
have caused so much abuse and fury,—the allusions to sexual acts and
organs,—the momentary contemplation of man as the perpetuator of his
species. Many good judges, who have followed Whitman thus far, stop here
and refuse their concurrence. But if the poet has failed in this part, he
has failed in the rest. It is of a piece with the whole. He has felt in
his way the same necessity as that which makes the anatomist or the
physiologist not pass by, or neglect, or falsify, the loins of his typical
personage. All the passages and allusions that come under this head have a
scientific coldness and purity, but differ from science, as poetry always
must differ, in being alive and sympathetic, instead of dead and analytic.
There is nothing of the forbidden here, none of those sweet morsels that
we love to roll under the tongue, such as are found in Byron and
Shakespeare, and even in austere Dante. If the fact is not lifted up and
redeemed by the solemn and far-reaching laws of maternity and paternity,
through which the poet alone contemplates it, then it is irredeemable, and
one side of our nature is intrinsically vulgar and mean.
Again: Out of all the full-grown, first-class poems, no matter what their
plot or theme, emerges a sample of Man, each after its kind, its period,
its nationality, its antecedents. The vast and cumbrous Hindu epics
contribute their special types of both man and woman, impossible except
from far-off Asia and Asian antiquity. Out of Homer, after all his
gorgeous action and events, the distinct personal identity, the heroic and
warlike chieftain of Hellas only permanently remains. In the same way,
when the fire and fervor of Shakespeare's plots and passions subside, the
special feudal personality, as lord or gentleman, still towers in undying
vitality. Even the Sacred Writings themselves, considered as the first
great poems, leave on record, out of all the rest, the portraiture of a
characteristic Oriental Man. Far different from these (and yet, as he
says, "the same old countenance pensively looking forth," and "the same
red running blood"), "Leaves of Grass" and "Two Rivulets" also bring their
contribution; nay, behind every page that is the main purport,—to
outline a New World Man and a New World Woman, modern, complete,
democratic, not only fully and nobly intellectual and spiritual, but in
the same measure physical, emotional, and even fully and nobly carnal.
An acute person once said to me, "As I read and re-read these poems, I
more and more think their inevitable result in time must be to produce
'A race of splendid and savage old men,'
of course dominated by moral and spiritual laws, but with volcanoes of
force always alive beneath the surface."
And still again: One of the questions to be put to any poem assuming a
first-class importance among us—and I especially invite this inquiry
toward "Leaves of Grass"—is, How far is this work consistent with,
and the outcome of, that something which secures to the race ascendency,
empire, and perpetuity? There is in every dominant people a germ, a
quality, an expansive force, that, no matter how it is overlaid, gives
them their push and their hold upon existence,—writes their history
upon the earth, and stamps their imprint upon the age. To what extent is
your masterpiece the standard-bearer of this quality,—helping the
race to victory? helping me to be more myself than I otherwise would?
III
Not the least of my poet's successes is in his thorough assimilation of
the modern sciences, transmuting them into strong poetic nutriment, and in
the extent to which all his main poems are grounded in the deepest
principles of modern philosophical inquiry.
Nearly all the old literatures may be said to have been founded upon
fable, and upon a basis and even superstructure of ignorance, that,
however charming it may be, we have not now got, and could not keep if we
had. The bump of wonder and the feeling of the marvelous,—a kind of
half-pleasing fear, like that of children in the dark or in the woods,—were
largely operative with the old poets, and I believe are necessary to any
eminent success in this field; but they seem nearly to have died out of
the modern mind, like organs there is no longer any use for. The poetic
temperament has not yet adjusted itself to the new lights, to science, and
to the vast fields and expanses opened up in the physical cosmos by
astronomy and geology, and in the spiritual or intellectual world by the
great German metaphysicians. The staple of a large share of our poetic
literature is yet mainly the result of the long age of fable and myth that
now lies behind us. "Leaves of Grass" is, perhaps, the first serious and
large attempt at an expression in poetry of a knowledge of the earth as
one of the orbs, and of man as a microcosm of the whole, and to give to
the imagination these new and true fields of wonder and romance. In it
fable and superstition are at an end, priestcraft is at an end, skepticism
and doubt are at an end, with all the misgivings and dark forebodings that
have dogged the human mind since it began to relax its hold upon tradition
and the past; and we behold man reconciled, happy, ecstatic, full of
reverence, awe, and wonder, reinstated in Paradise,—the paradise of
perfect knowledge and unrestricted faith.
