150 COUNTRY LIFE by way of natural compass, when he travels: (1) large pine-trees, which bear more numerous branches on their southern side; (2) ant-hills, which have grass on their south and whortle- berries on the north; (3) aspens, whose bark is rough on the north and smooth on the south side. All his knowledge is for use, and it only appears in use, whilst white men have theirs also for talking purposes.
I am avery indifferent botanist, but I admire that perennial four-petalled flower, which has one gray petal, one green, one red, and one white. I think sometimes how many days could Methuselah go out and find something new! In January the new snow has changed the woods so that he does not know them; has built sud- den cathedrals ina night. In the familiar forest he finds Norway and Russia in the masses of overloading snow which break all that they can- not bend. In March, the thaw, and the sound- ing of the south wind, and the splendor of the icicles. On the pond there is a cannonade of a hundred guns, but it is not in honor of election of any President. He went forth again after the rain; in the cold swamp, the buds are swollen, the ictodes prepares its flower, and the mallows and mouse-ear. The mallows the Greeks held COUNTRY LIFE 151 COUNTRY LIFE 151 sacred as giving the first sign of the sympathy of the earth with the celestial influences. The next day the Hylas were piping in every pool, and a new activity among the hardy birds, the premature arrival of the bluebird, and the first northward flight of the geese, who cannot keep their joy to themselves, and fly low over the farms. In May, the bursting of the leaf, —the oak and maple are red with the same colors on the new leaf which they will resume in autumn when it is ripe. In June, the miracle works faster," Painting with white and red the moors To draw the nations out of doors.
Man feels the blood of thousands in his body, and pumps the sap of all this forest through his arteries; the loquacity of all birds in the morn- ing; and the immensity of life seems to make the world deep and wide. In August, when the corn is grown to bea resort and protection to woodcocks and small birds, and when the leaves whisper to each other in the wind, we observe already that the leaf is sere, that a change has passed on the landscape. The world has no- thing to offer more rich or entertaining than the days which October always brings us, when, after the first frosts, a steady shower of gold 152 COUNTRY LIFE 152 COUNTRY LIFE falls in the strong south wind from the chest- nuts, maples and hickories: all the trees are wind-harps, filling the air with music; and all men become poets, and walk to the measure of rhymes they make or remember. The dullest churl begins to quaver. The forest in its coat of many colors reflects its varied splendor through the softest haze. The witch-hazel blooms to mark the last hour arrived, and that Nature has played out her summer score. The dry leaves rustle so loud, as we go rummaging through them, that we can hear nothing else. The leaf in our dry climate gets fully ripe, and, like the fruit when fully ripe, acquires fine color, whilst, in Europe, the damper climate decom- poses it too soon.
But the pleasures of garden, orchard and wood must be alternated. We know the healing effect on the sick of change of air,—the action of new scenery on the mind is not less fruitful. We must remember that man is a natural no- mad, and his old propensities will stir at mid- summer, and send him, like an Indian, to the sea. The influence of the ocean on the love of liberty, I have mentioned elsewhere. Its power on the mind in sharpening the perceptions has made the sea the famous educator of our race.
COUNTRY LIFE 153 The history of the world, — what is it but the doings about the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic?...
What freedom of grace has the sea with all this might!...The freedom makes the observer feel as a slave. Our expression is so thin and cramped! Can we not learn here a generous elo- quence? This was the lesson our starving poverty wanted...At Niagara, I have noticed, that, as quick as I got out of the wetting of the Fall, all the grandeur changed into beauty. You can- not keep it grand, ’t is so quickly beautiful; and the sea gave me the same experience. ’T is great and formidable, when you lie down in it, among the rocks. But, on the shore, at one rod’s dis- tance, ’t is changed into a beauty as of gems and clouds. Shores in sight of each other in a warm climate make boat-builders; and whenever we find a coast broken up into bays and harbors, we find an instant effect on the intellect and industry of the people.’
