Complete Prose Works
it all nourishes, lulls me, in the way most needed; the open air, the
rye-fields, the apple orchards. The last two days have been faultless
in sun, breeze, temperature and everything; never two more perfect days,
and I have enjoy'd them wonderfully. My health is somewhat better, and
my spirit at peace. (Yet the anniversary of the saddest loss and sorrow
of my life is close at hand.)
Another jotting, another perfect day: forenoon, from 7 to 9, two
hours envelop'd in sound of bumble-bees and bird-music. Down in the
apple-trees and in a neighboring cedar were three or four russet-back'd
thrushes, each singing his best, and roulading in ways I never heard
surpass'd. Two hours I abandon myself to hearing them, and indolently
absorbing the scene. Almost every bird I notice has a special time in
the year--sometimes limited to a few days--when it sings its best; and
now is the period of these russet-backs. Meanwhile, up and down the
lane, the darting, droning, musical bumble-bees. A great swarm again for
my entourage as I return home, moving along with me as before.
As I write this, two or three weeks later, I am sitting near the brook
under a tulip tree, 70 feet high, thick with the fresh verdure of its
young maturity--a beautiful object--every branch, every leaf perfect.
From top to bottom, seeking the sweet juice in the blossoms, it swarms
with myriads of these wild bees, whose loud and steady humming makes an
undertone to the whole, and to my mood and the hour. All of which I
will bring to a close by extracting the following verses from Henry A.
Beers's little volume:
As I lay yonder in tall grass
A drunken bumble-bee went past
Delirious with honey toddy.
The golden sash about his body
Scarce kept it in his swollen belly
Distent with honeysuckle jelly.
Rose liquor and the sweet-pea wine
Had fill' d his soul with song divine;
Deep had he drunk the warm night through,
His hairy thighs were wet with dew.
Full many an antic he had play'd
While the world went round through sleep and shade.
Oft had he lit with thirsty lip
Some flower-cup's nectar'd sweets to sip,
When on smooth petals he would slip,
Or over tangled stamens trip,
And headlong in the pollen roll'd,
Crawl out quite dusted o'er with gold;
Or else his heavy feet would stumble
Against some bud, and down he'd tumble
Amongst the grass; there lie and grumble
In low, soft bass--poor maudlin bumble!
CEDAR-APPLES
As I journey'd to-day in a light wagon ten or twelve miles through the
country, nothing pleas'd me more, in their homely beauty and novelty (I
had either never seen the little things to such advantage, or had
never noticed them before) than that peculiar fruit, with its profuse
clear-yellow dangles of inch-long silk or yarn, in boundless profusion
spotting the dark green cedar bushes--contrasting well with their bronze
tufts--the flossy shreds covering the knobs all over, like a shock of
wild hair on elfin pates. On my ramble afterward down by the creek I
pluck'd one from its bush, and shall keep it. These cedar-apples last
only a little while however, and soon crumble and fade.
SUMMER SIGHTS AND INDOLENCIES
_June 10th_.--As I write, 5-1/2 P.M., here by the creek, nothing can
exceed the quiet splendor and freshness around me. We had a heavy
shower, with brief thunder and lightning, in the middle of the day; and
since, overhead, one of those not uncommon yet indescribable skies
(in quality, not details or forms) of limpid blue, with rolling
silver-fringed clouds, and a pure-dazzling sun. For underlay, trees
in fulness of tender foliage--liquid, reedy, long-drawn notes of
birds--based by the fretful mewing of a querulous cat-bird, and the
pleasant chippering-shriek of two kingfishers. I have been watching the
latter the last half hour, on their regular evening frolic over and in
the stream; evidently a spree of the liveliest kind. They pursue each
other, whirling and wheeling around, with many a jocund downward dip,
splashing the spray in jets of diamonds--and then off they swoop, with
slanting wings and graceful flight, sometimes so near me I can plainly
see their dark-gray feather-bodies and milk-white necks.
SUNDOWN PERFUME--QUAILNOTES--THE HERMIT-THRUSH
_June 19th, 4 to 6-1/2, P.M._--Sitting alone by the creek--solitude
here, but the scene bright and vivid enough--the sun shining, and quite
a fresh wind blowing (some heavy showers last night,) the grass and
trees looking their best--the clare-obscure of different greens,
shadows, half-shadows, and the dappling glimpses of the water, through
recesses--the wild flageolet-note of a quail near by--the just-heard
fretting of some hylas down there in the pond--crows cawing in the
distance--a drove of young hogs rooting in soft ground near the oak
under which I sit--some come sniffing near me, and then scamper away,
with grunts. And still the clear notes of the quail--the quiver of
leaf-shadows over the paper as I write--the sky aloft, with white
clouds, and the sun well declining to the west--the swift darting
of many sand-swallows coming and going, their holes in a neighboring
marl-bank--the odor of the cedar and oak, so palpable, as evening
approaches--perfume, color, the bronze-and-gold of nearly ripen'd
wheat--clover-fields, with honey-scent--the well-up maize, with long and
rustling leaves--the great patches of thriving potatoes, dusky green,
fleck'd all over with white blossoms--the old, warty, venerable oak
above me--and ever, mix'd with the dual notes of the quail, the soughing
of the wind through some near-by pines.
As I rise for return, I linger long to a delicious song-epilogue (is
it the hermit-thrush?) from some bushy recess off there in the swamp,
repeated leisurely and pensively over and over again. This, to the
circle-gambols of the swallows flying by dozens in concentric rings in
the last rays of sunset, like flashes of some airy wheel.
A JULY AFTER-NOON BY THE POND
The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air--the
white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy
waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque
beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird
from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an
occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands
or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find
nothing, and away they go)--the vast space of the sky overhead so clear,
and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals
and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color'd
dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally
balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all the time,
(are they not showing off for my amusement?)--the pond itself, with
the sword-shaped calamus; the water snakes--occasionally a flitting
blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders, as he darts slantingly
by--the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade--the
quawk of some pond duck--(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in
the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas;)--then at some
distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw
it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the
creek--(what was the yellow or light-brown bird, large as a young hen,
with short neck and long-stretch'd legs I just saw, in flapping and
awkward flight over there through the trees?)--the prevailing delicate,
yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over
all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the
sky, transparent and blue--and hovering there in the west, a mass of
white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call "shoals of mackerel"--the sky,
with silver swirls like locks of toss'd hair, spreading, expanding--a
vast voiceless, formless simulacrum--yet may-be the most real reality
and formulator of everything--who knows?
LOCUSTS AND KATY-DIDS
_Aug. 22_.--Reedy monotones of locust, or sounds of katydid--I hear the
latter at night, and the other both day and night. I thought the morning
and evening warble of birds delightful; but I find I can listen to these
strange insects with just as much pleasure. A single locust is now heard
near noon from a tree two hundred feet off, as I write--a long whirring,
continued, quite loud noise graded in distinct whirls, or swinging
circles, increasing in strength and rapidity up to a certain point, and
then a fluttering, quietly tapering fall. Each strain is continued
from one to two minutes. The locust-song is very appropriate to the
scene--gushes, has meaning, is masculine, is like some fine old wine,
not sweet, but far better than sweet.
But the katydid--how shall I describe its piquant utterances? One sings
from a willow-tree just outside my open bedroom window, twenty yards
distant; every clear night for a fortnight past has sooth'd me to sleep.
I rode through a piece of woods for a hundred rods the other evening,
and heard the katydids by myriads--very curious for once; but I like
better my single neighbor on the tree. Let me say more about the song of
the locust, even to repetition; a long, chromatic, tremulous crescendo,
like a brass disk whirling round and round, emitting wave after wave
of notes, beginning with a certain moderate beat or measure, rapidly
increasing in speed and emphasis, reaching a point of great energy and
significance, and then quickly and gracefully dropping down and out. Not
the melody of the singing-bird--far from it; the common musician might
think without melody, but surely having to the finer ear a harmony of
its own; monotonous--but what a swing there is in that brassy drone,
round and round, cymballine--or like the whirling of brass quoits.
THE LESSON OF A TREE
_Sept. 1_.--I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque
tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorites now before me, a fine
yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four thick
at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What
suggestions of imperturbability and _being_, as against the human
trait of mere _seeming_. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably
artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It
_is_, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity
all weathers, this gusty-temper'd little whiffet, man, that runs indoors
at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs
at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But,
if they don't, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry,
sermons--or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that
those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder
than most reminiscences we get. ("Cut this out," as the quack mediciners
say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more
of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think.
One lesson from affiliating a tree--perhaps the greatest moral lesson
anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of
_what is_, without the least regard to what the looker-on (the critic)
supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse--what more
general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education,
attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid
trouble about _seems_, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble
at all, or hardly any, about the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real
parts of character, books, friendship, marriage--humanity's invisible