Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense and of simple justice, as at a wonderful discovery. Thus, at Mr. Ra- rey’s mode of taming a horse by kindness, or Garibaldi’s emancipation of Italy for Italy’s sake; at the introduction of gentleness into insane asylums, and of cleanliness and comfort into penitentiaries. A farmer wished to buy an ox. The seller told him how well he had treated the animal. ‘‘ But,” said my farmer, “I asked the ox, and the ox showed me by marks that could not lie that he had been abused.” We affect to slight England and Englishmen. But I note that we had a vast self-esteem on the subject of Bunker Hill, Yorktown and New Orleans. We should not think it much to beat Indians or Mexicans, — but to beat English! The Eng- lish newspapers and some writers of reputation disparage America. Meantime I note that the British people are emigrating hither by thou- sands, which is a very sincere, and apt to be a very seriously considered expression of opinion. The emigration into America of British, as well CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT 119 as of Continental people, is the eulogy of Amer- ica by the most competent and sincere arbiters. The hater of property and of government takes care to have his warranty-deed recorded; and the book written against fame and learning has the author’s name on the title-page...Gentlemen, I too am an American, and value practical talent. I love results and hate abor- tions. I delight in people who can do things. I value talent,—perhaps no man more. I value dearly the poet who knows his art so well that, when his voice vibrates, it fills the hearer with sympathetic song, just asa powerful note of an organ sets all tuned strings in its neighborhood in accordant vibration, — the novelist with his romance, the architect with his palace, the composer with his score. I wish you to be eloquent, to grasp the bolt and to hurl it home to the mark. I wish to see that Mirabeau who knows how to seize the heart-strings of the people and drive their hands and feet in the way he wishes them to go, to fill them with himself, to enchant men so that their will and purpose is in abeyance and they serve him with a million hands just as implicitly as his own members obey him. But I value it more when it is legitimate, when the talent is in true 120 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT order, subject to genius, subject to the total and native sentiment of the man, and therefore in harmony with the public sentiment of mankind. Such is the patriotism of Demosthenes, of Patrick Henry and of what was best in Cicero and Burke; not an ingenious special pleading, not the making a plausible case, but strong by the strength of the facts themselves. Then the orator is still one of the audience, persuaded by the same reasons which persuade them; not a ventriloquist, not a juggler, not a wire-puller paid to’ manage the lobby and caucus.* In Demosthenes is this realism of genius. He wins his cause honestly. His doctrine is self- reliance. “If it please you to note it, my coun- sels to you are not such whereby I should grow great among you, and you become little among the Grecians; but they be of that nature as is sometimes not good for me to give, but are always good for you to follow.”
You, gentlemen, are selected out of the great multitude of your mates, out of those who begun life with you, set apart through some strong persuasion of your own, or of your friends, that you were capable of the high privilege of thought. Need enough there is of such a band of priests of intellect and knowledge; and great CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT 121 is the office, and well deserving and well paying the last sacrifices and the highest ability. But I wish this were a needless task, to urge upon you scholars the claims of thought and learn- ing. The order of the world educates with care the senses and the understanding."...Men are as they think. A certain quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of truth. And the man who knows any truth not yet discerned by other men is master of all other men, so far as that truth and its wide rela- tions are concerned. Do you suppose that the thunderbolt falls short? Do you imagine that a lie will nourish and work like a truth?...The whole battle is fought in a few heads. A little finer order, a larger angle of vision, com- mands centuries of facts and millions of thought- less people. It reverses all rank; “he who discriminates is the father of his father.”...And yet the world is not saved. With this divine oracle, we somehow do not get instructed. Here are still perverse millions full of passion, crime and blood. Here are bad governors and bad subjects. Nay, in the class called intellect- ual the men are no better than the uninstructed. They use their wit and learning in the service of the Devil. There are bad books and false 122 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT teachers and corrupt judges; and in the institu- tions of education a want of faith in their own cause. Nay, it happens often that the well- bred and refined, the inhabitants of cities, dwell- ing amidst colleges, churches, and scientific museums, lectures, poets, libraries, newspapers, and other aids supposed intellectual are more vicious and malignant than the rude country people, and need to have their corrupt voting and violence corrected by the cleaner and wiser suffrages of poor farmers. The poet does not believe in his poetry. Men are ashamed of theirantellect inyic: Instinct is the name for the potential wit, that feeling which each has that what is done by any man or agent is done by the same wit as his. He looks at all men as his representatives, and is glad to see that his wit can work at that problem as it ought to be done, and better than he could do it; whether it be to build, engineer, carve, paint, sing, heal, or compute, or play chess, or ride, or swim. We feel as if one man wrote all the books, painted, built, in dark ages, and we are sure we can do more than ever was done. It was the same mind that built the world.
The Understanding is the name we give to CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT 123 the low, limitary power working to short ends, to daily life in house and street. This is the power which the world of men adopt and edu- cate. He is the calculator, he is the merchant, the politician, the worker in the useful; he works by shifts, by compromise, by statute, by bribes. All his activities are to short, personal ends, and he is apt to be a talker, a boaster, a busy-body.
Will you let me say to you what I think is the organic law of learning? It is to observe the order, to keep down the talent, to enthrone the Instinct. There must be the perpetual rally- ing and self-recovery; each talent links itself so fast with self-love and with petty advantage that it loses sight of its obedience, which is beautiful, and sets up for itself, and makes confusion. Falsehood begins as soon as it disobeys, it works for show, and for the shop, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief and misleading, so that presently all is wrong, talent is mistaken for genius, dogma or system for truth.’...Now the idea of a college is an assembly of such men, obedient each to this pure light, and drawing from it illumination to that science or art to which his constitution and affections draw 124 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT him. And the very highest advantage which a young man of good mind can meet is to find such a teacher. No books, no aids, laboratory, apparatus, prizes, can compare with this. Here is sympathy; here is an order that corresponds to that in his own mind, and in all sound minds, and the hope and impulse imparted. And educa- tion is what jt should be, a delightful unfolding of the faculties in right order.
I could heartily wish it were otherwise, but there is a certain shyness of genius, of free thought, of a master of art in colleges, which is as old as the rejection of Moliére by the French Academy, of Bentley by the pedants of his time, and only the other day, of Arago; in Oxford, the recent rejection of Max Miller...If the truth must be told, thought is as rare in colleges as in cities. The necessity of a mechanical system is not to be denied. Young men must be classed and employed, not according to the secret needs of each mind but by some available plan that will give weekly and annual results; anda little violence must be done to private genius to accomplish this. Then genius is always its own Jaw, and must be a little impatient and rebellious to this rule, so that, of necessity, a certain hos- tility and jealousy of genius grows up in the CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT 125 masters of routine, and unless, by rare good for- tune, the professor has a generous sympathy with genius and takes care to interpose a certain relief and cherishing and reverence for the wild poet and dawning philosopher he has detected in his classes, that will happen which has hap- pened so often, that the best scholar, he for whom colleges exist, finds himself a stranger and an orphan therein. ’T is precisely analogous to what befalls in religious societies. In the romance Spiridion a few years ago, we had what it seems was a piece of accurate autobiography, the story of a young saint who comes into a convent for her education, and not falling into the system and the little parties in the convent, but inspired with an enthusiasm which finds nothing there to feed it, it turns out in a few days that every hand is against this young votary. Piety in a convent accuses every one, from the novice to the abbess. What right have you to be better than your neighbor? Piety comes to be regarded as a spy anda rebel...And how often we have had repeated the trials of the young man who made no figure at college because his own methods were new and extraordinary, and who only prospered at last because he forsook theirs and took his own.’
126 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT It is true that the University and the Church, which should be counterbalancing institutions to our great material institutions of trade and of territorial power, do not express the sentiment of the popular politics and the popular optim- ism, whatever it be. Harvard College has no voice in Harvard College, but State Street votes it down on every ballot. Everything will be permitted there which goes to adorn Boston Whiggism, — is it geology, astronomy, poetry, antiquities, art, rhetoric. But that which it exists for, to be a fountain of novelties out of heaven, a Delphos uttering warning and ravishing oracles to lift and lead mankind, — ¢faz it shall not be permitted to do or to think of.* On the con- trary, every generosity of thought is suspect and gets a bad name. And all the youth come out decrepit citizens;* not a prophet, nota poet, not a daimon, but is gagged and stifled or driven away. All that is sought in the instruction is drill; tutors, not inspirers.