It needs but a little pondering to see that the great poet of the future
will not be afraid of science, but will rather seek to plant his feet upon
it as upon a rock. He knows that, from an enlarged point of view, there is
no feud between Science and Poesy, any more than there is between Science
and Religion, or between Science and Life. He sees that the poet and the
scientist do not travel opposite but parallel roads, that often approach
each other very closely, if they do not at times actually join. The poet
will always pause when he finds himself in opposition to science; and the
scientist is never more worthy the name than when he escapes from analysis
into synthesis, and gives us living wholes. And science, in its present
bold and receptive mood, may be said to be eminently creative, and to have
made every first-class thinker and every large worker in any aesthetic or
spiritual field immeasurably its debtor. It has dispelled many illusions,
but it has more than compensated the imagination by the unbounded vistas
it has opened up on every hand. It has added to our knowledge, but it has
added to our ignorance in the same measure: the large circle of light only
reveals the larger circle of darkness that encompasses it, and life and
being and the orbs are enveloped in a greater mystery to the poet to-day
than they were in the times of Homer or Isaiah. Science, therefore, does
not restrict the imagination, but often compels it to longer flights. The
conception of the earth as an orb shooting like a midnight meteor through
space, a brand cast by the burning sun with the fire at its heart still
unquenched, the sun itself shooting and carrying the whole train of worlds
with it, no one knows whither,—what a lift has science given the
imagination in this field! Or the tremendous discovery of the correlation
and conservation of forces, the identity and convertibility of heat and
force and motion, and that no ounce of power is lost, but forever passed
along, changing form but not essence, is a poetic discovery no less than a
scientific one. The poets have always felt that it must be so, and, when
the fact was authoritatively announced by science, every profound poetic
mind must have felt a thrill of pleasure. Or the nebular hypothesis of the
solar system,—it seems the conception of some inspired madman, like
William Blake, rather than the cool conclusion of reason, and to carry its
own justification, as great power always does. Indeed, our interest in
astronomy and geology is essentially a poetic one,—the love of the
marvelous, of the sublime, and of grand harmonies. The scientific
conception of the sun is strikingly Dantesque, and appalls the
imagination. Or the hell of fire through which the earth has passed, and
the aeons of monsters from which its fair forms have emerged,—from
which of the seven circles of the Inferno did the scientist get his hint?
Indeed, science everywhere reveals a carnival of mightier gods than those
that cut such fantastic tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on
light, or to Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable
pales its ineffectual fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets are
eclipsed.
The vibratory theory of light and its identity with the laws of sound, the
laws of the tides and the seasons, the wonders of the spectroscope, the
theory of gravitation, of electricity, of chemical affinity, the deep
beneath deep of the telescope, the world within world of the microscope,—in
these and many other fields it is hard to tell whether it is the scientist
or the poet we are listening to. What greater magic than that you can take
a colorless ray of light, break it across a prism, and catch upon a screen
all the divine hues of the rainbow?
In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim
foreshadowings of the human breast. Man in his simplicity has called the
sun father and the earth mother. Science shows this to be no fiction, but
a reality; that we are really children of the sun, and that every
heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a solar emanation. The power
with which you now move and breathe came from the sun just as literally as
the bank-notes in your pocket came from the bank.
The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of Atlas, and
Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was a
puzzle. An acute person says that science has but changed the terms of the
equation, but that the unknown quantity is the same as ever. The earth now
rests upon the sun,—in his outstretched palm; the sun rests upon
some other sun, and that upon some other; but what they all finally rest
upon, who can tell? Well may Tennyson speak of the﹃fairy tales of
science,﹄and well may Walt Whitman say:—
"I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the
reasons of things;
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen."
But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger
attending it that the poet alone can save us from,—the danger that
science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man. Hence the
especial office of the poet with reference to science is to endow it with
a human interest. The heart has been disenchanted by having disclosed to
it blind, abstract forces where it had enthroned personal humanistic
divinities. In the old time, man was the centre of the system; everything
was interested in him, and took sides for or against him. There were
nothing but men and gods in the universe. But in the results of science
the world is more and more, and man is less and less. The poet must come
to the rescue, and place man again at the top, magnify him, exalt him,
reinforce him, and match these wonders from without with equal wonders
from within. Welcome to the bard who is not appalled by the task, and who
can readily assimilate and turn into human emotions these vast deductions
of the savants! The minor poets do nothing in this direction; only men of
the largest calibre and the most heroic fibre are adequate to the service.
Hence one finds in Tennyson a vast deal more science than he would at
first suspect; but it is under his feet; it is no longer science, but
faith, or reverence, or poetic nutriment. It is in "Locksley Hall,"﹃The
Princess,﹄"In Memoriam," "Maud," and in others of his poems. Here is a
passage from "In Memoriam:"—
"They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
"In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man;
"Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place
If so he type this work of time
"Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crown'd with attributes of woe,
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore,
"But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom
"To shape and use. Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die."
Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned into the
sweetest music:—
"Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow;
From fringes of the faded eve,
O happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below."
A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that the
earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender love-song!
But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical absorption, and
re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that the earth is a star in
the heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown and finish, carries
in his moral consciousness the flower, the outcome, of all this wide field
of turbulent unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it is no longer
science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent heat of the
poet's heart, and charged with emotion. "The words of true poems," he
says, "are the tufts and final applause of science." Before Darwin or
Spencer he proclaimed the doctrine of evolution:—
"I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
And call anything close again when I desire it.
"In vain the speeding and shyness;
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach;
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones;
In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes;
In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters
lying low."
In the following passage the idea is more fully carried out, and man is
viewed through a vista which science alone has laid open; yet how
absolutely a work of the creative imagination is revealed:—
"I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am incloser of things
to be.
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs;
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the
steps;
All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me;
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing—I know I was even there;
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the foetid carbon.
"Long I was hugg'd close—long and long,
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me,
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
boatmen;
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings;
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
"Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me;
My embryo has never been torpid—nothing could overlay it,
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long low strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited
it with care;
All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight
me:
Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul."
I recall no single line of poetry in the language that fills my
imagination like that beginning the second stanza:—
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me."
One seems to see those huge Brocken shadows of the past sinking and
dropping below the horizon like mountain peaks, as he presses onward on
his journey. Akin to this absorption of science is another quality in my
poet not found in the rest, except perhaps a mere hint of it now and then
in Lucretius,—a quality easier felt than described. It is a tidal
wave of emotion running all through the poems, which is now and then
crested with such passages as this:—
"I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
I call to the earth and sea, half held by the night.
"Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night.
"Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains, misty topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with
blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my
sake!
Far-swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!"
Professor Clifford calls it "cosmic emotion,"—a poetic thrill and
rhapsody in contemplating the earth as a whole,—its chemistry and
vitality, its bounty, its beauty, its power, and the applicability of its
laws and principles to human, aesthetic, and art products. It affords the
key to the theory of art upon which Whitman's poems are projected, and
accounts for what several critics call their sense of magnitude,—"something
of the vastness of the succession of objects in Nature."
"I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those
of the earth!
I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it corroborate
the theory of the earth!
No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude
of the earth."
Or again, in his "Laws for Creation:"—
"All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
compact truth of the world,
There shall be no subject too pronounced—All works shall illustrate
the divine law of indirections."
Indeed, the earth ever floats in this poet's mind as his mightiest symbol,—his
type of completeness and power. It is the armory from which he draws his
most potent weapons. See, especially, "To the Sayers of Words,"﹃This
Compost,﹄"The Song of the Open Road," and "Pensive on her Dead gazing I
heard the Mother of all."
The poet holds essentially the same attitude toward cosmic humanity, well
illustrated in "Salut au Monde:"—
"My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the
whole earth;
I have look'd for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me
in all lands;
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.
"O vapors! I think I have risen with you and moved away to distant
continents, and fallen down there for reasons;
I think I have blown with you, O winds;
O waters, I have finger'd every shore with you."
Indeed, the whole book is leavened with vehement Comradeship. Not only in
the relations of individuals to each other shall loving good-will exist
and be cultivated,—not only between the different towns and cities,
and all the States of this indissoluble, compacted Union,—but it
shall make a tie of fraternity and fusion holding all the races and
peoples and countries of the whole earth.
Then the National question. As Whitman's completed works now stand, in
their two volumes, it is certain they could only have grown out of the
Secession War; and they will probably go to future ages as in literature
the most characteristic identification of that war,—risen from and
portraying it, representing its sea of passions and progresses, partaking
of all its fierce movements and perturbed emotions, and yet sinking the
mere military parts of that war, great as those were, below and with
matters far greater, deeper, more human, more expanding, and more
enduring.
I must not close this paper without some reference to Walt Whitman's prose
writings, which are scarcely less important than his poems. Never has
Patriotism, never has the antique Love of Country, with even doubled
passion and strength, been more fully expressed than in these
contributions. They comprise two thin volumes,—now included in "Two
Rivulets,"—called "Democratic Vistas" and﹃Memoranda during the
War;﹄the former exhibiting the personality of the poet in more vehement
and sweeping action even than do the poems, and affording specimens of
soaring vaticination and impassioned appeal impossible to match in the
literature of our time. The only living author suggested is Carlyle; but
so much is added, the presence is so much more vascular and human,
and the whole page so saturated with faith and love and democracy, that
even the great Scotchman is overborne. Whitman, too, radiates belief,
while at the core of Carlyle's utterances is despair. The style here is
eruptive and complex, or what Jeremy Taylor calls agglomerative,
and puts the Addisonian models utterly to rout,—a style such as only
the largest and most Titanic workman could effectively use. A sensitive
lady of my acquaintance says reading the "Vistas" is like being exposed to
a pouring hailstorm,—the words fairly bruise her mind. In its
literary construction the book is indeed a shower, or a succession of
showers, multitudinous, wide-stretching, down-pouring,—the wrathful
bolt and the quick veins of poetic fire lighting up the page from time to
time. I can easily conceive how certain minds must be swayed and bent by
some of these long, involved, but firm and vehement passages. I cannot
deny myself the pleasure of quoting one or two pages. The writer is
referring to the great literary relics of past times:—
"For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,—those
forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the
nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and
apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in flames
of lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of
vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding
love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal shapes of physical
and aesthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, and the codex,—of
the figures, some far off and veiled, others near and visible; Dante,
stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous
flesh; Angelo, and the great painters, architects, musicians; rich
Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of Feudalism in its
sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at
will;—and so to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though
near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like
the Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like of these, is it too much,
indeed, to return to our favorite figure, and view them as orbs, moving in
free paths in the spaces of that other heaven, the cosmic intellect, the
Soul?
"Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown not
for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the old—while
our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe
your breath of life into our New World's nostrils—not to enslave us
as now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own—perhaps
(dare we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy what you yourselves have
left! On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete
and measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards,
with unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic
despots of the west!"
