Complete Prose Works
themselves, confidentially,) for somebody to appear, or start up out
of the earth, or from behind some tree or rock? Is it a lingering,
inherited remains of man's primitive wariness, from the wild animals? or
from his savage ancestry far back? It is not at all nervousness or fear.
Seems as if something unknown were possibly lurking in those bushes, or
solitary places. Nay, it is quite certain there is--some vital unseen
presence.
AN AFTERNOON SCENE
_Feb. 22_.--Last night and to-day rainy and thick, till mid-afternoon,
when the wind chopp'd round, the clouds swiftly drew off like curtains,
the clear appear'd, and with it the fairest, grandest, most wondrous
rainbow I ever saw, all complete, very vivid at its earth-ends,
spreading vast effusions of illuminated haze, violet, yellow,
drab-green, in all directions overhead, through which the sun beam'd--an
indescribable utterance of color and light, so gorgeous yet so soft,
such as I had never witness'd before. Then its continuance: a full hour
pass'd before the last of those earth-ends disappear'd. The sky behind
was all spread in translucent blue, with many little white clouds and
edges. To these a sunset, filling, dominating the esthetic and soul
senses, sumptuously, tenderly, full. I end this note by the pond,
just light enough to see, through the evening shadows, the western
reflections in its water-mirror surface, with inverted figures of trees.
I hear now and then the _flup_ of a pike leaping out, and rippling the
water.
THE GATES OPENING
_April 6_.--Palpable spring indeed, or the indications of it. I am
sitting in bright sunshine, at the edge of the creek, the surface just
rippled by the wind. All is solitude, morning freshness, negligence.
For companions my two kingfishers sailing, winding, darting, dipping,
sometimes capriciously separate, then flying together. I hear their
guttural twittering again and again; for awhile nothing but that
peculiar sound. As noon approaches other birds warm up. The reedy notes
of the robin, and a musical passage of two parts, one a clear delicious
gurgle, with several other birds I cannot place. To which is join'd,
(yes, I just hear it,) one low purr at intervals from some impatient
hylas at the pond-edge. The sibilant murmur of a pretty stiff breeze
now and then through the trees. Then a poor little dead leaf, long
frost-bound, whirls from somewhere up aloft in one wild escaped
freedom-spree in space and sunlight, and then dashes down to the waters,
which hold it closely and soon drown it out of sight. The bushes and
trees are yet bare, but the beeches have their wrinkled yellow leaves of
last season's foliage largely left, frequent cedars and pines yet green,
and the grass not without proofs of coming fullness. And over all a
wonderfully fine dome of clear blue, the play of light coming and going,
and great fleeces of white clouds swimming so silently.
THE COMMON EARTH, THE SOIL
The soil, too--let others pen-and-ink the sea, the air, (as I sometimes
try)--but now I feel to choose the common soil for theme--naught else.
The brown soil here, (just between winter-close and opening spring
and vegetation)--the rain-shower at night, and the fresh smell next
morning--the red worms wriggling out of the ground--the dead leaves,
the incipient grass, and the latent life underneath--the effort to start
something--already in shelter'd spots some little flowers--the distant
emerald show of winter wheat and the rye-fields--the yet naked trees,
with clear insterstices, giving prospects hidden in summer--the tough
fallow and the plow-team, and the stout boy whistling to his horses for
encouragement--and there the dark fat earth in long slanting stripes
upturn'd.
BIRDS AND BIRDS AND BIRDS
_A little later--bright weather_.--An unusual melodiousness, these days,
(last of April and first of May) from the blackbirds; indeed all sorts
of birds, darting, whistling, hopping or perch'd on trees. Never before
have I seen, heard, or been in the midst of, and got so flooded and
saturated with them and their performances, as this current month. Such
oceans, such successions of them. Let me make a list of those I find
here:
Black birds (plenty,) Meadow-larks (plenty,) Ring doves, Cat-birds
(plenty,) Owls, Cuckoos, Woodpeckers, Pond snipes (plenty,) King-birds,
Cheewinks, Crows (plenty,) Quawks, Wrens, Ground robins, Kingfishers,
Ravens, Quails, Gray snipes, Turkey-buzzards, Eagles, Hen-hawks,
High-holes, Yellow birds, Herons, Thrushes, Tits, Reed birds,
Woodpigeons.
Early came the
Blue birds, Meadow-lark, Killdeer, White-bellied swallow, Plover,
Sandpiper, Robin, Wilson's thrush, Woodcock, Flicker.
FULL-STARR'D NIGHTS
_May 2l_.--Back in Camden. Again commencing one of those unusually
transparent, full-starr'd, blue-black nights, as if to show that however
lush and pompous the day may be, there is something left in the
not-day that can outvie it. The rarest, finest sample of long-drawn-out
clear-obscure, from sundown to 9 o'clock. I went down to the Delaware,
and cross'd and cross'd. Venus like blazing silver well up in the west.
The large pale thin crescent of the new moon, half an hour high, sinking
languidly under a bar-sinister of cloud, and then emerging. Arcturus
right overhead. A faint fragrant sea-odor wafted up from the south.
The gloaming, the temper'd coolness, with every feature of the scene,
indescribably soothing and tonic--one of those hours that give hints to
the soul, impossible to put in a statement. (Ah, where would be any food
for spirituality without night and the stars?) The vacant spaciousness
of the air, and the veil'd blue of the heavens, seem'd miracles enough.
As the night advanc'd it changed its spirit and garments to ampler
stateliness. I was almost conscious of a definite presence, Nature
silently near. The great constellation of the Water-Serpent stretch'd
its coils over more than half the heavens. The Swan with outspread wings
was flying down the Milky Way. The northern Crown, the Eagle, Lyra, all
up there in their places. From the whole dome shot down points of light,
rapport with me, through the clear blue-black. All the usual sense of
motion, all animal life, seem'd discarded, seem'd a fiction; a curious
power, like the placid rest of Egyptian gods, took possession, none
the less potent for being impalpable. Earlier I had seen many bats,
balancing in the luminous twilight, darting their black forms hither
and yon over the river; but now they altogether disappear'd. The evening
star and the moon had gone. Alertness and peace lay camly couching
together through the fluid universal shadows.
_Aug. 26_.--Bright has the day been, and my spirits an equal _forzando_.
Then comes the night, different, inexpressibly pensive, with its
own tender and temper'd splendor. Venus lingers in the west with a
voluptuous dazzle unshown hitherto this summer. Mars rises early, and
the red sulky moon, two days past her full; Jupiter at night's meridian,
and the long curling-slanted Scorpion stretching full view in the south,
Aretus-neck'd. Mars walks the heavens lord-paramount now; all through
this month I go out after supper and watch for him; sometimes getting
up at midnight to take another look at his unparallel'd lustre. (I see
lately an astronomer has made out through the new Washington telescope
that Mars has certainly one moon, perhaps two.) Pale and distant, but
near in the heavens, Saturn precedes him.
MULLEINS AND MULLEINS
Large, placid mulleins, as summer advances, velvety in texture, of a
light greenish-drab color, growing everywhere in the fields--at first
earth's big rosettes in their broad-leav'd low cluster-plants, eight,
ten, twenty leaves to a plant--plentiful on the fallow twenty-acre
lot, at the end of the lane, and especially by the ridge-sides of the
fences--then close to the ground, but soon springing up--leaves as broad
as my hand, and the lower ones twice as long--so fresh and dewy in the
morning--stalks now four or five, even seven or eight feet high. The
farmers, I find, think the mullein a mean unworthy weed, but I have
grown to a fondness for it. Every object has its lesson, enclosing
the suggestion of everything else--and lately I sometimes think all is
concentrated for me in these hardy, yellow-flower'd weeds. As I come
down the lane early in the morning, I pause before their soft wool-like
fleece and stem and broad leaves, glittering with countless diamonds.
Annually for three summers now, they and I have silently return'd
together; at such long intervals I stand or sit among them,
musing--and woven with the rest, of so many hours and moods of partial
rehabilitation--of my sane or sick spirit, here as near at peace as it
can be.
DISTANT SOUNDS
The axe of the wood-cutter, the measured thud of a single
threshing-flail, the crowing of chanticleer in the barn-yard, (with
invariable responses from other barn-yards,) and the lowing of
cattle--but most of all, or far or near, the wind--through the high
tree-tops, or through low bushes, laving one's face and hands so gently,
this balmy-bright noon, the coolest for a long time, (Sept. 2)--I will
not call it _sighing_, for to me it is always a firm, sane, cheery
expression, through a monotone, giving many varieties, or swift or slow,
or dense or delicate. The wind in the patch of pine woods off there--how
sibilant. Or at sea, I can imagine it this moment, tossing the waves,
with spirits of foam flying far, and the free whistle, and the scent
of the salt--and that vast paradox somehow with all its action and
restlessness conveying a sense of eternal rest.
_Other adjuncts._--But the sun and the moon here and these times. As
never more wonderful by day, the gorgeous orb imperial, so vast,
so ardently, lovingly hot--so never a more glorious moon of nights,
especially the last three or four. The great planets too--Mars never
before so flaming bright, so flashing-large, with slight yellow tinge,
(the astronomers say--is it true?--nearer to us than any time the past
century)--and well up, lord Jupiter, (a little while since close by
the moon)--and in the west, after the sun sinks, voluptuous Venus, now
languid and shorn of her beams, as if from some divine excess.
A SUN-BATH-NAKEDNESS
_Sunday, Aug. 27_.--Another day quite free from mark'd prostration
and pain. It seems indeed as if peace and nutriment from heaven subtly
filter into me as I slowly hobble down these country lanes and across
fields, in the good air--as I sit here in solitude with Nature--open,
voiceless, mystic, far removed, yet palpable, eloquent Nature. I
merge myself in the scene, in the perfect day. Hovering over the clear
brook-water, I am sooth'd by its soft gurgle in one place, and
the hoarser murmurs of its three-foot fall in another. Come, ye
disconsolate, in whom any latent eligibility is left--come get the sure
virtues of creek-shore, and wood and field. Two months (July and August,
'77,) have I absorb'd them, and they begin to make a new man of me.
Every day, seclusion--every day at least two or three hours of freedom,
bathing, no talk, no bonds, no dress, no books, no _manners_.
Shall I tell you, reader, to what I attribute my already much-restored
health? That I have been almost two years, off and on, without drugs and
medicines, and daily in the open air. Last summer I found a particularly
secluded little dell off one side by my creek, originally a large
dug-out marl-pit, now abandon'd, fill'd, with bushes, trees, grass, a
group of willows, a straggling bank, and a spring of delicious water
running right through the middle of it, with two or three little
cascades. Here I retreated every hot day, and follow it up this summer.
Here I realize the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom