a magnetic telegraph. All great inventions stoop thus low to succeed, for the understanding is but little above the feet. They preserve so low a tone; they are simple almost to coarseness and commonplaceness.
Somebody had told them what he wanted, and sent them forth with a coil of wire to make a magnetic telegraph. It seems not so wonderful an invention as a common cart or a plow.
* * * * * Evening.—A new moon visible in the east [_sic_]. How unexpectedly it always appears! You easily lose it in the sky. The whip-poor-will sings, but not so commonly as in spring. The bats are active.
The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
I omit the unusual—the hurricanes and earthquakes—and describe the common. This has the greatest charm and is the true theme of poetry.
You may have the extraordinary for your province, if you will let me have the ordinary. Give me the obscure life, the cottage of the poor and humble, the workdays of the world, the barren fields, the smallest share of all things but poetic perception. Give me but the eyes to see the things which you possess.[315] _Aug. 29._ Though it is early, my neighbor’s hens have strayed far into the fog toward the river. I find a wasp in my window, which already appears to be taking refuge from winter and unspeakable fate.
Those who first built it, coming from old France, with the memory and tradition of feudal days and customs weighing on them, were unquestionably behind their age, and those who now inhabit it and repair it are behind their ancestors. It is as if the inhabitants of Boston should go down to Fort Independence, or the inhabitants of New York should go over to Castle William, to live. I rubbed my eyes to be sure that I was in the Nineteenth Century. That would be a good place to read Froissart’s Chronicles, I thought. It is a specimen of the Old World in the New. It is such a reminiscence of the Middle Ages as one of Scott’s novels. Those old chevaliers thought they could transplant the feudal system to America. It has been set out, but it has not thriven.[316] Might I not walk a little further, till I hear new crickets, till their creak has acquired some novelty, as if they were a new species whose habitat I had reached?[317] The air is filled with mist, yet a transparent mist, a principle in it you might call _flavor_, which ripens fruits. This haziness seems to confine and concentrate the sunlight, as if you lived in a halo. It is August.
A flock of forty-four young turkeys with their old [_sic_], half a mile from a house on Conantum by the river, the old faintly gobbling, the half-grown young peeping. Turkey-men!
_Gerardia glauca_ (_quercifolia_, says one), tall gerardia, one flower only left; also _Corydalis glauca_.
_Aug. 30. Saturday._ I perceive in the Norway cinquefoil (_Potentilla Norvegica_), now nearly out of blossom, that the alternate five leaves of the calyx are closing over the seeds to protect them. This evidence of forethought, this simple _reflection_ in a double sense of the term, in this flower, is affecting to me, as if it said to me: “Even I am doing my appointed work in this world faithfully. Not even do I, however obscurely I may grow among the other loftier and more famous plants, shirk my work, humble weed as I am. Not even when I have blossomed, and have lost my painted petals and am preparing to die down to my root, do I forget to fall with my arms around my babe, faithful to the last, that the infant may be found preserved in the arms of the frozen mother.” That thus all the Norway cinquefoils in the world had curled back their calyx leaves, their warm cloaks, when now their flowering season was past, over their progeny, from the time they were created! There is one door closed, of the closing year. Nature ordered this bending back of the calyx leaves, and every year since this plant was created her order has been faithfully obeyed, and this plant acts not an obscure, but essential, part in the revolution of the seasons.
I am not ashamed to be contemporary with the Norway cinquefoil. May I perform my part as well![318] There is so much done toward closing up the year’s accounts. It is as good as if I saw the great globe go round. It is as if I saw the Janus doors of the year closing. The fall of each humblest flower marks the annual period of some phase of human life, experience. I can be said to note the flower’s fall only when I see in it the symbol of my own change. When I experience this, then the flower appears to me.
_Drosera rotundifolia_ in Moore’s new field ditch. The _Viola pedata_ and the houstonia now. What is the peculiarity of these flowers that _they_ blossom again? Is it merely because they blossomed so early in the spring, and now are ready for a new spring? They impress me as so much more native or naturalized here.