I conceive that a college should have no mean ambition, but should aim at a reverent disci- pline and invitation of the soul, that here, if no- where else in the world, genius should find its home; here Imagination should be greeted with the problems in which it delights; the noblest CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT 127 tasks to the Muse proposed and the most cor- dial and honoring rewards; here the highest duties be urged, and enthusiasm for liberty and wisdom should breed enthusiasm and form heroes for the state. The College should hold the pro- found thought, and the Church the great heart to which the nation should turn, and these two should be counterbalancing to the bad politics and selfish trade. But there is but one institu- tion, and not three. The Church and the Col- lege now take their tone from the City, and do not dictate their own. You all well know the downward tendency in literature, the facility with which men renounce their youthful aims and say, the labor is too severe, the prize too high for me; and they accept the employments of the market...Ah, gentlemen, it’s only a dream of mine, and perhaps never will be true, — but I thought a college was a place not to train talents, not to train attorneys, and those who say what they please, but to adorn Genius, which only speaks truth, and after the way which truth uses, namely, Beauty; a college was to teach you geometry, or the lovely laws of space and figure; chemis- try, botany, zodlogy, the streaming of thought 128 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT into form, and the precipitation of atoms which Nature 1s.
This, then, is the theory of Education, the happy meeting of the young soul, filled with the desire, with the living teacher who has already made the passage from the centre forth, step by step, along the intellectual roads to the theory and practice of special science. Now if there be genius in the scholar, that 1s,a delicate sensibility to the laws of the world, and the power to express them again in some new form, he is made to find his own way. He will greet joyfully the wise teacher, but colleges and teach- ers are no wise essential to him; he will find teachers everywhere.
I would have you rely on Nature ever, — wise, omnific, thousand-handed Nature, equal to each emergency, which can do very well without colleges, and, if the Latin, Greek, Alge- bra or Art were in the parents, it will be in the children, without being pasted on.
If your college and your literature are not felt, it is because the truth is not in them. When you say the times, the persons are pro- saic, where is the feudal, or the Saracenic, or Egyptian architecture? where the romantic manners? where the Romish or the Calvinistic CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT 129 religion, which made a kind of poetry in the air for Milton, or Byron, or Belzoni? but to us it is barren, — you expose your atheism. Is a railroad, or a shoe-factory, or an insurance office, bank or bakery outside of the system and connection of things, or further from God than a sheep-pasture or a clam-bank? Is chem- istry suspended? Do not the electricities and the imponderable influences play with all their magic undulations? Do not gravity and polar- ity keep their unerring watch on a needle and thread, on a cobbler’s lapstone or a switchman’s turntable as on the moon’s orbit? Only bring a deep observer, and he will make light of the new shop or old cathedral —all one to him — or new circumstances that afflict you. He will find the circumstances not altered; as deep a cloud of mystery on the cause, as dazzling a glory on the invincible law. Is it so important whether a man wears a shoe-buckle or ties his shoe-lappet with a string?...Bring the insight, and he will find as many beauties and heroes and astounding strokes of genius close by him as Shakspeare or Aéschylus or Dante beheld. It was in a beggarly heath farm, it was in a mean country inn that Burns found his fancy so sprightly. You find the times and XII 130 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT places mean. My friend, stretch a few threads over acommon éolian harp, and put it in your window, and listen to what it says of times and the heart of Nature. Ido not think that you will believe that the miracle of Nature is less, the chemical power worn out. Watch the break- ing morning, the enchantments of the sunset. If I had young men to reach, I should say to them, Keep the intellect sacred. Revere it. Give all to it. Its oracles countervail all. At- tention is its acceptable prayer. Sit low and wait long; and know that, next to being its minister, like Aristotle, and perhaps better than that, is the profound reception and sympathy, without ambition which secularizes and trades it. Go sit with the Hermit in you, who knows more than you do. You will find life enhanced, and doors opened to grander entertainments. Yet all comes easily that he does, as snow and vapor, heat, wind and light. Power costs no- thing to the powerful. I should say to them, Do what you can do. He that draws on his own talent cannot be overshadowed or sup- planted.*...Homage to truth discriminates good and evil. Power never departs from it. Our colleges may differ much in the scale of requirements, and the examination for admission CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT 131 and the examination for degrees and honors may be lax in this college and severe in that, and you may find facilities, translations, syllabuses and tutors here or there to coach you through, but ‘tis very certain that an examination is yonder before us and an examining committee that can- not be escaped nor deceived, that every scholar is to be put fairly on his own powers and must hear the questions proposed, and answer them by himself, and receive honor or dishonor according to the fidelity shown. For the men and women of your time, the circle of your friends and employers, your conditions, the invisible world, are the interrogators."...When the great painter was told by a dauber, “I have painted five pictures whilst you have made one,” he replied, ‘‘ Pingo in eternitatem.” “‘ Study for eternity smiled on me,” says Van Helmont. And it were a good rule to read some lines at least every day that shall not be of the day’s occasion or task, but of study for eternity.