Here is another passage of a political cast, but showing the same great
pinions and lofty flight:—
"It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of
imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of blood, and many
a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous
imperfection,—saying, Lo! the roads, the only plans of development,
long, and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in your
soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and
present, putting the history of Old World dynasties, conquests, behind me
as of no account,—making a new history, the history of Democracy,
making old history a dwarf,—I alone inaugurating largeness,
culminating time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the
determinations of your Soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already
specimens of the cost. Behold the anguish of suspense, existence itself
wavering in the balance, uncertain whether to rise or fall; already, close
behind you and around you, thick winrows of corpses on battlefields,
countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery among Generals, folly in
the Executive and Legislative departments, schemers, thieves everywhere,—cant,
credulity, make-believe everywhere. Thought you greatness was to ripen for
you, like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer
it through ages, centuries,—must pay for it with a proportionate
price. For you, too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily
person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the
demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long
postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions,
prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births, new projections, and
invigorations of ideas and men."
The "Memoranda during the War" is mainly a record of personal experiences,
nursing the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals: most of it is in a
low key, simple, unwrought, like a diary kept for one's self; but it
reveals the large, tender, sympathetic soul of the poet even more than his
elaborate works, and puts in practical form that unprecedented and fervid
comradeship which is his leading element. It is printed almost verbatim,
just as the notes were jotted down at the time and on the spot. It is
impossible to read it without the feeling of tears, while there is
elsewhere no such portrayal of the common soldier, and such appreciation
of him, as is contained in its pages. It is heart's blood, every word of
it, and along with "Drum-Taps" is the only literature of the war thus far
entirely characteristic and worthy of serious mention. There are in
particular two passages in the "Memoranda" that have amazing dramatic
power, vividness, and rapid action, like some quick painter covering a
large canvas. I refer to the account of the assassination of President
Lincoln, and to that of the scenes in Washington after the first battle of
Bull Run. What may be called the mass-movement of Whitman's prose style—the
rapid marshaling and grouping together of many facts and details,
gathering up, and recruiting, and expanding as the sentences move along,
till the force and momentum become like a rolling flood, or an army in
echelon on the charge—is here displayed with wonderful effect.
Noting and studying what forces move the world, the only sane explanation
that comes to me of the fact that such writing as these little volumes
contain has not, in this country especially, met with its due recognition
and approval, is that, like all Whitman's works, they have really never
yet been published at all in the true sense,—have never entered the
arena where the great laurels are won. They have been printed by the
author, and a few readers have found them out, but to all intents and
purposes they are unknown.
I have not dwelt on Whitman's personal circumstances, his age (he is now,
1877, entering his fifty-ninth year), paralysis, seclusion, and the
treatment of him by certain portions of the literary classes, although
these have all been made the subjects of wide discussion of late, both in
America and Great Britain, and have, I think, a bearing under the
circumstances on his character and genius. It is an unwritten tragedy that
will doubtless always remain unwritten. I will but mention an eloquent
appeal of the Scotch poet, Robert Buchanan, published in London in March,
1876, eulogizing and defending the American bard, in his old age, illness,
and poverty, from the swarms of maligners who still continue to assail
him. The appeal has this fine passage:—
"He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely Donegal
may often behold the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with age or famine,
or with both, passing with weary waft of wing from promontory to
promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of rooks and crows,
which fall back screaming whenever the noble bird turns his indignant
head, and which follow frantically once more, hooting behind him, whenever
he wends again upon his way."