We love to see Nature fruitful in whatever kind. It assures us of her vigor and that she may equally bring forth the fruits which we prize. I love to see the acorns plenty, even on the shrub oaks, aye, and the nightshade berries. I love to see the potato balls numerous and large, as I go through a low field, poisonous though they look, the plant thus, as it were, bearing fruit at both ends, saying ever and anon, “Not only these tubers I offer you for the present, but if you will have new varieties,—if these do not satisfy you,—plant these seeds.”[319] What abundance! what luxuriance! what bounty! The potato balls, which are worthless to the farmer, combine to make the general impression of the year’s fruitfulness. It is as cheering to me as the rapid increase of the population of New York.
mermaid-weed. (This in Hubbard’s Grove on my way to Conantum.)
A hornets’ (?) nest in a rather tall huckleberry bush, the stems projecting through it, the leaves spreading over it. How these fellows avail themselves of the vegetables! They kept arriving, the great fellows, but I never saw whence they came, but only heard the buzz just at the entrance. (With whitish abdomens.) At length, after I have stood before the nest five minutes, during which time they had taken no notice of me, two seemed to be consulting at the entrance, and then one made a threatening dash at me and returned to the nest. I took the hint and retired. They spoke as plainly as man could have done.[320] I see that the farmers have begun to top their corn.
Examined my old friend the green locust (?), shrilling on an alder leaf.
What relation does the fall dandelion bear to the spring dandelion?
There is a rank scent of tansy now on some roads, disagreeable to many people from being associated in their minds with funerals, where it is sometimes put into the coffin and about the corpse. I have not observed much St. John’s-wort yet. _Galium triflorum_, three-flowered cleavers, in Conant’s Spring Swamp; also fever-bush there, now budded for next year. Tobacco-pipe (_Monotropa uniflora_) in Spring Swamp Path. I came out of the thick, dark, swampy wood as from night into day. Having forgotten the daylight, I was surprised to see how bright it was. I had light enough, methought, and here was an afternoon sun illumining all the landscape. It was a surprise to me to see how much brighter an ordinary afternoon is than the light which penetrates a thick wood.
One of these drooping clusters of potato balls would be as good a symbol, emblem, of the year’s fertility as anything,—better surely than a bunch of grapes. Fruit of the strong soil, containing potash (?). The vintage is come; the olive is ripe.
“I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude; And with forc’d fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year;” Why not for my coat-of-arms, for device, a drooping cluster of potato What right has a New England poet to sing of wine, who never saw a vineyard, who obtains his liquor from the grocer, who would not dare, if he could, tell him what it is composed of. A Yankee singing in praise of wine! It is not sour grapes in this case, it is sweet grapes; the more inaccessible they are the sweeter they are. It seemed to me that the year had nothing so much to brag of as these potato balls.
Do they not concern New-Englanders a thousand times more than all her grapes? In Moore’s new field they grow, cultivated with the bog hoe, manured with ashes and sphagnum. How they take to the virgin soil![322] Shannon tells me that he took a piece of bog land of Augustus Hayden, cleared, turned up the stumps and roots and burned it over, making a coat of ashes six inches deep, then planted potatoes. He never put a hoe to it till he went to dig them; then between 8 o’clock A. M. and 5 P. M. he and another man dug and housed seventy-five bushels apiece!!
Cohush now in fruit, ivory-white berries tipped _now_ with black on I had discovered this singular flower there new to me, and, having a botany by me, looked it out. What a surprise and disappointment, what an insult and impertinence to my curiosity and expectation, to have given me the name “horseweed!”
Cohush Swamp is about twenty rods by three or four. Among rarer plants it contains the basswood, the black (as well as white) ash, the fever-bush, the cohush, the collinsonia, not to mention sassafras, poison sumach, ivy, agrimony, _Arum triphyllum_, (sweet viburnum (?)
in hedges near by), ground-nut, touch-me-not (as high as your head), and _Eupatorium purpureum_ (eight feet, eight inches high, with a large convex corymb (hemispherical) of many stories, fourteen inches wide; width of plant from tip of leaf to tip of leaf two feet, diameter of stalk one inch at ground, leaves seven in a whorl). Rare plants seem to love certain localities. As if the original Conant had been a botanist and endeavored to form an arboretum. A natural arboretum?
The handsome sweet viburnum berries, now red on one cheek.
It was the filiform crowfoot (_Ranunculus filiformis_) that I saw by the riverside the other day and to-day. The season advances apace.
The flowers of the nettle-leaved vervain are now near the ends of the spike, like the blue. _Utricularia inflata_, whorled bladderwort, floating on the water at same place. _Gentiana Saponaria_ budded.
Half an hour before sunset I was at Tupelo Cliff, when, looking up from my botanizing (I had been examining the _Ranunculus filiformis_, the _Sium latifolium_ (??), and the obtuse galium on the muddy shore), I saw the seal of evening on the river. There was a quiet beauty in the landscape at that hour which my senses were prepared to appreciate. The sun going down on the west side, that hand being already in shadow for the most part, but his rays lighting up the water and the willows and pads even more than before. His rays then fell at right angles on their stems. I sitting on the old brown geologic rocks, their feet submerged and covered with weedy moss (utricularia roots?). Sometimes their tops are submerged. The cardinal-flowers standing by me. The trivialness of the day is past. The greater stillness, the _serenity_ of the air, its coolness and transparency, the mistiness being condensed, are favorable to thought. (The pensive eve.) The coolness of evening comes to condense the haze of noon and make the air transparent and the outline of objects firm and distinct, and chaste (chaste eve); even as I am made more vigorous by my bath, am more _continent_ of thought.
After bathing, even at noonday, a man realizes a morning or evening life.[323] The evening air is such a bath for both mind and body. When I have walked all day in vain under the torrid sun, and the world has been all trivial,—as well field and wood as highway,—then at eve the sun goes down westward, and the wind goes down with it, and the dews begin to purify the air and make it transparent, and the lakes and rivers acquire a glassy stillness, reflecting the skies, the reflex of the day. I too am at the top of my condition for perceiving beauty.
Thus, long after feeding, the diviner faculties begin to be fed, to feel their oats, their nutriment, and are not oppressed by the belly’s load. It is abstinence from loading the belly anew until the brain and divine faculties have felt their vigor. Not till some hours does my food invigorate my brain,—ascendeth into the brain. We practice at this hour an involuntary abstinence. We are comparatively chaste and temperate as Eve herself; the nutriment is just reaching the brain.
Every sound is music now. The grating of some distant boat which a man is launching on the rocky bottom,—though here is no man nor inhabited house, nor even cultivated field, in sight,—this is heard with such distinctness that I listen with pleasure as if it was [_sic_] music.
The attractive point is that line where the water meets the land, not distinct, but known to exist. The willows are not the less interesting because of their nakedness below. How rich, like what we love to read of South American primitive forests, is the scenery of this river!
What luxuriance of weeds, what depth of mud along its sides! These old antehistoric, geologic, antediluvian rocks, which only primitive wading birds, still lingering among us, are worthy to tread. The season which we seem to _live_ in anticipation of is arrived. The water, indeed, reflects heaven because my mind does; such is its own serenity, its transparency and stillness.
With what sober joy I stand to let the water drip from me and feel my fresh vigor, who have been bathing in the same tub which the muskrat uses! Such a medicated bath as only nature furnishes. A fish leaps, and the dimple he makes is observed now. How ample and generous was nature!
My inheritance is not narrow.[324] Here is no other this evening. Those resorts which I most love and frequent, numerous and vast as they are, are as it were given up to me, as much as if I were an autocrat or owner of the world, and by my edicts excluded men from my territories.
Perchance there is some advantage here not enjoyed in older countries.
There are said to be two thousand inhabitants in Concord, and yet I find such ample space and verge, even miles of walking every day in which I do not meet nor see a human being, and often not very recent traces of them. So much of man as there is in your mind, there will be in your eye. Methinks that for a great part of the time, as much as it is possible, I walk as one possessing the advantages of human culture, fresh from society of men, but turned loose into the woods, the only man in nature, walking and meditating to a great extent as if man and his customs and institutions were not. The catbird, or the jay, is sure of the whole of your ear now. Each noise is like a stain on pure glass.
The rivers now, these great blue subterranean heavens, reflecting the supernal skies and red-tinted clouds.
A fly (or gnat?) will often buzz round you and persecute you like an imp. How much of imp-like, pestering character they express! (I hear a boy driving home his cows.) What unanimity between the water and the sky!—one only a little denser element than the other. The grossest part of heaven. Think of a mirror on so large a scale! Standing on distant hills, you see the heavens reflected, the evening sky, in some low lake or river in the valley, as perfectly as in any mirror they could be.
Does it not prove how intimate heaven is with earth?
We commonly sacrifice to supper this serene and sacred hour. Our customs turn the hour of sunset to a trivial time, as at the meeting of two roads, one coming from the noon, the other leading to the night.
It might be [well] if our repasts were taken out-of-doors, in view of the sunset and the rising stars; if there were two persons whose pulses beat together, if men cared for the κόσμος, or _beauty_ of the world; if men were _social_ in a high and rare sense; if they associated on high levels; if we took in with our tea a draught of the transparent, dew-freighted evening air; if, with our bread and butter, we took a slice of the red western sky; if the smoking, steaming urn were the vapor on a thousand lakes and rivers and meads.
The air of the valleys at this hour is the distilled essence of all those fragrances which during the day have been filling and have been dispersed in the atmosphere. The fine fragrances, perchance, which have floated in the upper atmospheres have settled to these low vales!
I talked of buying Conantum once, but for want of money we did not come to terms. But I have farmed it in my own fashion every year since.
I have no objection to giving the names of some naturalists, men of flowers, to plants, if by their lives they have identified themselves with them. There may be a few Kalmias. But it must be done very sparingly, or, rather, discriminatingly, and no man’s name be used who has not been such a lover of flowers that the flowers themselves may be supposed thus to reciprocate his love.
VIII SEPTEMBER, 1851 (ÆT. 34) _Sept. 1._ _Mikania scandens_, with its purplish white flowers, now covering the button-bushes and willows by the side of the stream.
_Bidens chrysanthemoides_, large-flowered bidens, edge of river.
Various-colored polygonums standing high among the bushes and weeds by riverside,—white and reddish and red.
Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
The fruit of the trilliums is very handsome. I found some a month ago, a singular _red_, angular-cased pulp, drooping, with the old anthers surrounding it three quarters of an inch in diameter; and now there is another kind, a dense crowded cluster of many ovoid berries turning from green to scarlet or bright brick-color. Then there is the mottled fruit of the clustered Solomon’s-seal, and also the greenish (with blue meat) fruit of the _Convallaria multiflora_ dangling from the axils of the leaves.
_Sept. 2._ The dense fog came into my chamber early this morning, freighted with light, and woke me. It was, no doubt, lighter at that hour than if there had been no fog.
Not till after several months does an infant find its hands, and it may be seen looking at them with astonishment, holding them up to the light; and so also it finds its toes. How many faculties there are which we have never found![325] Some men, methinks, have found only their hands and feet. At least I have seen some who appeared never to have found their heads, but used them only instinctively, as the negro who butts with his,[326] or the water-carrier who makes a pack-horse of his. They have but partially found their heads.
We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.
The maturity of the mind, however, may perchance consist with a certain dryness.
There are flowers of thought, and there are leaves of thought; most of our thoughts are merely leaves, to which the thread of thought is the stem.
What affinity is it brings the goldfinch to the sunflower—both yellow—to pick its seeds? Whatever things I perceive with my entire man, those let me record, and it will be poetry. The sounds which I hear with the consent and coincidence of all my senses, these are significant and musical; at least, they only are heard.[327] In a day or two the first message will be conveyed or transmitted over the magnetic telegraph through this town, as a thought traverses space, and no citizen of the town shall be aware of it. The atmosphere is full of telegraphs equally unobserved. We are not confined to Morse’s or House’s or Bain’s line.
Raise some sunflowers to attract the goldfinches, to feed them as well as your hens. What a broad and loaded, bounteously filled platter of food is presented this _bon-vivant_!
Here is one of those thick fogs which last well into the day. While the farmer is concerned about the crops which his fields bear, I will be concerned about the fertility of my human farm. I will watch the winds and the rains as they affect the crop of thought,—the crop of crops, ripe thoughts, which glow and rustle and fill the air with fragrance for centuries. Is it a drought? How long since we had a rain? What is the state of the springs? Are the low springs high?
I now begin to pluck wild apples.
The difference is not great between some fruits in which the worm is always present and those gall fruits which were produced by the insect.
Old Cato says well, “_Patremfamilias vendacem, non emacem, esse oportet_.” These Latin terminations express better than any English that I know the greediness, as it were, and tenacity of purpose with which the husbandman and householder is required to be a seller and not the lips of moose and browsing creatures, gather in the herbage and twigs with a certain greed. This termination _cious_ adds force to a word, like the lips of browsing creatures, which greedily collect what the jaw holds; as in the word “tenacious” the first half represents the kind of jaw which holds, the last the lips which collect. It can only be pronounced by a certain opening and protruding of the lips; so “avaricious”. These words express the sense of their simple roots with the addition, as it were, of a certain lip greediness. Hence “capacious” and “capacity,” “emacity.” When these expressive words are used, the hearer gets something to chew upon. To be a seller with the tenacity and firmness and steadiness of the jaws which hold and the greediness of the lips which collect. The audacious man not only dares, but he greedily collects more danger to dare. The avaricious man not only desires and satisfies his desire, but he collects ever new browse in anticipation of his ever-springing desires. What is _luscious_ is especially enjoyed by the lips. The mastiff-mouthed are tenacious. To be a seller with mastiff-mouthed tenacity of purpose, with moose-lipped greediness,—ability to browse! To be edacious and voracious is to be not nibbling and swallowing merely, but eating and swallowing while the lips are greedily collecting more food.
There is a reptile in the throat of the greedy man always thirsting and famishing. It is not his own natural hunger and thirst which he satisfies.
The more we know about the ancients, the more we find that they were like the moderns. When I read Marcus Cato De Re Rustica, a small treatise or Farmer’s Manual of those days, fresh from the field of Roman life, all reeking with and redolent of the life of those days, containing more indirect history than any of the histories of Rome of direct,—all of that time but that time,—_here_ is a simple, direct, pertinent word addressed to the Romans. And where are _the Romans_? Rome and the Romans are commonly a piece of rhetoric. As if New England had disappeared poetically and there were left Buel’s “Farmer’s Companion,” or the letters of Solon Robinson, or a volume of extracts from the _New England Farmer_. Though the Romans are no more but a fable and an ornament of rhetoric, we have here their _New England Farmer_, the very manual those Roman farmers read, speaking as if they were to hear it, its voice not silenced, as if Rome were still the mistress of the world,—as fresh as a dripping dish-cloth from a Roman kitchen.[328] As when you overhaul the correspondence of a man who died fifty years ago, with like surprise and feelings you overhaul the manuscripts of the Roman nation. There exist certain old papers, manuscripts, either the originals or faithful and trustworthy old copies of the originals, which were left by the Roman people. They have gone their way, but these old papers of all sorts remain. Among them there are some farm journals, or farm books; just such a collection of diary and memorandum—as when the cow calved, and the dimensions, with a plan, of the barn, and how much paid to Joe Farrar for work done on the farm, etc., etc.—as you might find in an old farmer’s pocket-book to-day.
Indeed the farmer’s was pretty much the same routine then as now.
Cato says: “Sterquilinium magnum stude ut habeas. Stercus sedulo conserva, cum exportabis purgato et comminuito. Per autumnum evehito.”
(Study to have a great dungheap. Carefully preserve your dung, when you carry it out, make clean work of it and break it up fine. Carry it out during the autumn.) Just such directions as you find in the “Farmer’s Almanack” to-day. It reminds me of what I see going on in our fields every autumn. As if the farmers of Concord were obeying Cato’s directions. And Cato but repeated the maxims of a remote antiquity.
Nothing can be more homely and suggestive of the every-day life of the Roman agriculturalists, thus supplying the very deficiencies in what is commonly called Roman history, _i. e._ revealing to us the actual life of the Romans, the how they got their living and what they did from day to day.[329] They planted _rapa_, _raphanos_, _milium_, and _panicum_ in low foggy I see the farmer now—_i. e._ I shall in autumn—on every side carting out his manure and sedulously making his compost-heap, or scattering it over his grass ground and breaking it up with a mallet; and it reminds me of Cato’s advice. He died one hundred and fifty years before Christ.[330] Before Christianity was heard of, this was done. A Roman family appears to have had a great supply of tubs and kettles.
A fire in the sitting-room to-day. Walk in the afternoon by Walden road and railroad to Minn’s place, and round it to railroad and home. The first coolness is welcome, so serious and fertile of thought. My skin contracts, and I become more continent. Carried umbrellas, it mizzling.
As in the night, now in the rain, I smell the fragrance of the woods.
The prunella leaves have turned a delicate claret or lake color by the roadside. I am interested in these revolutions as much as in those of kingdoms. Is there not tragedy enough in the autumn? Walden seems to be going down at last. The pines are dead and leaning, red and half upset, about its shore. Thus, by its rising once in twenty-five years, perchance, it keeps an open shore, as if the ice had heaved them over.
Found the succory at Minn’s Bridge on railroad and beyond. Query: May not this and the tree-primrose and other plants be distributed from Boston on the rays of the railroads, the seeds mixing with the grains and all kinds of dirt and being blown from the passing freight-cars?
The feathery-tailed fruit of the fertile flowers of the clematis conspicuous now.
The shorn meadows looked of a living green as we came home at eve, even greener than in spring. The _faenum cordum_, the aftermath, _sicilimenta de prato_, the second mowings of the meadow, this reminds me of, in Cato.[331] _Sept. 3._ Why was there never a poem on the cricket? Its creak seems to me to be one of the most prominent and obvious facts in the world, and the least heeded. In the report of a man’s contemplations I look to see somewhat answering to this sound.[332] When I sat on Lee’s Cliff the other day (August 29th), I saw a man working with a horse in a field by the river, carting dirt; and the horse and his relation to him struck me as very remarkable. There was the horse, a mere animated machine,—though his tail was brushing off the flies,—his whole existence subordinated to the man’s, with no tradition, perhaps no instinct, in him of independence and freedom, of a time when he was wild and free,—completely humanized. No compact made with him that he should have the Saturday afternoons, or the Sundays, or any holidays.
His independence never recognized, it being now quite forgotten both by men and by horses that the horse was ever free. For I am not aware that there are any wild horses known surely not to be descended from tame ones. Assisting that man to pull down that bank and spread it over the meadow; only keeping off the flies with his tail, and stamping, and catching a mouthful of grass or leaves from time to time, on his own account,—all the rest for man. It seemed hardly worth while that he should be _animated_ for this. It was plain that the man was not educating the horse; not trying to develop his nature, but merely getting work out of him. That mass of animated matter seemed more completely the servant of man than any inanimate. For slaves have their holidays; a heaven is conceded to them, but to the horse none. Now and forever he is man’s slave. The more I considered, the more the man seemed akin to the horse; only his was the stronger will of the two.
For a little further on I saw an Irishman shovelling, who evidently was as much tamed as the horse. He had stipulated that to a certain extent his independence be recognized, and yet really he was but little more independent. I had always instinctively regarded the horse as a free people somewhere, living wild. Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild,—not tamed and broken by society. Now for my part I have such a respect for the horse’s nature as would tempt me to let him alone; not to interfere with him,—his walks, his diet, his loves. But by mankind he is treated simply as if he were an engine which must have rest and is sensible of pain. Suppose that every squirrel were made to turn a coffee-mill!
Suppose that the gazelles were made to draw milk-carts!
There he was with his tail cut off, because it was in the way, or to suit the taste of his owner; his mane trimmed, and his feet shod with iron that he might wear longer. What is a horse but an animal that has lost its liberty? What is it but a system of slavery? and do you not thus by _insensible_ and unimportant degrees come to human slavery?
Has lost its liberty!—and has man got any more liberty himself for having robbed the horse, or has he lost just as much of his own, and become more like the horse he has robbed? Is not the other end of the bridle in this case, too, coiled round his own neck? Hence stable-boys, jockeys, all that class that is daily transported by fast horses. There he stood with his oblong square figure (his tail being cut off) seen against the water, brushing off the flies with his tail and stamping, braced back while the man was filling the cart.[333] It is a very remarkable and significant fact that, though no man is quite well or healthy, yet every one believes practically that health is the rule and disease the exception, and each invalid is wont to think himself in a minority, and to postpone somewhat of endeavor to another state of existence. But it may be some encouragement to men to know that in this respect they stand on the same platform, that disease is, in fact, the _rule_ of our terrestrial life and the prophecy of a _celestial_ life. Where is the coward who despairs because he is sick?
Every one may live either the life of Achilles or of Nestor. Seen in this light, our life with all its diseases will look healthy, and in one sense the more healthy as it is the more diseased. Disease is not the accident of the individual, nor even of the generation, but of life itself. In some form, and to some degree or other, it is one of the permanent conditions of life. It is, nevertheless, a cheering fact that men affirm health unanimously, and esteem themselves miserable failures. Here was no blunder. They gave us life on exactly these conditions, and methinks we shall live it with more heart when we perceive clearly that these are the terms on which we have it. Life is a warfare, a struggle, and the diseases of the body answer to the troubles and defeats of the spirit. Man begins by quarrelling with the animal in him, and the result is immediate disease. In proportion as the spirit is the more ambitious and persevering, the more obstacles it will meet with. It is as a seer that man asserts his disease to be exceptional.[334] * * * * * As I went under the new telegraph-wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead. It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life, a supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated the lattice-work of this life of ours.[335] The melons and the apples seem at once to feed my brain.
Here comes a laborer from his dinner to resume his work at clearing out a ditch notwithstanding the rain, remembering as Cato says, _per ferias potuisse fossas veteres tergeri_, that in the holidays old ditches might have been cleared out. One would think that I were the paterfamilias come to see if the steward of my farm has done his duty.
The ivy leaves are turning red. Fall dandelions stand thick in the meadows.
How much the Roman must have been indebted to his agriculture, dealing with the earth, its clods and stubble, its dust and mire. Their farmer consuls were their glory, and they well knew the farm to be the nursery of soldiers. Read Cato to see what kind of legs the Romans stood on.
The leaves of the hardhack are somewhat appressed, clothing the stem and showing their downy under sides like white, waving wands. Is it peculiar to the season, or the rain,—or the plant?
Walk often in drizzly weather, for then the small weeds (especially if they stand on bare ground), covered with rain-drops like beads, appear more beautiful than ever,—the hypericums, for instance. They are equally beautiful when covered with dew, fresh and adorned, almost spirited away, in a robe of dewdrops.[336] Some farmers have begun to thresh and winnow their oats.
Identified spotted spurge (_Euphorbia maculata_), apparently out of blossom. Shepherd’s-purse and chickweed.
As for walking, the inhabitants of large English towns are confined almost exclusively to their parks and to the highways. The few footpaths in their vicinities “are gradually vanishing,” says Wilkinson, “under the encroachments of the proprietors.” He proposes that the people’s right to them be asserted and defended and that they be kept in a passable state at the public expense. “This,” says he, “would be easily done by means of asphalt laid upon a good foundation”!!! So much for walking, and the prospects of walking, in the neighborhood of English large towns.
Think of a man—he may be a genius of some kind—being confined to a highway and a park for his world to range in! I should die from mere nervousness at the thought of such confinement. I should hesitate before I were born, if those terms could be made known to me