I have detained you too long; but it is the privilege of the moral sentiment to be every moment new and commanding, and old men 132 CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT cannot see the powers of society, the institutions, the laws under which they have lived, passing, or soon to pass, into the hands of you and your contemporaries, without an earnest wish that you have caught sight of your high calling, your vast — possibilities and inspiring duties.
Il COUNTRY LIFE Il COUNTRY LIFE THE air is wise, the wind thinks well, And all through which it blows; If plant or brain, if egg or shell, Or bird or biped knows.
What boots it here of Thebes or Rome, Or lands of Eastern day?
In forests I am still at home And there I cannot stray.
KEEN ears can catch a syllable, As if one spoke to another, In the hemlocks tall, untamable, And what the whispering grasses smother.
Wonderful verse of the gods, Of one import, of varied tone; They chant the bliss of their abodes To man imprisoned in his own.
COUNTRY LIFE HE Teutonic race have been marked in all ages by a trait which has received the name of Earth-hunger, a love of possessing land. It is not less visible in that branch of the fam- ily which inhabits America. Nor is it confined to farmers, speculators, and filibusters, or con- querors. The land, the care of land, seems to be the calling of the people of this new country, of those, at least, who have not some decided bias, driving them toa particular craft, as a born sailor or machinist. The capable and generous, let them spend their talent on the land. Plant it, adorn it, study it, it will develop in the culti- vator the talent it requires.
The avarice of real estate native to us all covers instincts of great generosity, namely, all that is called the love of Nature, comprising the largest use and the whole beauty of a farm or Janded estate. Travel and walking have this apology, that Nature has impressed on savage men periodical or secular impulses to emigrate, as upon lemmings, rats and birds. The Indians go in summer to the coast, for fishing; in winter, to the woods. The nomads wander over vast 136 COUNTRY LIFE territory, to find their pasture. Other impulses hold us to other habits. As the increasing pop- ulation finds new values in the ground, the no- mad life is given up for settled homes. But the necessity of exercise and the nomadic instinct are always stirring the wish to travel, and in the spring and summer, it commonly gets the victory. Chaucer notes of the month of April, << Than longen folk to goon on pilgrymages, And palmers for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes.’’?
And, in the country, Nature is always inviting to the compromise of walking as soon as we are re- leased from severe labor. Linnzus, early in life, read a discourse at the University of Upsala on the necessity of travelling in one’s own country, based on the conviction that Nature was inex- haustibly rich, and that in every district were swamps, or beaches, or rocks, or mountains, which were now nuisances, but, if explored, and turned to account, were capable of yield- ing immense benefit. At Upsala, therefore, he instituted what were called herborizations: he summoned his class to go with him on excursions on foot into the country, to collect plants and insects, birds and eggs. These par- ties started at seven in the morning, and stayed COUNTRY LIFE 137 out till nine in the evening; the Professor was generally attended by two hundred students, and, when they returned, they marched through the streets of Upsala in a festive procession, with flowers in their hats, to the music of drums and trumpets, and with loads of natural produc- tions collected on the way.
Let me remind you what this walker found in his walks. He went into Oland, and found that the farms on the shore were perpetually encroached on by the sea, and ruined by blowing sand. He discovered that the arundo arenaris, or beach-grass, had long firm roots, and he taught them to plant it for the protection of their shores. In Tornea, he found the people suffering every spring from the loss of their cattle, which died by some frightful distemper, to the number of fifty or a hundred in a year. Linneus walked out to examine the meadow into which they were first turned out to grass, and found it a bog, where the water-hemlock grew in abundance, and had evidently been cropped plentifully by the animals in feeding. He found the plant also dried in their cut hay. He showed them that the whole evil might be prevented by employing a woman for a month — to eradicate the noxious plants. When the ship- 138 COUNTRY LIFE yards were infested with rot, Linnzeus was sent to provide some remedy. He studied the insects that infested the timber, and found that they laid their eggs in the logs within certain days in April and he directed that during ten days, at that time of the year, the logs should be immersed under the water, which being done, the timber was found to be uninjured.
He found that the gout, to which he was subject, was cured by wood-strawberries. He had other remedies. When Kalm returned from America, Linneus was laid up with severe gout. But the joy in his return, and the curiosity to see his plants, restored him instantly, and he found an old friend as good as the treatment by wood-strawberries. He learned the secret of making pearls in the river-pearl mussel. He found out that a terrible distemper which some- times proves fatal in the north of Europe, was occasioned by an animalcule, which he called Furia infernalis, which falls from the air on the face, or hand,or other uncovered part, burrows into it, multiplies and kills the sufferer. By timely attention, it is easily extracted.
He examined eight thousand plants; and examined fishes, insects, birds, quadrupeds; and distributed the animal, vegetable and min- COUNTRY LIFE 139 eral kingdoms. And if, instead of running about in the hotels and theatres of Europe, we would, manlike, see what grows, or might grow, in Massachusetts, stock its gardens, drain its bogs, plant its miles and miles of barren waste with oak and pine, and following what is usually the natural suggestion of these pursuits, ponder the moral secrets which, in her solitudes, Nature has to whisper to us, we were better patriots and happier men.
We have the finest climate in the world, for this purpose, in Massachusetts. If we have coarse days, and dogdays, and white days, and days that are like ice-blinks, we have also yellow days, and crystal days, — days which are neither hot nor cold, but the perfection of temperature. New England has a good climate, — yet, in choosing a farm, we like a southern exposure, whilst Massachusetts, it must be owned, is on the northern slope, towards the Arctic circle, and the Pole. Our climate is a series of sur- prises, and among our many prognostics of the weather, the only trustworthy one that I know is that, when it is warm, it is a sign that it is going to be cold. The climate needs, therefore, to be corrected by a little anthracite coal,—a little coal indoors, during much of the year, and 140 COUNTRY LIFE thick coats and shoes must be recommended to walkers. I own I prefer the solar to the polar climates. ‘‘I have no enthusiasm for Nature,” said a French writer, “ which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.”
But we cannot overpraise the comfort and the beauty of the climate in the best days of the year. In summer, we have for weeks a sky of Calcutta, yielding the richest growth, maturing plants which require strongest sunshine, and scores of days when the heat is so rich, and yet so tempered, that it is delicious to live.
The importance to the intellect of exposing the body and brain to the fine mineral and imponderable agents of the air makes the chief interestin the subject. ‘So exquisite is the struc- ture of the cortical glands,” said the old physio- logist Malpighi, “that when the atmosphere is ever so slightly vitiated or altered, the brain is the first part to sympathize and to undergo a change of state.” We are very sensible of this, when, in midsummer, we go to the seashore, or to mountains, or when, after much confinement to the house, we go abroad into the landscape, with any leisure to attend to its soothing and expanding influences. The power of the air was the first explanation offered by the early philo- COUNTRY LIFE I4I sophers of the mutual understanding that men have. “The air,” said Anaximenes, “is the soul, and the essence of life. By breathing it, we become intelligent, and, because we breathe the same air, understand one another.” Plu- tarch thought it contained the knowledge of the future. “ If it be true that souls are naturally endowed with the faculty of prediction, and that the chief cause that excites that faculty is a cer- tain temperature of air and winds,” etc. Even Lord Bacon said, “ The Stars inject their imagi- nation or influence into the air.”
The air that we breathe is an exhalation of all the solid material of the globe...It is the last finish of the work of the Creator. We might say, the Rock of Ages dissolves himself into the mineral air to build up this mystic con- stitution of man’s mind and body.
Walking has the best value as gymnastics for the mind. “ You shall never break down in a speech,” said Sydney Smith, “on the day on which you have walked twelve miles.” In the English universities, the reading men are daily performing their punctual training in the boat- clubs, or a long gallop of many miles in the saddle, or, taking their famed “ constitutionals,”’ walks of eight and ten miles. “ Walking,” said 142 COUNTRY LIFE Rousseau, “‘ has something which animates and vivifies my ideas.’ And Plato said of exercise that “it would almost cure a guilty conscience.” “ For the living out of doors, and simple fare, and gymnastic exercises, and the morals of companions, produce the greatest effect on the way of virtue and of vice.”
Few men know how to take a walk. The qualifications of a professor are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for Nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much. If a man tells me that he has an intense love of Nature, I know, of course, that he has none. Good observers have the man- ners of trees and animals, their patient good sense, and if they add words, ’tis only when words are better than silence. Buta loud singer, or a story-teller, or a vain talker profanes the river and the forest, and is nothing like so good company as a dog.
There is also an effect on beauty...De Quincey said, “I have seen Wordsworth’s eyes sometimes affected powerfully in this respect. His eyes are not under any circumstances bright, lustrous or piercing, but, after a long day’s toil in walking, | have seen them assume an appear- ance the most solemn and spiritual that it is COUNTRY LIFE 143 COUNTRY LIFE 143 possible for the human eye to wear. The light which resides in them is at no time a superficial light, but, under favorable accidents, it is a light which seems to come from depths below all depths; in fact, it is more truly entitled to be held ‘the light that never was on land or sea,’ a light radiating from some far spiritual world, than any that can be named.”” But De Quincey prefixes to this description of Wordsworth a little piece of advice, which I wonder has not attracted more attention. “The depth and subtlety of the eyes varies exceedingly with the state of the stomach, and, if young ladies were aware of the magical transformations which can be wrought in the depth and sweetness of the eye by a few weeks’ exercise, I fancy we should see their habits in this point altered greatly for the better.” | For walking, you must have a broken coun- try. In Illinois, everybody rides. There is no good walk in that state. The reason is, a square yard of it is as good as a hundred miles. You can distinguish from the cows a horse feeding, at the distance of five miles, with the naked eye. Hence, you have the monotony of Holland, and when you step out of the door can see all that you will have seen when you come home. In 144 COUNTRY LIFE 144 COUNTRY LIFE Massachusetts, our land is agreeably broken, and is permeable like a park, and not like some towns in the more broken country of New Hampshire, built on three or four hills having each one side at forty-five degrees and the other side perpendicular: so that if you go a mile, you have only the choice whether you will climb the hill on your way out or on your way back. The more reason we have to be content with the felicity of our slopes in Massachusetts, undulating, rocky, broken and surprising, but without this alpine inconveniency. Twenty years ago in Northern Wisconsin the pinery was composed of trees so big, and so many of them, that it was impossible to walk in the country, and the traveller had nothing for it but to wade in the streams. One more inconveniency, I remember, they showed me in Illinois, that, in the bottom lands, the grass was fourteen feet high. We may well enumerate what compen- sating advantages we have over that country, for ‘tis a commonplace, which I have frequently heard spoken in Illinois, that it was a manifest leading of the Divine Providence that the New England states should have been first settled, before the Western country was known, or they would never have been settled at all.
COUNTRY LIFE 145 COUNTRY LIFE 145 The privilege of the countryman is the cul- ture of the land, the laying out of grounds and gardens, the orchard and the forest. The Rosa- ceous tribe in botany, including the apple, pear, peach and cherry, are coeval with man. The apple is our national fruit. In October, the country is covered with its ornamental harvests. The American sun paints itself in these glowing balls amid the green leaves, the social fruit, in which Nature has deposited every possible flavor; whole zones and climates she has con- centrated into apples. I am afraid you do not understand values. Look over the fence at the farmer who stands there. He makes every cloud in the sky, and every beam of the sun, serve him. His trees are full of brandy. He saves every drop of sap, as if it were wine. A few years ago those trees were whipsticks. Now, every one of them is worth a hundred dollars. Observe their form; not a branch nor a twig is to spare. They look as if they were arms and fingers, holding out to you balls of fire and gold. One tree yields the rent of an acre of land. Yonder pear has every property which should belong to a tree. It is hardy, and almost im- mortal. It accepts every species of nourishment, and yet could live, like an Arab, on air and water.