Skipping many things I should yet like to touch upon,—for this paper
is already too long,—I will say in conclusion that, if any reader of
mine is moved by what I have here written to undertake the perusal of
"Leaves of Grass," or the later volume, "Two Rivulets," let me yet warn
him that he little suspects what is before him. Poetry in the Virgilian,
Tennysonian, or Lowellian sense it certainly is not. Just as the living
form of man in its ordinary garb is less beautiful (yet more beautiful)
than the marble statue; just as the living woman and child that may have
sat for the model is less beautiful (yet more so) than one of Raphael's
finest Madonnas, or just as a forest of trees addresses itself less
directly to the feeling of what is called art and form than the house or
other edifice built from them; just as you, and the whole spirit of our
current times, have been trained to feed on and enjoy, not Nature or Man,
or the aboriginal forces, or the actual, but pictures, books, art, and the
selected and refined,—just so these poems will doubtless first shock
and disappoint you. Your admiration for the beautiful is never the feeling
directly and chiefly addressed in them, but your love for the breathing
flesh, the concrete reality, the moving forms and shows of the universe. A
man reaches and moves you, not an artist. Doubtless, too, a certain
withholding and repugnance has first to be overcome, analogous to a cold
sea plunge; and it is not till you experience the reaction, the
after-glow, and feel the swing and surge of the strong waves, that you
know what Walt Whitman's pages really are. They don't give themselves at
first,—like the real landscape and the sea, they are all
indirections. You may have to try them many times; there is something of
Nature's rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the first, but probably
always. But after you have mastered them by resigning yourself to them,
there is nothing like them anywhere in literature for vital help and
meaning. The poet says:—
"The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
That scorn the best I can do to relate them."
And the press of your mind to these pages will certainly start new and
countless problems that poetry and art have never before touched, and that
afford a perpetual stimulus and delight.
It has been said that the object of poetry and the higher forms of
literature is to escape from the tyranny of the real into the freedom of
the ideal; but what is the ideal unless ballasted and weighted with the
real? All these poems have a lofty ideal background; the great laws and
harmonies stretch unerringly above them, and give their vista and
perspective. It is because Whitman's ideal is clothed with rank
materiality, as the soul is clothed with the carnal body, that his poems
beget such warmth and desire in the mind, and are the reservoirs of so
much power. No one can feel more than I how absolutely necessary it is
that the facts of nature and experience be born again in the heart of the
bard, and receive the baptism of the true fire before they be counted
poetical; and I have no trouble on this score with the author of﹃Leaves
of Grass.﹄He never fails to ascend into spiritual meanings. Indeed, the
spirituality of Walt Whitman is the chief fact after all, and dominates
every page he has written.
Observe that this singer and artist makes no direct attempt to be
poetical, any more than he does to be melodious or rhythmical. He
approaches these qualities and results as it were from beneath, and always
indirectly; they are drawn to him, not he to them; and if they appear
absent from his page at first, it is because we have been looking for them
in the customary places on the outside, where he never puts them, and have
not yet penetrated the interiors. As many of the fowls hide their eggs by
a sort of intuitive prudery and secretiveness, Whitman always half hides,
or more than half hides, his thought, his glow, his magnetism, his most
golden and orbic treasures.
Finally, as those men and women respect and love Walt Whitman best who
have known him longest and closest personally, the same rule will apply to
"Leaves of Grass" and the later volume, "Two Rivulets." It is indeed
neither the first surface reading of those books, nor perhaps even the
second or third, that will any more than prepare the student for the full
assimilation of the poems. Like Nature, and like the Sciences, they
suggest endless suites of chambers opening and expanding more and more and
continually.
INDEX
[Transcribist's note: Index has been shortened to names
of authors and to birds, with scientific names.]
Aeschylus
Akers, Elizabeth.
Apuleius.
Audubon, John Jaines.
Bacon, Francis.
Benton, Myron.
Bible.
Bittern, American (Botaurus lentiginosus).
Björnson, Björnstjerne.
Blackbird, cow, or cowbird (Molothrus ater).
Blackbird, European.
Bluebird (Sialia sialis).
Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus).
Bryant, William Cullen.
Buchanan, Robert.
Bunting, snow, or snowflake (Passerina nivalis).
Burke, Edmund.
Burns, Robert.
Byron, Lord.
Cardinal. See Grosbeak, cardinal.
Carlyle, Thomas.
Cedar-bird, or cedar waxwing (Ampelis cedrorum).
Chat, yellow-breasted (Icteria virens).
Chewink, or towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus).
Chickadee (Parus atricapillus).
Cicada.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
Cowper, William.
Crow, American (Corvis brachyrhynchos).
Cuckoo, American.
Cuckoo, European.
Dante.
Darwin, Charles.
Dove, mourning (Zenaidura macroura).
Eagle.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo.
Everett, Edward.
Flagg, Wilson.
Flicker. See High-hole.
Flycatcher, great crested (Myiarchus crinitus).
Frogs. See Hyla.
Gilder, Richard Watson.
Grasshopper of Greek poetry.
Grosbeak, cardinal, or cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis).
Grosbeak, pine (Pinicola enucleator leucura).
Grouse, ruffed (Bonasa umbellus).
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert.
Hawk.
High-hole, or yellow-hammer, or golden-shafted woodpecker, or
flicker (Colaptes auratus luteus).
Hogg, James.
Homer.
Hood, Thomas.
Hornets, black.
Hudson River valley.
Hummingbird, ruby-throated (Trochilus colubris).
Hyla, green.
Hyla, Pickering's.
Ingelow, Jean.
Jefferson, Thomas.
Jonson, Ben.
Keats, John.
Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus).
Lamb, Charles.
Lark. See Skylark.
Lark, shore or horned (Otocoris alpestris).
Lathrop, George Parson.
Lincoln, Abraham.
Lizard.
Locust.
Logan, John.
Loon (Gavia imber).
Lowell, James Russell.
Lyly, John.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington.
Meadowlark (Sturnella magna).
Michael Angelo.
Milton, John.
Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos).
Oriole, Baltimore (Icterus galbula).
Oven-bird, or golden-crowned thrush (Seiurus aurocapillus).
Owl.
Partridge. See Grouse, ruffed.
Pewee, wood (Contopus virens).
Phaedrus.
Phoebe-bird (Sayornis phoebe).
Pigeon, passenger (Ectopistes migratorius).
Pipit, American, or titlark (Anthus pensilvanicus).
Pipit, Sprague's (Anthus spragueii).
Pope, Alexander.
Quail, or bob-white (Colinus virginianus).
Redpoll (Acanthis linaria).
Robin, American (Merula migratoria).
Sandpiper, spotted, or "tip-up" (Actitis macularia).
Sandpipers.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe.
Snake.
Snake, garter.
Socrates.
Solomon.
Sparrow, social or chipping (Spizella socialis).
Sparrow, song (Melospiza cinerea melodia).
Sparrow, tree or Canada (Spizella monticola).
Sparrow, vesper (Pooecetes gramineus).
Sparrow, white-crowned (Zonotrichia leucophrys).
Sparrow, white-throated (Zonotrichia albicollis).
Spenser.
Strawberry.
Sugar-berry.
Swallow, barn (Hirundo erythrogastra).
Swallow, chimney, or chimney swift (Chaetura pelagica).
Swallow, cliff (Petrochellidon lunifrons).
Swift, chimney. See Swallow.
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe.
Tennyson, Alfred.
Thaxter, Celia.
Thomson, James.
Thoreau, Henry D..
Thrasher, brown, or long-tailed thrush (Toxostoma rufum).
Thrush, golden-crowned. See Ovenbird.
Thrush, hermit (Hylocichla guttata pallasii).
Thrush, wood (Hylocichla mustelina).
Tip-up. See Sandpiper, spotted.
Titlark. See Pipit, American.
Townee. See Chewink.
Trowbridge, John T.
Turgenieff.
Turner, J. M. W.
Turtles.
Warbler, pine (Dendroica vigorsii).
Water-thrush.
Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vociferous).
Whitman, Walt.
Whittier, John Greenleaf.
Wilde, Richard Henry.
Wilson, Alexander.
Woodchuck.
Woodpecker, downy (Dryobates pubescens medianus).
Woodpecker, golden-shafted. See High-hole.
Woodpecker, hairy (Dryobates villosus).
Woodpecker, red-headed (Melanerpes erythrocephalus).
Wordsworth, William.
Wren, house (Troglodytes aëdon).
Yellow-hammer. See High-hole.
Yellow-throat, Maryland, or northern yellow-throat (Geothlypis
trichas brachidactyla).
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