On the seashore the play of the Atlantic with the coast! What wealth is here! Every wave is a fortune; one thinks of Etzlers and great projectors who will yet turn all this waste strength to account: what strength and fecund- ity, from the sea-monsters, hugest of animals, 154 COUNTRY LIFE to the primary forms of which it is the immense cradle, and the phosphorescent infusories; — it is one vast rolling bed of life, and every sparkle is a fish. What freedom and grace with all this might! The seeing so excellent a spectacle is a certificate to the mind that all imaginable good shall yet be realized. The sea is the chemist that dissolves the mountain and the rock; pul- verizes old continents, and builds new;— for- ever redistributing the solid matter of the globe; and performs an analogous office in perpetual new transplanting of the races of men over the surface, the Exodus of nations. We may well yield us fora time to its lessons. But the nomad instinct, as I said, persists to drive us to fresh fields and pastures new. Indeed the variety of our moods has an answering variety in the face of the world, and the sea drives us back to the hills. | Dr. Johnson said of the Scotch mountains, ‘The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by Nature from her care.” The poor blear-eyed doctor was no poet. Like Charles Lamb, he loved the sweet security of streets. It was said of him that “he preferred the Strand to the Garden of the Hesperides.” But this is not the experience of COUNTRY LIFE 155 imaginative men, nor of men with good eyes and susceptible organizations. “ For my own part,’ says Linnzus, “1 have enjoyed good health, except a slight languor, but as soon as I got upon the Norway Alps I seemed to have acquired a new existence. I felt as if relieved from a heavy burden. Then, spending a few days in the low country of Norway, though without committing the least excess, my languor or heaviness returned. When I again ascended the Alps, I revived as before.”’ And he cele- brates the health and performance of the Laps as the best walkers of Europe. “ Not without admiration, I have watched my two Lap com- panions, in my journey to Finmark, one, my conductor, the other, my interpreter. For after having climbed the Alps, whilst I, a youth of twenty-five years, was spent and tired, like one dead, and lay down as if to die in those ends of the world, these two old men, one fifty, one seventy years, running and playing like boys, felt none of the inconveniences of the road, although they were both loaded heavily enough with my baggage. I saw men more than seventy years old put their heel on their own neck, without any exertion. O holy simplicity of diet, past all praise!” * 156 COUNTRY LIFE 156 COUNTRY LIFE But beside their sanitary and gymnastic benefit, mountains are silent poets, and a view from a cliff over a wide country undoes a good deal of prose, and reinstates us wronged men in our rights. The imagination istouched. There is some pinch and narrowness to us, and we are glad to see the world, and what amplitudes it has, of meadow, stream, upland, forest and sea, which yet are lanes and crevices to the great space in which the world shines like a cockboat in the sea.
Of the finer influences, I shall say that they are not less positive, if they are indescribable. If you wish to know the shortcomings of poetry and language, try to reproduce the October picture to a city company, — and see what you make of it." There is somewhat finer in the sky than we have senses to appreciate. It escapes us, and yet is only just beyond our reach. Is all this beauty to perish? Where is he who is to save the perfect moment, and cause that this beauty shall not be lost? Where is he who has senses fine enough to catch the inspiration of the landscape? The mountains in the horizon acquaint us with finer relations to our friends than any we sustain.