XII 146 COUNTRY LIFE It grows like the ash Ygdrasil. It seems to me much that I have brought a skilful chemist into my ground, and keep him there overnight, all day, all summer, for an art he has, out of all kinds of refuse rubbish to manufacture Virgali- ens, Bergamots, and Seckels, in a manner which no confectioner can approach, and his method of working is no less beautiful than the result.
In old towns there are always certain para- dises known to the pedestrian, old and deserted farms, where the neglected orchard has been left to itself, and whilst some of its trees decay, the hardier have held their own. I know a whole district, Estabrook Farm, made up of wide, straggling orchards, where the apple-trees strive with and hold their ground against the native forest-trees: the apple growing with profusion that mocks the pains taken by careful cockneys, who come out into the country, plant young trees and watch them dwindling. Here, no hedges are wanted; the wide distance from any population is fence enough: the fence is a mile wide. Here are varieties of apple not found in Downing or Loudon. The “ Tartaric” variety, and ‘‘Cow-apple,” and the ‘“ Bite-me-if-you- dare,” the “ Beware-of-this.” Apples of a kind which I remember in boyhood, each containing COUNTRY LIFE 147 COUNTRY LIFE 147 a barrel of wind and half a barrel of cider. But there was a contest between the old orchard and the invading forest-trees, for the possession of the ground, of the whites against the Pequots, and if the handsome savages win, we shall not DenQsetsity. 4: According to the common estimate of farm- ers, the wood-lot yields its gentle rent of six per cent., without any care or thought, when the owner sleeps or travels, and it 1s subject to no enemy but fire. Evelyn quotes Lord Caernar- von’s saying, ‘‘ Wood is an excrescence of the earth provided by God for the payment of debts.”
When Nero advertised for a new luxury, a walk in the woods should have been offered. ’T is one of the secrets for dodging old age. For Nature makes a like impression on age as on youth. Then I recommend it to people who are growing old, against their will. A man in that predicament, if he stands before a mirror, or among young people, is made quite too sens- ible of the fact; but the forest awakes in him the same feeling it did when he was a boy, and he may drawa moral from the fact that ’tis the old trees that have all the beauty and grandeur. I admire the taste which makes the avenue to a 148 COUNTRY LIFE 148 COUNTRY LIFE house, were the house never so small, through a wood; besides the beauty, it has a positive effect on manners, as it disposes the mind of the inhabitant and of his guests to the deference due to each. Some English reformers’ thought the cattle made all this wide space necessary between house and house, and that, if there were no cows to pasture, less land would suf- fice. But a cow does not need so much land as the owner’s eyes require between him and his neighbor.
Our Aryan progenitors in Asia celebrated the winds as the conveying Maruts, “ traversers of places difficult of access. Stable is their birth- place in the sky, but they are agitators of heaven and earth, who shake all around like the top of a tree. Because they drive the clouds, they have harnessed the spotted deer to their chariot; they are coming with weapons, war-cries and decorations. I hear the cracking of the whips in their hands. I praise their sportive resistless strength. They are the generators of speech. They drive before them in their course the long, vast, uninjurable, rain-retaining cloud. Wherever they pass, they fill the way with clamor. Every one hears their noise. The light- ning roars like a parent cow that bellows for its COUNTRY LIFE 149 COUNTRY LIFE 149 calf, and the rain is set free by the Maruts. Maruts, as you have vigor, invigorate man- kind! Aswins (Waters), long-armed, good- looking Aswins! bearers of wealth, guides of men, harness your car! Ambrosia is in you, in you are medicinal herbs.” The Hindoos called fire Agni, born in the woods, bearer of oblations, smoke-bannered and light-shedding, lord of red coursers; the guest of man; pro- tector of people in villages; the sacrificer visible to all, thousand-eyed, all-beholding, of graceful form and whose countenance is turned on all sides.
What uses that we know belong to the for- est, and what countless uses that we know not! How an Indian helps himself with fibre of milkweed, or withe-bush, or wild hemp, or root of spruce, black or white, for strings; making his bow of hickory, birch, or even a fir-bough, at a pinch; hemlock bark for his roof, hair- moss or fern for his bed. He goes to a white birch-tree, and can fit his leg with a seamless boot, or a hat for his head. He can draw sugar from the maple, food and antidotes from a hun- dred plants. He knows his way in a straight line from watercourse to watercourse, and you cannot lose him in the woods. He consults 150 COUNTRY LIFE