Complete Prose Works
these at Chicoutimi and Ha-ha bay, and my days and nights up and down
this fascinating savage river--the rounded mountains, some bare and
gray, some dull red, some draped close all over with matted green
verdure or vines--the ample, calm, eternal rocks everywhere--the long
streaks of motley foam, a milk-white curd on the glistening breast of
the stream--the little two-masted schooner, dingy yellow, with patch'd
sails, set wing-and-wing, nearing us, coming saucily up the water with a
couple of swarthy, black-hair'd men aboard--the strong shades falling on
the light gray or yellow outlines of the hills all through the forenoon,
as we steam within gunshot of them--while ever the pure and delicate
sky spreads over all. And the splendid sunsets, and the sights of
evening--the same old stars, (relatively a little different, I see, so
far north) Arcturus and Lyra, and the Eagle, and great Jupiter like
a silver globe, and the constellation of the Scorpion. Then northern
lights nearly every night.
THE INHABITANTS--GOOD LIVING
Grim and rocky and black-water'd as the demesne hereabout is, however,
you must not think genial humanity, and comfort, and good-living are not
to be met. Before I began this memorandum I made a first-rate breakfast
of sea-trout, finishing off with wild raspberries. I find smiles and
courtesy everywhere--physiognomies in general curiously like those in
the United States--(I was astonish'd to find the same resemblance all
through the province of Quebec.) In general the inhabitants of this
rugged country (Charlevoix, Chicoutimi and Tadousac counties, and lake
St. John region) a simple, hardy population, lumbering, trapping furs,
boating, fishing, berry-picking and a little farming. I was watching a
group of young boatmen eating their early dinner--nothing but an immense
loaf of bread, had apparently been the size of a bushel measure, from
which they cut chunks with a jack-knife. Must be a tremendous winter
country this, when the solid frost and ice fully set in.
CEDAR-PLUMS LIKE-NAMES (_Back again in Camden and down in Jersey_)
One time I thought of naming this collection "Cedar-Plums Like" (which I
still fancy wouldn't have been a bad name nor inappropriate.) A melange
of loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling--a little thinking
thrown in for salt, but very little--not only summer but all
seasons--not only days but nights--some literary meditations--books,
authors examined, Carlyle, Poe, Emerson tried, (always under my
cedar-tree, in the open air, and never in the library)--mostly the
scenes everybody sees, but some of my own caprices, meditations,
egotism--truly an open air and mainly summer formation--singly, or in
clusters--wild and free and somewhat acrid--indeed more like cedar-plums
than you might guess at first glance.
But do you know what they are? (To city man, or some sweet parlor lady,
I now talk.) As you go along roads, or barrens, or across country,
anywhere through these States, middle, eastern, western, or southern,
you will see, certain seasons of the year, the thick woolly tufts of
the cedar mottled with bunches of china-blue berries, about as big as
fox-grapes. But first a special word for the tree itself: everybody
knows that the cedar is a healthy, cheap, democratic wood, streak'd red
and white--an evergreen--that it is not a _cultivated_ tree--that it
keeps away moths--that it grows inland or seaboard, all climates, hot
or cold, any soil--in fact rather prefers sand and bleak side
spots--content if the plough, the fertilizer and the trimming-axe, will
but keep away and let it alone. After a long rain, when everything looks
bright, often have I stopt in my wood-saunters, south or north, or far
west, to take in its dusky green, wash'd clean and sweet, and speck'd
copiously with its fruit of clear, hardy blue. The wood of the cedar
is of use--but what profit on earth are those sprigs of acrid plums?
A question impossible to answer satisfactorily. True, some of the herb
doctors give them for stomachic affections, but the remedy is as bad as
the disease. Then in my rambles down in Camden county I once found an
old crazy woman gathering the clusters with zeal and joy. She show'd,
as I was told afterward, a sort of infatuation for them, and every year
placed and kept profuse bunches high and low about her room. They had a
strange charm on her uneasy head, and effected docility and peace. (She
was harmless, and lived near by with her well-off married daughter.)
Whether there is any connection between those bunches, and being out of
one's wits, I cannot say, but I myself entertain a weakness for them.
Indeed, I love the cedar, anyhow--its naked ruggedness, its just
palpable odor, (so different from the perfumer's best,) its silence,
its equable acceptance of winter's cold and summer's heat, of rain or
drouth--its shelter to me from those, at times--its associations--(well,
I never could explain _why_ I love anybody, or anything.) The service I
now specially owe to the cedar is, while I cast around for a name for my
proposed collection, hesitating, puzzled--after rejecting a long, long
string, I lift my eyes, and lo! the very term I want. At any rate, I go
no further--I tire in the search. I take what some invisible kind spirit
has put before me. Besides, who shall say there is not affinity enough
between (at least the bundle of sticks that produced) many of these
pieces, or granulations, and those blue berries? their uselessness
growing wild--a certain aroma of Nature I would so like to have in
my pages--the thin soil whence they come--their content in being let
alone--their stolid and deaf repugnance to answering questions, (this
latter the nearest, dearest trait affinity of all.)
Then reader dear, in conclusion, as to the point of the name for the
present collection, let us be satisfied to _have_ a name--something to
identify and bind it together, to concrete all its vegetable, mineral,
personal memoranda, abrupt raids of criticism, crude gossip of
philosophy, varied sands and clumps--without bothering ourselves because
certain pages do not present themselves to you or me as coming under
their own name with entire fitness or amiability. (It is a profound,
vexatious never-explicable matter--this of names. I have been exercised
deeply about it my whole life.[11])
After all of which the name "Cedar-Plums Like" got its nose put out of
joint; but I cannot afford to throw away what I pencill'd down the
lane there, under the shelter of my old friend, one warm October noon.
Besides, it wouldn't be civil to the cedar tree.
Note:
[11] In the pocket of my receptacle-book I find a list of suggested and
rejected names for this volume, or parts of it--such as the following:
_As the wild bee hums in May,
& August mulleins grow,
& Winter snow-flakes fall,
& stars in the sky roll round._
_Away from Books--away from Art,
Now for the Day and Night--the lessons done,
Now for the Sun and Stars._
_Notes of a Half-Paralytic, As Voices in the Dusk, from
Week in and Week out, Speakers far or hid,
Embers of Ending Days, Autochthons....Embryons,
Ducks and Drakes, Wing-and-Wing,
Flood Tide and Ebb, Notes and Recalles.
Gossip at Early Candle-light, Only Mulleins and Bumble-Bees,
Echoes and Escapades, Pond-Babble....Tête-a-Têtes,
Such as I....Evening Dews, Echoes of a Life in the 19th
Notes and Writing a Book, Century in the New World,
Far and Near at 63, Flanges of Fifty Years,
Drifts and Cumulus, Abandons....Hurry Notes,
Maize-Tassels....Kindlings, A Life-Mosaic....Native Moments,
Fore and Aft....Vestibules, Types and Semi-Tones,
Scintilla at 60 and after, Oddments....Sand-Drifts,
Sands on the Shores of 64, Again and Again._
DEATH OF THOMAS CARLYLE
_Feb. 10, '81_.--And so the flame of the lamp, after long wasting and
flickering, has gone out entirely.
As a representative author, a literary figure, no man else will bequeath
to the future more significant hints of our stormy era, its fierce
paradoxes, its din, and its struggling parturition periods, than
Carlyle. He belongs to our own branch of the stock too; neither Latin
nor Greek, but altogether Gothic. Rugged, mountainous, volcanic, he
was himself more a French revolution than any of his volumes. In some
respects, so far in the Nineteenth century, the best equipt, keenest
mind, even from the college point of view, of all Britain; only he had
an ailing body. Dyspepsia is to be traced in every page, and now and
then fills the page. One may include among the lessons of his life--even
though that life stretch'd to amazing length--how behind the tally of
genius and morals stands the stomach, and gives a sort of casting vote.
Two conflicting agonistic elements seem to have contended in the
man, sometimes pulling him different ways like wild horses. He was a
cautious, conservative Scotchman, fully aware what a foetid gas-bag
much of modern radicalism is; but then his great heart demanded reform,
demanded change--often terribly at odds with his scornful brain. No
author ever put so much wailing and despair into his books, sometimes
palpable, oftener latent. He reminds me of that passage in Young's poems
where as death presses closer and closer for his prey, the soul rushes
hither and thither, appealing, shrieking, berating, to escape the
general doom.
Of short-comings, even positive blur-spots, from an American point of
view, he had serious share.
Not for his merely literary merit, (though that was great)--not as
"maker of books," but as launching into the self-complacent atmosphere
of our days a rasping, questioning, dislocating agitation and shock, is
Carlyle's final value. It is time the English-speaking peoples had some
true idea about the verteber of genius, namely power. As if they must
always have it cut and bias'd to the fashion, like a lady's cloak! What
a needed service he performs! How he shakes our comfortable reading
circles with a touch of the old Hebraic anger and prophecy--and indeed
it is just the same. Not Isaiah himself more scornful, more threatening:
"The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under
feet: And the glorious beauty which is on the head of the fat valley
shall be a fading flower." (The word prophecy is much misused; it seems
narrow'd to prediction merely. That is not the main sense of the Hebrew
word translated "prophet;" it means one whose mind bubbles up and pours
forth as a fountain, from inner, divine spontaneities revealing God.
Prediction is a very minor part of prophecy. The great matter is to
reveal and outpour the God-like suggestions pressing for birth in the
soul. This is briefly the doctrine of the Friends or Quakers.)
Then the simplicity and amid ostensible frailty the towering strength
of this man--a hardy oak knot, you could never wear out--an old
farmer dress'd in brown clothes, and not handsome--his very foibles
fascinating. Who cares that he wrote about Dr. Francia, and "Shooting
Niagara"--and "the Nigger Question,"--and didn't at all admire our
United States? (I doubt if he ever thought or said half as bad words
about us as we deserve.) How he splashes like leviathan in the seas of
modern literature and politics! Doubtless, respecting the latter, one
needs first to realize, from actual observation, the squalor, vice and
doggedness ingrain'd in the bulk-population of the British islands, with
the red tape, the fatuity, the flunkeyism everywhere, to understand the