I think ’tis the best of humanity that goes COUNTRY LIFE 157 out to walk. In happy hours, I think all affairs may be wisely postponed for this walking. Can you hear what the morning says to you, and believe that? Can you bring home the summits of Wachusett, Greylock, and the New Hamp- shire hills? the Savin groves of Middlesex? the sedgy ripples of the old Colony ponds? the sunny shores of your own bay, and the low Indian hills of Rhode Island? the savageness of pine-woods? Can you bottle the efflux of a June noon, and bring home the tops of Unca- noonuc? The landscape is vast, complete, alive. We step about, dibble and dot, and attempt in poor linear ways to hobble after those angelic radiations. The gulf between our seeing and our doing is a symbol of that between faith and experience...Our schools and colleges strangely neglect the general education of the eye. Every acqui- sition we make in the science of beauty is so sweet that I think it is cheaply paid for by what accompanies it, of course, the prating and affec- tation of connoisseurship. The facts disclosed by Winkelmann, Goethe, Bell, Greenough, Ruskin, Garbett, Penrose, are joyful possessions, which we cannot spare, and which we rank close beside the disclosures of natural history. There are 158 COUNTRY LIFE 158 COUNTRY LIFE probably many in this audience who have tried the experiment on a hilltop, and many who have not, of bending the head so as to look at the landscape with your eyes upside down. What new softness in the picture! It changes the landscape from November into June. My companion and I remarked from the hilltop the prevailing sobriety of color, and agreed that russet was the hue of Massachusetts, but on trying this experiment of inverting the view he said, “ There is the Campagna! and Italy is Massachusetts upside down.” The effect is remarkable, and perhaps is not explained. An ingenious friend of mine suggested that it was because the upper part of the eye is little used, and therefore retains more susceptibility than the lower, and returns more delicate im- pressions.
Dr. Johnson said, “ Few men know how to take a walk,” and it is certain that Dr. Johnson was not one of the few. It is a fine art, requir- ing rare gifts and much experience. No man is suddenly a good walker. Many men begin with good resolution, but they do not hold out, and I have sometimes thought it would be well to publish an Art of Walking, with Easy Lessons for Beginners. These we call apprentices. Those COUNTRY LIFE 159 who persist from year to year, and obtain at last an intimacy with the country, and know all the good points within ten miles, with the sea- sons for visiting each, know the lakes, the hills, where grapes, berries and nuts, where the rare plants are; where the best botanic ground; and where the noblest landscapes are seen, and are learning all the time; these we call professors...Nature kills egotism and conceit; deals strictly with us; and gives sanity; so that it was the practice of the Orientals, especially of the Persians, to let insane persons wander at their own will out of the towns, into the desert, and, if they liked, to associate with wild ani- mals. In their belief, wild beasts, especially gazelles, collect around an insane person, and live with him on a friendly footing. The patient found something curative in that intercourse, by which he was quieted, and sometimes restored. But there are more insane persons than are called so, or are under treatment in hospitals. The crowd in the cities, at the hotels, theatres, card-tables, the speculators who rush for invest- ment, at ten per cent., twenty per cent., cent. per cent., are all more or less mad, — I need not say it now in the crash of bankruptcy; — these 160 COUNTRY LIFE point the moral, and persuade us to seek in the fields the health of the mind.
I hold all these opinions on the power of the air to be substantially true. The poet affirms them; the religious man, going abroad, affirms them; the patriot on his mountains or his prairie affirms them; the contemplative man afirms them.
Nature tells everything once. Our micro- scopes are not necessary. She shows every fact in large bodies somewhere. On the seashore, she reveals to the eye, by the sea-line, the true curve of the globe. It does not need a barometer to find the height of mountains. The line of snow is surer than the barometer: and the zones of plants, the savin, the pine, vernal gentian, plum, linnzea and the various lichens and grapes are all thermometers which cannot be deceived, and will not lie. They are instruments by the best maker. The earthquake is the first chemist, goldsmith and brazier: he wrought to purpose in craters, and we borrowed ‘the hint in cruci- bles. When I look at natural structures, as at a tree, or the teeth of a shark, or the anatomy of an elephant, I know that I am seeing an archi- tecture and carpentry which has no sham, 1s solid and conscientious, which perfectly answers COUNTRY LIFE 161 COUNTRY LIFE 161 its end, and has nothing to spare. But in all works of human art there is deduction to be made for blunder and falsehood. Therefore Goethe, whose whole life was a study of the theory of art, said no man should be admit- ted to his Republic, who was not versed in Natural History.
The college is not so wise as the mechanic’s shop, nor the quarter-deck as the forecastle. Wit- ness the insatiable interest of the white man about the Indian, the trapper, the hunter and sailor. In a water-party in which many scholars joined, I noted that the skipper of the boat was much the best companion. The scholars made puns. The skipper saw instructive facts on every side, and there was no trifle to him. How startling are the hints of wit we detect in the horse and dog, and in the wild animals! By what compass the geese steer, and the herring migrate, we would so gladly know. What the dog knows, and how he knows it, piques us more than all we heard from the chair of meta- physics.
Is it not an eminent convenience to have in your town a person who knows where arnica grows, or sassafras, or pennyroyal, and the mints, or the scented goldenrod, or punk for XII 162 COUNTRY LIFE slow-match; or the slippery-elm, or wild cher- ries, or wild pears? Where are the best hazel- nuts, chestnuts and shagbarks? Where the white grapes? Where are the choice apple-trees? And what are the poisons? Where is the Nor- way pine, where the beech, where the epigzea, the linnzea, or sanguinaria, or orchis pulcherrima, or sundew, or laurus benzoin, or pink huckleberry? where trout, woodcocks, wild bees, pigeons, where the bittern (stake-driver) can be seen and heard, where the Wilson’s plover can be seen and heard?
The true naturalist can go wherever woods or waters go; almost where a squirrel or a bee can go, he can; and no man is asked for leave. Sometimes the farmer withstands him in cross- ing his lots, but ’t is to no purpose; the farmer could as well hope to prevent the sparrows or tortoises. It was their land before it was his, and their title was precedent. My naturalist knew what was on their land, and the farmers did not, and sometimes he brought them ostenta- tiously gifts of flowers, fruits or rare shrubs they would gladly have paid a price for, and did not tell them that he gathered them in their own woods. Moreover the very time at which he used their land and water (for his boat glided COUNTRY LIFE 163 like a trout everywhere unseen) was in hours when they were sound asleep. Before the sun was up, he went up and down to survey his possessions, and passed onward and left them, before the second owners, as he called them, were awake.
If we should now say a few words on the advantages that belong to the conversation with Nature, I might set them so high as to make it a religious duty. ’Iis the greatest use and the greatest beauty. “I is the lesson we were put hither to learn. What truth, and what elegance belong to every fact of Nature, we know. And the study of them awakens the like truth and elegance in the student. One thing, the lover of Nature cannot tell the best thing he knows...What alone possesses interest for us is the naturel of each man. This is that which is the saliency, or principle of levity, the antagonist of matter and gravitation, and as good as they. This is forever a surprise, and engaging, and lovely. We can’t be satiated with knowing it, and about it. It is related to the purest of the world, to gravity, the growth of grass, and the angles of crystals. Nature speaks to the imagi- 164 COUNTRY LIFE 164 COUNTRY LIFE nation; first, through her grand style, —the hint of immense force and unity which her works convey; second, because her visible productions and changes are the nouns of language, and our only means of uttering the invisible thought. Every new perception of the method and beauty of Nature gives a new shock of surprise and pleasure; and always for this double ‘reason: first, because they are so excellent in their pri- mary fact, as frost, or cloud, or fire, or animal; and, secondly, because we have an instinct that they express a grander law.
"Tis not easy to say again what Nature says to us. But it is the best part of poetry, merely to name natural objects well. A farm- er’s boy finds delight in reading the verses under the Zodiacal vignettes in the Almanac. What is the merit of Thomson’s Seasons but copy- ing a few of the pictures out of this vast book into words, without a hint of what they signify, and the best passages of great poets, old and new, are often simple enumerations of some features of landscape. And as man is the object of Nature, what we study in Nature is man. "Tis true, that man only interests us. We are not to be imposed upon by the apparatus and the nomenclature of the physiologist. Agassiz COUNTRY LIFE 165 COUNTRY LIFE 165 studies year after year fishes and fossil anatomy of saurian, and lizard, and pterodactyl. But whatever he says, we know very well what he means. He pretends to be only busy with the foldings of the yolk of a turtle’s egg. I can see very well what he is driving at; he means men and women. He talks about lizard, shell-fish and squid, he means John and Mary, Thomas and Ann. For Nature is only a mirror in which man is reflected -colossally. Swedenborg or Behman or Plato tried to decipher this hiero- glyphic, and explain what rock, what sand, what wood, what fire signified in regard to man. They may have been right or wrong in any particulars of their interpretation, but it is only our ineradicable belief that the world answers to man, and part to part, that gives any interest in the subject. If we believed that Nature was foreign and unrelated, — some rock on which souls wandering in the Universe were ship- wrecked, we should think all exploration of it frivolous waste of time. No, it is bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, made of us, as we of it. External Nature is only a half. The geology, the astronomy, the anatomy, are all good, but tis all a half, and—enlarge it by astronomy never so far—remains a half. It requires a 166 COUNTRY LIFE 166 COUNTRY LIFE will as perfectly organized, — requires man: Astronomy is a cold, desert science, with all its pompous figures, — depends a little too much on the glass-grinder, too little on the mind. ’T is of no use to show us more planets and systems. We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify. He can dispose in his thought of more worlds, just as readily as of few, or one. It is his relation to one, to the first, that imports. Nay, I will say, of the two facts, the world and man, man is by much the larger half.
I know that the imagination...is a coy, capricious power, and does not impart its secret to inquisitive persons. Sometimes a parlor in which fine persons are found, with beauty, cul- ture and sensibility, answers our purpose still better. Striking the electric chain with which we are darkly bound, but that again is Nature, and there we have again the charm which land- scape gives us, ina finer form; but the persons must have had the influence of Nature, must know her simple, cheap pleasures, must know what Pindar means when he says that ‘‘ water is the best of things,’ and have manners that speak of reality and great elements, or we shall know no Olympus.
COUNTRY LIFE 167 COUNTRY LIFE 167 Matter, how immensely soever enlarged by the telescope, remains the lesser half. The very science by which it is shown to you argues the force of man. Nature is vast and strong, but as soon as man knows himself as its interpreter, knows that Nature and he are from one source, and that he, when humble and obedient, is nearer to the source, then all things fly into place, then is there a rider to the horse, an organized will, then Nature has a lord.
IV CONCORD WALKS Nor many men see beauty in the fogs Of close, low pine-woods in a river town; Yet unto me not morn’s magnificence ‘ Nor the red rainbow of a summer’s eve, Nor Rome, nor joyful Paris, nor the halls Of rich men, blazing hospitable light, Nor wit, nor eloquence, — no, nor even the song Of any woman that is now alive, — Hath such a soul, such divine influence, Such resurrection of the happy past, As is to me when I behold the morn Ope in such low, moist roadside, and beneath Peep the blue violets out of the black loam.
THERE is no rood has not a star above it; The cordial quality of pear or plum Ascends as gladly in a single tree As in broad orchards resonant with bees; And every atom poises for itself, And for the whole. The gentle deities Showed me the love of color and of sounds, The innumerable tenements of beauty, The miracle of generative force, Far-reaching concords of astronomy Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds; Better, the linkéd purpose of the whole.
CONCORD WALKS HEN I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks and:thrushes, which were not charged in the bill; as little did I guess what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying — what reaches of landscape, and what fields and lanes for atramp. Neither did I fully consider what an indescribable luxury is our Indian river, the Musketaquid, — which runs parallel with the village street and to which every house on that long street has a back door, which leads down through the garden to the river-bank, when a skiff, or a dory, gives you, all summer, access to enchantments, new every day, and all winter, to miles of ice for the skater.* And because our river is no Hudson or Mississippi I have a problem long waiting for an engineer, — this, — to what height I must build a tower in my garden that shall show me the Atlantic Ocean from its top — the ocean twenty miles away.
Still less did I know what good and true neighbors I was buying, men of thought and virtue, some of them now known the country through for their learning, or subtlety, or active 172 CONCORD WALKS or patriotic power, but whom I had the plea- sure of knowing long before the Country did; and of other men not known widely but known at home, farmers, — not doctors of laws but doctors of land, skilled in turning a swamp or a sand-bank into a fruitful field, and, when witch-grass and nettles grew, causing a forest of apple-trees or miles of corn and rye to thrive.
I did not know what groups of interesting school-boys and fair school-girls were to greet me in the highway, and to take hold of one’s heart at the School Exhibitions.’
“ Little joy has he who has no garden,” said Saadi. Montaigne took much pains to be made a citizen of Rome; and our people are vain, when abroad, of having the freedom of foreign cities presented to them in a gold box. I much prefer to have the freedom of a garden presented me. When I go into a good garden, I think, if it were mine, I should never go out of it. It requires some geometry in the head to lay it out rightly, and there are many who can enjoy to one that can create it.
Linneus, who was professor of the Royal Garden at Upsala, took the occasion of a public ceremony to say, “I thank God, who has ordered my fate, that I live in this time, and so CONCORD WALKS 173 ordered it that I live happier than the king of the Persians. You know, fathers and citizens, that I live entirely inthe Academy Garden; here is my Vale of Tempe, say rather my Elysium. I possess here all that I desire of the spoils of the East and the West, and, unless I am very much mistaken, what is far more beautiful than Babylonian robes, or vases of the Chinese. Here I learn what I teach. Here I admire the wisdom of the Supreme Artist, disclosing Himself by proofs of every kind, and show them to others.” Our people are learning that lesson year by year. As you know, nothing in Europe is more elab- orately luxurious than the costly gardens, — as the Boboli at Florence, the Borghese, the Orsini at Rome, the Villa d’ Este at Tivoli; with their greenhouses, conservatories, palm-houses, fish- ponds, sculptured summer-houses and grottoes; but without going into the proud niceties of an European garden, there is happiness all the year round to be had from the square fruit-gardens which we plant in the front or rear of every farmhouse. In the orchard, we build monu- ments to Van Mons‘ annually.
The place where a thoughtful man in the country feels the joy of eminent domain is in his wood-lot. If he suffer from accident or low 174 CONCORD WALKS spirits, his spirits rise when he enters it. He can spend the entire day therein, with hatchet or pruning-shears, making paths, without remorse of wasting time. He can fancy that the birds know him and trust him, and even the trees make little speeches or hint them. Then he remembers that Allah in his allotment of life “does not count the time which the Arab spends in the chase.” * If you can add to the garden a noble luxury, let it be an arboretum. In the arboretum you should have things which are of a solitary excel- lence, and which people who read of them are hungry to see. Thus plant the Sequoia Gigantea, give it room, and set it on its way of ten or fifteen centuries. Bayard Taylor planted two —one died, but I saw the other looking well. Plant the Banian, the Sandal-tree, the Lotus, the Upas, Ebony, Century Aloes, the Soma of the Vedas — Asclepias Viminalis, the Mandrake and Papyrus, Dittany,-Asphodel, Nepenthe, Hemony, Moly, Spikenard, Amomum.’ Make a calendar — your own — of the year, that you may never miss your favorites in their month. As Linneus made a dial of plants, so shall you of all the objects that guide your walks.
Learn to know the conspicuous planets in CONCORD WALKS 175 the heavens, and the chief constellations. Thus do not forget the 14th of November, when the meteors come, and on some years drop into your house-yard like sky-rockets. And ’t is worth remarking, what a man may go through life without knowing, that a common spy-glass, which you carry in your pocket, will show the satellites of Jupiter, and turned on the Pleiades, or Seven Stars, in which most eyes can only count six,—will show many more,—a tele- scope in an observatory will show two hundred. How many poems have been written, or, at least attempted, on the lost Pleiad! for though that pretty constellation is called for thousands of years the “Seven Stars,’”’ most eyes can only count six.
Horses and carriages are costly toys, but the word park always charms me. I could not find it in my heart to chide the citizen who should ruin himself to buy a patch of heavy oak tim- ber. I admire the taste which makes the avenue to the house — were the house never so small — through a wood;—as it disposes the mind of the inhabitant and of his guest to the deference due to each.
There are two companions, with one or other 176 CONCORD WALKS of whom ’t is desirable to go out on a tramp. One is an artist, that is, who has an eye for beauty. If you use a good and skilful com- panion, you shall see through his eyes; and, if they be of great discernment, you will learn wonderful secrets. In walking with Allston, you shall see what was never before shown to the eye of man. Andas the perception of beauty always exhilarates, if one is so happy as to find the company of a true artist, he is a perpetual holi- day and benefactor, and ought only to be used like an oriflamme or a garland, for feasts and May-days, and parliaments of wit and love.
The other is a naturalist, for the reason that it is much better to learn the elements of geo- logy, of botany, of ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book. There is so much, too, which a book cannot teach which an old friend can. A man should carry Nature in his head — should know the hour of the day or night, and the time of the year, by the sun and stars; should know the solstice and the equinox, the quarter of the moon and the daily tides.’
This is my ideal of the powers of wealth. Find out what lake or sea Agassiz wishes to explore, and offer to carry him there, and he CONCORD WALKS 177 will make you acquainted with all its fishes: or what district Dr. Gray has not found the plants of, — carry him; or when Dr. Wyman wishes to find new anatomic structures or fossil remains; or when Dr. Charles Jackson or Mr. Hall would study chemistry or mines; and you secure the best company and the best teaching with every advantage."
But the countryman, as I said, has more than he paid for; the landscape is his. I am sorry to say the farmers seldom walk for pleasure. It is a fine art;—there are degrees of proficiency, and we distinguish the professors of that science from the apprentices. But there is a manifest increase in the taste for it. "I is the con- solation of mortal men. It is an old saying that physicians or naturalists are the only profes- sional men who continue their tasks out of study-hours; and the naturalist has no barren places, no winter, and no night, pursuing his researches in the sea, in the ground, in barren moors, in the night even, because the woods exhibit a whole new world of nocturnal animals; in winter, because, remove the snow a little, a multitude of plants live and grow, and there is a perpetual push of buds, so that it 1s impossible to say when vegetation begins. I think XII 178 CONCORD WALKS no pursuit has more breath of immortality in it.
I admire in trees the creation of property so clean of tears, or crime, or even care. No lesson of chemistry is more impressive to me than this chemical fact that ‘ Nineteen twentieths of the timber are drawn from the atmosphere.” We knew the root was sucking juices from the ground. But the top of the tree is also a tap- root thrust into the public pocket of the atmo- sphere. This is a highwayman, to besure. And I am always glad to remember that in proportion to the foliation is the addition of wood. Then they grow, when you wake and when you sleep, at nobody’s cost, and for everybody’s comfort. Lord Abercorn, when some one praised the rapid growth of his trees, replied, “Sir, they have nothing else to do!”
That uncorrupted behavior which we admire in the animals, and in young children, belongs also to the farmer, the hunter, the sailor, the man who lives in the presence of Nature. Cities force the growth and make him talkative and entertaining, but they make him artificial. What alone possesses interest for us is the naturel of each, that which is constitutional to CONCORD WALKS 179 him only. This is forever a surprise, and en- gaging, and lovely; we can’t be satiated with knowing it, and about it, and this is that which the conversation with Nature goes to cherish and to guard.
The man finds himself expressed in Nature. Yet when he sees this annual reappearance of | beautiful forms, the lovely carpet, the lovely tapestry of June, he may well ask himself the special meaning of the hieroglyphic, as well as the sense and scope of the whole —and there is a general sense which the best knowledge of the particular alphabet leaves unexplained.’
- ue ake hI V BOSTON «« We are citizens of two fair cities,’’ said the Genoese gentle- man to a Florentine artist, <‘ and if I were not a Genoese, I should wish to be Florentine.’’ «And I,’’ replied the artist, > ©€You would wish to be Genoese,’’ said the other. ‘*No,’’ replied the artist, co] should wish to be Florentine.’’
<<if I were not Florentine —’ Tue rocky nook with hilltops three Looked eastward from the farms, And twice each day the flowing sea Took Boston in its arms.
The sea returning day by day Restores the world-wide mart; So let each dweller on the Bay Fold Boston in his heart.
Let the blood of her hundred thousands Throb in each manly vein, And the wits of all her wisest Make sunshine in her brain.
And each shall care for other, And each to each shall bend, To the poor a noble brother, To the good an equal friend.
A blessing through the ages thus Shield all thy roofs and towers! GoD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US, Thou darling town of ours!
BOSTON HE old physiologists said, “ There is in the air a hidden food of life;” and they watched the effect of different climates. They believed the air of mountains and the seashore a potent predisposer to rebellion. The air was a good republican, and it was remarked that insulary people are versatile and addicted to change, both in religious and secular affairs.
‘The air that we breathe is an exhalation of all the solid material globe. An aérial fluid streams all day, all night, from every flower and leaf, from every water and soil, from every rock ledge; and from every stratum a different aroma and air according to its quality. According to quality and according to temperature, it must have effect on manners.’
There is the climate of the Sahara: a climate where the sunbeams are vertical; where is day after day, sunstroke after sunstroke, with a frosty shadow between. ‘‘ There are countries,” said Howell, “‘ where the heaven is a fiery furnace or a blowing bellows, or a dropping sponge, most parts of the year.” Such is the assimilating force of the Indian climate that Sir Erskine Perry 184 BOSTON 184 BOSTON says “the usage and opinion of the Hindoos so invades men of all castes and colors who deal with them that all take a Hindoo tint. Parsee, Mongol, Afghan, Israelite, Christian, have all passed under this influence and exchanged a good part of their patrimony of ideas for the notions, manner of seeing and habitual tone of Indian society.” He compares it to the geologic phenomenon which the black soil of the Dhakkan offers, — the property, namely, of assimilating to itself every foreign substance introduced into its bosom.
How can we not believe in influences of climate and air, when, as true philosophers, we must believe that chemical atoms also have their spiritual cause why they are thus and not other; that carbon, oxygen, alum and iron, each has its origin in spiritual nature?
Even at this day men are to be found super- stitious enough to believe that to certain spots on the surface of the planet special powers attach, and an exalted influence on the genius of man. And it appears as if some localities of the earth, through wholesome springs, or as the habitat of rare plants and minerals, or through ravishing beauties of Nature, were preferred before others. There is great testimony of BOSTON 185 discriminating persons to the effect that Rome is endowed with the enchanting property of inspiring a longing in men there to live and there to die.’
Who lives one year in Boston ranges through all the climates of the globe. And if the charac- ter of the people has a larger range and greater versatility, causing them to exhibit equal dexter- ity in what are elsewhere reckoned incompatible works, perhaps they may thank their climate of extremes, which at one season gives them the splendor of the equator and a touch of Syria, and then runs down to a cold which approaches the temperature of the celestial spaces.
It is not a country of luxury or of pictures; of snows rather, of east winds and changing skies; visited by icebergs, which, floating by, nip with their cool breath our blossoms. Not a luxurious climate, — but wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease. Give me a climate where people think well and construct well, — I will spend six months there, and you may have all the rest of my years.
What Vasari said, three hundred years ago, of the republican city of Florence might be said of Boston; “ that the desire for glory and honor 186 BOSTON