Walking
will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor
firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast
and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in
the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds
himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it
were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where
her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests
ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these
bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but
they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the
glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from
beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no
trace, and it will have no anniversary.
I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting
sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden
rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I
was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining
family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord,
unknown to me—to whom the sun was servant—who had not gone into society
in the village—who had not been called on. I saw their park,
their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s
cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew.
Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do
not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not.
They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters.
They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly
through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy
bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies.
They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their
neighbor,—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team
through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their
coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks.
Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics.
There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving
or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done
away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a distant hive in
May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle
thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry
was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out
of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and
recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to
recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should
move out of Concord.
We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit
us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem,
few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for
the grove in our minds is laid waste,—sold to feed unnecessary fires of
ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them
to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial
season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the
mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal
migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of
the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They
no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin China
grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!
We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate
ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my
account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top
of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for
I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen
before,—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked
about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I
certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered
around me,—it was near the end of June,—on the ends of the topmost
branches only, a few minute and delicate red conelike blossoms,
the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried
straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger
jurymen who walked the streets,—for it was court week—and to farmers and
lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen
the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell
of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as
perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from
the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the
heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the
flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed
their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer
for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children as of her
white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen
them.
Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed
over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering
the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard
within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us
that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of
thoughts. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours.
There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,—the gospel
according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early
and kept up early, and to be where he is, is to be in season, in the
foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness
of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst
forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of
time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not
betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?
The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all
plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter,
but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in
doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on
a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a
cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well,
at any rate,”—and with a sudden gush return to my senses.
We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a
meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before
setting, after a cold grey day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon,
and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on
the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the
shrub-oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the
meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such
a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also
was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of
that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon,
never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an
infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child
that walked there, it was more glorious still.
The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all
the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it
has never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have
his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and
there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just
beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked
in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves,
so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a
golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every
wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun
on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.
So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine
more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our
minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening
light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn.