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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Birds and Poets, by John Burroughs
+(#3 in our series by John Burroughs)
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+Title: Birds and Poets
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+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5177]
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+[This file was first posted on May 29, 2002]
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, BIRDS AND POETS ***
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+This eBook was produced by Jack Eden.
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+This etext was produced by Jack Eden <jackeden@yahoo.com>
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+
+THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS
+WITH PORTRAITS AND MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+VOLUME III
+
+BIRDS AND POETS
+WITH OTHER PAPERS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+I have deliberated a long time about coupling some of my sketches
+of outdoor nature with a few chapters of a more purely literary
+character, and thus confiding to my reader what absorbs and
+delights me inside my four walls, as well as what pleases and
+engages me outside those walls; especially since I have aimed to
+bring my outdoor spirit and method within, and still to look upon
+my subject with the best naturalist's eye I could command.
+
+I hope, therefore, he will not be scared away when I boldly
+confront him in the latter portions of my book with this name of
+strange portent, Walt Whitman, for I assure him that in this
+misjudged man he may press the strongest poetic pulse that has yet
+beaten in America, or perhaps in modern times.
+Then, these chapters are a proper supplement or continuation of my
+themes and their analogy in literature, because in them we shall
+"follow out these lessons of the earth and air," and behold their
+application to higher matters.
+
+It is not an artificially graded path strewn with roses that
+invites us in this part, but, let me hope, something better, a
+rugged trail through the woods or along the beach where we shall
+now and then get a whiff of natural air, or a glimpse of something
+to
+
+         "Make the wild blood start
+      In its mystic springs."
+
+ESOPUS-ON-HUDSON, March, 1877.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+   I.  BIRDS AND POETS
+  II.  TOUCHES OF NATURE
+ III.  A BIRD MEDLEY
+  IV.  APRIL
+   V.  SPRING POEMS
+  VI.  OUR RURAL DIVINITY
+ VII.  BEFORE GENIUS
+VIII.  BEFORE BEAUTY
+  IX.  EMERSON
+   X.  THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE
+       INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+BARN SWALLOW (colored)
+    From a drawing by L. A. Fuertes
+EMERSON'S HOUSE IN CONCORD
+    From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason
+A RIVER VIEW IN APRIL
+    From a drawing by Charles H. Woodbury
+FLICKER
+    From a drawing by L. A. Fuertes Cows
+IN RURAL LANDSCAPE
+    From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason
+VIEW FROM A HILLTOP
+    From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason
+
+
+
+
+BIRDS AND POETS
+
+I
+
+BIRDS AND POETS
+
+       "In summer, when the shawes be shene,
+           And leaves be large and long,
+        It is full merry in fair forest
+           To hear the fowlés' song.
+        The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease,
+           Sitting upon the spray;
+        So loud, it wakened Robin Hood
+           In the greenwood where he lay."
+
+It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets
+and of no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament
+that fully responds to them. So true is this, that all the great
+ornithologists--original namers and biographers of the birds--have
+been poets in deed if not in word. Audubon is a notable case in
+point, who, if he had not the tongue or the pen of the poet,
+certainly had the eye and ear and heart--"the fluid and attaching
+character"--and the singleness of purpose, the enthusiasm, the
+unworldliness, the love, that characterize the true and divine race
+of bards.
+
+So had Wilson, though perhaps not in as large a measure; yet he
+took fire as only a poet can. While making a journey on foot to
+Philadelphia, shortly after landing in this country, he caught
+sight of the red-headed woodpecker flitting among the trees,--a
+bird that shows like a tricolored scarf among the foliage,--and it
+so kindled his enthusiasm that his life was devoted to the pursuit
+of the birds from that day. It was a lucky hit. Wilson had already
+set up as a poet in Scotland, and was still fermenting when the
+bird met his eye and suggested to his soul a new outlet for its
+enthusiasm.
+
+The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A
+bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense
+is his life,--large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame
+charged with buoyancy and his heart with song. The beautiful
+vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and
+knowing no bounds,--how many human aspirations are realized in
+their free, holiday lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in
+their flight and song!
+
+Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet,
+and do we not demand of the human lark or thrush that he "shake out
+his carols" in the same free and spontaneous manner as his winged
+prototype? Kingsley has shown how surely the old minnesingers and
+early ballad-writers have learned of the birds, taking their key-
+note from the blackbird, or the wood-lark, or the throstle, and
+giving utterance to a melody as simple and unstudied. Such things
+as the following were surely caught from the fields or the woods:--
+
+       "She sat down below a thorn,
+        Fine flowers in the valley,
+        And there has she her sweet babe borne,
+        And the green leaves they grow rarely."
+
+Or the best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird-songs!
+--clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge and
+triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains. (Is not the
+genuine singing, lyrical quality essentially masculine?) Keats and
+Shelley, perhaps more notably than any other English poets, have
+the bird organization and the piercing wild-bird cry. This, of
+course, is not saying that they are the greatest poets, but that
+they have preëminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and the
+larks.
+
+But when the general reader thinks of the birds of the poets, he
+very naturally calls to mind the renowned birds, the lark and the
+nightingale, Old World melodists, embalmed in Old World poetry, but
+occasionally appearing on these shores, transported in the verse of
+some callow singer.
+
+The very oldest poets, the towering antique bards, seem to make
+little mention of the song-birds. They loved better the soaring,
+swooping birds of prey, the eagle, the ominous birds, the vultures,
+the storks and cranes, or the clamorous sea-birds and the screaming
+hawks. These suited better the rugged, warlike character of the
+times and the simple, powerful souls of the singers themselves.
+Homer must have heard the twittering of the swallows, the cry of
+the plover, the voice of the turtle, and the warble of the
+nightingale; but they were not adequate symbols to express what he
+felt or to adorn his theme. Aeschylus saw in the eagle "the dog of
+Jove," and his verse cuts like a sword with such a conception.
+
+It is not because the old bards were less as poets, but that they
+were more as men. To strong, susceptible characters, the music of
+nature is not confined to sweet sounds. The defiant scream of the
+hawk circling aloft, the wild whinny of the loon, the whooping of
+the crane, the booming of the bittern, the vulpine bark of the
+eagle, the loud trumpeting of the migratory geese sounding down out
+of the midnight sky; or by the seashore, the coast of New Jersey or
+Long Island, the wild crooning of the flocks of gulls, repeated,
+continued by the hour, swirling sharp and shrill, rising and
+falling like the wind in a storm, as they circle above the beach or
+dip to the dash of the waves,--are much more welcome in certain
+moods than any and all mere bird-melodies, in keeping as they are
+with the shaggy and untamed features of ocean and woods, and
+suggesting something like the Richard Wagner music in the
+ornithological orchestra.
+
+                      "Nor these alone whose notes
+       Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain,
+       But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime
+       In still repeated circles, screaming loud,
+       The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl,
+       That hails the rising moon, have charms for me,"
+
+says Cowper. "I never hear," says Burns in one of his letters, "the
+loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild
+mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning,
+without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of
+devotion or poetry."
+
+Even the Greek minor poets, the swarm of them that are represented
+in the Greek Anthology, rarely make affectionate mention of the
+birds, except perhaps Sappho, whom Ben Jonson makes speak of the
+nightingale as--
+
+       "The dear glad angel of the spring."
+
+The cicada, the locust, and the grasshopper are often referred to,
+but rarely by name any of the common birds. That Greek grasshopper
+must have been a wonderful creature. He was a sacred object in
+Greece, and is spoken of by the poets as a charming songster. What
+we would say of birds the Greek said of this favorite insect. When
+Socrates and Phaedrus came to the fountain shaded by the plane-
+tree, where they had their famous discourse, Socrates said:
+"Observe the freshness of the spot, how charming and very
+delightful it is, and how summer-like and shrill it sounds from the
+choir of grasshoppers." One of the poets in the Anthology finds a
+grasshopper struggling in a spider's web, which he releases with
+the words:--
+
+       "Go safe and free with your sweet voice of song."
+
+Another one makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:--
+
+       "Me, the Nymphs' wayside minstrel whose sweet note
+        O'er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float."
+
+Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken
+string on his lyre, and "filled the cadence due."
+
+       "For while six chords beneath my fingers cried,
+        He with his tuneful voice the seventh supplied;
+        The midday songster of the mountain set
+        His pastoral ditty to my canzonet;
+        And when he sang, his modulated throat
+        Accorded with the lifeless string I smote."
+
+While we are trying to introduce the lark in this country, why not
+try this Pindaric grasshopper also?
+
+It is to the literary poets and to the minstrels of a softer age
+that we must look for special mention of the song-birds and for
+poetical rhapsodies upon them. The nightingale is the most general
+favorite, and nearly all the more noted English poets have sung her
+praises. To the melancholy poet she is melancholy, and to the
+cheerful she is cheerful. Shakespeare in one of his sonnets speaks
+of her song as mournful, while Martial calls her the "most
+garrulous" of birds. Milton sang:--
+
+       "Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,
+        Most musical, most melancholy,
+        Thee, chantress, oft the woods among
+        I woo, to hear thy evening song."
+
+To Wordsworth she told another story:--
+
+       "O nightingale! thou surely art
+        A creature of ebullient heart;
+        These notes of thine,--they pierce and pierce,--
+        Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
+        Thou sing'st as if the god of wine
+        Had helped thee to a valentine;
+        A song in mockery and despite
+        Of shades, and dews, and silent night,
+        And steady bliss, and all the loves
+        Now sleeping in these peaceful groves."
+
+In a like vein Coleridge sang:--
+
+       "'T is the merry nightingale
+        That crowds and hurries and precipitates
+        With fast, thick warble his delicious notes."
+
+Keats's poem on the nightingale is doubtless more in the spirit of
+the bird's strain than any other. It is less a description of the
+song and more the song itself. Hood called the nightingale
+
+       "The sweet and plaintive Sappho of the dell."
+
+I mention the nightingale only to point my remarks upon its
+American rival, the famous mockingbird of the Southern States,
+which is also a nightingale,--a night-singer,--and which no doubt
+excels the Old World bird in the variety and compass of its powers.
+The two birds belong to totally distinct families, there being no
+American species which answers to the European nightingale, as
+there are that answer to the robin, the cuckoo, the blackbird, and
+numerous others. Philomel has the color, manners, and habits of a
+thrush,--our hermit thrush,--but it is not a thrush at all, but a
+warbler. I gather from the books that its song is protracted and
+full rather than melodious,--a capricious, long-continued warble,
+doubling and redoubling, rising and falling, issuing from the
+groves and the great gardens, and associated in the minds of the
+poets with love and moonlight and the privacy of sequestered walks.
+All our sympathies and attractions are with the bird, and we do not
+forget that Arabia and Persia are there back of its song.
+
+_Our_ nightingale has mainly the reputation of the caged bird, and
+is famed mostly for its powers of mimicry, which are truly
+wonderful, enabling the bird to exactly reproduce and even improve
+upon the notes of almost any other songster. But in a state of
+freedom it has a song of its own which is infinitely rich and
+various. It is a garrulous polyglot when it chooses to be, and
+there is a dash of the clown and the buffoon in its nature which
+too often flavors its whole performance, especially in captivity;
+but in its native haunts, and when its love-passion is upon it, the
+serious and even grand side of its character comes out.  In Alabama
+and Florida its song may be heard all through the sultry summer
+night, at times low and plaintive, then full and strong.  A friend
+of Thoreau and a careful observer, who has resided in Florida,
+tells me that this bird is a much more marvelous singer than it has
+the credit of being.  He describes a habit it has of singing on the
+wing on moonlight nights, that would be worth going South to hear.
+Starting from a low bush, it mounts in the air and continues its
+flight apparently to an altitude of several hundred feet, remaining
+on the wing a number of minutes, and pouring out its song with the
+utmost clearness and abandon,--a slowly rising musical rocket that
+fills the night air with harmonious sounds.  Here are both the lark
+and nightingale in one; and if poets were as plentiful down South
+as they are in New England, we should have heard of this song long
+ago, and had it celebrated in appropriate verse.  But so far only
+one Southern poet, Wilde, has accredited the bird this song.  This
+he has done in the following admirable sonnet:--
+
+                    TO THE MOCKINGBIRD
+
+       Winged mimic of the woods! thou motley fool!
+          Who shall thy gay buffoonery describe?
+       Thine ever-ready notes of ridicule
+          Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe.
+       Wit--sophist--songster--Yorick of thy tribe,
+          Thou sportive satirist of Nature's school,
+       To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe,
+          Arch scoffer, and mad Abbot of Misrule!
+       For such thou art by day--but all night long
+          Thou pour'st a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain,
+       As if thou didst in this, thy moonlight song,
+          Like to the melancholy Jaques, complain,
+       Musing on falsehood, violence, and wrong,
+          And sighing for thy motley coat again.
+
+Aside from this sonnet, the mockingbird has got into poetical
+literature, so far as I know, in only one notable instance, and
+that in the page of a poet where we would least expect to find
+him,--a bard who habitually bends his ear only to the musical surge
+and rhythmus of total nature, and is as little wont to turn aside
+for any special beauties or points as the most austere of the
+ancient masters. I refer to Walt Whitman's "Out of the cradle
+endlessly rocking," in which the mockingbird plays a part. The
+poet's treatment of the bird is entirely ideal and eminently
+characteristic. That is to say, it is altogether poetical and not
+at all ornithological; yet it contains a rendering or free
+translation of a bird-song--the nocturne of the mockingbird,
+singing and calling through the night for its lost mate--that I
+consider quite unmatched in our literature:--
+
+ Once, Paumanok,
+ When the snows had melted, and the Fifth-month grass was growing,
+ Up this seashore, in some briers,
+ Two guests from Alabama--two together,
+ And their nest, and four light green eggs, spotted with brown,
+ And every day the he-bird, to and fro, near at hand,
+ And every day the she-bird, crouched on her nest, silent, with bright
+    eyes,
+ And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
+ Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.
+
+ _Shine! Shine! Shine!
+ Pour down your warmth, great Sun!
+ While we bask--we two together._
+
+ _Two together!
+ Winds blow South, or winds blow North,
+ Day come white, or night come black,
+ Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
+ Singing all time, minding no time,
+ If we two but keep together._
+
+ Till of a sudden,
+ Maybe killed unknown to her mate,
+ One forenoon the she-bird crouched not on the nest,
+ Nor returned that afternoon, nor the next,
+ Nor ever appeared again.
+
+ And thenceforward all summer, in the sound of the sea,
+ And at night, under the full of the moon, in calmer weather,
+ Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
+ Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
+ I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the he-bird,
+ The solitary guest from Alabama.
+
+ _Blow! blow! blow!
+ Blow up, sea-winds, along Paumanok's shore!
+ I wait and I wait, till you blow my mate to me._
+
+ Yes, when the stars glistened,
+ All night long, on the prong of a moss-scalloped stake,
+ Down, almost amid the slapping waves,
+ Sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears.
+
+ He called on his mate:
+ He poured forth the meanings which I, of all men, know.
+
+  .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+ _Soothe! soothe! soothe!
+ Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
+ And again another behind, embracing and lapping, every one close,
+ But my love soothes not me, not me._
+
+ _Low hangs the moon--it rose late.
+ Oh it is lagging--oh I think it is heavy with love, with love._
+
+ _Oh madly the sea pushes, pushes upon the land,
+ With love--with love._
+
+ _O night! do I not see my love fluttering out there among the breakers!
+ What is that little black thing I see there in the white?_
+
+ _Loud! loud! loud!
+ Loud I call to you, my love!
+ High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves:
+ Surely you must know who is here, is here;
+ You must know who I am, my love._
+
+ _Low-hanging moon!
+ What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
+ Oh it is the shape, the shape of my mate!
+ O moon, do not keep her from me any longer._
+
+ _Land! land! O land!
+ Whichever way I turn, oh I think you could give my mate back again,
+    if you only would;
+ For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look._
+
+ _O rising stars!
+ Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you._
+
+ _O throat! O trembling throat!
+ Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
+ Pierce the woods, the earth;
+ Somewhere listening to catch you, must be the one I want._
+
+ _Shake out, carols!
+ Solitary here--the night's carols!
+ Carols of lonesome love! Death's carols!
+ Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
+ Oh, under that moon, where she droops almost down into the sea!
+ O reckless, despairing carols._
+
+ _But soft! sink low! Soft! let me just murmur;
+ And do you wait a moment, you husky-noised sea;
+ For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
+ So faint--I must be still, be still to listen!
+ But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately
+   to me._
+
+ _Hither, my love!
+ Here I am! Here!
+ With this just-sustained note I announce myself to you;
+ This gentle call is for you, my love, for you._
+
+ _Do not be decoyed elsewhere!
+ That is the whistle of the wind--it is not my voice;
+ That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray;
+ Those are the shadows of leaves._
+
+ _O darkness! Oh in vain!
+ Oh I am very sick and sorrowful._
+
+  .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+The bird that occupies the second place to the nightingale in
+British poetical literature is the skylark, a pastoral bird as the
+Philomel is an arboreal,-- a creature of light and air and motion,
+the companion of the plowman, the shepherd, the harvester,--whose
+nest is in the stubble and whose tryst is in the clouds. Its life
+affords that kind of contrast which the imagination loves,--one
+moment a plain pedestrian bird, hardly distinguishable from the
+ground, the next a soaring, untiring songster, reveling in the
+upper air, challenging the eye to follow him and the ear to
+separate his notes.
+
+The lark's song is not especially melodious, but is blithesome,
+sibilant, and unceasing. Its type is the grass, where the bird
+makes its home, abounding, multitudinous, the notes nearly all
+alike and all in the same key, but rapid, swarming, prodigal,
+showering down as thick and fast as drops of rain in a summer
+shower.
+
+Many noted poets have sung the praises of the lark, or been kindled
+by his example. Shelley's ode and Wordsworth's "To a Skylark" are
+well known to all readers of poetry, while every schoolboy will
+recall Hogg's poem, beginning:--
+
+       "Bird of the wilderness,
+        Blithesome and cumberless,
+    Sweet be thy matin o'er moorland and lea!
+        Emblem of happiness,
+        Blest is thy dwelling-place--
+    Oh to abide in the desert with thee!"
+
+I heard of an enthusiastic American who went about English fields
+hunting a lark with Shelley's poem in his hand, thinking no doubt
+to use it as a kind of guide-book to the intricacies and harmonies
+of the song. He reported not having heard any larks, though I have
+little doubt they were soaring and singing about him all the time,
+though of course they did not sing to his ear the song that Shelley
+heard. The poets are the best natural historians, only you must
+know how to read them. They translate the facts largely and freely.
+A celebrated lady once said to Turner, "I confess I cannot see in
+nature what you do." "Ah, madam," said the complacent artist,
+"don't you wish you could!"
+
+Shelley's poem is perhaps better known, and has a higher reputation
+among literary folk, than Wordsworth's; it is more lyrical and
+lark-like; but it is needlessly long, though no longer than the
+lark's song itself, but the lark can't help it, and Shelley can. I
+quote only a few stanzas:--
+
+              "In the golden lightning
+                  Of the sunken sun,
+               O'er which clouds are bright'ning
+                  Thou dost float and run,
+       Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
+
+              "The pale purple even
+                  Melts around thy flight;
+               Like a star of heaven,
+                  In the broad daylight
+       Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
+
+              "Keen as are the arrows
+                  Of that silver sphere,
+               Whose intense lamp narrows
+                  In the white dawn clear,
+       Until we hardly see--we feel that it is there;
+
+              "All the earth and air
+                  With thy voice is loud,
+               As, when Night is bare,
+                  From one lonely cloud
+       The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed."
+
+Wordsworth has written two poems upon the lark, in one of which he
+calls the bird "pilgrim of the sky." This is the one quoted by
+Emerson in "Parnassus." Here is the concluding stanza:--
+
+       "Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
+        A privacy of glorious light is thine,
+        Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
+        Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
+        Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam,
+        True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
+
+The other poem I give entire:--
+
+       "Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
+           For thy song, Lark, is strong;
+        Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
+              Singing, singing,
+        With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
+           Lift me, guide me till I find
+        That spot which seems so to thy mind!
+
+       "I have walked through wilderness dreary,
+           And to-day my heart is weary;
+        Had I now the wings of a Faery
+           Up to thee would I fly.
+        There is madness about thee, and joy divine
+           In that song of thine;
+        Lift me, guide me high and high
+        To thy banqueting-place in the sky.
+
+             "Joyous as morning
+        Thou art laughing and scorning;
+        Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest,
+        And, though little troubled with sloth,
+        Drunken Lark! thou wouldst be loth
+        To be such a traveler as I.
+           Happy, happy Liver!
+        With a soul as strong as a mountain river,
+        Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver,
+        Joy and jollity be with us both!
+
+       "Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,
+        Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;
+        But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,
+        As full of gladness and as free of heaven,
+        I, with my fate contented, will plod on,
+        And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done."
+
+
+But better than either--better and more than a hundred pages--is
+Shakespeare's simple line,--
+
+       "Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,"
+
+or John Lyly's, his contemporary,--
+
+             "Who is't now we hear?
+        None but the lark so shrill and clear;
+        Now at heaven's gate she claps her wings,
+        The morn not waking till she sings."
+
+We have no well-known pastoral bird in the Eastern States that
+answers to the skylark. The American pipit or titlark and the shore
+lark, both birds of the far north, and seen in the States only in
+fall and winter, are said to sing on the wing in a similar strain.
+Common enough in our woods are two birds that have many of the
+habits and manners of the lark--the water-thrush and the golden-
+crowned thrush, or oven-bird. They are both walkers, and the latter
+frequently sings on the wing up aloft after the manner of the lark.
+Starting from its low perch, it rises in a spiral flight far above
+the tallest trees, and breaks out in a clear, ringing, ecstatic
+song, sweeter and more richly modulated than the skylark's, but
+brief, ceasing almost before you have noticed it; whereas the
+skylark goes singing away after you have forgotten him and returned
+to him half a dozen times.
+
+But on the Great Plains, of the West there; is a bird whose song
+resembles the skylark's quite closely and is said to be not at all
+inferior. This is Sprague's pipit, sometimes called the Missouri
+skylark, an excelsior songster, which from far up in the
+transparent blue rains down its notes for many minutes together. It
+is, no doubt, destined to figure in the future poetical literature
+of the West.
+
+Throughout the northern and eastern parts of the Union the lark
+would find a dangerous rival in the bobolink, a bird that has no
+European prototype, and no near relatives anywhere, standing quite
+alone, unique, and, in the qualities of hilarity and musical
+tintinnabulation, with a song unequaled. He has already a secure
+place in general literature, having been laureated by no less a
+poet than Bryant, and invested with a lasting human charm in the
+sunny page of Irving, and is the only one of our songsters, I
+believe, that the mockingbird cannot parody or imitate. He affords
+the most marked example of exuberant pride, and a glad, rollicking,
+holiday spirit, that can be seen among our birds. Every note
+expresses complacency and glee. He is a beau of the first pattern,
+and, unlike any other bird of my acquaintance, pushes his gallantry
+to the point of wheeling gayly into the train of every female that
+comes along, even after the season of courtship is over and the
+matches are all settled; and when she leads him on too wild a
+chase, he turns, lightly about and breaks out with a song is
+precisely analogous to a burst of gay and self-satisfied laughter,
+as much as to say, _"Ha! ha! ha! I must have my fun, Miss
+Silverthimble, thimble, thimble, if I break every heart in the
+meadow, see, see, see!"_
+
+At the approach of the breeding season the bobolink undergoes a
+complete change; his form changes, his color changes, his flight
+changes. From mottled brown or brindle he becomes black and white,
+earning, in some localities, the shocking name of "skunk bird;" his
+small, compact form becomes broad and conspicuous, and his ordinary
+flight is laid aside for a mincing, affected gait, in which he
+seems to use only the very tips of his wings. It is very noticeable
+what a contrast he presents to his mate at this season, not only in
+color but in manners, she being as shy and retiring as he is
+forward and hilarious. Indeed, she seems disagreeably serious and
+indisposed to any fun or jollity, scurrying away at his approach,
+and apparently annoyed at every endearing word and look. It is
+surprising that all this parade of plumage and tinkling of cymbals
+should be gone through with and persisted in to please a creature
+so coldly indifferent as she really seems to be. If Robert
+O'Lincoln has been stimulated into acquiring this holiday uniform
+and this musical gift by the approbation of Mrs. Robert, as Darwin,
+with his sexual selection principle, would have us believe, then
+there must have been a time when the females of this tribe were not
+quite so chary of their favors as they are now. Indeed, I never
+knew a female bird of any kind that did not appear utterly
+indifferent to the charms of voice and plumage that the male birds
+are so fond of displaying. But I am inclined to believe that the
+males think only of themselves and of outshining each other, and
+not at all of the approbation of their mates, as, in an analogous
+case in a higher species, it is well known whom the females dress
+for, and whom they want to kill with envy!
+
+I know of no other song-bird that expresses so much self-
+consciousness and vanity, and comes so near being an ornithological
+coxcomb. The red-bird, the yellowbird, the indigo-bird, the oriole,
+the cardinal grosbeak, and others, all birds of brilliant plumage
+and musical ability, seem quite unconscious of self, and neither by
+tone nor act challenge the admiration of the beholder.
+
+By the time the bobolink reaches the Potomac, in September, he has
+degenerated into a game-bird that is slaughtered by tens of
+thousands in the marshes. I think the prospects now are of his
+gradual extermination, as gunners and sportsmen are clearly on the
+increase, while the limit of the bird's productivity in the North
+has no doubt been reached long ago. There are no more meadows to be
+added to his domain there, while he is being waylaid and cut off
+more and more on his return to the South. It is gourmand eat
+gourmand, until in half a century more I expect the blithest and
+merriest of our meadow songsters will have disappeared before the
+rapacity of human throats.
+
+But the poets have had a shot at him in good time, and have
+preserved some of his traits. Bryant's poem on this subject does
+not compare with his lines "To a Water-Fowl,"--a subject so well
+suited to the peculiar, simple, and deliberate motion of his mind;
+at the same time it is fit that the poet who sings of "The Planting
+of the Apple-Tree" should render into words the song of "Robert of
+Lincoln." I subjoin a few stanzas:--
+
+                ROBERT OF LINCOLN
+
+        Merrily swinging on brier and weed,
+           Near to the nest of his little dame,
+        Over the mountain-side or mead,
+           Robert of Lincoln is telling his name:
+                 Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
+                 Spink, spank, spink:
+        Snug and safe is that nest of ours,
+        Hidden among the summer flowers.
+                 Chee, chee, chee.
+
+        Robert of Lincoln is gayly drest,
+           Wearing a bright black wedding-coat,
+        White are his shoulders and white his crest,
+           Hear him call in his merry note:
+                 Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
+                 Spink, spank, spink:
+        Look what a nice new coat is mine,
+        Sure there was never a bird so fine.
+                 Chee, chee, chee.
+
+        Robert of Lincoln's Quaker wife,
+           Pretty and quiet, with plain brown wings,
+        Passing at home a patient life,
+           Broods in the grass while her husband sings.
+                 Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
+                 Spink, spank, spink:
+        Brood, kind creature; you need not fear
+        Thieves and robbers while I am here.
+                 Chee, chee, chee.
+
+
+But it has been reserved for a practical ornithologist, Mr. Wilson
+Flagg, to write by far the best poem on the bobolink that I have
+yet seen. It is much more in the mood and spirit of the actual song
+than Bryant's poem:--
+
+                         THE O'LINCOLN FAMILY
+
+       A flock of merry singing-birds were sporting in the grove;
+       Some were warbling cheerily, and some were making love:
+       There were Bobolincon, Wadolincon, Winterseeble, Conquedle,--
+       A livelier set was never led by tabor, pipe, or fiddle,--
+       Crying, "Phew, shew, Wadolincon, see, see, Bobolincon,
+       Down among the tickletops, hiding in the buttercups!
+       I know the saucy chap, I see his shining cap
+       Bobbing in the clover there--see, see, see!"
+
+       Up flies Bobolincon, perching on an apple-tree,
+       Startled by his rival's song, quickened by his raillery.
+       Soon he spies the rogue afloat, curveting in the air,
+       And merrily he turns about, and warns him to beware!
+       "'T is you that would a-wooing go, down among the rushes O!
+       But wait a week, till flowers are cheery,--wait a week,and,
+          ere you marry,
+       Be sure of a house wherein to tarry!
+       Wadolink, Whiskodink, Tom Denny, wait, wait, wait!"
+
+       Every one's a funny fellow; every one's a little mellow;
+       Follow, follow, follow, follow, o'er the hill and in the hollow!
+       Merrily, merrily, there they hie; now they rise and now they fly;
+       They cross and turn, and in and out, and down in the middle,
+          and wheel about,--
+       With a "Phew, shew, Wadolincon! listen to me, Bobolincon!--
+       Happy's the wooing that's speedily doing, that's speedily doing,
+       That's merry and over with the bloom of the clover!
+       Bobolincon, Wadolincon, Winterseeble, follow, follow me!"
+
+
+Many persons, I presume, have admired Wordsworth's poem on the
+cuckoo, without recognizing its truthfulness, or how thoroughly, in
+the main, the description applies to our own species. If the poem
+had been written in New England or New York, it could not have
+suited our case better:--
+
+       "O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
+           I hear thee and rejoice,
+        O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
+           Or but a wandering Voice?
+
+       "While I am lying on the grass,
+           Thy twofold shout I hear,
+        From hill to hill it seems to pass,
+           At once far off, and near.
+
+       "Though babbling only to the Vale,
+           Of sunshine and of flowers,
+        Thou bringest unto me a tale
+           Of visionary hours.
+
+       "Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
+           Even yet thou art to me
+        No bird, but an invisible thing,
+           A voice, a mystery;
+
+       "The same whom in my schoolboy days
+           I listened to; that Cry
+        Which made me look a thousand ways
+           In bush, and tree, and sky.
+
+       "To seek thee did I often rove
+           Through woods and on the green;
+       And thou wert still a hope, a love;
+           Still longed for, never seen.
+
+       "And I can listen to thee yet;
+           Can lie upon the plain
+        And listen, till I do beget
+           That golden time again.
+
+       "O blesséd Bird! the earth we pace
+           Again appears to be
+        An unsubstantial, faery place;
+           That is fit home for thee!"
+
+Logan's stanzas, "To the Cuckoo," have less merit both as poetry
+and natural history, but they are older, and doubtless the latter
+poet benefited by them. Burke admired them so much that, while on a
+visit to Edinburgh, he sought the author out to compliment him:--
+
+       "Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove!
+           Thou messenger of spring!
+        Now Heaven repairs thy rural seat,
+           And woods thy welcome sing.
+
+       "What time the daisy decks the green,
+           Thy certain voice we hear;
+        Hast thou a star to guide thy path,
+           Or mark the rolling year?
+
+        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+       "The schoolboy, wandering through the wood
+           To pull the primrose gay,
+       Starts, the new voice of spring to hear,
+          And imitates thy lay.
+
+        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+       "Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green,
+           Thy sky is ever clear;
+       Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
+           No winter in thy year."
+
+The European cuckoo is evidently a much gayer bird than ours, and
+much more noticeable.
+
+       "Hark, how the jolly cuckoos sing
+       'Cuckoo!' to welcome in the spring,"
+
+says John Lyly three hundred years agone. Its note is easily
+imitated, and boys will render it so perfectly as to deceive any
+but the shrewdest ear. An English lady tells me its voice reminds
+one of children at play, and is full of gayety and happiness. It is
+a persistent songster, and keeps up its call from morning to night.
+Indeed, certain parts of Wordsworth's poem--those that refer to the
+bird as a mystery, a wandering, solitary voice--seem to fit our
+bird better than the European species. Our cuckoo is in fact a
+solitary wanderer, repeating its loud, guttural call in the depths
+of the forest, and well calculated to arrest the attention of a
+poet like Wordsworth, who was himself a kind of cuckoo, a solitary
+voice, syllabling the loneliness that broods over streams and
+woods,--
+
+       "And once far off, and near."
+
+Our cuckoo is not a spring bird, being seldom seen or heard in the
+North before late in May. He is a great devourer of canker-worms,
+and, when these pests appear, he comes out of his forest seclusion
+and makes excursions through the orchards stealthily and quietly,
+regaling himself upon those pulpy, fuzzy titbits. His coat of deep
+cinnamon brown has a silky gloss and is very beautiful. His note or
+call is not musical but loud, and has in a remarkable degree the
+quality of remoteness and introvertedness. It is like a vocal
+legend, and to the farmer bodes rain.
+
+It is worthy of note, and illustrates some things said farther
+back, that birds not strictly denominated songsters, but criers
+like the cuckoo, have been quite as great favorites with the poets,
+and have received as affectionate treatment at their hands, as have
+the song-birds. One readily recalls Emerson's "Titmouse,"
+Trowbridge's "Pewee," Celia Thaxter's "Sandpiper," and others of a
+like character.
+
+It is also worthy of note that the owl appears to be a greater
+favorite with the poets than the proud, soaring hawk. The owl is
+doubtless the more human and picturesque bird; then he belongs to
+the night and its weird effects. Bird of the silent wing and
+expansive eye, grimalkin in feathers, feline, mousing, haunting
+ruins" and towers, and mocking the midnight stillness with thy
+uncanny cry! The owl is the great bugaboo of the feathered tribes.
+His appearance by day is hailed by shouts of alarm and derision
+from nearly every bird that flies, from crows down to sparrows.
+They swarm about him like flies, and literally mob him back into
+his dusky retreat. Silence is as the breath of his nostrils to him,
+and the uproar that greets him when he emerges into the open day
+seems to alarm and confuse him as it does the pickpocket when
+everybody cries Thief.
+
+But the poets, I say, have not despised him:--
+
+       "The lark is but a bumpkin fowl;
+           He sleeps in his nest till morn;
+        But my blessing upon the jolly owl
+           That all night blows his horn."
+
+Both Shakespeare and Tennyson have made songs about him. This is
+Shakespeare's, from "Love's Labor's Lost," and perhaps has
+reference to the white or snowy owl:--
+
+       "When icicles hang by the wall,
+           And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
+        And Tom bears logs into the hall,
+           And milk comes frozen home in pail;
+        When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
+        Then nightly sings the staring owl,
+                 Tu-whoo!
+        Tu-whit! tu-whoo! a merry note,
+        While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
+
+       "When all aloud the wind doth blow,
+           And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
+        And birds sit brooding in the snow,
+           And Marian's nose looks red and raw;
+       When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
+       Then nightly sings the staring owl,
+                 Tu-whoo!
+        Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! a merry note,
+        While greasy Joan doth keel the pot."
+
+There is, perhaps, a slight reminiscence of this song in Tennyson's
+"Owl:"--
+
+       "When cats run home and light is come,
+           And dew is cold upon the ground,
+        And the far-off stream is dumb,
+          And the whirring sail goes round,
+          And the whirring sail goes round;
+             Alone and warming his five wits,
+             The white owl in the belfry sits.
+
+       "When merry milkmaids click the latch,
+           And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
+        And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch
+           Twice or thrice his roundelay,
+           Twice or thrice his roundelay;
+              Alone and warming his five wits,
+              The white owl in the belfry sits."
+
+Tennyson has not directly celebrated any of the more famous birds,
+but his poems contain frequent allusions to them. The
+
+       "Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
+           Rings Eden through the budded quicks,
+           Oh, tell me where the senses mix,
+        Oh, tell me where the passions meet,"
+
+of "In Memoriam," is doubtless the nightingale. And here we have
+the lark:--
+
+       "Now sings the woodland loud and long,
+           And distance takes a lovelier hue,
+           And drowned in yonder living blue
+        The lark becomes a sightless song."
+
+And again in this from "A Dream of Fair Women:"--
+
+                   "Then I heard
+        A noise of some one coming through the lawn,
+        And singing clearer than the crested bird
+              That claps his wings at dawn."
+
+The swallow is a favorite bird with Tennyson, and is frequently
+mentioned, beside being the principal figure in one of those
+charming love-songs in "The Princess." His allusions to the birds,
+as to any other natural feature, show him to be a careful observer,
+as when he speaks of
+
+       "The swamp, where hums the dropping snipe."
+
+His single bird-poem, aside from the song I have quoted, is "The
+Blackbird," the Old World prototype of our robin, as if our bird
+had doffed the aristocratic black for a more democratic suit on
+reaching these shores. In curious contrast to the color of its
+plumage is its beak, which is as yellow as a kernel of Indian corn.
+The following are the two middle stanzas of the poem:--
+
+       "Yet, though I spared thee all the spring,
+           Thy sole delight is, sitting still,
+           With that gold dagger of thy bill
+        To fret the summer jenneting.
+
+       "A golden bill! the silver tongue
+           Cold February loved is dry;
+           Plenty corrupts the melody
+        That made thee famous once, when young."
+
+Shakespeare, in one of his songs, alludes to the blackbird as the
+ouzel-cock; indeed, he puts quite a flock of birds in this song:--
+
+       "The ouzel-cock so black of hue,
+           With orange tawny bill;
+        The throstle with his note so true,
+           The wren with little quill;
+        The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
+           The plain song cuckoo gray,
+        Whose note full many a man doth mark,
+           And dares not answer nay."
+
+So far as external appearances are concerned,--form, plumage, grace
+of manner,--no one ever had a less promising subject than had
+Trowbridge in the "Pewee." This bird, if not the plainest dressed,
+is the most unshapely in the woods. It is stiff and abrupt in its
+manners and sedentary in its habits, sitting around all day, in the
+dark recesses of the woods, on the dry twigs and branches, uttering
+now and then its plaintive cry, and "with many a flirt and flutter"
+snapping up its insect game.
+
+The pewee belongs to quite a large family of birds, all of whom
+have strong family traits, and who are not the most peaceable and
+harmonious of the sylvan folk. They are pugnacious, harsh-voiced,
+angular in form and movement, with flexible tails and broad, flat,
+bristling beaks that stand to the face at the angle of a turn-up
+nose, and most of them wear a black cap pulled well down over their
+eyes. Their heads are large, neck and legs short, and elbows sharp.
+The wild Irishman of them all is the great crested flycatcher, a
+large, leather-colored or sandy-complexioned bird that prowls
+through the woods, uttering its harsh, uncanny note and waging
+fierce warfare upon its fellows.
+The exquisite of the family, and the braggart of the orchard, is
+the kingbird, a bully that loves to strip the feathers off its more
+timid neighbors such as the bluebird, that feeds on the stingless
+bees of the hive, the drones, and earns the reputation of great
+boldness by teasing large hawks, while it gives a wide berth to
+little ones.
+
+The best beloved of them all is the phoebe-bird, one of the
+firstlings of the spring, of whom so many of our poets have made
+affectionate mention.
+
+The wood pewee is the sweetest voiced, and, notwithstanding the
+ungracious things I have said of it and of its relations, merits to
+the full all Trowbridge's pleasant fancies. His poem is indeed a
+very careful study of the bird and its haunts, and is good poetry
+as well as good ornithology:--
+
+       "The listening Dryads hushed the woods;
+           The boughs were thick, and thin and few
+           The golden ribbons fluttering through;
+        Their sun-embroidered, leafy hoods
+           The lindens lifted to the blue;
+        Only a little forest-brook
+        The farthest hem of silence shook;
+        When in the hollow shades I heard--
+        Was it a spirit or a bird?
+        Or, strayed from Eden, desolate,
+        Some Peri calling to her mate,
+        Whom nevermore her mate would cheer?
+           'Pe-ri! pe-ri! peer!'
+
+        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+       "To trace it in its green retreat
+           I sought among the boughs in vain;
+           And followed still the wandering strain,
+        So melancholy and so sweet,
+           The dim-eyed violets yearned with pain.
+        'T was now a sorrow in the air,
+        Some nymph's immortalized despair
+        Haunting the woods and waterfalls;
+        And now, at long, sad intervals,
+        Sitting unseen in dusky shade,
+        His plaintive pipe some fairy played,
+       With long-drawn cadence thin and clear,--
+          'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'
+
+       "Long-drawn and clear its closes were--
+           As if the hand of Music through
+           The sombre robe of Silence drew
+        A thread of golden gossamer;
+           So pure a flute the fairy blew.
+        Like beggared princes of the wood,
+        In silver rags the birches stood;
+        The hemlocks, lordly counselors,
+        Were dumb; the sturdy servitors,
+        In beechen jackets patched and gray,
+        Seemed waiting spellbound all the day
+        That low, entrancing note to hear,--
+           'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'
+
+       "I quit the search, and sat me down
+           Beside the brook, irresolute,
+           And watched a little bird in suit
+        Of sober olive, soft and brown,
+           Perched in the maple branches, mute;
+        With greenish gold its vest was fringed,
+        Its tiny cap was ebon-tinged,
+        With ivory pale its wings were barred,
+        And its dark eyes were tender-starred.
+       "Dear bird," I said, "what is thy name?"
+        And thrice the mournful answer came,
+        So faint and far, and yet so near,--
+           'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'
+
+       "For so I found my forest bird,--
+           The pewee of the loneliest woods,
+           Sole singer in these solitudes,
+        Which never robin's whistle stirred,
+           Where never bluebird's plume intrudes.
+        Quick darting through the dewy morn,
+        The redstart trilled his twittering horn
+        And vanished in thick boughs; at even,
+        Like liquid pearls fresh showered from heaven,
+        The high notes of the lone wood thrush
+        Fell on the forest's holy hush;
+        But thou all day complainest here,--
+           'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'"
+
+Emerson's best natural history poem is the "Humble-Bee,"--a poem as
+good in its way as Burns's poem on the mouse; but his later poem,
+"The Titmouse," has many of the same qualities, and cannot fail to
+be acceptable to both poet and naturalist.
+
+The chickadee is indeed a truly Emersonian bird, and the poet shows
+him to be both a hero and a philosopher. Hardy, active, social, a
+winter bird no less than a summer, a defier of both frost and heat,
+lover of the pine-tree, and diligent searcher after truth in the
+shape of eggs and larvae of insects, preëminently a New England
+bird, clad in black and ashen gray, with a note the most cheering
+and reassuring to be heard in our January woods,--I know of none
+other of our birds so well calculated to captivate the Emersonian
+muse.
+
+Emerson himself is a northern hyperborean genius,--a winter bird
+with a clear, saucy, cheery call, and not a passionate summer
+songster. His lines have little melody to the ear, but they have
+the vigor and distinctness of all pure and compact things. They are
+like the needles of the pine--"the snow loving pine"--more than the
+emotional foliage of the deciduous trees, and the titmouse becomes
+them well:--
+
+       "Up and away for life! be fleet!--
+        The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,
+        Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,
+        Curdles the blood to the marble bones,
+        Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,
+        And hems in life with narrowing fence.
+        Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,--
+        The punctual stars will vigil keep,--
+        Embalmed by purifying cold;
+        The wind shall sing their dead march old,
+        The snow is no ignoble shroud,
+        The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.
+
+       "Softly,--but this way fate was pointing,
+        'T was coming fast to such anointing,
+        When piped a tiny voice hard by,
+        Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,
+        _Chick-chickadeedee!_ saucy note,
+        Out of sound heart and merry throat,
+        As if it said 'Good day, good sir!
+        Fine afternoon, old passenger!
+        Happy to meet you in these places,
+        Where January brings few faces.'
+
+       "This poet, though he lived apart,
+        Moved by his hospitable heart,
+        Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort,
+        To do the honors of his court,
+        As fits a feathered lord of land;
+        Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hands
+        Hopped on the bough, then darting low,
+        Prints his small impress on the snow,
+        Shows feats of his gymnastic play,
+        Head downward, clinging to the spray.
+
+       "Here was this atom in full breath,
+        Hurling defiance at vast death;
+        This scrap of valor just for play
+        Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,
+        As if to shame my weak behavior;
+        I greeted loud my little savior,
+       'You pet! what dost here? and what for?
+        In these woods, thy small Labrador,
+        At this pinch, wee San Salvador!
+        What fire burns in that little chest,
+        So frolic, stout, and self-possest?
+        Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;
+        Ashes and jet all hues outshine.
+        Why are not diamonds black and gray,
+        To ape thy dare-devil array?
+        And I affirm, the spacious North
+        Exists to draw thy virtue forth.
+        I think no virtue goes with size;
+        The reason of all cowardice
+        Is, that men are overgrown,
+        And, to be valiant, must come down
+        To the titmouse dimension.'
+
+        .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+       "I think old Caesar must have heard
+        In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,
+        And, echoed in some frosty wold,
+        Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.
+        And I will write our annals new
+        And thank thee for a better clew.
+        I, who dreamed not when I came here
+        To find the antidote of fear,
+        Now hear thee say in Roman key,
+        _Poean! Veni, vidi, vici."_
+
+A late bird-poem, and a good one of its kind, is Celia Thaxter's
+"Sandpiper," which recalls Bryant's "Water-Fowl" in its successful
+rendering of the spirit and atmosphere of the scene, and the
+distinctness with which the lone bird, flitting along the beach, is
+brought before the mind. It is a woman's or a feminine poem, as
+Bryant's is characteristically a man's.
+
+The sentiment or feeling awakened by any of the aquatic fowls is
+preëminently one of loneliness. The wood duck which your approach
+starts from the pond or the marsh, the loon neighing down out of
+the April sky, the wild goose, the curlew, the stork, the bittern,
+the sandpiper, awaken quite a different train of emotions from
+those awakened by the land-birds. They all have clinging to them
+some reminiscence and suggestion of the sea. Their cries echo its
+wildness and desolation; their wings are the shape of its billows.
+
+Of the sandpipers there are many varieties, found upon the coast
+and penetrating inland along the rivers and water-courses, one of
+the most interesting of the family, commonly called the "tip-up,"
+going up all the mountain brooks and breeding in the sand along
+their banks; but the characteristics are the same in all, and the
+eye detects little difference except in size.
+
+The walker on the beach sees it running or flitting before him,
+following up the breakers and picking up the aquatic insects left
+on the sands; and the trout-fisher along the farthest inland stream
+likewise intrudes upon its privacy. Flitting along from stone to
+stone seeking its food, the hind part of its body "teetering" up
+and down, its soft gray color blending it with the pebbles and the
+rocks, or else skimming up or down the stream on its long, convex
+wings, uttering its shrill cry, the sandpiper is not a bird of the
+sea merely; and Mrs. Thaxter's poem is as much for the dweller
+inland as for the dweller upon the coast:--
+
+                     THE SANDPIPER
+
+       Across the narrow beach we flit,
+          One little sandpiper and I;
+       And fast I gather, bit by bit,
+          The scattered driftwood bleached and dry.
+       The wild waves reach their hands for it,
+          The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
+       As up and down the beach we flit,--
+          One little sandpiper and I.
+
+       Above our heads the sullen clouds
+          Scud black and swift across the sky;
+       Like silent ghosts in misty shrouds
+          Stand out the white lighthouses high.
+       Almost as far as eye can reach
+          I see the close-reefed vessels fly,
+       As fast we flit along the beach,--
+          One little sandpiper and I.
+
+       I watch him as he skims along,
+          Uttering his sweet and mournful cry;
+       He starts not at my fitful song,
+          Or flash of fluttering drapery;
+       He has no thought of any wrong;
+          He scans me with a fearless eye.
+       Stanch friends are we, well tried and strong,
+          The little sandpiper and I.
+
+       Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night
+          When the loosed storm breaks furiously?
+       My driftwood fire will burn so bright!
+          To what warm shelter canst thou fly?
+       I do not fear for thee, though wroth
+          The tempest rushes through the sky;
+       For are we not God's children both,
+          Thou, little sandpiper, and I?
+
+Others of our birds have been game for the poetic muse, but in most
+cases the poets have had some moral or pretty conceit to convey,
+and have not loved the bird first. Mr. Lathrop preaches a little in
+his pleasant poem, "The Sparrow," but he must some time have looked
+upon the bird with genuine emotion to have written the first two
+stanzas:--
+
+       "Glimmers gay the leafless thicket
+           Close beside my garden gate,
+        Where, so light, from post to wicket,
+           Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate:
+              Who, with meekly folded wing,
+              Comes to sun himself and sing.
+
+       "It was there, perhaps, last year,
+           That his little house he built;
+        For he seems to perk and peer,
+           And to twitter, too, and tilt
+              The bare branches in between,
+              With a fond, familiar mien."
+
+The bluebird has not been overlooked, and Halleek, Longfellow, and
+Mrs. Sigourney have written poems upon him, but from none of them
+does there fall that first note of his in early spring,--a note
+that may be called the violet of sound, and as welcome to the ear,
+heard above the cold, damp earth; as is its floral type to the eye
+a few weeks later Lowell's two lines come nearer the mark:--
+
+       "The bluebird, shifting his light load of song
+       From post to post along the cheerless fence."
+
+Or the first swallow that comes twittering up the southern valley,
+laughing a gleeful, childish laugh, and awakening such memories in
+the heart, who has put him in a poem? So the hummingbird, too,
+escapes through the finest meshes of rhyme.
+
+The most melodious of our songsters, the wood thrush and the hermit
+thrush,--birds whose strains, more than any others, express harmony
+and serenity,--have not yet, that I am aware, had reared to them
+their merited poetic monument, unless, indeed, Whitman has done
+this service for the hermit thrush in his "President Lincoln's
+Burial Hymn." Here the threnody is blent of three chords, the
+blossoming lilac, the evening star, and the hermit thrush, the
+latter playing the most prominent part throughout the composition.
+It is the exalting and spiritual utterance of the "solitary singer"
+that calms and consoles the poet when the powerful shock of the
+President's assassination comes upon him, and he flees from the
+stifling atmosphere and offensive lights and conversation of the
+house,--
+
+          "Forth to hiding, receiving night that talks not,
+Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
+To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still."
+
+Numerous others of our birds would seem to challenge attention by
+their calls and notes. There is the Maryland yellowthroat, for
+instance, standing in the door of his bushy tent, and calling out
+as you approach, _"which way, sir! which way, sir!"_ If he says
+this to the ear of common folk, what would he not say to the poet?
+One of the peewees says _"stay there!"_ with great emphasis. The
+cardinal grosbeak calls out _"what cheer" "what cheer;"" the
+bluebird says _"purity," "purity," "purity;"_ the brown thrasher,
+or ferruginous thrush, according to Thoreau, calls out to the
+farmer planting his corn, _"drop it," "drop it," "cover it up,"
+"cover it up"_ The yellow-breasted chat says _"who," "who"_ and
+_"tea-boy"_ What the robin says, caroling that simple strain from
+the top of the tall maple, or the crow with his hardy haw-haw, or
+the pedestrain meadowlark sounding his piercing and long-drawn note
+in the spring meadows, the poets ought to be able to tell us. I
+only know the birds all have a language which is very expressive,
+and which is easily translatable into the human tongue.
+
+
+
+
+II TOUCHES OF NATURE
+
+I
+
+WHEREVER Nature has commissioned one creature to prey upon another,
+she has preserved the balance by forewarning that other creature of
+what she has done. Nature says to the cat, "Catch the mouse," and
+she equips her for that purpose; but on the selfsame day she says
+to the mouse, "Be wary,--the cat is watching for you." Nature takes
+care that none of her creatures have smooth sailing, the whole
+voyage at least. Why has she not made the mosquito noiseless and
+its bite itchless? Simply because in that case the odds would be
+too greatly in its favor. She has taken especial pains to enable
+the owl to fly softly and silently, because the creatures it preys
+upon are small and wary, and never venture far from their holes.
+She has not shown the same caution in the case of the crow, because
+the crow feeds on dead flesh, or on grubs and beetles, or fruit and
+grain, that do not need to be approached stealthily. The big fish
+love to cat up the little fish, and the little fish know it, and,
+on the very day they are hatched, seek shallow water, and put
+little sandbars between themselves and their too loving parents.
+
+How easily a bird's tail, or that of any fowl, or in fact any part
+of the plumage, comes out when the hold of its would-be capturer is
+upon this alone; and how hard it yields in the dead bird! No doubt
+there is relaxation in the former case. Nature says to the pursuer,
+"Hold on," and to the pursued, "Let your tail go." What is the
+tortuous, zigzag course of those slow-flying moths for but to make
+it difficult for the birds to snap them up? The skunk is a slow,
+witless creature, and the fox and lynx love its meat; yet it
+carries a bloodless weapon that neither likes to face.
+
+I recently heard of an ingenious method a certain other simple and
+slow-going creature has of baffling its enemy. A friend of mine was
+walking in the fields when he saw a commotion in the grass a few
+yards off. Approaching the spot, he found a snake--the common
+garter snake--trying to swallow a lizard. And how do you suppose
+the lizard was defeating the benevolent designs of the snake? By
+simply taking hold of its own tail and making itself into a hoop.
+The snake went round and round, and could find neither beginning
+nor end. Who was the old giant that found himself wrestling with
+Time? This little snake had a tougher customer the other day in the
+bit of eternity it was trying to swallow.
+
+The snake itself has not the same wit, because I lately saw a black
+snake in the woods trying to swallow the garter snake, and he had
+made some headway, though the little snake was fighting every inch
+of the ground, hooking his tail about sticks and bushes, and
+pulling back with all his might, apparently not liking the look of
+things down there at all. I thought it well to let him have a good
+taste of his own doctrines, when I put my foot down against further
+proceedings.
+
+This arming of one creature against another is often cited as an
+evidence of the wisdom of Nature, but it is rather an evidence of
+her impartiality. She does not care a fig more for one creature
+than for another, and is equally on the side of both, or perhaps it
+would be better to say she does not care a fig for either. Every
+creature must take its chances, and man is no exception.  We can
+ride if we know how and are going her way, or we can be run over if
+we fall or make a mistake. Nature does not care whether the hunter
+slay the beast or the beast the hunter; she will make good compost
+of them both, and her ends are prospered whichever succeeds.
+
+       "If the red slayer think he slays,
+           Or if the slain think he is slain,
+        They know not well the subtle ways
+           I keep, and pass, and turn again."
+
+What is the end of Nature?  Where is the end of a sphere? The
+sphere balances at any and every point. So everything in Nature is
+at the top, and yet no _one_ thing is at the top.
+
+She works with reference to no measure of time, no limit of space,
+and with an abundance of material, not expressed by exhaustless.
+Did you think Niagara a great exhibition of power? What is that,
+then, that withdraws noiseless and invisible in the ground about,
+and of which Niagara is but the lifting of the finger?
+
+Nature is thoroughly selfish, and looks only to her own ends. One
+thing she is bent upon, and that is keeping up the supply,
+multiplying endlessly and scattering as she multiplies. Did Nature
+have in view our delectation when she made the apple, the peach,
+the plum, the cherry? Undoubtedly; but only as a means to her own
+private ends. What a bribe or a wage is the pulp of these
+delicacies to all creatures to come and sow their seed! And Nature
+has taken care to make the seed indigestible, so that, though the
+fruit be eaten, the germ is not, but only planted.
+
+God made the crab, but man made the pippin; but the pippin cannot
+propagate itself, and exists only by violence and usurpation. Bacon
+says, "It is easier to deceive Nature than to force her," but it
+seems to me the nurserymen really force her. They cut off the head
+of a savage and clap on the head of a fine gentleman, and the crab
+becomes a Swaar or a Baldwin.  Or is it a kind of deception
+practiced upon Nature, which succeeds only by being carefully
+concealed?  If we could play the same tricks upon her in the human
+species, how the great geniuses could be preserved and propagated,
+and the world stocked with them!  But what a frightful condition of
+things that would be! No new men, but a tiresome and endless
+repetition of the old ones,--a world perpetually stocked with
+Newtons and Shakespeares!
+
+We say Nature knows best, and has adapted this or that to our wants
+or to our constitution,--sound to the ear, light and color to the
+eye; but she has not done any such thing, but has adapted man to
+these things. The physical cosmos is the mould, and man is the
+molten metal that is poured into it. The light fashioned the eye,
+the laws of sound made the ear; in fact, man is the outcome of
+Nature and not the reverse.  Creatures that live forever in the
+dark have no eyes; and would not any one of our senses perish and
+be shed, as it were, in a world where it could not be used?
+
+
+
+II
+
+It is well to let down our metropolitan pride a little. Man thinks
+himself at the top, and that the immense display and prodigality of
+Nature are for him. But they are no more for him than they are for
+the birds and beasts, and he is no more at the top than they are.
+He appeared upon the stage when the play had advanced to a certain
+point, and he will disappear from the stage when the play has
+reached another point, and the great drama will go on without him.
+The geological ages, the convulsions and parturition throes of the
+globe, were to bring him forth no more than the beetles. Is not all
+this wealth of the seasons, these solar and sidereal influences,
+this depth and vitality and internal fire, these seas, and rivers,
+and oceans, and atmospheric currents, as necessary to the life of
+the ants and worms we tread under foot as to our own?  And does the
+sun shine for me any more than for yon butterfly?  What I mean to
+say is, we cannot put our finger upon this or that and say, Here is
+the end of Nature.  The Infinite cannot be measured.  The plan of
+Nature is so immense,--but she has no plan, no scheme, but to go on
+and on forever.  What is size, what is time, distance, to the
+Infinite?  Nothing.  The Infinite knows no time, no space, no
+great, no small, no beginning, no end.
+
+I sometimes think that the earth and the worlds are a kind of
+nervous ganglia in an organization of which we can form no
+conception, or less even than that. If one of the globules of blood
+that circulate in our veins were magnified enough million times, we
+might see a globe teeming with life and power. Such is this earth
+of ours, coursing in the veins of the Infinite. Size is only
+relative, and the imagination finds no end to the series either
+way.
+
+
+
+III
+
+Looking out of the car window one day, I saw the pretty and unusual
+sight of an eagle sitting upon the ice in the river, surrounded by
+half a dozen or more crows.  The crows appeared as if looking up to
+the noble bird and attending his movements.  "Are those its young?"
+asked a gentleman by my side.  How much did that man know--not
+about eagles, but about Nature?  If he had been familiar with geese
+or hens, or with donkeys, he would not have asked that question.
+The ancients had an axiom that he who knew one truth knew all
+truths; so much else becomes knowable when one vital fact is
+thoroughly known.  You have a key, a standard, and cannot be
+deceived.  Chemistry, geology, astronomy, natural history, all
+admit one to the same measureless interiors.
+
+I heard a great man say that he could see how much of the theology
+of the day would fall before the standard of him who had got even
+the insects. And let any one set about studying these creatures
+carefully, and he will see the force of the remark. We learn the
+tremendous doctrine of metamorphosis from the insect world; and
+have not the bee and the ant taught man wisdom from the first? I
+was highly edified the past summer by observing the ways and doings
+of a colony of black hornets that established themselves under one
+of the projecting gables of my house. This hornet has the
+reputation of being a very ugly customer, but I found it no trouble
+to live on the most friendly terms with her. She was as little
+disposed to quarrel as I was. She is indeed the eagle among
+hornets, and very noble and dignified in her bearing. She used to
+come freely into the house and prey upon the flies. You would hear
+that deep, mellow hum, and see the black falcon poising on wing, or
+striking here and there at the flies, that scattered on her
+approach like chickens before a hawk. When she had caught one, she
+would alight upon some object and proceed to dress and draw her
+game. The wings were sheared off, the legs cut away, the bristles
+trimmed, then the body thoroughly bruised and broken. When the work
+was completed, the fly was rolled up into a small pellet, and with
+it under her arm the hornet flew to her nest, where no doubt in due
+time it was properly served up on the royal board. Every dinner
+inside these paper walls is a state dinner, for the queen is always
+present.
+
+I used to mount the ladder to within two or three feet of the nest
+and observe the proceedings. I at first thought the workshop must
+be inside,--a place where the pulp was mixed, and perhaps treated
+with chemicals; for each hornet, when she came with her burden of
+materials, passed into the nest, and then, after a few moments,
+emerged again and crawled to the place of building. But I one day
+stopped up the entrance with some cotton, when no one happened to
+be on guard, and then observed that, when the loaded hornet could
+not get inside, she, after some deliberation, proceeded to the
+unfinished part and went forward with her work. Hence I inferred
+that maybe the hornet went inside to report and to receive orders,
+or possibly to surrender her material into fresh hands. Her career
+when away from the nest is beset with dangers; the colony is never
+large, and the safe return of every hornet is no doubt a matter of
+solicitude to the royal mother.
+
+The hornet was the first paper-maker, and holds the original
+patent. The paper it makes is about like that of the newspaper;
+nearly as firm, and made of essentially the same material,--woody
+fibres scraped from old rails and boards. And there is news on it,
+too, if one could make out the characters.
+
+When I stopped the entrance with cotton, there was no commotion or
+excitement, as there would have been in the case of yellow-jackets.
+Those outside went to pulling, and those inside went to pushing and
+chewing. Only once did one of the outsiders come down and look me
+suspiciously in the face, and inquire very plainly what my business
+might be up there. I bowed my head, being at the top of a twenty-
+foot ladder, and had nothing to say.
+
+The cotton was chewed and moistened about the edges till every
+fibre was loosened, when the mass dropped. But instantly the
+entrance was made smaller, and changed so as to make the feat of
+stopping it more difficult.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+There are those who look at Nature from the standpoint of
+conventional and artificial life,-- from parlor windows and through
+gilt-edged poems,--the. sentimentalists. At the other extreme are
+those who do not look at Nature at all, but are a grown part of
+her, and look away from her toward the other class,--the
+backwoodsmen and pioneers, and all rude and simple persons. Then
+there are those in whom the two are united or merged,--the great
+poets and artists. In them the sentimentalist is corrected and
+cured, and the hairy and taciturn frontiersman has had experience
+to some purpose. The true poet knows more about Nature than the
+naturalist because he carries her open secrets in his heart.
+Eckermann could instruct Goethe in ornithology, but could not
+Goethe instruct Eckermann in the meaning and mystery of the bird?
+It is my privilege to number among my friends a man who has passed
+his life in cities amid the throngs of men, who never goes to the
+woods or to the country, or hunts or fishes, and yet he is the true
+naturalist. I think he studies the orbs. I think day and night and
+the stars, and the faces of men and women, have taught him all
+there is worth knowing.
+
+We run to Nature because we are afraid of man. Our artists paint
+the landscape because they cannot paint the human face. If we could
+look into the eyes of a man as coolly as we can into the eyes of an
+animal, the products of our pens and brushes would be quite
+different from what they are.
+
+
+
+V
+
+But I suspect, after all, it makes but little difference to which
+school you go, whether to the woods or to the city.  A sincere man
+learns pretty much the same things in both places. The differences
+are superficial, the resemblances deep and many.  The hermit is a
+hermit, and the poet a poet, whether he grow up in the town or the
+country.  I was forcibly reminded of this fact recently on opening
+the works of Charles Lamb after I had been reading those of our
+Henry Thoreau.  Lamb cared nothing for nature, Thoreau for little
+else.  One was as attached to the city and the life of the street
+and tavern as the other to the country and the life of animals and
+plants.  Yet they are close akin.  They give out the same tone and
+are pitched in about the same key.  Their methods are the same; so
+are their quaintness and scorn of rhetoric.  Thoreau has the drier
+humor, as might be expected, and is less stomachic. There is more
+juice and unction in Lamb, but this he owes to his nationality.
+Both are essayists who in a less reflective age would have been
+poets pure and simple. Both were spare, high-nosed men, and I fancy
+a resemblance even in their portraits. Thoreau is the Lamb of New
+England fields and woods, and Lamb is the Thoreau of London streets
+and clubs. There was a willfulness and perversity about Thoreau,
+behind which he concealed his shyness and his thin skin, and there
+was a similar foil in Lamb, though less marked, on account of his
+good-nature; that was a part of his armor, too.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Speaking of Thoreau's dry humor reminds me how surely the old
+English unctuous and sympathetic humor is dying out or has died out
+of our literature. Our first notable crop of authors had it,--
+Paulding, Cooper, Irving, and in a measure Hawthorne,--but our
+later humorists have it not at all, but in its stead an
+intellectual quickness and perception of the ludicrous that is not
+unmixed with scorn.
+
+One of the marks of the great humorist, like Cervantes, or Sterne,
+or Scott, is that he approaches his subject, not through his head
+merely, but through his heart, his love, his humanity. His humor is
+full of compassion, full of the milk of human kindness, and does
+not separate him from his subject, but unites him to it by vital
+ties.  How Sterne loved Uncle Toby and sympathized with him, and
+Cervantes his luckless knight! I fear our humorists would have made
+fun of them, would have shown them up and stood aloof superior, and
+"laughed a laugh of merry scorn."  Whatever else the great humorist
+or poet, or any artist, may be or do, there is no contempt in his
+laughter.  And this point cannot be too strongly insisted on in
+view of the fact that nearly all our humorous writers seem
+impressed with the conviction that their own dignity and self-
+respect require them to _look down_ upon what they portray.  But it
+is only little men who look down upon anything or speak down to
+anybody. One sees every day how clear it is that specially fine,
+delicate, intellectual persons cannot portray satisfactorily
+coarse, common, uncultured characters. Their attitude is at once
+scornful and supercilious. The great man, like Socrates, or Dr.
+Johnson, or Abraham Lincoln, is just as surely coarse as he is
+fine, but the complaint I make with our humorists is that they are
+fine and not coarse in any healthful and manly sense.  A great part
+of the best literature and the best art is of the vital fluids, the
+bowels, the chest, the appetites, and is to be read and judged only
+through love and compassion. Let us pray for unction, which is the
+marrowfat of humor, and for humility, which is the badge of
+manhood.
+
+As the voice of the American has retreated from his chest to his
+throat and nasal passages, so there is danger that his contribution
+to literature will soon cease to imply any blood or viscera, or
+healthful carnality, or depth of human and manly affection, and
+will be the fruit entirely of our toploftical brilliancy and
+cleverness.
+
+What I complain of is just as true of the essayists and the critics
+as of the novelists. The prevailing tone here also is born of a
+feeling of immense superiority. How our lofty young men, for
+instance, look down upon Carlyle, and administer their masterly
+rebukes to him! But see how Carlyle treats Burns, or Scott, or
+Johnson, or Novalis, or any of his heroes. Ay, there's the rub; he
+makes heroes of them, which is not a trick of small natures. He can
+say of Johnson that he was "moonstruck," but it is from no lofty
+height of fancied superiority, but he uses the word as a naturalist
+uses a term to describe an object he loves.
+
+What we want, and perhaps have got more of than I am ready to
+admit, is a race of writers who affiliate with their subjects, and
+enter into them through their blood, their sexuality and manliness,
+instead of standing apart and criticising them and writing about
+them through mere intellectual cleverness and "smartness."
+
+
+
+VII
+
+There is a feeling in heroic poetry, or in a burst of eloquence,
+that I sometimes catch in quite different fields.  I caught it this
+morning, for instance, when I saw the belated trains go by, and
+knew how they had been battling with storm, darkness, and distance,
+and had triumphed.  They were due at my place in the night, but did
+not pass till after eight o'clock in the morning.  Two trains
+coupled together,--the fast mail and the express,--making an
+immense line of coaches hauled by two engines. They had come from
+the West, and were all covered with snow and ice, like soldiers
+with the dust of battle upon them.  They had massed their forces,
+and were now moving with augmented speed, and with a resolution
+that was epic and grand.  Talk about the railroad dispelling the
+romance from the landscape; if it does, it brings the heroic
+element in.  The moving train is a proud spectacle, especially on
+stormy and tempestuous nights.  When I look out and see its light,
+steady and unflickering as the planets, and hear the roar of its
+advancing tread, or its sound diminishing in the distance, I am
+comforted and made stout of heart.  O night, where is thy stay! O
+space, where is thy victory! Or to see the fast mail pass in the
+morning is as good as a page of Homer. It quickens one's pulse for
+all day. It is the Ajax of trains.  I hear its defiant, warning
+whistle, hear it thunder over the bridges, and its sharp, rushing
+ring among the rocks, and in the winter mornings see its glancing,
+meteoric lights, or in summer its white form bursting through the
+silence and the shadows, its plume of smoke lying flat upon its
+roofs and stretching far behind,--a sight better than a battle. It
+is something of the same feeling one has in witnessing any wild,
+free careering in storms, and in floods in nature; or in beholding
+the charge of an army; or in listening to an eloquent man, or to a
+hundred instruments of music in full blast,--it is triumph,
+victory. What is eloquence but mass in motion,--a flood, a
+cataract, an express train, a cavalry charge? We are literally
+carried away, swept from our feet, and recover our senses again as
+best we can.
+
+I experienced the same emotion when I saw them go by with the
+sunken steamer. The procession moved slowly and solemnly. It was
+like a funeral cortege,--a long line of grim floats and barges and
+boxes, with their bowed and solemn derricks, the pall-bearers; and
+underneath in her watery grave, where she had been for six months,
+the sunken steamer, partially lifted and borne along. Next day the
+procession went back again, and the spectacle was still more
+eloquent. The steamer had been taken to the flats above and raised
+till her walking-beam was out of water; her bell also was exposed
+and cleaned and rung, and the wreckers' Herculean labor seemed
+nearly over. But that night the winds and the storms held high
+carnival.  It looked like preconcerted action on the part of tide,
+tempest, and rain to defeat these wreckers, for the elements all
+pulled together and pulled till cables and hawser snapped like
+threads.  Back the procession started, anchors were dragged or
+lost, immense new cables were quickly taken ashore and fastened to
+trees; but no use: trees were upturned, the cables stretched till
+they grew small and sang like harp-strings, then parted; back, back
+against the desperate efforts of the men, till within a few feet of
+her old grave, when there was a great commotion among the craft,
+floats were overturned, enormous chains parted, colossal timbers
+were snapped like pipestems, and, with a sound that filled all the
+air, the steamer plunged to the bottom again in seventy feet of
+water.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+I am glad to observe that all the poetry of the midsummer
+harvesting has not gone out with the scythe and the whetstone. The
+line of mowers was a pretty sight, if one did not sympathize too
+deeply with the human backs turned up there to the sun, and the
+sound of the whetstone, coming up from the meadows in the dewy
+morning, was pleasant music. But I find the sound of the mowing-
+machine and the patent reaper is even more in tune with the voices
+of Nature at this season. The characteristic sounds of midsummer
+are the sharp, whirring crescendo of the cicada or harvest fly, and
+the rasping, stridulous notes of the nocturnal insects. The mowing-
+machine repeats and imitates these sounds. 'T is like the hum of a
+locust or the shuffling of a mighty grasshopper. More than that,
+the grass and the grain at this season have become hard. The
+timothy stalk is like a file; the rye straw is glazed with flint;
+the grasshoppers snap sharply as they fly up in front of you; the
+bird-songs have ceased; the ground crackles under foot; the eye of
+day is brassy and merciless; and in harmony with all these things
+is the rattle of the mower and the hay-tedder.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+'T is an evidence of how directly we are related to Nature, that we
+more or less sympathize with the weather, and take on the color of
+the day. Goethe said he worked easiest on a high barometer. One is
+like a chimney that draws well some days and won't draw at all on
+others, and the secret is mainly in the condition of the
+atmosphere. Anything positive and decided with the weather is a
+good omen. A pouring rain may be more auspicious than a sleeping
+sunshine. When the stove draws well, the fogs and fumes will leave
+your mind.
+I find there is great virtue in the bare ground, and have been much
+put out at times by those white angelic days we have in winter,
+such as Whittier has so well described in these lines:--
+
+       "Around the glistening wonder bent
+           The blue walls of the firmament;
+        No cloud above, no earth below,
+           A universe of sky and snow."
+
+On such days my spirit gets snow-blind; all things take on the same
+color, or no color; my thought loses its perspective; the inner
+world is a blank like the outer, and all my great ideals are
+wrapped in the same monotonous and expressionless commonplace. The
+blackest of black days are better.
+
+Why does snow so kill the landscape and blot out our interest in
+it? Not merely because it is cold, and the symbol of death,--for I
+imagine as many inches of apple blossoms would have about the same
+effect,--but because it expresses nothing. White is a negative; a
+perfect blank. The eye was made for color, and for the earthy
+tints, and, when these are denied it, the mind is very apt to
+sympathize and to suffer also.
+
+Then when the sap begins to mount in the trees, and the spring
+languor comes, does not one grow restless indoors? The sun puts out
+the fire, the people say, and the spring sun certainly makes one's
+intellectual light grow dim. Why should not a man sympathize with
+the seasons and the moods and phases of Nature? He is an apple upon
+this tree, or rather he is a babe at this breast, and what his
+great mother feels affects him also.
+
+
+
+X
+
+I have frequently been surprised, in late fall and early winter, to
+see how unequal or irregular was the encroachment of the frost upon
+the earth. If there is suddenly a great fall in the mercury, the
+frost lays siege to the soil and effects a lodgment here and there,
+and extends its conquests gradually. At one place in the field you
+can easily run your staff through into the soft ground, when a few
+rods farther on it will be as hard as a rock. A little covering of
+dry grass or leaves is a great protection. The moist places hold
+out long, and the spring runs never freeze. You find the frost has
+gone several inches into the plowed ground, but on going to the
+woods, and poking away the leaves and debris under the hemlocks and
+cedars, you find there is no frost at all. The Earth freezes her
+ears and toes and naked places first, and her body last.
+
+If heat were visible, or if we should represent it say by smoke,
+then the December landscape would present a curious spectacle. We
+should see the smoke lying low over the meadows, thickest in the
+hollows and moist places, and where the turf is oldest and densest.
+It would cling to the fences and ravines. Under every evergreen
+tree we should see the vapor rising and filling the branches, while
+the woods of pine and hemlock would be blue with it long after it
+had disappeared from the open country.  It would rise from the tops
+of the trees, and be carried this way and that with the wind. The
+valleys of the great rivers, like the Hudson, would overflow with
+it. Large bodies of water become regular magazines in which heat is
+stored during the summer, and they give it out again during the
+fall and early winter.  The early frosts keep well back from the
+Hudson, skulking behind the ridges, and hardly come over in sight
+at any point.  But they grow bold as the season advances, till the
+river's fires, too, I are put out and Winter covers it with his
+snows.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+One of the strong and original strokes of Nature was when she made
+the loon.  It is always refreshing to contemplate a creature so
+positive and characteristic.  He is the great diver and flyer under
+water. The loon is the genius loci of the wild northern lakes, as
+solitary as they are. Some birds represent the majesty of nature,
+like the eagles; others its ferocity, like the hawks; others its
+cunning, like the crow; others its sweetness and melody, like the
+song-birds.  The loon represents its wildness and solitariness. It
+is cousin to the beaver. It has the feathers of a bird and the fur
+of an animal, and the heart of both. It is as quick and cunning as
+it is bold and resolute.  It dives with such marvelous quickness
+that the shot of the gunner get there just in time "to cut across a
+circle of descending tail feathers and a couple of little jets of
+water flung upward by the web feet of the loon."  When disabled so
+that it can neither dive nor fly, it is said to face its foe, look
+him in the face with its clear, piercing eye, and fight resolutely
+till death. The gunners say there is something in its wailing,
+piteous cry, when dying, almost human in its agony. The loon is, in
+the strictest sense, an aquatic fowl. It can barely walk upon the
+land, and one species at least cannot take flight from the shore.
+But in the water its feet are more than feet, and its wings more
+than wings.  It plunges into this denser air and flies with
+incredible speed.  Its head and beak form a sharp point to its
+tapering neck.  Its wings are far in front and its legs equally far
+in the rear, and its course through the crystal depths is like the
+speed of an arrow.  In the northern lakes it has been taken forty
+feet under water upon hooks baited for the great lake trout.  I had
+never seen one till last fall, when one appeared on the river in
+front of my house.  I knew instantly it was the loon.  Who could
+not tell a loon a half mile or more away, though he had never seen
+one before?  The river was like glass, and every movement of the
+bird as it sported about broke the surface into ripples, that
+revealed it far and wide.  Presently a boat shot out from shore,
+and went ripping up the surface toward the loon.  The creature at
+once seemed to divine the  intentions  of the boatman,  and  sidled
+off obliquely, keeping a sharp lookout as if to make sure it was
+pursued.  A steamer came down and passed between them, and when the
+way was again clear, the loon was still swimming on the surface.
+Presently it disappeared under the water, and the boatman pulled
+sharp and hard. In a few moments the bird reappeared some rods
+farther on, as if to make an observation. Seeing it was being
+pursued, and no mistake, it dived quickly, and, when it came up
+again, had gone many times as far as the boat had in the same space
+of time. Then it dived again, and distanced its pursuer so easily
+that he gave over the chase and rested upon his oars.  But the bird
+made a final plunge, and, when it emerged upon the surface again,
+it was over a mile away.  Its course must have been, and doubtless
+was, an actual flight under water, and half as fast as the crow
+flies in the air.
+
+The loon would have delighted the old poets. Its wild, demoniac
+laughter awakens the echoes on the solitary lakes, and its ferity
+and hardiness are kindred to those robust spirits.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+One notable difference between man and the four-footed animals
+which has often occurred to me is in the eye, and the greater
+perfection, or rather supremacy, of the sense of sight in the human
+species. All the animals--the dog, the fox, the wolf, the deer, the
+cow, the horse--depend mainly upon the senses of hearing and smell.
+Almost their entire powers of discrimination are confined to these
+two senses. The dog picks his master out of the crowd by smell, and
+the cow her calf out of the herd. Sight is only partial
+recognition. The question can only be settled beyond all doubt by
+the aid of the nose. The fox, alert and cunning as he is, will pass
+within a few yards of the hunter and not know him from a stump. A
+squirrel will run across your lap, and a marmot between your feet,
+if you are motionless. When a herd of cattle see a strange object,
+they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse
+is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other
+object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it. There is a great
+deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little
+science. Then you cannot catch an animal's eye; he looks at you,
+but not into your eye. The dog directs his gaze toward your face,
+but, for aught you can tell, it centres upon your mouth or nose.
+The same with your horse or cow. Their eye is vague and indefinite.
+
+Not so with the birds. The bird has the human eye in its clearness,
+its power, and its supremacy over the other senses. How acute their
+sense of smell may be is uncertain; their hearing is sharp enough,
+but their vision is the most remarkable. A crow or a hawk, or any
+of the larger birds, will not mistake you for a stump or a rock,
+stand you never so still amid the bushes. But they cannot separate
+you from your horse or team. A hawk reads a man on horseback as one
+animal, and reads it as a horse. None of the sharp-scented animals
+could be thus deceived.
+
+The bird has man's brain also in its size. The brain of a song-bird
+is even much larger in proportion than that of the greatest human
+monarch, and its life is correspondingly intense and high-strung.
+But the bird's eye is superficial. It is on the outside of his
+head. It is round, that it may take in a full circle at a glance.
+
+All the quadrupeds emphasize their direct forward gaze by a
+corresponding movement of the ears, as if to supplement and aid one
+sense with another. But man's eye seldom needs the confirmation of
+his ear, while it is so set, and his head so poised, that his look
+is forcible and pointed without being thus seconded.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+I once saw a cow that had lost her cud. How forlorn and desolate
+and sick at heart that cow looked! No more rumination, no more of
+that second and finer mastication, no more of that sweet and juicy
+reverie under the spreading trees, or in the stall. Then the farmer
+took an elder and scraped the bark and put something with it, and
+made the cow a cud, and, after due waiting, the experiment took, a
+response came back, and the mysterious machinery was once more in
+motion, and the cow was herself again.
+
+Have you, O poet, or essayist, or story-writer, never lost your
+cud, and wandered about days and weeks without being able to start
+a single thought or an image that tasted good,--your literary
+appetite dull or all gone, and the conviction daily growing that it
+was all over with you in that direction? A little elder-bark,
+something fresh and bitter from the woods, is about the best thing
+you can take.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+Notwithstanding what I have elsewhere said about the desolation of
+snow, when one looks closely it is little more than a thin veil
+after all, and takes and repeats the form of whatever it covers.
+Every path through the fields is just as plain as before. On every
+hand the ground sends tokens, and the curves and slopes are not of
+the snow, but of the earth beneath. In like manner the rankest
+vegetation hides the ground less than we think. Looking across a
+wide valley in the month of July, I have noted that the fields,
+except the meadows, had a ruddy tinge, and that corn, which near at
+hand seemed to completely envelop the soil, at that distance gave
+only a slight shade of green. The color of the ground everywhere
+predominated, and I doubt not that, if we could see the earth from
+a point sufficiently removed, as from the moon, its ruddy hue, like
+that of Mars, would alone be visible.
+
+What is a man but a miniature earth, with many disguises in the way
+of manners, possessions, dissemblances? Yet through all--through
+all the work of his hands and all the thoughts of his mind--how
+surely the ground quality of him, the fundamental hue, whether it
+be this or that, makes itself felt and is alone important!
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Men follow their noses, it is said.  I have wondered why the Greek
+did not follow his nose in architecture,--did not copy those arches
+that spring from it as from a pier, and support his brow,--but
+always and everywhere used the post and the lintel. There was
+something in that face that has never reappeared in the human
+countenance. I am thinking especially of that straight, strong
+profile.  Is it really godlike, or is this impression the result of
+association?  But any suggestion or reminiscence of it in the
+modern face at once gives one the idea of strength.  It is a face
+strong in the loins, or it suggests a high, elastic instep.  It is
+the face of order and proportion.  Those arches are the symbols of
+law and self-control.  The point of greatest interest is the union
+of the nose with the brow,--that strong, high embankment; it makes
+the bridge from the ideal to the real sure and easy. All the
+Greek's ideas passed readily into form. In the modern face the
+arches are more or less crushed, and the nose is severed from the
+brow,--hence the abstract and the analytic; hence the preponderance
+of the speculative intellect over creative power.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+I have thought that the boy is the only true lover of Nature, and
+that we, who make such a dead set at studying and admiring her,
+come very wide of the mark. "The nonchalance of a boy who is sure
+of his dinner," says our Emerson, "is the healthy attitude of
+humanity." The boy is a part of Nature; he is as indifferent, as
+careless, as vagrant as she. He browses, he digs, he hunts, he
+climbs, he halloes, he feeds on roots and greens and mast. He uses
+things roughly and without sentiment. The coolness with which boys
+will drown dogs or cats, or hang them to trees, or murder young
+birds, or torture frogs or squirrels, is like Nature's own
+mercilessness.
+
+Certain it is that we often get some of the best touches of nature
+from children. Childhood is a world by itself, and we listen to
+children when they frankly speak out of it with a strange interest.
+There is such a freedom from responsibility and from worldly
+wisdom,--it is heavenly wisdom. There is no sentiment in children,
+because there is no ruin; nothing has gone to decay about them
+yet,--not a leaf or a twig.  Until he is well into his teens, and
+sometimes later, a boy is like a bean-pod before the fruit has
+developed,--indefinite, succulent, rich in possibilities which are
+only vaguely outlined. He is a pericarp merely. How rudimental are
+all his ideas!  I knew a boy who began his school composition on
+swallows by saying there were two kinds of swallows,--chimney
+swallows and swallows.
+
+Girls come to themselves sooner; are indeed, from the first, more
+definite and "translatable."
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Who will write the natural history of the boy? One of the first
+points to be taken account of is his clannishness. The boys of one
+neighborhood are always pitted against those of an adjoining
+neighborhood, or of one end of the town against those of the other
+end. A bridge, a river, a railroad track, are always boundaries of
+hostile or semi-hostile tribes. The boys that go up the road from
+the country school hoot derisively at those that go down the road,
+and not infrequently add the insult of stones; and the down-roaders
+return the hooting and the missiles with interest.
+
+Often there is open war, and the boys meet and have regular
+battles. A few years since, the boys of two rival towns on opposite
+sides of the Ohio River became so belligerent that the authorities
+had to interfere. Whenever an Ohio boy was caught on the West
+Virginia side of the river, he was unmercifully beaten; and when a
+West Virginia boy was discovered on the Ohio side, he was pounced
+upon in the same manner. One day a vast number of boys, about one
+hundred and fifty on a side, met by appointment upon the ice and
+engaged in a pitched battle. Every conceivable missile was used,
+including pistols. The battle, says the local paper, raged with
+fury for about two hours. One boy received a wound behind the ear,
+from the effects of which he died the next morning. More recently
+the boys of a large manufacturing town of New Jersey were divided
+into two hostile clans that came into frequent collision. One
+Saturday both sides mustered their forces, and a regular fight
+ensued, one boy here also losing his life from the encounter.
+
+Every village and settlement is at times the scene of these
+youthful collisions When a new boy appears in the village, or at
+the country school, how the other boys crowd around him and take
+his measure, or pick at him and insult him to try his mettle!
+
+I knew a boy, twelve or thirteen years old, who was sent to help a
+drover with some cattle as far as a certain village ten miles from
+his home.  After the place was reached, and while the boy was
+eating his cracker and candies, he strolled about the village, and
+fell in with some other boys playing upon a bridge.  In a short
+time a large number of children of all sizes had collected upon the
+bridge.  The new-comer was presently challenged by the boys of his
+own age to jump with them.  This he readily did, and cleared their
+farthest mark. Then he gave them a sample of his stone-throwing,
+and at this pastime he also far surpassed his competitors.  Before
+long, the feeling of the crowd began to set against him, showing
+itself first in the smaller fry, who began half playfully to throw
+pebbles and lumps of dry earth at him.  Then they would run up
+slyly and strike him with sticks.  Presently the large ones began
+to tease him in like manner, till the contagion of hostility
+spread, and the whole pack was arrayed against the strange boy. He
+kept them at bay for a few moments with his stick, till, the
+feeling mounting higher and higher, he broke through their ranks,
+and fled precipitately toward home, with the throng of little and
+big at his heels. Gradually the girls and smaller boys dropped
+behind, till at the end of the first fifty rods only two boys of
+about his own size, with wrath and determination in their faces,
+kept up the pursuit.  But to these he added the final insult of
+beating them at running also, and reached, much blown, a point
+beyond which they refused to follow.
+
+The world the boy lives in is separate and distinct from the world
+the man lives in. It is a world inhabited only by boys. No events
+are important or of any moment save those affecting boys. How they
+ignore the presence of their elders on the street, shouting out
+their invitations, their appointments, their pass-words from our
+midst, as from the veriest solitude! They have peculiar calls,
+whistles, signals, by which they communicate with each other at
+long distances, like birds or wild creatures. And there is as
+genuine a wildness about these notes and calls as about those of a
+fox or a coon.
+
+The boy is a savage, a barbarian, in his taste,--devouring roots,
+leaves, bark, unripe fruit; and in the kind of music or discord he
+delights in,--of harmony he has no perception. He has his fashions
+that spread from city to city. In one of our large cities the rage
+at one time was an old tin can with a string attached, out of which
+they tortured the most savage and ear-splitting discords. The
+police were obliged to interfere and suppress the nuisance. On
+another occasion, at Christmas, they all came forth with tin horns,
+and nearly drove the town distracted with the hideous uproar.
+
+Another savage trait of the boy is his untruthfulness. Corner him,
+and the chances are ten to one he will lie his way out. Conscience
+is a plant of slow growth in the boy. If caught in one lie, he
+invents another. I know a boy who was in the habit of eating apples
+in school. His teacher finally caught him in the act, and, without
+removing his eye from him, called him to the middle of the floor.
+
+"I saw you this time," said the teacher.
+
+"Saw me what?" said the boy innocently.
+
+"Bite that apple," replied the teacher.
+
+"No, sir," said the rascal.
+
+"Open your mouth;" and from its depths the teacher, with his thumb
+and finger, took out the piece of apple.
+
+"Did n't know it was there," said the boy, unabashed.
+
+Nearly all the moral sentiment and graces are late in maturing in
+the boy. He has no proper self-respect till past his majority. Of
+course there are exceptions, but they are mostly windfalls. The
+good boys die young. We lament the wickedness and thoughtlessness
+of the young vagabonds at the same time that we know it is mainly
+the acridity and bitterness of the unripe fruit that we are
+lamenting.
+
+
+
+
+III A BIRD MEDLEY
+
+People who have not made friends with the birds do not know how
+much they miss. Especially to one living in the country, of strong
+local attachments and an observing turn of mind, does an
+acquaintance with the birds form a close and invaluable tie. The
+only time I saw Thomas Carlyle, I remember his relating, apropos of
+this subject, that in his earlier days he was sent on a journey to
+a distant town on some business that gave him much bother and
+vexation, and that on his way back home, forlorn and dejected, he
+suddenly heard the larks singing all about him,--soaring and
+singing, just as they did about his father's fields, and it
+comforted him and cheered him up amazingly.
+
+Most lovers of the birds can doubtless recall similar experiences
+from their own lives. Nothing wonts me to a new place more than the
+birds. I go, for instance, to take up my abode in the country,--to
+plant myself upon unfamiliar ground. I know nobody, and nobody
+knows me. The roads, the fields, the hills, the streams, the woods,
+are all strange. I look wistfully upon them, but they know me not.
+They give back nothing to my yearning gaze. But there, on every
+hand, are the long-familiar birds,--the same ones I left behind me,
+the same ones I knew in my youth,--robins, sparrows, swallows,
+bobolinks, crows, hawks, high-holes, meadowlarks, all there before
+me, and ready to renew and perpetuate the old associations. Before
+my house is begun, theirs is completed; before I have taken root at
+all, they are thoroughly established. I do not yet know what kind
+of apples my apple-trees bear, but there, in the cavity of a
+decayed limb, the bluebirds are building a nest, and yonder, on
+that branch, the social sparrow is busy with hairs and straws. The
+robins have tasted the quality of my cherries, and the cedar-birds
+have known every red cedar on the place these many years. While my
+house is yet surrounded by its scaffoldings, the phoebe-bird has
+built her exquisite mossy nest on a projecting stone beneath the
+eaves, a robin has filled a niche in the wall with mud and dry
+grass, the chimney swallows are going out and in the chimney, and a
+pair of house wrens are at home in a snug cavity over the door,
+and, during an April snowstorm, a number of hermit thrushes have
+taken shelter in my unfinished chambers. Indeed, I am in the midst
+of friends before I fairly know it. The place is not so new as I
+had thought. It is already old; the birds have supplied the
+memories of many decades of years.
+
+There is something almost pathetic in the fact that the birds
+remain forever the same.  You grow old, your friends die or move to
+distant lands, events sweep on, and all things are changed.  Yet
+there in your garden or orchard are the birds of your boyhood, the
+same notes, the same calls, and, to all intents and purposes, the
+identical birds endowed with perennial youth.  The swallows, that
+built so far out of your reach beneath the eaves of your father's
+barn, the same ones now squeak and chatter beneath the eaves of
+your barn. The warblers and shy wood-birds you pursued with such
+glee ever so many summers ago, and whose names you taught to some
+beloved youth who now, perchance, sleeps amid his native hills, no
+marks of time or change cling to them; and when you walk out to the
+strange woods, there they are, mocking you with their ever-renewed
+and joyous youth.  The call of the high-holes, the whistle of the
+quail, the strong piercing note of the meadowlark, the drumming of
+the grouse,--how these sounds ignore the years, and strike on the
+ear with the melody of that springtime when the world was young,
+and life was all holiday and romance!
+
+During any unusual tension of the feelings or emotions, how the
+note or song of a single bird will sink into the memory, and become
+inseparably associated with your grief or joy! Shall I ever again
+be able to hear the song of the oriole without being pierced
+through and through? Can it ever be other than a dirge for the dead
+to me? Day after day, and week after week, this bird whistled and
+warbled in a mulberry by the door, while sorrow, like a pall,
+darkened my day. So loud and persistent was the singer that his
+note teased and worried my excited ear.
+
+       "Hearken to yon pine warbler,
+           Singing aloft in the tree!
+        Hearest thou, O traveler!
+           What he singeth to me?
+
+       "Not unless God made sharp thine ear
+           With sorrow such as mine,
+        Out of that delicate lay couldst thou
+           Its heavy tale divine."
+
+It is the opinion of some naturalists that birds never die what is
+called a natural death, but come to their end by some murderous or
+accidental means; yet I have found sparrows and vireos in the
+fields and woods dead or dying, that bore no marks of violence; and
+I remember that once in my childhood a redbird fell down in the
+yard exhausted, and was brought in by the girl; its bright scarlet
+image is indelibly stamped upon my recollection. It is not known
+that birds have any distempers like the domestic fowls, but I saw a
+social sparrow one day quite disabled by some curious malady that
+suggested a disease that sometimes attacks poultry; one eye was
+nearly put out by a scrofulous-looking sore, and on the last joint
+of one wing there was a large tumorous or fungous growth that
+crippled the bird completely. On another occasion I picked up one
+that appeared well, but could not keep its centre of gravity when
+in flight, and so fell to the ground.
+
+One reason why dead birds and animals are so rarely found is, that
+on the approach of death their instinct prompts them to creep away
+in some hole or under some cover, where they will be least liable
+to fall a prey to their natural enemies. It is doubtful if any of
+the game-birds, like the pigeon and grouse, ever die of old age, or
+the semi-game-birds, like the bobolink, or the "century living"
+crow; but in what other form can death overtake the hummingbird, or
+even the swift and the barn swallow? Such are true birds of the
+air; they may be occasionally lost at sea during their migrations,
+but, so far as I know, they are not preyed upon by any other
+species.
+
+The valley of the Hudson, I find, forms a great natural highway for
+the birds, as do doubtless the Connecticut, the Susquehanna, the
+Delaware, and all other large water-courses running north and
+south. The birds love an easy way, and in the valleys of the rivers
+they find a road already graded for them; and they abound more in
+such places throughout the season than they do farther inland. The
+swarms of robins that come to us in early spring are a delight to
+behold. In one of his poems Emerson speaks of
+
+                                 "April's bird,
+        Blue-coated, flying before from tree to tree;"
+
+but April's bird with me is the robin, brisk, vociferous, musical,
+dotting every field, and larking it in every grove; he is as easily
+atop at this season as the bobolink is a month or two later. The
+tints of April are ruddy and brown,--the new furrow and the
+leafless trees,--and these are the tints of its dominant bird.
+
+>From my dining-room window I look, or did look, out upon a long
+stretch of smooth meadow, and as pretty a spring sight as I ever
+wish to behold was this field, sprinkled all over with robins,
+their red breasts turned toward the morning sun, or their pert
+forms sharply outlined against lingering patches of snow. Every
+morning for weeks I had those robins for breakfast; but what they
+had I never could find out.
+
+After the leaves are out, and gayer colors come into fashion, the
+robin takes a back seat. He goes to housekeeping in the old apple-
+tree, or, what he likes better, the cherry-tree. A pair reared
+their domestic altar (of mud and dry grass) in one of the latter
+trees, where I saw much of them. The cock took it upon himself to
+keep the tree free of all other robins during cherry time, and its
+branches were the scene of some lively tussles every hour in the
+day. The innocent visitor would scarcely alight before the jealous
+cock was upon him; but while he was thrusting the intruder out at
+one side, a second would be coming in on the other. He managed,
+however, to protect his cherries very well, but had so little time
+to eat the fruit himself that we got fully our share.
+
+I have frequently seen the robin courting, and have always been
+astonished and amused at the utter coldness and indifference of the
+female. The females of every species of bird, however, I believe,
+have this in common,--they are absolutely free from coquetry, or
+any airs and wiles whatever. In most cases, Nature has given the
+song and the plumage to the other sex, and all the embellishing and
+acting is done by the male bird.
+
+I am always at home when I see the passenger pigeon. Few spectacles
+please me more than to see clouds of these birds sweeping across
+the sky, and few sounds are more agreeable to my ear than their
+lively piping and calling in the spring woods. They come in such
+multitudes, they people the whole air; they cover townships, and
+make the solitary places gay as with a festival. The naked woods
+are suddenly blue as with fluttering ribbons and scarfs, and vocal
+as with the voices of children. Their arrival is always unexpected.
+We know April will bring the robins and May the bobolinks, but we
+do not know that either they or any other month will bring the
+passenger pigeon. Sometimes years elapse and scarcely a flock is
+seen. Then, of a sudden, some March or April they come pouring over
+the horizon from the south or southwest, and for a few days the
+land is alive with them.
+
+The whole race seems to be collected in a few vast swarms or
+assemblages. Indeed, I have sometimes thought there was only one
+such in the United States, and that it moved in squads, and
+regiments, and brigades, and divisions, like a giant army. The
+scouting and foraging squads are not unusual, and every few years
+we see larger bodies of them, but rarely indeed do we witness the
+spectacle of the whole vast tribe in motion. Sometimes we hear of
+them in Virginia, or Kentucky and Tennessee; then in Ohio or
+Pennsylvania; then in New York; then in Canada or Michigan or
+Missouri. They are followed from point to point, and from State to
+State, by human sharks, who catch and shoot them for market.
+
+A year ago last April, the pigeons flew for two or three days up
+and down the Hudson. In long bowing lines, or else in dense masses,
+they moved across the sky. It was not the whole army, but I should
+think at least one corps of it; I had not seen such a flight of
+pigeons since my boyhood. I went up to the top of the house, the
+better to behold the winged procession.  The day seemed memorable
+and poetic in which such sights occurred.
+
+    [Footnote: This proved to be the last flight of the pigeons
+    in the valley of the Hudson. The whole tribe has now (1895)
+    been nearly exterminated by pot-hunters. The few that still
+    remain appear to be scattered through the Northern States
+    in small, loose flocks.]
+
+While I was looking at the pigeons, a flock of wild geese went by,
+harrowing the sky northward. The geese strike a deeper chord than
+the pigeons. Level and straight they go as fate to its mark. I
+cannot tell what emotions these migrating birds awaken in me,--the
+geese especially. One seldom sees more than a flock or two in a
+season, and what a spring token it is! The great bodies are in
+motion. It is like the passage of a victorious army. No longer inch
+by inch does spring come, but these geese advance the standard
+across zones at one pull. How my desire goes with them; how
+something in me, wild and migratory, plumes itself and follows
+fast!
+
+       "Steering north, with raucous cry,
+        Through tracts and provinces of sky,
+        Every night alighting down
+        In new landscapes of romance,
+        Where darkling feed the clamorous clans
+        By lonely lakes to men unknown."
+
+Dwelling upon these sights, I am reminded that the seeing of spring
+come, not only upon the great wings of the geese and the lesser
+wings of the pigeons and birds, but in the many more subtle and
+indirect signs and mediums, is also a part of the compensation of
+living in the country. I enjoy not less what may be called the
+negative side of spring,-- those dark, dank, dissolving days,
+yellow sposh and mud and water everywhere,--yet who can stay long
+indoors? The humidity is soft and satisfying to the smell, and to
+the face and hands, and, for the first time for months, there is
+the fresh odor of the earth. The air is full of the notes and calls
+of the first birds. The domestic fowls refuse their accustomed food
+and wander far from the barn. Is it something winter has left, or
+spring has dropped, that they pick up? And what is it that holds me
+so long standing in the yard or in the fields? Something besides
+the ice and snow melts and runs away with the spring floods.
+
+The little sparrows and purple finches are so punctual in
+announcing spring, that some seasons one wonders how they know
+without looking in the almanac, for surely there are no signs of
+spring out of doors. Yet they will strike up as cheerily amid the
+driving snow as if they had just been told that to-morrow is the
+first day of March. About the same time I notice the potatoes in
+the cellar show signs of sprouting. They, too, find out so quickly
+when spring is near. Spring comes by two routes,--in the air and
+underground, and often gets here by the latter course first.  She
+undermines Winter when outwardly his front is nearly as bold as
+ever. I have known the trees to bud long before, by outward
+appearances, one would expect them to. The frost was gone from the
+ground before the snow was gone from the surface.
+
+But Winter hath his birds also; some of them such tiny bodies that
+one wonders how they withstand the giant cold,--but they do.  Birds
+live on highly concentrated food,--the fine seeds of weeds and
+grasses, and the eggs and larvae of insects. Such food must be very
+stimulating and heating.  A gizzard full of ants, for instance,
+what spiced and seasoned extract is equal to that?  Think what
+virtue there must be in an ounce of gnats or mosquitoes, or in the
+fine mysterious food the chickadee and the brown creeper gather in
+the winter woods! It is doubtful if these birds ever freeze when
+fuel enough can be had to keep their little furnaces going. And, as
+they get their food entirely from the limbs and trunks of trees,
+like the woodpeckers, their supply is seldom interfered with by the
+snow.  The worst annoyance must be the enameling of ice our winter
+woods sometimes get.
+
+Indeed, the food question seems to be the only serious one with the
+birds. Give them plenty to eat, and no doubt the majority of them
+would face our winters. I believe all the woodpeckers are winter
+birds, except the high-hole or yellow-hammer, and he obtains the
+greater part of his subsistence from the ground, and is not a
+woodpecker at all in his habits of feeding. Were it not that it has
+recourse to budding, the ruffed grouse would be obliged to migrate.
+The quail--a bird, no doubt, equally hardy, but whose food is at
+the mercy of the snow--is frequently cut off by our severe winters
+when it ventures to brave them, which is not often. Where plenty of
+the berries of the red cedar can be had, the cedar-bird will pass
+the winter in New York. The old ornithologists say the bluebird
+migrates to Bermuda; but in the winter of 1874-75, severe as it
+was, a pair of them wintered with me eighty miles north of New York
+city. They seem to have been decided in their choice by the
+attractions of my rustic porch and the fruit of a sugar-berry tree
+(celtis--a kind of tree-lotus) that stood in front of it. They
+lodged in the porch and took their meals in the tree. Indeed, they
+became regular lotus-eaters. Punctually at dusk they were in their
+places on a large laurel root in the top of the porch, whence,
+however, they were frequently routed by an indignant broom that was
+jealous of the neatness of the porch floor. But the pair would not
+take any hints of this kind, and did not give up their quarters in
+the porch or their lotus berries till spring.
+
+Many times during the winter the sugar-berry tree was visited by a
+flock of cedar-birds that also wintered in the vicinity. At such
+times it was amusing to witness the pretty wrath of the bluebirds,
+scolding and threatening the intruders, and begrudging them every
+berry they ate. The bluebird cannot utter a harsh or unpleasing
+note. Indeed, he seems to have but one language, one speech, for
+both love and war, and the expression of his indignation is nearly
+as musical as his song. The male frequently made hostile
+demonstrations toward the cedar-birds, but did not openly attack
+them, and, with his mate, appeared to experience great relief when
+the poachers had gone.
+
+I had other company in my solitude also, among the rest a
+distinguished arrival from the far north, the pine grosbeak, a bird
+rarely seen in these parts, except now and then a single specimen.
+But in the winter of 1875, heralding the extreme cold weather, and
+no doubt in consequence of it, there was a large incursion of them
+into this State and New England. They attracted the notice of the
+country people everywhere. I first saw them early in December about
+the head of the Delaware. I was walking along a cleared ridge with
+my gun, just at sundown, when I beheld two strange birds sitting in
+a small maple. On bringing one of them down, I found it was a bird
+I had never before seen; in color and shape like the purple finch,
+but quite as large again in size. From its heavy beak, I at once
+recognized it as belonging to the family of grosbeaks. A few days
+later I saw large numbers of them in the woods, on the ground, and
+in the trees. And still later, and on till February, they were very
+numerous on the Hudson, coming all about my house,--more familiar
+even than the little snowbird, hopping beneath the windows, and
+looking up at me apparently with as much curiosity as I looked down
+upon them. They fed on the buds of the sugar maples and upon frozen
+apples in the orchard. They were mostly young birds and females,
+colored very much like the common sparrow, with now and then
+visible the dull carmine-colored head and neck of an old male.
+
+Other northern visitors that tarried with me the same winter were
+the tree or Canada sparrow and the redpoll, the former a bird
+larger than the social sparrow or hair-bird, but otherwise much
+resembling it, and distinguishable by a dark spot in the middle of
+its breast; the latter a bird the size and shape of the common
+goldfinch, with the same manner of flight and nearly the same note
+or cry, but darker than the winter plumage of the goldfinch, and
+with a red crown and a tinge of red on the breast. Little bands of
+these two species lurked about the barnyard all winter, picking up
+the hayseed, the sparrow sometimes venturing in on the haymow when
+the supply outside was short. I felt grateful to them for their
+company. They gave a sort of ornithological air to every errand I
+had to the barn.
+
+Though a number of birds face our winters, and by various shifts
+worry through till spring, some of them permanent residents, and
+some of them visitors from the far north, yet there is but one
+genuine snow bird, nursling of the snow, and that is the snow
+bunting, a bird that seems proper to this season, heralding the
+coming storm, sweeping by on bold and rapid wing, and calling and
+chirping as cheerily as the songsters of May. In its plumage it
+reflects the winter landscape,--an expanse of white surmounted or
+streaked with gray and brown; a field of snow with a line of woods
+or a tinge of stubble. It fits into the scene, and does not appear
+to lead a beggarly and disconsolate life, like most of our winter
+residents. During the ice-harvesting on the river, I see them
+flitting about among the gangs of men, or floating on the cakes of
+ice, picking and scratching amid the droppings of the horses. They
+love the stack and hay-barn in the distant field, where the farmer
+fodders his cattle upon the snow, and every red-root, ragweed, or
+pigweed left standing in the fall adds to their winter stores.
+
+Though this bird, and one or two others, like the chickadee and
+nuthatch, are more or less complacent and cheerful during the
+winter, yet no bird can look our winters in the face and sing, as
+do so many of the English birds. Several species in Great Britain,
+their biographers tell us, sing the winter through, except during
+the severest frosts; but with us, as far south as Virginia, and,
+for aught I know, much farther, the birds are tuneless at this
+season. The owls, even, do not hoot, nor the hawks scream.
+
+Among the birds that tarry briefly with us in the spring on their
+way to Canada and beyond, there is none I behold with so much
+pleasure as the white-crowned sparrow. I have an eye out for him
+all through April and the first week in May. He is the rarest and
+most beautiful of the sparrow kind. He is crowned, as some hero or
+victor in the games. He is usually in company with his congener,
+the white-throated sparrow, but seldom more than in the proportion
+of one to twenty of the latter. Contrasted with this bird, he looks
+like its more fortunate brother, upon whom some special distinction
+has been conferred, and who is, from the egg, of finer make and
+quality. His sparrow color of ashen gray and brown is very clear
+and bright, and his form graceful. His whole expression, however,
+culminates in a singular manner in his crown. The various tints of
+the bird are brought to a focus here and intensified, the lighter
+ones becoming white, and the deeper ones nearly black. There is the
+suggestion of a crest, also, from a habit the bird has of slightly
+elevating this part of its plumage, as if to make more conspicuous
+its pretty markings. They are great scratchers, and will often
+remain several minutes scratching in one place, like a hen. Yet,
+unlike the hen and like all hoppers, they scratch with both feet at
+once, which is by no means the best way to scratch.
+
+The white-throats often sing during their sojourning both in fall
+and spring; but only on one occasion have I ever heard any part of
+the song of the white-crowned, and that proceeded from what I took
+to be a young male, one October morning, just as the sun was
+rising. It was pitched very low, like a half-forgotten air, but it
+was very sweet. It was the song of the vesper sparrow and the
+white-throat in one. In his breeding haunts he must be a superior
+songster, but he is very chary of his music while on his travels.
+
+The sparrows are all meek and lowly birds. They are of the grass,
+the fences, the low bushes, the weedy wayside places. Nature has
+denied them all brilliant tints, but she has given them sweet and
+musical voices. Theirs are the quaint and simple lullaby songs of
+childhood. The white-throat has a timid, tremulous strain, that
+issues from the low bushes or from behind the fence, where its
+cradle is hid. The song sparrow modulates its simple ditty as
+softly as the lining of its own nest. The vesper sparrow has only
+peace and gentleness in its strain.
+
+What pretty nests, too, the sparrows build! Can anything be more
+exquisite than a sparrow's nest under a grassy or mossy bank? What
+care the bird has taken not to disturb one straw or spear of grass,
+or thread of moss! You cannot approach it and put your hand into it
+without violating the place more or less, and yet the little
+architect has wrought day after day and left no marks. There has
+been an excavation, and yet no grain of earth appears to have been
+moved. If the nest had slowly and silently grown like the grass and
+the moss, it could not have been more nicely adjusted to its place
+and surroundings. There is absolutely nothing to tell the eye it is
+there. Generally a few spears of dry grass fall down from the turf
+above and form a slight screen before it. How commonly and coarsely
+it begins, blending with the debris that lies about, and how it
+refines and comes into form as it approaches the centre, which is
+modeled so perfectly and lined so softly! Then, when the full
+complement of eggs is laid, and incubation has fairly begun, what a
+sweet, pleasing little mystery the silent old bank holds!
+
+The song sparrow, whose nest I have been describing, displays a
+more marked individuality in its song than any bird with which I am
+acquainted. Birds of the same species generally all sing alike, but
+I have observed numerous song sparrows with songs peculiarly their
+own. Last season, the whole summer through, one sang about my
+grounds like this: _swee-e-t, swee-e-t, swee-e-t, bitter._ Day
+after day, from May to September, I heard this strain, which I
+thought a simple but very profound summing-up of life, and wondered
+how the little bird had learned it so quickly. The present season,
+I heard another with a song equally original, but not so easily
+worded. Among a large troop of them in April, my attention was
+attracted to one that was a master songster,--some Shelley or
+Tennyson among his kind. The strain was remarkably prolonged,
+intricate, and animated, and far surpassed anything I ever before
+heard from that source.
+
+But the most noticeable instance of departure from the standard
+song of a species I ever knew of was in the case of a wood thrush.
+The bird sang, as did the sparrow, the whole season through, at the
+foot of my lot near the river.  The song began correctly and ended
+correctly; but interjected into it about midway was a loud,
+piercing, artificial note, at utter variance with the rest of the
+strain. When my ear first caught this singular note, I started out,
+not a little puzzled, to make, as I supposed, a new acquaintance,
+but had not gone far when I discovered whence it proceeded. Brass
+amid gold, or pebbles amid pearls, are not more out of place than
+was this discordant scream or cry in the melodious strain of the
+wood thrush. It pained and startled the ear.  It seemed as if the
+instrument of the bird was not under control, or else that one note
+was sadly out of tune, and, when its turn came, instead of giving
+forth one of those sounds that are indeed like pearls, it shocked
+the ear with a piercing discord.  Yet the singer appeared entirely
+unconscious of the defect; or had he grown used to it, or had his
+friends persuaded him that it was a variation to be coveted?
+Sometimes, after the brood had hatched and the bird's pride was at
+its full, he would make a little triumphal tour of the locality,
+coming from under the hill quite up to the house, and flaunting his
+cracked instrument in the face of whoever would listen. He did not
+return again the next season; or, if he did, the malformation of
+his song was gone.
+
+I have noticed that the bobolink does not sing the same in
+different localities.  In New Jersey it has one song; on the
+Hudson, a slight variation of the same; and on the high grass-lands
+of the interior of the State, quite a different strain,--clearer,
+more distinctly articulated, and running off with more sparkle and
+liltingness.  It reminds one of the clearer mountain air and the
+translucent spring-water of those localities.  I never could make
+out what the bobolink says in New Jersey, but in certain districts
+in this State his enunciation is quite distinct. Sometimes he
+begins with the word _gegue, gegue._   Then again, more fully, _be
+true to me, Clarsy, be true to me, Clarsy, Clarsy,_ thence full
+tilt into his inimitable song, interspersed in which the words
+_kick your slipper, kick your slipper,_ and temperance, temperance
+(the last with a peculiar nasal resonance), are plainly heard. At
+its best, it is a remarkable performance, a unique performance, as
+it contains not the slightest hint or suggestion, either in tone or
+manner or effect, of any other bird-song to be heard. The bobolink
+has no mate or parallel in any part of the world. He stands alone.
+There is no closely allied species. He is not a lark, nor a finch,
+nor a warbler, nor a thrush, nor a starling (though classed with
+the starlings by late naturalists). He is an exception to many
+well-known rules.  He is the only ground-bird known to me of marked
+and conspicuous plumage. He is the only black and white field-bird
+we have east of the Mississippi, and, what is still more odd, he is
+black beneath and white above,--the reverse of the fact in all
+other cases. Preëminently a bird of the meadow during the breeding
+season, and associated with clover and daisies and buttercups as no
+other bird is, he yet has the look of an interloper or a newcomer,
+and not of one to the manner born.
+
+The bobolink has an unusually full throat, which may help account
+for his great power of song. No bird has yet been found that could
+imitate him, or even repeat or suggest a single note, as if his
+song were the product of a new set of organs. There is a vibration
+about it, and a rapid running over the keys, that is the despair of
+other songsters. It is said that the mockingbird is dumb in the
+presence of the bobolink. My neighbor has an English skylark that
+was hatched and reared in captivity. The bird is a most persistent
+and vociferous songster, and fully as successful a mimic as the
+mockingbird. It pours out a strain that is a regular mosaic of
+nearly all the bird-notes to be heard, its own proper lark song
+forming a kind of bordering for the whole. The notes of the phoebe-
+bird, the purple finch, the swallow, the yellowbird, the kingbird,
+the robin, and others, are rendered with perfect distinctness and
+accuracy, but not a word of the bobolink's, though the lark must
+have heard its song every day for four successive summers. It was
+the one conspicuous note in the fields around that the lark made no
+attempt to plagiarize. He could not steal the bobolink's thunder.
+
+The lark is a more marvelous songster than the bobolink only on
+account of his soaring flight and the sustained copiousness of his
+song. His note is rasping and harsh, in point of melody, when
+compared with the bobolink's. When caged and near at hand, the
+lark's song is positively disagreeable, it is so loud and full of
+sharp, aspirated sounds. But high in air above the broad downs,
+poured out without interruption for many minutes together, it is
+very agreeable.
+
+The bird among us that is usually called a lark, namely, the
+meadowlark, but which our later classifiers say is no lark at all,
+has nearly the same quality of voice as the English skylark,--loud,
+piercing, z-z-ing; and during the mating season it frequently
+indulges while on the wing in a brief song that is quite lark-like.
+It is also a bird of the stubble, and one of the last to retreat on
+the approach of winter.
+
+The habits of many of our birds are slowly undergoing a change.
+Their migrations are less marked. With the settlement and
+cultivation of the country, the means of subsistence of nearly
+every species are vastly increased. Insects are more numerous, and
+seeds of weeds and grasses more abundant. They become more and more
+domestic, like the English birds. The swallows have nearly all left
+their original abodes--hollow trees, and cliffs, and rocks--for
+human habitations and their environments. Where did the barn
+swallow nest before the country was settled? The chimney swallow
+nested in hollow trees, and, perhaps, occasionally resorts thither
+yet. But the chimney, notwithstanding the smoke, seems to suit his
+taste best. In the spring, before they have paired, I think these
+swallows sometimes pass the night in the woods, but not if an old,
+disused chimney is handy.
+
+One evening in early May, my attention was arrested by a band of
+them containing several hundreds, perhaps a thousand, circling
+about near a large, tall, disused chimney in a secluded place in
+the country. They were very lively, and chippering, and diving in a
+most extraordinary manner. They formed a broad continuous circle
+many rods in diameter. Gradually the circle contracted and neared
+the chimney. Presently some of the birds as they came round began
+to dive toward it, and the chippering was more animated than ever.
+Then a few ventured in; in a moment more, the air at the mouth of
+the chimney was black with the stream of descending swallows. When
+the passage began to get crowded, the circle lifted and the rest of
+the birds continued their flight, giving those inside time to
+dispose of themselves. Then the influx began again, and was kept up
+till the crowd became too great, when it cleared as before. Thus by
+installments, or in layers, the swallows were packed into the
+chimney until the last one was stowed away. Passing by the place a
+few days afterward, I saw a board reaching from the roof of the
+building to the top of the chimney, and imagined some curious
+person or some predaceous boy had been up to take a peep inside,
+and see how so many swallows could dispose of themselves in such a
+space. It would have been an interesting spectacle to see them
+emerge from the chimney in the morning.
+
+
+
+
+IV APRIL
+
+If we represent the winter of our northern climate by a rugged
+snow-clad mountain, and summer by a broad fertile plain, then the
+intermediate belt, the hilly and breezy uplands, will stand for
+spring, with March reaching well up into the region of the snows,
+and April lapping well down upon the greening fields and unloosened
+currents, not beyond the limits of winter's sallying storms, but
+well within the vernal zone,--within the reach of the warm breath
+and subtle, quickening influences of the plain below. At its best,
+April is the tenderest of tender salads made crisp by ice or snow
+water. Its type is the first spear of grass. The senses--sight,
+hearing, smell--are as hungry for its delicate and almost spiritual
+tokens as the cattle are for the first bite of its fields. How it
+touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the
+arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping
+across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first
+honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear
+piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the campfire
+in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the
+tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny knolls and
+slopes, the full translucent streams, the waxing and warming sun,--
+how these things and others like them are noted by the eager eye
+and ear! April is my natal month, and I am born again into new
+delight and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an
+indescribable charm to me. Its two syllables are like the calls of
+the first birds,--like that of the phoebe-bird, or of the
+meadowlark. Its very snows are fertilizing, and are called the poor
+man's manure.
+
+Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and indescribable
+odors,--the perfume of the bursting sod, of the quickened roots and
+rootlets, of the mould under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No
+other month has odors like it. The west wind the other day came
+fraught with a perfume that was to the sense of smell what a wild
+and delicate strain of music is to the ear. It was almost
+transcendental. I walked across the hill with my nose in the air
+taking it in. It lasted for two days. I imagined it came from the
+willows of a distant swamp, whose catkins were affording the bees
+their first pollen: or did it come from much farther,--from beyond
+the horizon, the accumulated breath of innumerable farms and
+budding forests? The main characteristic of these April odors is
+their uncloying freshness. They are not sweet, they are oftener
+bitter, they are penetrating and lyrical. I know well the odors of
+May and June, of the world of meadows and orchards bursting into
+bloom, but they are not so ineffable and immaterial and so
+stimulating to the sense as the incense of April.
+
+The season of which I speak does not correspond with the April of
+the almanac in all sections of our vast geography. It answers to
+March in Virginia and Maryland, while in parts of New York and New
+England it laps well over into May. It begins when the partridge
+drums, when the hyla pipes, when the shad start up the rivers, when
+the grass greens in the spring runs, and it ends when the leaves
+are unfolding and the last snowflake dissolves in midair. It may be
+the first of May before the first swallow appears, before the whip-
+poor-will is heard, before the wood thrush sings; but it is April
+as long as there is snow upon the mountains, no matter what the
+almanac may say. Our April is, in fact, a kind of Alpine summer,
+full of such contrasts and touches of wild, delicate beauty as no
+other season affords. The deluded citizen fancies there is nothing
+enjoyable in the country till June, and so misses the freshest,
+tenderest part. It is as if one should miss strawberries and begin
+his fruit-eating with melons and peaches. These last are good,--
+supremely so, they are melting and luscious,--but nothing so
+thrills and penetrates the taste, and wakes up and teases the
+papillae of the tongue, as the uncloying strawberry. What midsummer
+sweetness half so distracting as its brisk sub-acid flavor, and
+what splendor of full-leaved June can stir the blood like the best
+of leafless April?
+
+One characteristic April feature, and one that delights me very
+much, is the perfect emerald of the spring runs while the fields
+are yet brown and sere,--strips and patches of the most vivid
+velvet green on the slopes and in the valleys. How the eye grazes
+there, and is filled and refreshed! I had forgotten what a marked
+feature this was until I recently rode in an open wagon for three
+days through a mountainous, pastoral country, remarkable for its
+fine springs. Those delicious green patches are yet in my eye. The
+fountains flowed with May. Where no springs occurred, there were
+hints and suggestions of springs about the fields and by the
+roadside in the freshened grass,--sometimes overflowing a space in
+the form of an actual fountain. The water did not quite get to the
+surface in such places, but sent its influence.
+
+The fields of wheat and rye, too, how they stand out of the April
+landscape,--great green squares on a field of brown or gray!
+
+Among April sounds there is none more welcome or suggestive to me
+than the voice of the little frogs piping in the marshes. No bird-
+note can surpass it as a spring token; and as it is not mentioned,
+to my knowledge, by the poets and writers of other lands, I am
+ready to believe it is characteristic of our season alone. You may
+be sure April has really come when this little amphibian creeps out
+of the mud and inflates its throat. We talk of the bird inflating
+its throat, but you should see this tiny minstrel inflate _its_
+throat, which becomes like a large bubble, and suggests a drummer-
+boy with his drum slung very high. In this drum, or by the aid of
+it, the sound is produced. Generally the note is very feeble at
+first, as if the frost was not yet all out of the creature's
+throat, and only one voice will be heard, some prophet bolder than
+all the rest, or upon whom the quickening ray of spring has first
+fallen. And it often happens that he is stoned for his pains by the
+yet unpacified element, and is compelled literally to "shut up"
+beneath a fall of snow or a heavy frost. Soon, however, he lifts up
+his voice again with more confidence, and is joined by others and
+still others, till in due time, say toward the last of the month,
+there is a shrill musical uproar, as the sun is setting, in every
+marsh and bog in the land. It is a plaintive sound, and I have
+heard people from the city speak of it as lonesome and depressing,
+but to the lover of the country it is a pure spring melody. The
+little piper will sometimes climb a bulrush, to which he clings
+like a sailor to a mast, and send forth his shrill call. There is a
+Southern species, heard when you have reached the Potomac, whose
+note is far more harsh and crackling. To stand on the verge of a
+swamp vocal with these, pains and stuns the ear. The call of the
+Northern species is far more tender and musical. [Footnote: The
+Southern species is called the green hyla. I have since heard them
+in my neighborhood on the Hudson.]
+
+Then is there anything like a perfect April morning? One hardly
+knows what the sentiment of it is, but it is something very
+delicious. It is youth and hope. It is a new earth and a new sky.
+How the air transmits sounds, and what an awakening, prophetic
+character all sounds have! The distant barking of a dog, or the
+lowing of a cow, or the crowing of a cock, seems from out the heart
+of Nature, and to be a call to come forth. The great sun appears to
+have been reburnished, and there is something in his first glance
+above the eastern hills, and the way his eye-beams dart right and
+left and smite the rugged mountains into gold, that quickens the
+pulse and inspires the heart.
+
+Across the fields in the early morning I hear some of the rare
+April birds,--the chewink and the brown thrasher. The robin, the
+bluebird, the song sparrow, the phoebe-bird, come in March; but
+these two ground-birds are seldom heard till toward the last of
+April. The ground-birds are all tree-singers or air-singers; they
+must have an elevated stage to speak from. Our long-tailed thrush,
+or thrasher, like its congeners the catbird and the mockingbird,
+delights in a high branch of some solitary tree, whence it will
+pour out its rich and intricate warble for an hour together. This
+bird is the great American chipper. There is no other bird that I
+know of that can chip with such emphasis and military decision as
+this yellow-eyed songster. It is like the click of a giant gunlock.
+Why is the thrasher so stealthy? It always seems to be going about
+on tiptoe. I never knew it to steal anything, and yet it skulks and
+hides like a fugitive from justice. One never sees it flying aloft
+in the air and traversing the world openly, like most birds, but it
+darts along fences and through bushes as if pursued by a guilty
+conscience. Only when the musical fit is upon it does it come up
+into full view, and invite the world to hear and behold.
+
+The chewink is a shy bird also, but not stealthy. It is very
+inquisitive, and sets up a great scratching among the leaves,
+apparently to attract your attention. The male is perhaps the most
+conspicuously marked of all the ground-birds except the bobolink,
+being black above, bay on the sides, and white beneath. The bay is
+in compliment to the leaves he is forever scratching among,--they
+have rustled against his breast and sides so long that these parts
+have taken their color; but whence come the white and the black?
+The bird seems to be aware that his color betrays him, for there
+are few birds in the woods so careful about keeping themselves
+screened from view. When in song, its favorite perch is the top of
+some high bush near to cover. On being disturbed at such times, it
+pitches down into the brush and is instantly lost to view.
+
+This is the bird that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Wilson about,
+greatly exciting the latter's curiosity. Wilson was just then upon
+the threshold of his career as an ornithologist, and had made a
+drawing of the Canada jay which he sent to the President. It was a
+new bird, and in reply Jefferson called his attention to a "curious
+bird" which was everywhere to be heard, but scarcely ever to be
+seen. He had for twenty years interested the young sportsmen of his
+neighborhood to shoot one for him, but without success. "It is in
+all the forests, from spring to fall," he says in his letter, "and
+never but on the tops of the tallest trees, from which it
+perpetually serenades us with some of the sweetest notes, and as
+clear as those of the nightingale. I have followed it for miles,
+without ever but once getting a good view of it. It is of the size
+and make of the mockingbird, lightly thrush-colored on the back,
+and a grayish white on the breast and belly. Mr. Randolph, my son-
+in-law, was in possession of one which had been shot by a
+neighbor," etc. Randolph pronounced it a flycatcher, which was a
+good way wide of the mark.  Jefferson must have seen only the
+female, after all his tramp, from his description of the color; but
+he was doubtless following his own great thoughts more than the
+bird, else he would have had an earlier view.  The bird was not a
+new one, but was well known then as the ground-robin. The President
+put Wilson on the wrong scent by his erroneous description, and it
+was a long time before the latter got at the truth of the case. But
+Jefferson's letter is a good sample of those which specialists
+often receive from intelligent persons who have seen or heard
+something in their line very curious or entirely new, and who set
+the man of science agog by a description of the supposed novelty,--
+a description that generally fits the facts of the case about as
+well as your coat fits the chair-back. Strange and curious things
+in the air, and in the water, and in the earth beneath, are seen
+every day except by those who are looking for them, namely, the
+naturalists. When Wilson or Audubon gets his eye on the unknown
+bird, the illusion vanishes, and your phenomenon turns out to be
+one of the commonplaces of the fields or woods.
+
+A prominent April bird, that one does not have to go to the woods
+or away from his own door to see and hear, is the hardy and ever-
+welcome meadowlark. What a twang there is about this bird, and what
+vigor! It smacks of the soil. It is the winged embodiment of the
+spirit of our spring meadows. What emphasis in its _"z-d-t, z-d-t"_
+and what character in its long, piercing note! Its straight,
+tapering, sharp beak is typical of its voice. Its note goes like a
+shaft from a crossbow; it is a little too sharp and piercing when
+near at hand, but, heard in the proper perspective, it is eminently
+melodious and pleasing.  It is one of the major notes of the fields
+at this season. In fact, it easily dominates all others. _"Spring
+o' the year! spring o' the year!"_ it says, with a long-drawn
+breath, a little plaintive, but not complaining or melancholy. At
+times it indulges in something much more intricate and lark-like
+while hovering on the wing in midair, but a song is beyond the
+compass of its instrument, and the attempt usually ends in a
+breakdown. A clear, sweet, strong, high-keyed note, uttered from
+some knoll or rock, or stake in the fence, is its proper vocal
+performance. It has the build and walk and flight of the quail and
+the grouse. It gets up before you in much the same manner, and
+falls an easy prey to the crack shot. Its yellow breast, surmounted
+by a black crescent, it need not be ashamed to turn to the morning
+sun, while its coat of mottled gray is in perfect keeping with the
+stubble amid which it walks. The two lateral white quills in its
+tail seem strictly in character.  These quills spring from a dash
+of scorn and defiance in the bird's make-up. By the aid of these,
+it can almost emit a flash as it struts about the fields and jerks
+out its sharp notes. They give a rayed, a definite and piquant
+expression to its movements. This bird is not properly a lark, but
+a starling, say the ornithologists, though it is lark-like in its
+habits, being a walker and entirely a ground-bird. Its color also
+allies it to the true lark. I believe there is no bird in the
+English or European fields that answers to this hardy pedestrian of
+our meadows. He is a true American, and his note one of our
+characteristic April sounds.
+
+Another marked April note, proceeding sometimes from the meadows,
+but more frequently from the rough pastures and borders of the
+woods, is the call of the high-hole, or golden-shafted woodpecker.
+It is quite as strong as that of the meadowlark, but not so long-
+drawn and piercing. It is a succession of short notes rapidly
+uttered, as if the bird said _"if-if-if-if-if-if-if."_   The notes
+of the ordinary downy and hairy woodpeckers suggest, in some way.
+the sound of a steel punch; but that of the high-hole is much
+softer, and strikes on the ear with real springtime melody. The
+high-hole is not so much a wood-pecker as he is a ground-pecker. He
+subsists largely on ants and crickets, and does not appear till
+they are to be found.
+
+In Solomon's description of spring, the voice of the turtle is
+prominent, but our turtle, or mourning dove, though it arrives in
+April, can hardly be said to contribute noticeably to the open-air
+sounds. Its call is so vague, and soft, and mournful,--in fact, so
+remote and diffused,--that few persons ever hear it at all.
+
+Such songsters as the cow blackbird are noticeable at this season,
+though they take a back seat a little later. It utters a peculiarly
+liquid April sound. Indeed, one would think its crop was full of
+water, its notes so bubble up and regurgitate, and are delivered
+with such an apparent stomachic contraction. This bird is the only
+feathered polygamist we have. The females are greatly in excess of
+the males, and the latter are usually attended by three or four of
+the former. As soon as the other birds begin to build, they are on
+the _qui vive,_ prowling about like gypsies, not to steal the young
+of others, but to steal their eggs into other birds' nests, and so
+shirk the labor and responsibility of hatching and rearing their
+own young. As these birds do not mate, and as therefore there can
+be little or no rivalry or competition between the males, one
+wonders--in view of Darwin's teaching--why one sex should have
+brighter and richer plumage than the other, which is the fact. The
+males are easily distinguished from the dull and faded females by
+their deep glossy-black coats.
+
+The April of English literature corresponds nearly to our May. In
+Great Britain, the swallow and the cuckoo usually arrive by the
+middle of April; with us, their appearance is a week or two later.
+Our April, at its best, is a bright, laughing face under a hood of
+snow, like the English March, but presenting sharper contrasts, a
+greater mixture of smiles and tears and icy looks than are known to
+our ancestral climate. Indeed, Winter sometimes retraces his steps
+in this month, and unburdens himself of the snows that the previous
+cold has kept back; but we are always sure of a number of radiant,
+equable days,--days that go before the bud, when the sun embraces
+the earth with fervor and determination. How his beams pour into
+the woods till the mould under the leaves is warm and emits an
+odor! The waters glint and sparkle, the birds gather in groups, and
+even those unused to singing find a voice. On the streets of the
+cities, what a flutter, what bright looks and gay colors! I recall
+one preëminent day of this kind last April. I made a note of it in
+my note-book. The earth seemed suddenly to emerge from a wilderness
+of clouds and chilliness into one of these blue sunlit spaces. How
+the voyagers rejoiced! Invalids came forth, old men sauntered down
+the street, stocks went up, and the political outlook brightened.
+
+Such days bring out the last of the hibernating animals. The
+woodchuck unrolls and creeps out of his den to see if his clover
+has started yet. The torpidity leaves the snakes and the turtles,
+and they come forth and bask in the sun. There is nothing so small,
+nothing so great, that it does not respond to these celestial
+spring days, and give the pendulum of life a fresh start.
+
+April is also the month of the new furrow. As soon as the frost is
+gone and the ground settled, the plow is started upon the hill, and
+at each bout I see its brightened mould-board flash in the sun.
+Where the last remnants of the snowdrift lingered yesterday the
+plow breaks the sod to-day. Where the drift was deepest the grass
+is pressed flat, and there is a deposit of sand and earth blown
+from the fields to windward. Line upon line the turf is reversed,
+until there stands out of the neutral landscape a ruddy square
+visible for miles, or until the breasts of the broad hills glow
+like the breasts of the robins.
+
+Then who would not have a garden in April? to rake together the
+rubbish and burn it up, to turn over the renewed soil, to scatter
+the rich compost, to plant the first seed, or bury the first tuber!
+It is not the seed that is planted, any more than it is I that is
+planted; it is not the dry stalks and weeds that are burned up, any
+more than it is my gloom and regrets that are consumed. An April
+smoke makes a clean harvest.
+
+I think April is the best month to be born in. One is just in time,
+so to speak, to catch the first train, which is made up in this
+month. My April chickens always turn out best. They get an early
+start; they have rugged constitutions. Late chickens cannot stand
+the heavy dews, or withstand the predaceous hawks. In April all
+nature starts with you. You have not come out of your hibernaculum
+too early or too late; the time is ripe, and, if you do not keep
+pace with the rest, why, the fault is not in the season.
+
+
+
+
+V SPRING POEMS
+
+There is no month oftener on the tongues of the poets than April.
+It is the initiative month; it opens the door of the seasons; the
+interest and expectations of the untried, the untasted, lurk in it,
+
+       "From you have I been absent in the spring,"
+
+says Shakespeare in one of his sonnets,--
+
+       "When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
+        Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
+        That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him."
+
+The following poem, from Tennyson's "In Memoriam," might be headed
+"April," and serve as descriptive of parts of our season:--
+
+       "Now fades the last long streak of snow,
+           Now bourgeons every maze of quick
+           About the flowering squares, and thick
+        By ashen roots the violets blow.
+
+       "Now rings the woodland loud and long,
+           The distance takes a lovelier hue,
+           And drowned in yonder living blue
+       The lark becomes a sightless song.
+
+       "Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,
+           The flocks are whiter down the vale,
+           And milkier every milky sail
+        On winding stream or distant sea;
+
+       "Where now the sea-mew pipes, or dives
+           In yonder greening gleam, and fly
+           The happy birds, that change their sky
+        To build and brood; that live their lives
+
+        "From land to land; and in my breast
+           Spring wakens too; and my regret
+           Becomes an April violet,
+        And buds and blossoms like the rest."
+
+In the same poem the poet asks:--
+
+        "Can trouble live with April days?"
+
+Yet they are not all jubilant chords that this season awakens.
+Occasionally there is an undertone of vague longing and sadness,
+akin to that which one experiences in autumn. Hope for a moment
+assumes the attitude of memory and stands with reverted look. The
+haze, that in spring as well as in fall sometimes descends and
+envelops all things, has in it in some way the sentiment of music,
+of melody, and awakens pensive thoughts. Elizabeth Akers, in her
+"April," has recognized and fully expressed this feeling. I give
+the first and last stanzas:--
+
+       "The strange, sweet days are here again,
+           The happy-mournful days;
+        The songs which trembled on our lips
+           Are half complaint, half praise.
+
+       "Swing, robin, on the budded sprays,
+           And sing your blithest tune;--
+        Help us across these homesick days
+           Into the joy of June!"
+
+This poet has also given a touch of spring in her "March," which,
+however, should be written "April" in the New England climate:--
+
+       "The brown buds thicken on the trees,
+           Unbound, the free streams sing,
+        As March leads forth across the leas
+           The wild and windy spring.
+
+       "Where in the fields the melted snow
+           Leaves hollows warm and wet,
+        Ere many days will sweetly blow
+           The first blue violet."
+
+But on the whole the poets have not been eminently successful in
+depicting spring. The humid season, with its tender, melting blue
+sky, its fresh, earthy smells, its new furrow, its few simple signs
+and awakenings here and there, and its strange feeling of unrest,--
+how difficult to put its charms into words! None of the so-called
+pastoral poets have succeeded in doing it. That is the best part of
+spring which escapes a direct and matter-of-fact description of
+her. There is more of spring in a line or two of Chaucer and
+Spenser than in the elaborate portraits of her by Thomson or Pope,
+because the former had spring in their hearts, and the latter only
+in their inkhorns. Nearly all Shakespeare's songs are spring
+songs,--full of the banter, the frolic, and the love-making of the
+early season. What an unloosed current, too, of joy and fresh new
+life and appetite in Burns!
+
+In spring everything has such a margin! there are such spaces of
+silence! The influences are at work underground. Our delight is in
+a few things. The drying road is enough; a single wild flower, the
+note of the first bird, the partridge drumming in the April woods,
+the restless herds, the sheep steering for the uplands, the cow
+lowing in the highway or hiding her calf in the bushes, the first
+fires, the smoke going up through the shining atmosphere, from the
+burning of rubbish in gardens and old fields,--each of these simple
+things fills the breast with yearning and delight, for they are
+tokens of the spring. The best spring poems have this singleness
+and sparseness. Listen to Solomon: "For lo, the winter is past, the
+rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of
+the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard
+in the land." In Wordsworth are some things that breathe the air of
+spring. These lines, written in early spring, afford a good
+specimen:--
+
+       "I heard a thousand blended notes,
+           While in a grove I sate reclined,
+        In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
+           Bring sad thoughts to the mind."
+
+       "To her fair works did Nature link
+           The human soul that through me ran;
+        And much it grieved my heart to think
+           What man has made of man.
+
+       "Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
+           The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
+        And 't is my faith that every flower
+           Enjoys the air it breathes.
+
+       "The birds around me hopped and played,
+           Their thoughts I cannot measure:
+        But the least motion which they made
+           It seemed a thrill of pleasure."
+
+Or these from another poem, written in his usual study, "Out-of-
+Doors," and addressed to his sister:--
+
+       "It is the first mild day of March,
+           Each minute sweeter than before;
+       The redbreast sings from the tall larch
+          That stands beside the door.
+
+       "There is a blessing in the air,
+           Which seems a sense of joy to yield
+        To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
+           And grass in the green field.
+
+      .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+       "Love, now a universal birth,
+           From heart to heart is stealing,
+        From earth to man, from man to earth;
+           It is the hour of feeling.
+
+       "One moment now may give us more
+           Than years of toiling reason:
+        Our minds shall drink at every pore
+           The spirit of the season."
+
+It is the simplicity of such lines, like the naked branches of the
+trees or the unclothed fields, and the spring-like depth of feeling
+and suggestion they hold, that make them so appropriate to this
+season.
+
+At this season I often find myself repeating these lines of his
+also:--
+
+       "My heart leaps up, when I behold
+           A rainbow in the sky;
+        So was it, when my life began;
+        So is it, now I am a man;
+           So be it, when I shall grow old,
+           Or let me die!"
+
+Though there are so few good poems especially commemorative of the
+spring, there have no doubt been spring poets,--poets with such
+newness and fullness of life, and such quickening power, that the
+world is re-created, as it were, beneath their touch. Of course
+this is in a measure so with all real poets. But the difference I
+would indicate may exist between poets of the same or nearly the
+same magnitude. Thus, in this light Tennyson is an autumnal poet,
+mellow and dead-ripe, and was so from the first; while Wordsworth
+has much more of the spring in him, is nearer the bone of things
+and to primitive conditions.
+
+Among the old poems, one which seems to me to have much of the
+charm of springtime upon it is the story of Cupid and Psyche in
+Apuleius. The songs, gambols, and wooings of the early birds are
+not more welcome and suggestive. How graceful and airy, and yet
+what a tender, profound, human significance it contains! But the
+great vernal poem, doubly so in that it is the expression of the
+springtime of the race, the boyhood of man as well, is the Iliad of
+Homer. What faith, what simple wonder, what unconscious strength,
+what beautiful savagery, what magnanimous enmity,--a very paradise
+of war!
+
+Though so young a people, there is not much of the feeling of
+spring in any of our books. The muse of our poets is wise rather
+than joyous. There is no excess or extravagance or unruliness in
+her. There are spring sounds and tokens in Emerson's "May-Day:"--
+
+          "April cold with dropping rain
+        Willows and lilacs brings again,
+        The whistle of returning birds,
+        And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
+        The scarlet maple-keys betray
+        What potent blood hath modest May,
+        What fiery force the earth renews,
+        The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;
+        What joy in rosy waves outpoured
+        Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord."
+
+But this is not spring in the blood. Among the works of our young
+and rising poets, I am not certain but that Mr. Gilder's "New Day"
+is entitled to rank as a spring poem in the sense in which I am
+speaking. It is full of gayety and daring, and full of the reckless
+abandon of the male bird when he is winning his mate. It is full
+also of the tantalizing suggestiveness, the half-lights and shades,
+of April and May.
+
+Of prose poets who have the charm of the springtime upon them, the
+best recent example I know of is Björnson, the Norwegian romancist.
+What especially makes his books spring-like is their freshness and
+sweet good faith. There is also a reticence and an unwrought
+suggestiveness about them that is like the promise of buds and
+early flowers. Of Turgenieff, the Russian, much the same thing
+might be said. His stories are simple and elementary, and have none
+of the elaborate hair-splitting and forced hot-house character of
+the current English or American novel. They spring from stronger,
+more healthful and manly conditions, and have a force in them that
+is like a rising, incoming tide.
+
+
+
+
+VI OUR RURAL DIVINITY
+
+I wonder that Wilson Flagg did not include the cow among his
+"Picturesque Animals," for that is where she belongs. She has not
+the classic beauty of the horse, but in picture-making qualities
+she is far ahead of him. Her shaggy, loose-jointed body; her
+irregular, sketchy outlines, like those of the landscape,--the
+hollows and ridges, the slopes and prominences; her tossing horns,
+her bushy tail, tier swinging gait, her tranquil, ruminating
+habits,--all tend to make her an object upon which the artist eye
+loves to dwell. The artists are forever putting her into pictures,
+too. In rural landscape scenes she is an important feature. Behold
+her grazing in the pastures and on the hillsides, or along banks of
+streams, or ruminating under wide-spreading trees, or standing
+belly-deep in the creek or pond, or lying upon the smooth places in
+the quiet summer afternoon, the day's grazing done, and waiting to
+be summoned home to be milked; and again in the twilight lying upon
+the level summit of the hill, or where the sward is thickest and
+softest; or in winter a herd of them filing along toward the spring
+to drink, or being "foddered" from the stack in the field upon the
+new snow,--surely the cow is a picturesque animal, and all her
+goings and comings are pleasant to behold.
+
+I looked into Hamerton's clever book on the domestic animals also,
+expecting to find my divinity duly celebrated, but he passes her by
+and contemplates the bovine qualities only as they appear in the ox
+and the bull.
+
+Neither have the poets made much of the cow, but have rather dwelt
+upon the steer, or the ox yoked to the plow. I recall this touch
+from Emerson:--
+
+       "The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
+        Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm."
+
+But the ear is charmed, nevertheless, especially if it be not too
+near, and the air be still and dense, or hollow, as the farmer
+says. And again, if it be springtime and she task that powerful
+bellows of hers to its utmost capacity, how round the sound is, and
+how far it goes over the hills!
+
+The cow has at least four tones or lows. First, there is her
+alarmed or distressed low when deprived of her calf, or when
+separated from her mates,--her low of affection. Then there is her
+call of hunger, a petition for food, sometimes full of impatience,
+or her answer to the farmer's call, full of eagerness. Then there
+is that peculiar frenzied bawl she utters on smelling blood, which
+causes every member of the herd to lift its head and hasten to the
+spot,--the native cry of the clan. When she is gored or in great
+danger she bawls also, but that is different. And lastly, there is
+the long, sonorous volley she lets off on the hills or in the yard,
+or along the highway, and which seems to be expressive of a kind of
+unrest and vague longing,--the longing of the imprisoned Io for her
+lost identity. She sends her voice forth so that every god on Mount
+Olympus can hear her plaint. She makes this sound in the morning,
+especially in the spring, as she goes forth to graze.
+
+One of our rural poets, Myron Benton, whose verse often has the
+flavor of sweet cream, has written some lines called "Rumination,"
+in which the cow is the principal figure, and with which I am
+permitted to adorn my theme. The poet first gives his attention to
+a little brook that "breaks its shallow gossip" at his feet and
+"drowns the oriole's voice:"--
+
+       "But moveth not that wise and ancient cow,
+        Who chews her juicy cud so languid now
+        Beneath her favorite elm, whose drooping bough
+        Lulls all but inward vision fast asleep:
+        But still, her tireless tail a pendulum sweep
+        Mysterious clock-work guides, and some hid pulley
+        Her drowsy cud, each moment, raises duly.
+
+       "Of this great, wondrous world she has seen more
+        Than you, my little brook, and cropped its store
+        Of succulent grass on many a mead and lawn;
+        And strayed to distant uplands in the dawn.
+        And she has had some dark experience
+        Of graceless man's ingratitude; and hence
+        Her ways have not been ways of pleasantness,
+        Nor all her paths of peace. But her distress
+        And grief she has lived past; your giddy round
+        Disturbs her not, for she is learned profound
+        In deep brahminical philosophy.
+        She chews the cud of sweetest revery
+        Above your worldly prattle, brooklet merry,
+        Oblivious of all things sublunary."
+
+The cow figures in Grecian mythology, and in the Oriental
+literature is treated as a sacred animal. "The clouds are cows and
+the rain milk." I remember what Herodotus says of the Egyptians'
+worship of heifers and steers; and in the traditions of the Celtic
+nations the cow is regarded as a divinity.  In Norse mythology the
+milk of the cow Andhumbla afforded nourishment to the Frost giants,
+and it was she that licked into being and into shape a god, the
+father of Odin. If anything could lick a god into shape, certainly
+the cow could do it. You may see her perform this office for young
+Taurus any spring.  She licks him out of the fogs and bewilderments
+and uncertainties in which he finds himself on first landing upon
+these shores, and up onto his feet in an incredibly short time.
+Indeed, that potent tongue of hers can almost make the dead alive
+any day, and the creative lick of the old Scandinavian mother cow
+is only a large-lettered rendering of the commonest facts.
+
+The horse belongs to the fiery god Mars. He favors war, and is one
+of its oldest, most available, and most formidable engines. The
+steed is clothed with thunder, and smells the battle from afar; but
+the cattle upon a thousand hills denote that peace and plenty bear
+sway in the land. The neighing of the horse is a call to battle;
+but the lowing of old Brockleface in the valley brings the golden
+age again. The savage tribes are never without the horse; the
+Scythians are all mounted; but the cow would tame and humanize
+them. When the Indians will cultivate the cow, I shall think their
+civilization fairly begun. Recently, when the horses were sick with
+the epizoötic, and the oxen came to the city and helped to do their
+work, what an Arcadian air again filled the streets! But the dear
+old oxen,--how awkward and distressed they looked! Juno wept in the
+face of every one of them. The horse is a true citizen, and is
+entirely at home in the paved streets; but the ox,--what a complete
+embodiment of all rustic and rural things! Slow, deliberate, thick-
+skinned, powerful, hulky, ruminating, fragrant-breathed, when he
+came to town the spirit and suggestion of all Georgics and Bucolics
+came with him. O citizen, was it only a plodding, unsightly brute
+that went by? Was there no chord in your bosom, long silent, that
+sweetly vibrated at the sight of that patient, Herculean couple?
+Did you smell no hay or cropped herbage, see no summer pastures
+with circles of cool shade, hear no voice of herds among the hills?
+They were very likely the only horses your grandfather ever had.
+Not much trouble to harness and unharness them. Not much vanity on
+the road in those days. They did all the work on the early pioneer
+farm. They were the gods whose rude strength first broke the soil.
+They could live where the moose and the deer could. If there was no
+clover or timothy to be had, then the twigs of the basswood and
+birch would do. Before there were yet fields given up to grass,
+they found ample pasturage in the woods. Their wide-spreading horns
+gleamed in the duskiness, and their paths and the paths of the cows
+became the future roads and highways, or even the streets of great
+cities.
+
+All the descendants of Odin show a bovine trace, and cherish and
+cultivate the cow. In Norway she is a great feature. Professor
+Boyesen describes what he calls the _saeter_, the spring migration
+of the dairy and dairymaids, with all the appurtenances of butter
+and cheese making, from the valleys to the distant plains upon the
+mountains, where the grass keeps fresh and tender till fall. It is
+the great event of the year in all the rural districts. Nearly the
+whole family go with the cattle and remain with them. At evening
+the cows are summoned home with a long horn, called the _loor,_ in
+the hands of the milkmaid. The whole herd comes winding down the
+mountain-side toward the _saeter_ in obedience to the mellow blast.
+
+What were those old Vikings but thick-hided bulls that delighted in
+nothing so much as goring each other? And has not the charge of
+beefiness been brought much nearer home to us than that? But about
+all the northern races there is something that is kindred to cattle
+in the best sense,--something in their art and literature that is
+essentially pastoral, sweet-breathed, continent, dispassionate,
+ruminating, wide-eyed, soft-voiced,--a charm of kine, the virtue of
+brutes.
+
+The cow belongs more especially to the northern peoples, to the
+region of the good, green grass. She is the true _grazing_ animal.
+That broad, smooth, always dewy nose of hers is just the suggestion
+of greensward. She caresses the grass; she sweeps off the ends of
+the leaves; she reaps it with the soft sickle of her tongue. She
+crops close, but she does not bruise or devour the turf like the
+horse. She is the sward's best friend, and will make it thick and
+smooth as a carpet.
+
+       "The turfy mountains where live the nibbling sheep"
+
+are not for her. Her muzzle is too blunt; then she does not _bite_
+as do the sheep; she has no upper teeth; she _crops._ But on the
+lower slopes, and margins, and rich bottoms, she is at home. Where
+the daisy and the buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will
+grow, is her proper domain. The agriculture of no country can long
+thrive without her. Not only a large part of the real, but much of
+the potential, wealth of the land is wrapped up in her.
+
+Then the cow has given us some good words and hints. How could we
+get along without the parable of the cow that gave a good pail of
+milk and then kicked it over? One could hardly keep house without
+it. Or the parable of the cream and the skimmed milk, or of the
+buttered bread? We know, too, through her aid, what the horns of
+the dilemma mean, and what comfort there is in the juicy cud of
+reverie.
+
+I have said the cow has not been of much service to the poets, and
+yet I remember that Jean Ingelow could hardly have managed her
+"High Tide" without "Whitefoot" and "Lightfoot" and "Cusha! Cusha!
+Cusha! calling;" or Trowbridge his "Evening at the Farm," in which
+the real call of the American farm-boy of "Co', boss! Co', boss!
+Co', Co'," makes a very musical refrain.
+
+Tennyson's charming "Milking Song" is another flower of poesy that
+has sprung up in my divinity's footsteps.
+
+What a variety of individualities a herd of cows presents when you
+have come to know them all, not only in form and color, but in
+manners and disposition! Some are timid and awkward, and the butt
+of the whole herd. Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression
+in the face like certain persons you have known. A petted and well-
+fed cow has a benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly
+fed one, a pitiful and forlorn look. Some cows have a masculine or
+ox expression; others are extremely feminine. The latter are the
+ones for milk. Some cows will kick like a horse; some jump fences
+like deer. Every herd has its ringleader, its unruly spirit,--one
+that plans all the mischief, and leads the rest through the fences
+into the grain or into the orchard. This one is usually quite
+different from the master spirit, the "boss of the yard." The
+latter is generally the most peaceful and law-abiding cow in the
+lot, and the least bullying and quarrelsome. But she is not to be
+trifled with; her will is law; the whole herd give way before her,
+those that have crossed horns with her and those that have not, but
+yielded their allegiance without crossing. I remember such a one
+among my father's milkers when I was a boy,--a slender-horned,
+deep-shouldered, large-uddered, dewlapped old cow that we always
+put first in the long stable, so she could not have a cow on each
+side of her to forage upon; for the master is yielded to no less in
+the stanchions than in the yard. She always had the first place
+anywhere. She had her choice of standing-room in the milking-yard,
+and when she wanted to lie down there or in the fields the best and
+softest spot was hers. When the herd were foddered from the stack
+or barn, or fed with pumpkins in the fall, she was always first
+served. Her demeanor was quiet but impressive. She never bullied or
+gored her mates, but literally ruled them with the breath of her
+nostrils. If any new-comer or ambitious younger cow, however,
+chafed under her supremacy, she was ever ready to make good her
+claims. And with what spirit she would fight when openly
+challenged! She was a whirlwind of pluck and valor; and not after
+one defeat or two defeats would she yield the championship. The
+boss cow, when overcome, seems to brood over her disgrace, and day
+after day will meet her rival in fierce combat.
+
+A friend of mine, a pastoral philosopher, whom I have consulted in
+regard to the master cow, thinks it is seldom the case that one
+rules all the herd, if it number many, but that there is often one
+that will rule nearly all. "Curiously enough," he says, "a case
+like this will often occur: No. 1 will whip No. 2; No. 2 whips No.
+3; and No. 3 whips No. 1; so around in a circle. This is not a
+mistake; it is often the case. I remember," he continued, "we once
+had feeding out of a large bin in the centre of the yard six cows
+who mastered right through in succession from No. 1 to No. 6;
+_but_ No. 6 _paid off the score by whipping No. 1._ I often watched
+them when they were all trying to feed out of the box, and of
+course trying, dog-in-the-manger fashion, each to prevent any other
+she could. They would often get in the order to do it very
+systematically, since they could keep rotating about the box till
+the chain happened to get broken somewhere, when there would be
+confusion. Their mastership, you know, like that between nations,
+is constantly changing. There are always Napoleons who hold their
+own through many vicissitudes; but the ordinary cow is continually
+liable to lose her foothold. Some cow she has always despised, and
+has often sent tossing across the yard at her horns' ends, some
+pleasant morning will return the compliment and pay off old
+scores."
+
+But my own observation has been that, in herds in which there have
+been no important changes for several years, the question of might
+gets pretty well settled, and some one cow becomes the acknowledged
+ruler.
+
+The bully of the yard is never the master, but usually a second or
+third rate pusher that never loses an opportunity to hook those
+beneath her, or to gore the masters if she can get them in a tight
+place. If such a one can get loose in the stable, she is quite
+certain to do mischief. She delights to pause in the open bars and
+turn and keep those behind her at bay till she sees a pair of
+threatening horns pressing toward her, when she quickly passes on.
+As one cow masters all, so there is one cow that is mastered by
+all. These are the two extremes of the herd, the head and the tail.
+Between them are all grades of authority, with none so poor but
+hath some poorer to do her reverence.
+
+The cow has evidently come down to us from a wild or semi-wild
+state; perhaps is a descendant of those wild, shaggy cattle of
+which a small band is still preserved in some nobleman's park in
+Scotland. Cuvier seems to have been of this opinion. One of the
+ways in which her wild instincts still crop out is the disposition
+she shows in spring to hide her calf,--a common practice among the
+wild herds. Her wild nature would be likely to come to the surface
+at this crisis if ever; and I have known cows that practiced great
+secrecy in dropping their calves. As their time approached, they
+grew restless, a wild and excited look was upon them; and if left
+free, they generally set out for the woods, or for some other
+secluded spot. After the calf is several hours old, and has got
+upon its feet and had its first meal, the dam by some sign commands
+it to lie down and remain quiet while she goes forth to feed. If
+the calf is approached at such time, it plays "possum," pretends to
+be dead or asleep, till, on finding this ruse does not succeed, it
+mounts to its feet, bleats loudly and fiercely, and charges
+desperately upon the intruder. But it recovers from this wild scare
+in a little while, and never shows signs of it again.
+
+The habit of the cow, also, in eating the placenta, looks to me
+like a vestige of her former wild instincts,--the instinct to
+remove everything that would give the wild beasts a clew or a
+scent, and so attract them to her helpless young.
+
+How wise and sagacious the cows become that run upon the street, or
+pick their living along the highway! The mystery of gates and bars
+is at last solved to them. They ponder over them by night, they
+lurk about them by day, till they acquire a new sense,--till they
+become _en rapport_ with them and know when they are open and
+unguarded. The garden gate, if it open into the highway at any
+point, is never out of the mind of these roadsters, or out of their
+calculations. They calculate upon the chances of its being left
+open a certain number of times in the season; and if it be but
+once, and only for five minutes, your cabbage and sweet corn
+suffer. What villager, or countryman either, has not been awakened
+at night by the squeaking and crunching of those piratical jaws
+under the window, or in the direction of the vegetable patch? I
+have had the cows, after they had eaten up my garden, break into
+the stable where my own milcher was tied, and gore her and devour
+her meal. Yes, life presents but one absorbing problem to the
+street cow, and that is how to get into your garden. She catches
+glimpses of it over the fence or through the pickets, and her
+imagination or her epigastrium is inflamed. When the spot is
+surrounded by a high board fence, I think I have seen her peeping
+at the cabbages through a knothole. At last she learns to open the
+gate. It is a great triumph of bovine wit. She does it with her
+horn or her nose, or may be with her ever-ready tongue. I doubt if
+she has ever yet penetrated the mystery of the newer patent
+fastenings; but the old-fashioned thumb-latch she can see through,
+give her time enough.
+
+A large, lank, muley or polled cow used to annoy me in this way
+when I was a dweller in a certain pastoral city. I more than half
+suspected she was turned in by some one; so one day I watched.
+Presently I heard the gate-latch rattle; the gate swung open, and
+in walked the old buffalo. On seeing me she turned and ran like a
+horse. I then fastened the gate on the inside and watched again.
+After long waiting the old cow came quickly round the corner and
+approached the gate. She lifted the latch with her nose. Then, as
+the gate did not move, she lifted it again and again. Then she
+gently nudged it. Then, the obtuse gate not taking the hint, she
+butted it gently, then harder and still harder, till it rattled
+again. At this juncture I emerged from my hiding-place, when the
+old villain scampered off with great precipitation. She knew she
+was trespassing, and she had learned that there were usually some
+swift penalties attached to this pastime.
+
+I have owned but three cows and loved but one. That was the first
+one, Chloe, a bright red, curly-pated, golden-skinned Devonshire
+cow, that an ocean steamer landed for me upon the banks of the
+Potomac one bright May Day many clover summers ago. She came from
+the north, from the pastoral regions of the Catskills, to graze
+upon the broad commons of the national capital. I was then the
+fortunate and happy lessee of an old place with an acre of ground
+attached, almost within the shadow of the dome of the Capitol.
+Behind a high but aged and decrepit board fence I indulged my rural
+and unclerical tastes. I could look up from my homely tasks and
+cast a potato almost in the midst of that cataract of marble steps
+that flows out of the north wing of the patriotic pile. Ah! when
+that creaking and sagging back gate closed behind me in the
+evening, I was happy; and when it opened for my egress thence in
+the morning, I was not happy. Inside that gate was a miniature
+farm, redolent of homely, primitive life, a tumble-down house and
+stables and implements of agriculture and horticulture, broods of
+chickens, and growing pumpkins, and a thousand antidotes to the
+weariness of an artificial life. Outside of it were the marble and
+iron palaces, the paved and blistering streets, and the high,
+vacant mahogany desk of a government clerk. In that ancient
+inclosure I took an earth bath twice a day. I planted myself as
+deep in the soil as I could, to restore the normal tone and
+freshness of my system, impaired by the above-mentioned government
+mahogany. I have found there is nothing like the earth to draw the
+various social distempers out of one. The blue devils take flight
+at once if they see you mean to bury them and make compost of them.
+Emerson intimates that the scholar had better not try to have two
+gardens; but I could never spend an hour hoeing up dock and red-
+root and twitch-grass without in some way getting rid of many weeds
+and fungi, unwholesome growths, that a petty indoor life is forever
+fostering in my moral and intellectual nature.
+
+But the finishing touch was not given till Chloe came. She was the
+jewel for which this homely setting waited. My agriculture had some
+object then. The old gate never opened with such alacrity as when
+she paused before it. How we waited for her coming! Should I send
+Drewer, the colored patriarch, for her? No; the master of the house
+himself should receive Juno at the capital.
+
+"One cask for you," said the clerk, referring to the steamer bill
+of lading.
+
+"Then I hope it's a cask of milk," I said. "I expected a cow."
+
+"One cask, it says here."
+
+"Well, let's see it; I'll warrant it has horns and is tied by a
+rope;" which proved to be the case, for there stood the only object
+that bore my name, chewing its cud, on the forward deck. How she
+liked the voyage I could not find out; but she seemed to relish so
+much the feeling of solid ground beneath her feet once more, that
+she led me a lively step all the way home. She cut capers in front
+of the White House, and tried twice to wind me up in the rope as we
+passed the Treasury. She kicked up her heels on the broad avenue,
+and became very coltish as she came under the walls of the Capitol.
+But that night the long-vacant stall in the old stable was filled,
+and the next morning the coffee had met with a change of heart. I
+had to go out twice with the lantern and survey my treasure before
+I went to bed. Did she not come from the delectable mountains, and
+did I not have a sort of filial regard for her as toward my foster-
+mother?
+
+This was during the Arcadian age at the capital, before the easy-
+going Southern ways had gone out and the prim new Northern ways had
+come in, and when the domestic animals were treated with
+distinguished consideration and granted the freedom of the city.
+There was a charm of cattle in the street and upon the commons;
+goats cropped your rosebushes through the pickets, and nooned upon
+your front porch; and pigs dreamed Arcadian dreams under your
+garden fence, or languidly frescoed it with pigments from the
+nearest pool. It was a time of peace; it was the poor man's golden
+age. Your cow, your goat, your pig, led vagrant, wandering lives,
+and picked up a subsistence wherever they could, like the bees,
+which was almost everywhere. Your cow went forth in the morning and
+came home fraught with milk at night, and you never troubled
+yourself where she went or how far she roamed.
+
+Chloe took very naturally to this kind of life. At first I had to
+go with her a few times and pilot her to the nearest commons, and
+then I left her to her own wit, which never failed her. What
+adventures she had, what acquaintances she made, how far she
+wandered, I never knew. I never came across her in my walks or
+rambles. Indeed, on several occasions I thought I would look her up
+and see her feeding in national pastures, but I never could find
+her. There were plenty of cows, but they were all strangers. But
+punctually, between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, her
+white horns would be seen tossing above the gate and her impatient
+low be heard. Sometimes, when I turned her forth in the morning,
+she would pause and apparently consider which way she would go.
+Should she go toward Kendall Green to-day, or follow the Tiber, or
+over by the Big Spring, or out around Lincoln Hospital? She seldom
+reached a conclusion till she had stretched forth her neck and
+blown a blast on her trumpet that awoke the echoes in the very
+lantern on the dome of the Capitol. Then, after one or two licks,
+she would disappear around the corner. Later in the season, when
+the grass was parched or poor on the commons, and the corn and
+cabbage tempting in the garden, Chloe was loath to depart in the
+morning, and her deliberations were longer than ever, and very
+often I had to aid her in coming to a decision.
+
+For two summers she was a wellspring of pleasure and profit in my
+farm of one acre, when, in an evil moment, I resolved to part with
+her and try another. In an evil moment I say, for from that time my
+luck in cattle left me. The goddess never forgave me the execution
+of that rash and cruel resolve.
+
+The day is indelibly stamped on my memory when I exposed my Chloe
+for sale in the public market-place. It was in November, a bright,
+dreamy, Indian summer day. A sadness oppressed me, not unmixed with
+guilt and remorse. An old Irish woman came to the market also with
+her pets to sell, a sow and five pigs, and took up a position next
+me. We condoled with each other; we bewailed the fate of our
+darlings together; we berated in chorus the white-aproned but
+blood-stained fraternity who prowled about us. When she went away
+for a moment I minded the pigs, and when I strolled about she
+minded my cow. How shy the innocent beast was of those carnal
+marketmen! How she would shrink away from them! When they put out a
+hand to feel her condition she would "scrooch" down her back, or
+bend this way or that, as if the hand were a branding-iron. So long
+as I stood by her head she felt safe--deluded creature!--and chewed
+the cud of sweet content; but the moment I left her side she seemed
+filled with apprehension, and followed me with her eyes, lowing
+softly and entreatingly till I returned.
+
+At last the money was counted out for her, and her rope surrendered
+to the hand of another. How that last look of alarm and
+incredulity, which I caught as I turned for a parting glance, went
+to my heart!
+
+Her stall was soon filled, or partly filled, and this time with a
+native,--a specimen of what may be called the cornstalk breed of
+Virginia; a slender, furtive, long-geared heifer just verging on
+cowhood, that in spite of my best efforts would wear a pinched and
+hungry look. She evidently inherited a humped back. It was a family
+trait, and evidence of the purity of her blood. For the native
+blooded cow of Virginia, from shivering over half rations of
+cornstalks in the open air during those bleak and windy winters,
+and roaming over those parched fields in summer, has come to have
+some marked features. For one thing, her pedal extremities seem
+lengthened; for another, her udder does not impede her traveling;
+for a third, her backbone inclines strongly to the curve; then, she
+despiseth hay. This last is a sure test. Offer a thorough-bred
+Virginia cow hay, and she will laugh in your face; but rattle the
+husks or shucks, and she knows you to be her friend.
+
+The new-comer even declined corn-meal at first. She eyed it
+furtively, then sniffed it suspiciously, but finally discovered
+that it bore some relation to her native "shucks," when she fell to
+eagerly.
+
+I cherish the memory of this cow, however, as the most affectionate
+brute I ever knew. Being deprived of her calf, she transferred her
+affections to her master, and would fain have made a calf of him,
+lowing in the most piteous and inconsolable manner when he was out
+of her sight, hardly forgetting her grief long enough to eat her
+meal, and entirely neglecting her beloved husks. Often in the
+middle of the night she would set up that sonorous lamentation, and
+continue it till sleep was chased from every eye in the household.
+This generally had the effect of bringing the object of her
+affection before her, but in a mood anything but filial or
+comforting. Still, at such times a kick seemed a comfort to her,
+and she would gladly have kissed the rod that was the instrument of
+my midnight wrath.
+
+But her tender star was destined soon to a fatal eclipse. Being
+tied with too long a rope on one occasion during my temporary
+absence, she got her head into the meal-barrel, and stopped not
+till she had devoured nearly half a bushel of dry meal. The
+singularly placid and benevolent look that beamed from the meal-
+besmeared face when I discovered her was something to be
+remembered. For the first time, also, her spinal column came near
+assuming a horizontal line.
+But the grist proved too much for her frail mill, and her demise
+took place on the third day, not of course without some attempt to
+relieve her on my part. I gave her, as is usual in such
+emergencies, everything I "could think of," and everything my
+neighbors could think of, besides some fearful prescriptions which
+I obtained from a German veterinary surgeon, but to no purpose. I
+imagined her poor maw distended and inflamed with the baking sodden
+mass which no physic could penetrate or enliven.
+
+Thus ended my second venture in live-stock. My third, which
+followed sharp upon the heels of this disaster, was scarcely more
+of a success. This time I led to the altar a buffalo cow, as they
+call the "muley" down South,--a large, spotted, creamy-skinned cow,
+with a fine udder, that I persuaded a Jew drover to part with for
+ninety dollars. "Pag like a dish rack (rag)," said he, pointing to
+her udder after she had been milked. "You vill come pack and gif me
+the udder ten tollar" (for he had demanded an even hundred), he
+continued, "after you have had her a gouple of days." True, I felt
+like returning to him after a "gouple of days," but not to pay the
+other ten dollars. The cow proved to be as blind as a bat, though
+capable of counterfeiting the act of seeing to perfection. For did
+she not lift up her head and follow with her eyes a dog that scaled
+the fence and ran through the other end of the lot, and the next
+moment dash my hopes thus raised by trying to walk over a locust-
+tree thirty feet high? And when I set the bucket before her
+containing her first mess of meal, she missed it by several inches,
+and her nose brought up against the ground. Was it a kind of far-
+sightedness and near blindness? That was it, I think; she had
+genius, but not talent; she could see the man in the moon, but was
+quite oblivious to the man immediately in her front. Her eyes were
+telescopic and required a long range.
+
+As long as I kept her in the stall, or confined to the inclosure,
+this strange eclipse of her sight was of little consequence. But
+when spring came, and it was time for her to go forth and seek her
+livelihood in the city's waste places, I was embarrassed. Into what
+remote corners or into what _terra incognita_ might she not wander!
+There was little doubt but that she would drift around home in the
+course of the summer, or perhaps as often as every week or two; but
+could she be trusted to find her way back every night? Perhaps she
+could be taught. Perhaps her other senses were acute enough to
+compensate in a measure for her defective vision. So I gave her
+lessons in the topography of the country. I led her forth to graze
+for a few hours each day and led her home again. Then I left her to
+come home alone, which feat she accomplished very encouragingly.
+She came feeling her way along, stepping very high, but apparently
+a most diligent and interested sight-seer. But she was not sure of
+the right house when she got to it, though she stared at it very
+hard.
+
+Again I turned her forth, and again she came back, her telescopic
+eyes apparently of some service to her. On the third day, there was
+a fierce thunder-storm late in the afternoon, and old buffalo did
+not come home. It had evidently scattered and bewildered what
+little wits she had. Being barely able to navigate those streets on
+a calm day, what could she be expected to do in a tempest?
+
+After the storm had passed, and near sundown, I set out in quest of
+her, but could get no clew. I heard that two cows had been struck
+by lightning about a mile out on the commons. My conscience
+instantly told me that one of them was mine. It would be a fit
+closing of the third act of this pastoral drama. Thitherward I bent
+my steps, and there upon the smooth plain I beheld the scorched and
+swollen forms of two cows slain by thunderbolts, but neither of
+them had ever been mine.
+
+The next day I continued the search, and the next, and the next.
+Finally I hoisted an umbrella over my head, for the weather had
+become hot, and set out deliberately and systematically to explore
+every foot of open common on Capitol Hill. I tramped many miles,
+and found every man's cow but my own,--some twelve or fifteen
+hundred, I should think. I saw many vagrant boys and Irish and
+colored women, nearly all of whom had seen a buffalo cow that very
+day that answered exactly to my description, but in such diverse
+and widely separate places that I knew it was no cow of mine. And
+it was astonishing how many times I was myself deceived; how many
+rumps or heads, or line backs or white flanks, I saw peeping over
+knolls, or from behind fences or other objects, that could belong
+to no cow but mine!
+
+Finally I gave up the search, concluded the cow had been stolen,
+and advertised her, offering a reward. But days passed, and no
+tidings were obtained. Hope began to burn pretty low,--was indeed
+on the point of going out altogether,--when one afternoon, as I was
+strolling over the commons (for in my walks I still hovered about
+the scenes of my lost milcher), I saw the rump of a cow, over a
+grassy knoll, that looked familiar. Coming nearer, the beast lifted
+up her head; and, behold! it was she! only a few squares from home,
+where doubtless she had been most of the time. I had overshot the
+mark in my search. I had ransacked the far-off, and had neglected
+the near-at-hand, as we are so apt to do. But she was ruined as a
+milcher, and her history thenceforward was brief and touching!
+
+
+
+
+VII BEFORE GENIUS
+
+If there did not something else go to the making of literature
+besides mere literary parts, even the best of them, how long ago
+the old bards and the Biblical writers would have been superseded
+by the learned professors and the gentlemanly versifiers of later
+times! Is there to-day a popular poet, using the English language,
+who does not, in technical acquirements and in the artificial
+adjuncts of poetry,--rhyme, metre, melody, and especially sweet,
+dainty fancies,--surpass Europe's and Asia's loftiest and oldest?
+Indeed, so marked is the success of the latter-day poets in this
+respect, that any ordinary reader may well be puzzled, and ask, if
+the shaggy antique masters are poets, what are the refined and
+euphonious producers of our own day?
+
+If we were to inquire what this something else is which is
+prerequisite to any deep and lasting success in literature, we
+should undoubtedly find that it is the man behind the book. It is
+the fashion of the day to attribute all splendid results to genius
+and culture. But genius and culture are not enough. "All other
+knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and
+goodness," says Montaigne.  The quality of simple manhood, and the
+universal human traits which form the bond of union between man and
+man,--which form the basis of society, of the family, of
+government, of friendship,-- are quite overlooked; and the credit
+is given to some special facility, or to brilliant and lucky hit.
+Does any one doubt that the great poets and artists are made up
+mainly of the most common universal human and heroic
+characteristics?--that in them, though working to other ends, is
+all that construct the soldier, the sailor, the farmer, the
+discoverer, the bringer-to-pass in any field, and that their work
+is good and enduring in proportion as it is saturated and
+fertilized by the qualities of these? Good human stock is the main
+dependence.  No great poet ever appeared except from a race of good
+fighters, good eaters, good sleepers, good breeders.  Literature
+dies with the decay of the _un-_literary element. It is not in the
+spirit of something far away in the clouds or under the moon,
+something ethereal, visionary, and anti-mundane, that Angelo,
+Dante, and Shakespeare work, but in the spirit of common Nature and
+of the homeliest facts; through these, and not away from them, the
+path of the creator lies.
+
+It is no doubt this tendency, always more or less marked in highly
+refined and cultivated times, to forget or overlook the primary
+basic qualities, and to parade and make much of verbal and
+technical acquirements, that led Huxley to speak with such bitter
+scorn of the "sensual caterwauling of the literary classes," for
+this is not the only country in which books are produced that are a
+mere skin of elegant words blown up by copious literary gas.
+
+In imaginative works, especially, much depends upon the quality of
+mere weight. A stern, material inertia is indispensable. It is like
+the immobility and the power of resistance of a piece of ordnance,
+upon which the force and efficacy of the projectile finally depend.
+In the most daring flights of the master, there is still something
+which remains indifferent and uncommitted, and which acts as
+reserve power, making the man always superior to his work. He must
+always leave the impression that if he wanted to pull harder or to
+fly higher he could easily do so. In Homer there is much that is
+not directly available for Homer's purposes as poet. This is his
+personality,--the real Homer,--which lies deeper than his talents
+and skill, and which works through these by indirections. This
+gives the authority; this is the unseen backer, which makes every
+promise good.
+
+What depths can a man sound but his own, or what heights explore?
+"We carry within us," says Sir Thomas Browne, "the wonders we seek
+without us."
+
+Indeed, there is a strict moral or ethical dependence of the
+capacity to conceive or to project great things upon the capacity
+to be or to do them. It is as true as any law of hydraulics or of
+statics, that the workmanship of a man can never rise above the
+level of his character. He can never adequately say or do anything
+greater than he himself is. There is no such thing, for instance,
+as deep insight into the mystery of Creation, without integrity and
+simplicity of character.
+
+In the highest mental results and conditions the whole being
+sympathizes. The perception of a certain range of truth, such as is
+indicated by Plato, Hegel, Swedenborg, and which is very far from
+what is called "religious" or "moral," I should regard as the best
+testimonial that could be offered of a man's probity and essential
+nobility of soul. Is it possible to imagine a fickle, inconstant,
+or a sly, vain, mean person reading and appreciating Emerson? Think
+of the real men of science, the great geologists and astronomers,
+one opening up time, the other space! Shall mere intellectual
+acumen be accredited with these immense results? What noble pride,
+self-reliance, and continuity of character underlie Newton's
+deductions!
+
+Only those books are for the making of men into which a man has
+gone in the making. Mere professional skill and sleight of hand, of
+themselves, are to be apprized as lightly in letters as in war or
+in government, or in any kind of leadership. Strong native
+qualities only avail in the long run; and the more these dominate
+over the artificial endowments, sloughing or dropping the latter in
+the final result, the more we are refreshed and enlarged. Who has
+not, at some period of his life, been captivated by the rhetoric
+and fine style of nearly all the popular authors of a certain sort,
+but at last waked up to discover that behind these brilliant names
+was no strong, loving man, but only a refined taste, a fertile
+invention, or a special talent of one kind or another.
+
+Think of the lather of the modern novel, and the fashion-plate men
+and women that figure in it! What noble person has Dickens
+sketched, or has any novelist since Scott? The utter poverty of
+almost every current novelist, in any grand universal human traits
+in his own character, is shown in nothing more clearly than in the
+_kind_ of interest the reader takes in his books. We are led along
+solely by the ingenuity of the plot, and a silly desire to see how
+the affair came out. What must be the effect, long continued, of
+this class of jugglers working upon the sympathies and the
+imagination of a nation of gestating women?
+
+How the best modern novel collapses before the homely but immense
+human significance of Homer's celestial swineherd entertaining
+divine Ulysses, or even the solitary watchman in Aeschylus'
+"Agamemnon," crouched, like a night-dog, on the roofs of the
+Atreidae, waiting for the signal fires that should announce the
+fall of sacred Ilion!
+
+But one need not look long, even in contemporary British
+literature, to find a man. In the author of "Characteristics" and
+"Sartor Resartus" we surely encounter one of the true heroic cast.
+We are made aware that here is something more than a _littérateur,_
+something more than genius. Here is veracity, homely directness and
+sincerity, and strong primary idiosyncrasies.  Here the man enters
+into the estimate of the author.  There is no separating them, as
+there never is in great examples. A curious perversity runs through
+all, but in no way vitiates the result.  In both his moral and
+intellectual nature, Carlyle seems made with a sort of stub and
+twist, like the best gun-barrels.  The knotty and corrugated
+character of his sentences suits well the peculiar and intense
+activity of his mind.  What a transition from his terse and sharply
+articulated pages, brimming with character and life, and a strange
+mixture of rage, humor, tenderness, poetry, philosophy, to the cold
+disbelief and municipal splendor of Macaulay!  Nothing in Carlyle's
+contributions seems fortuitous.  It all flows from a good and
+sufficient cause in the character of the man.
+
+Every great man is, in a certain way, an Atlas, with the weight of
+the world upon him. And if one is to criticise at all, he may say
+that, if Carlyle had not been quite so conscious of this weight,
+his work would have been better done. Yet to whom do we owe more,
+even as Americans? Anti-democratic in his opinions, he surely is
+not so in spirit, or in the quality of his make. The nobility of
+labor and the essential nobility of man were never so effectively
+preached before. The deadliest enemy of democracy is not the
+warning or dissenting voice, but it is the spirit, rife among us,
+which would engraft upon our hardy Western stock the sickly and
+decayed standards of the expiring feudal world.
+
+With two or three exceptions, there is little as yet in American
+literature that shows much advance beyond the merely conventional
+and scholastic,--little, I mean, in which one gets a whiff of the
+strong, unbreathed air of mountain or prairie, or a taste of rude,
+new power that is like the tonic of the sea. Thoreau occupies a
+niche by himself. Thoreau was not a great personality, yet his
+writings have a strong characteristic flavor. He is anti-scorbutic,
+like leeks and onions. He has reference, also, to the highest
+truths.
+
+It is very likely true that our most native and original characters
+do not yet take to literature. It is, perhaps, too early in the
+day. Iron and lime have to pass through the vegetable before they
+can reach the higher organization of the animal, and maybe this
+Western nerve and heartiness will yet emerge on the intellectual
+plane. Let us hope that it will indeed be Western nerve and
+heartiness when it gets there, and not Eastern wit and epigram!
+
+In Abraham Lincoln we had a character of very marked and lofty
+type, the most suggestive study or sketch of the future American
+man that has yet appeared in our history.  How broad,
+unconventional, and humane! How democratic! how adhesive!  No fine
+arabesque carvings, but strong, unhewn, native traits, and deep
+lines of care, toil, and human sympathy.  Lincoln's Gettysburg
+speech is one of the most genuine and characteristic utterances in
+our annals.  It has the true antique simplicity and impressiveness.
+It came straight from the man, and is as sure an index of character
+as the living voice, or the physiognomy, or the personal presence.
+Indeed, it may be said of Mr. Lincoln's entire course while at the
+head of the nation, that no President, since the first, ever in his
+public acts allowed the man so fully to appear, or showed so little
+disposition to retreat behind the featureless political mask which
+seems to adhere to the idea of gubernatorial dignity.
+
+It would be hardly fair to cite Everett's speech on the same
+occasion as a specimen of the opposite style, wherein ornate
+scholarship and the pride of talents dominate. Yet a stern critic
+would be obliged to say that, as an author, Everett allowed, for
+the most part, only the expurgated, complimenting, drawing-room man
+to speak; and that, considering the need of America to be kept
+virile and broad at all hazards, his contribution, both as man and
+writer, falls immeasurably short of Abraham Lincoln's.
+
+What a noble specimen of its kind, and how free from any verbal
+tricks or admixture of literary sauce, is Thoreau's "Maine Woods"!
+And what a marked specimen of the opposite style is a certain other
+book I could mention in which these wild and grand scenes serve but
+as a medium to advertise the author's fund of classic lore!
+
+Can there be any doubt about the traits and outward signs of a
+noble character, and is not the style of an author the manners of
+his soul?
+
+Is there a lyceum lecturer in the country who is above manoeuvring
+for the applause of his audience? or a writer who is willing to
+make himself of no account for the sake of what he has to say? Even
+in the best there is something of the air and manners of a
+performer on exhibition. The newspaper, or magazine, or book is a
+sort of raised platform upon which the advertiser advances before a
+gaping and expectant crowd. Truly, how well he _handles_ his
+subject! He turns it over, and around, and inside out, and top-side
+down. He tosses it about; he twirls it; he takes it apart and puts
+it together again, and knows well beforehand where the applause
+will come in. Any reader, in taking up the antique authors, must be
+struck by the contrast.
+
+"In Aeschylus," says Landor, "there is no trickery, no trifling, no
+delay, no exposition, no garrulity, no dogmatism, no declamation,
+no prosing, . . . but the loud, clear challenge, the firm,
+unstealthy step, of an erect, broad-breasted soldier."
+
+On the whole, the old authors are better than the new.  The real
+question of literature is not simplified by culture or a
+multiplication of books, as the conditions of life are always the
+same, and are not made one whit easier by all the myriads of men
+and women who have lived upon the globe. The standing want is never
+for more skill, but for newer, fresher power,--a more plentiful
+supply of arterial blood. The discoverer, or the historian, or the
+man of science, may begin where his predecessor left off, but the
+poet or any artist must go back for a fresh start. With him it is
+always the first day of creation, and he must begin at the stump or
+nowhere.
+
+
+
+
+VIII BEFORE BEAUTY
+
+I
+
+Before genius is manliness, and before beauty is power. The Russian
+novelist and poet, Turgenieff, scattered all through whose works
+you will find unmistakable traits of greatness, makes one of his
+characters say, speaking of beauty, "The old masters,--they never
+hunted after it; it comes of itself into their compositions, God
+knows whence, from heaven or elsewhere. The whole world belonged to
+them, but we are unable to clasp its broad spaces; our arms are too
+short."
+
+>From the same depth of insight come these lines from "Leaves of
+Grass," apropos of true poems:--
+
+"They do not seek beauty--they are sought;
+Forever touching them, or close upon them, follows beauty, longing,
+   fain, love-sick."
+
+The Roman was perhaps the first to separate beauty from use, and to
+pursue it as ornament merely. He built his grand edifice,--its
+piers, its vaults, its walls of brick and concrete,--and then gave
+it a marble envelope copied from the Greek architecture. The latter
+could be stripped away, as in many cases it was by the hand of
+time, and leave the essentials of the structure nearly complete.
+Not so with the Greek: he did not seek the beautiful, he was
+beauty; his building had no ornament, it was all structure; in its
+beauty was the flower of necessity, the charm of inborn fitness and
+proportion. In other words, "his art was structure refined into
+beautiful forms, not beautiful forms superimposed upon structure,"
+as with the Roman. And it is in Greek mythology, is it not, that
+Beauty is represented as riding upon the back of a lion? as she
+assuredly always does in their poetry and art,--rides upon power,
+or terror, or savage fate; not only rides upon, but is wedded and
+incorporated with it; hence the athletic desire and refreshment her
+coming imparts.
+
+This is the invariable order of nature. Beauty without a rank
+material basis enfeebles. The world is not thus made; man is not
+thus begotten and nourished.
+
+It comes to me there is something implied or understood when we
+look upon a beautiful object, that has quite as much to do with the
+impression made upon the mind as anything in the object itself;
+perhaps more. There is somehow an immense and undefined background
+of vast and unconscionable energy, as of earthquakes, and ocean
+storms, and cleft mountains, across which things of beauty play,
+and to which they constantly defer; and when this background is
+wanting, as it is in much current poetry, beauty sickens and dies,
+or at most has only a feeble existence.
+
+Nature does nothing merely for beauty; beauty follows as the
+inevitable result; and the final impression of health and finish
+which her works make upon the mind is owing as much to those things
+which are not technically called beautiful as to those which are.
+The former give identity to the latter. The one is to the other
+what substance is to form, or bone to flesh. The beauty of nature
+includes all that is called beautiful, as its flower; and all that
+is not called beautiful, as its stalk and roots.
+
+Indeed, when I go to the woods or the fields, or ascend to the
+hilltop, I do not seem to be gazing upon beauty at all, but to be
+breathing it like the air. I am not dazzled or astonished; I am in
+no hurry to look lest it be gone. I would not have the litter and
+debris removed, or the banks trimmed, or the ground painted. What I
+enjoy is commensurate with the earth and sky itself. It clings to
+the rocks and trees; it is kindred to the roughness and savagery;
+it rises from every tangle and chasm; it perches on the dry oak-
+stubs with the hawks and buzzards; the crows shed it from their
+wings and weave it into their nests of coarse sticks; the fox barks
+it, the cattle low it, and every mountain path leads to its haunts.
+I am not a spectator of, but a participator in it. It is not an
+adornment; its roots strike to the centre of the earth.
+
+All true beauty in nature or in art is like the iridescent hue of
+mother-of-pearl, which is intrinsic and necessary, being the result
+of the arrangement of the particles,--the flowering of the
+mechanism of the shell; or like the beauty of health which comes
+out of and reaches back again to the bones and the digestion. There
+is no grace like the grace of strength. What sheer muscular gripe
+and power lie back of the firm, delicate notes of the great
+violinist! "Wit," says Heine,--and the same thing is true of
+beauty,--"isolated, is worthless. It is only endurable when it
+rests on a solid basis."
+
+In fact, beauty as a separate and distinct thing does not exist.
+Neither can it be reached by any sorting or sifting or clarifying
+process. It is an experience of the mind, and must be preceded by
+certain conditions, just as light is an experience of the eye, and
+sound of the ear.
+
+To attempt to manufacture beauty is as vain as to attempt to
+manufacture truth; and to give it to us in poems or any form of
+art, without a lion of some sort, a lion of truth or fitness or
+power, is to emasculate it and destroy its volition.
+
+But current poetry is, for the most part, an attempt to do this
+very thing, to give us beauty without beauty's antecedents and
+foil. The poets want to spare us the annoyance of the beast. Since
+beauty is the chief attraction, why not have this part alone, pure
+and unadulterated,--why not pluck the plumage from the bird, the
+flower from its stalk, the moss from the rock, the shell from the
+shore, the honey-bag from the bee, and thus have in brief what
+pleases us? Hence, with rare exceptions, one feels, on opening the
+latest book of poems, like exclaiming, Well, here is the beautiful
+at last divested of everything else,--of truth, of power, of
+utility,-- and one may add of beauty, too. It charms as color, or
+flowers, or jewels, or perfume charms--and that is the end of it.
+
+It is ever present to the true artist, in his attempt to report
+nature, that every object as it stands in the circuit of cause and
+effect has a history which involves its surroundings, and that the
+depth of the interest which it awakens in us is in proportion as
+its integrity in this respect is preserved. In nature we are
+prepared for any opulence of color or of vegetation, or freak of
+form, or display of any kind, because of the preponderance of the
+common, ever-present feature of the earth. The foil is always at
+hand. In like manner in the master poems we are never surfeited
+with mere beauty.
+
+Woe to any artist who disengages Beauty from the wide background of
+rudeness, darkness, and strength,--and disengages her from absolute
+nature! The mild and beneficent aspects of nature,-- what gulfs and
+abysses of power underlie them! The great shaggy, barbaric earth,--
+yet the summing-up, the plenum, of all we know or can know of
+beauty! So the orbic poems of the world have a foundation as of the
+earth itself, and are beautiful because they are something else
+first. Homer chose for his groundwork War, clinching, tearing,
+tugging war; in Dante, it is Hell; in Milton, Satan and the Fall;
+in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal world, with its towering
+and kingly personalities; in Byron, it is Revolt and diabolic
+passion. When we get to Tennyson, the lion is a good deal tamed,
+but he is still there in the shape of the proud, haughty, and manly
+Norman, and in many forms yet stimulates the mind.
+
+The perception of cosmical beauty comes by a vital original
+process. It is in some measure a creative act, and those works that
+rest upon it make demands--perhaps extraordinary ones--upon the
+reader or the beholder. We regard mere surface glitter, or mere
+verbal sweetness, in a mood entirely passive, and with a pleasure
+entirely profitless. The beauty of excellent stage scenery seems
+much more obvious and easy of apprehension than the beauty of trees
+and hills themselves, inasmuch as the act of association in the
+mind is much easier and cheaper than the act of original
+perception.
+
+Only the greatest works in any department afford any explanation of
+this wonder we call nature, or aid the mind in arriving at correct
+notions concerning it. To copy here and there a line or a trait is
+no explanation; but to translate nature into another language--to
+bridge it to us, to repeat in some sort the act of creation itself--
+is the crowning triumph of poetic art.
+
+
+
+II
+
+After the critic has enumerated all the stock qualities of the
+poet, as taste, fancy, melody, it remains to be said that unless
+there is something in him that is _living identity,_ something
+analogous to the growing, pushing, reproducing forces of nature,
+all the rest in the end pass for but little.
+
+This is perhaps what the German critic, Lessing, really means by
+_action,_ for true poems are more like deeds, expressive of
+something behind, more like acts of heroism or devotion, or like
+personal character, than like thoughts or intellections.
+
+All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical,
+assimilative property, a sort of gastric juice which dissolves
+thought and form, and holds in vital fusion religions, times,
+races, and the theory of their own construction, naming up with
+electric and defiant power,--power without any admixture of
+resisting form, as in a living organism.
+
+There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal.
+One means the organic, the other the inorganic; one means growth,
+development, life;
+the other means reaction, solidification, rest.  The hint and model
+of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and
+philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is
+much good literature that is neither the one nor the other
+distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both.
+But crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the
+result of the reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we
+do not expect to find in the best poems, though they may be most
+prized by specially intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the
+solids are very few, or do not appear at all as solids,--as lime
+and iron,--any more than they do in organic nature, in the flesh of
+the peach or the apple. The main thing in every living organism is
+the vital fluids: seven tenths of man is water; and seven tenths of
+Shakespeare is passion, emotion,--fluid humanity. Out of this arise
+his forms, as Venus arose out of the sea, and as man is daily built
+up out of the liquids of the body. We cannot taste, much less
+assimilate, a solid until it becomes a liquid; and your great idea,
+your sermon or moral, lies upon your poem a dead, cumbrous mass
+unless there is adequate heat and solvent, emotional power.  Herein
+I think Wordsworth's "Excursion" fails as a poem. It has too much
+solid matter. It is an over-freighted bark that does not ride the
+waves buoyantly and lifelike; far less so than Tennyson's "In
+Memoriam," which is just as truly a philosophical poem as the
+"Excursion." (Wordsworth is the fresher poet; his poems seem really
+to have been written in the open air, and to have been brought
+directly under the oxygenating influence of outdoor nature; while
+in Tennyson this influence seems tempered or farther removed.)
+
+The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural
+objects do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished
+handicraft, which have nothing to follow, but as living,
+procreating energy. Nature is perpetual transition. Everything
+passes and presses on; there is no pause, no completion, no
+explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly, without ever
+reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without committing
+herself to any end, is the law of Nature.
+
+These considerations bring us very near the essential difference
+between prose and poetry, or rather between the poetic and the
+didactic treatment of a subject. The essence of creative art is
+always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the
+method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation.
+The latter must formulate and define; but the principle of the
+former is to flow, to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive
+of life only as something constantly _becoming._ It plays forever
+on the verge. It is never _in loco,_ but always _in transitu._
+Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your hands
+upon the light, and behold, it is gone.
+
+The antithesis of art in method is science, as Coleridge has
+intimated. As the latter aims at the particular, so the former aims
+at the universal. One would have truth of detail, the other truth
+of _ensemble._ The method of science may be symbolized by the
+straight line, that of art by the curve. The results of science,
+relatively to its aim, must be parts and pieces; while art must
+give the whole in every act; not quantitively of course, but
+qualitively,--by the integrity of the spirit in which it works.
+
+The Greek mind will always be the type of the artist mind, mainly
+because of its practical bent, its healthful objectivity. The Greek
+never looked inward, but outward. Criticism and speculation were
+foreign to him. His head shows a very marked predominance of the
+motive and perceptive powers over the reflective. The expression of
+the face is never what we call intellectual or thoughtful, but
+commanding. His gods are not philosophers, but delight in deeds,
+justice, rulership.
+
+Among the differences between the modern and the classical
+aesthetic mind is the greater precision and definiteness of the
+latter. The modern genius is Gothic, and demands in art a certain
+vagueness and spirituality like that of music, refusing to be
+grasped and formulated. Hence for us (and this is undoubtedly an
+improvement) there must always be something about a poem, or any
+work of art, besides the evident intellect or plot of it, or what
+is on its surface, or what it tells. This something is the
+Invisible, the Undefined, almost Unexpressed, and is perhaps the
+best part of any work of art, as it is of a noble personality. To
+amuse, to exhibit culture, to formulate the aesthetic, or even to
+excite the emotions, is by no means all,--is not even the deepest
+part. Beside these, and inclosing all, is the general impalpable
+effect, like good air, or the subtle presence of good spirits,
+wordless but more potent far than words. As, in the superbest
+person, it is not merely what he says or knows or shows, or even
+how he behaves, but the silent qualities, like gravitation, that
+insensibly but resistlessly hold us; so in a good poem, or in any
+other expression of art.
+
+
+
+
+IX EMERSON
+
+Wherein the race has so far lost and gained, in being transplanted
+from Europe to the New England soil and climate, is well
+illustrated by the writings of Emerson. There is greater refinement
+and sublimation of thought, greater clearness and sharpness of
+outline, greater audacity of statement, but, on the other hand,
+there is a loss of bulk, of unction, of adipose tissue, and shall
+we say of power?
+
+Emerson is undoubtedly a master on the New England scale,--such a
+master as the land and race are capable of producing. He stands out
+clear and undeniable. The national type, as illustrated by that
+section of the country, is the purest and strongest in him of any
+yet. He can never suffer eclipse. Compared with the English or
+German master, he is undoubtedly deficient in viscera, in moral and
+intellectual stomach; but, on the other hand, he is of a fibre and
+quality hard to match in any age or land. From first to last he
+strikes one as something extremely pure and compact, like a nut or
+an egg. Great matters and tendencies lie folded in him, or rather
+are summarized in his pages. He writes short but pregnant chapters
+on great themes, as in his "English Traits," a book like rich
+preserves put up pound for pound, a pound of Emerson to every pound
+of John Bull. His chapter on Swedenborg in "Representative Men" is
+a good sample of his power to abbreviate and restate with added
+force. His mind acts like a sun-lens in gathering the cold pale
+beams of that luminary to a focus which warms and stimulates the
+reader in a surprising manner. The gist of the whole matter is
+here; and how much weariness and dullness and plodding is left out!
+
+In fact, Emerson is an essence, a condensation; more so, perhaps,
+than any other man who has appeared in literature. Nowhere else is
+there such a preponderance of pure statement, of the very attar of
+thought, over the bulkier, circumstantial, qualifying, or secondary
+elements. He gives us net results. He is like those strong
+artificial fertilizers. A pinch of him is equivalent to a page or
+two of Johnson, and he is pitched many degrees higher as an
+essayist than even Bacon. He has had an immediate stimulating
+effect upon all the best minds of the country; how deep or lasting
+this influence will be remains to be seen.
+
+This point and brevity has its convenience and value especially in
+certain fields of literature.  I by no means would wish to water
+Emerson; yet it will not do to lose sight of the fact that mass and
+inertia are indispensable to the creator.  Considering him as poet
+alone, I have no doubt of his irremediable deficiency here.  You
+cannot have broad, massive effect, deep light and shade, or a
+torrent of power, with such extreme refinement and condensation.
+The superphosphates cannot take the place of the coarser, bulkier
+fertilizers.  Especially in poetry do we require pure thought to be
+well diluted with the human, emotional qualities. In the writing
+most precious to the race, how little is definition and
+intellectual formula, and how much is impulse, emotion, will,
+character, blood, chyle!  We must have liquids and gases and
+solvents. We perhaps get more of them in Carlyle. Emerson's page
+has more serene astral beauty than Carlyle's, but not that intense
+blast-furnace heat that melts down the most obdurate facts and
+characters into something plastic and poetical. Emerson's ideal is
+always the scholar, the man of books and ready wit; Carlyle's hero
+is a riding or striding ruler, or a master worker in some active
+field.
+
+The antique mind no doubt affords the true type of health and
+wholeness in this respect. The Greek could see, and feel, and
+paint, and carve, and speak nothing but emotional man. In nature he
+saw nothing but personality,--nothing but human or superhuman
+qualities; to him the elements all took the human shape. Of that
+vague, spiritual, abstract something which we call Nature he had no
+conception. He had no sentiment, properly speaking, but impulse and
+will-power. And the master minds of the world, in proportion to
+their strength, their spinal strength, have approximated to this
+type. Dante, Angelo, Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, saw mainly man,
+and him not abstractly but concretely. And this is the charm of
+Burns and the glory of Scott. Carlyle has written the best
+histories and biographies of modern times, because he sees man with
+such fierce and steadfast eyes. Emerson sees him also, but he is
+not interested in him as a man, but mainly as a spirit, as a
+demigod, or as a wit or a philosopher.
+
+Emerson's quality has changed a good deal in his later writings.
+His corn is no longer in the milk; it has grown hard, and we that
+read have grown hard, too. He has now ceased to be an expansive,
+revolutionary force, but he has not ceased to be a writer of
+extraordinary gripe and unexpected resources of statement. His
+startling piece of advice, "Hitch your wagon to a star," is typical
+of the man, as combining the most unlike and widely separate
+qualities. Because not less marked than his idealism and mysticism
+is his shrewd common sense, his practical bent, his definiteness,--
+in fact, the sharp New England mould in which he is cast. He is the
+master Yankee, the centennial flower of that thrifty and peculiar
+stock. More especially in his later writings and speakings do we
+see the native New England traits,--the alertness, eagerness,
+inquisitiveness,  thrift,  dryness, archness, caution, the nervous
+energy as distinguished from the old English unction and vascular
+force. How he husbands himself,--what prudence, what economy,
+always spending up, as he says, and not down! How alert, how
+attentive; what an inquisitor;  always ready with some test
+question, with some fact or idea to match or to verify, ever on the
+lookout for some choice bit of adventure or information, or some
+anecdote that has pith and point! No tyro basks and takes his ease
+in his presence, but is instantly put on trial and must answer or
+be disgraced. He strikes at an idea like a falcon at a bird. His
+great fear seems to be lest there be some fact or point worth
+knowing that will escape him. He is a close-browed miser of the
+scholar's gains. He turns all values into intellectual coin. Every
+book or person or experience is an investment that will or will not
+warrant a good return in ideas. He goes to the Radical Club, or to
+the literary gathering, and listens with the closest attention to
+every word that is said, in hope that something will be said, some
+word dropped, that has the ring of the true metal. Apparently he
+does not permit himself a moment's indifference or inattention.
+His own pride is always to have the ready change, to speak the
+exact and proper word, to give to every occasion the dignity of
+wise speech. You are bartered with for your best. There is no
+profit in life but in the interchange of ideas, and the chief
+success is to have a head well filled with them. Hard cash at that;
+no paper promises satisfy him; he loves the clink and glint of the
+real coin.
+
+His earlier writings were more flowing and suggestive, and had
+reference to larger problems; but now everything has got weighed
+and stamped and converted into the medium of wise and scholarly
+conversation. It is of great value; these later essays are so many
+bags of genuine coin, which it has taken a lifetime to hoard; not
+all gold, but all good, and the fruit of wise industry and economy.
+
+I know of no other writing that yields the reader so many strongly
+stamped medallion-like sayings and distinctions. There is a
+perpetual refining and recoining of the current wisdom of life and
+conversation. It is the old gold or silver or copper, but how
+bright and new it looks in his pages! Emerson loves facts, things,
+objects, as the workman his tools. He makes everything serve. The
+stress of expression is so great that he bends the most obdurate
+element to his purpose; as the bird, under her keen necessity,
+weaves the most contrary and diverse materials into her nest. He
+seems to like best material that is a little refractory; it makes
+his page more piquant and stimulating. Within certain limits he
+loves roughness, but not at the expense of harmony. He has
+wonderful hardiness and push. Where else in literature is there a
+mind, moving in so rare a medium, that gives one such a sense of
+tangible resistance and force? It is a principle in mechanics that
+velocity is twice as great as mass: double your speed and you
+double your heat, though you halve your weight. In like manner this
+body we are considering is not the largest, but its speed is great,
+and the intensity of its impact with objects and experience is
+almost without parallel. Everything about a man like Emerson is
+important. I find his phrenology and physiognomy more than
+ordinarily typical and suggestive. Look at his picture there,--
+large, strong features on a small face and head,--no blank spaces;
+all given up to expression; a high predaceous nose, a sinewy brow,
+a massive, benevolent chin. In most men there is more face than
+feature, but here is a vast deal more feature than face, and a
+corresponding alertness and emphasis of character. Indeed, the man
+is made after this fashion. He is all type; his expression is
+transcendent. His mind has the hand's pronounced anatomy,--its
+cords and sinews and multiform articulations and processes, its
+opposing and coordinating power. If his brain is small, its texture
+is fine and its convolutions are deep. There have been broader and
+more catholic natures, but few so towering and audacious in
+expression and so rich in characteristic traits. Every scrap and
+shred of him is important and related. Like the strongly aromatic
+herbs and simples,--sage, mint, wintergreen, sassafras,--the least
+part carries the flavor of the whole. Is there one indifferent or
+equivocal or unsympathizing drop of blood in him? Where he is at
+all, he is entirely,--nothing extemporaneous; his most casual word
+seems to have lain in pickle a long time, and is saturated through
+and through with the Emersonian brine. Indeed, so pungent and
+penetrating is his quality that even his quotations seem more than
+half his own.
+
+He is a man who occupies every inch of his rightful territory; he
+is there in proper person to the farthest bound. Not every man is
+himself and his best self at all times and to his finger points.
+Many great characters, perhaps the greatest, have more or less
+neutral or waste ground. You must penetrate a distance before you
+reach the real quick. Or there is a good wide margin of the
+commonplace which is sure to put them on good terms with the mass
+of their fellow-citizens. And one would think Emerson could afford
+to relax a little; that he had earned the right to a dull page or
+two now and then. The second best or third best word sometimes
+would make us appreciate his first best all the more. Even his god-
+father Plato nods occasionally, but Emerson's good breeding will
+not for a moment permit such a slight to the reader.
+
+Emerson's peculiar quality is very subtle, but very sharp and firm
+and unmistakable. It is not analogous to the commoner, slower-going
+elements, as heat, air, fire, water, but is nearer akin to that
+elusive but potent something we call electricity. It is abrupt,
+freaky, unexpected, and always communicates a little wholesome
+shock. It darts this way and that, and connects the far and the
+near in every line. There is always a leaping thread of light, and
+there is always a kind of answering peal or percussion. With what
+quickness and suddenness extremes are brought together! The reader
+is never prepared for what is to come next; the spark will most
+likely leap from some source or fact least thought of. His page
+seldom glows and burns, but there is a never-ceasing crackling and
+discharge of moral and intellectual force into the mind.
+
+His chief weapon, and one that he never lays down, is identical
+with that of the great wits, namely, surprise. The point of his
+remark or idea is always sprung upon the reader, never quietly laid
+before him. He has a mortal dread of tameness and flatness, and
+would make the very water we drink bite the tongue.
+
+He has been from the first a speaker and lecturer, and his style
+has been largely modeled according to the demand of those sharp,
+heady New England audiences  for ceaseless  intellectual  friction
+and chafing. Hence every sentence is braided hard, and more or less
+knotted, and, though of silk, makes the mind tingle. He startles by
+overstatement, by understatement, by paradox, by antithesis, and by
+synthesis. Into every sentence enters the unexpected,--the
+congruous leaping from the incongruous, the high coming down, the
+low springing up, likeness or relation suddenly coming into view
+where before was only difference or antagonism. How he delights to
+bring the reader up with a short turn, to impale him on a knotty
+point, to explode one of his verbal bombshells under his very nose!
+Yet there is no trickery or rhetorical legerdemain. His heroic
+fibre always saves him.
+
+The language in which Taine describes Bacon applies with even more
+force to Emerson:--
+
+"Bacon," he says, "is a producer of conceptions and of sentences.
+The matter being explored, he says to us: 'Such it is; touch it not
+on that side; it must be approached from the other.'  Nothing more;
+no proof, no effort to convince; he affirms, and nothing more; he
+has thought in the manner of artists and poets, and he speaks after
+the manner of prophets and seers. 'Cogita et visa,'--this title of
+one of his books might be the title of all.  His process is that of
+the creators; it is intuition, not reasoning. . . . There is
+nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy, than this mode of
+thought when it is not checked by natural and good strong common
+sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural divination,
+the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the
+true, like the needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the
+highest degree. He has a preëminently practical, even an
+utilitarian mind."
+
+It is significant, and is indeed the hidden seed or root out of
+which comes the explanation of much, if not the main part, of his
+life and writings, that Emerson comes of a long line of clergymen;
+that the blood in his veins has been teaching, and preaching, and
+thinking, and growing austere, these many generations. One wonders
+that it is still so bounding and strong, so red with iron and quick
+with oxygen. But in him seems to be illustrated one of those rare
+cases in the genealogy of families where the best is carried
+forward each time, and steadily recruited and intensified. It does
+not seem possible for any man to become just what Emerson is from
+the stump, though perhaps great men have been the fruit of one
+generation; but there is a quality in him, an aroma of fine
+manners, a propriety, a chivalry in the blood, that dates back, and
+has been refined and transmitted many times. Power is born with a
+man, and is always first hand, but culture, genius, noble
+instincts, gentle manners, or the easy capacity for these things,
+may be, and to a greater or a lesser extent are, the contribution
+of the past. Emerson's culture is radical and ante-natal, and never
+fails him. The virtues of all those New England ministers and all
+those tomes of sermons are in this casket. One fears sometimes that
+he has been too much clarified, or that there is not enough savage
+grace or original viciousness and grit in him to save him. How he
+hates the roysterers, and all the rank, turbulent, human passions,
+and is chilled by the thought that perhaps after all Shakespeare
+led a vulgar life!
+
+When Tyndall was here, he showed us how the dark, coarse, invisible
+heat rays could be strained out of the spectrum; or, in other
+words, that every solar beam was weighted with a vast, nether,
+invisible side, which made it a lever of tremendous power in
+organic nature.  After some such analogy, one sees how the highest
+order of power in the intellectual world draws upon and is
+nourished by those rude, primitive, barbaric human qualities that
+our culture and pietism tend to cut off and strain out. Our culture
+has its eye on the other end of the spectrum, where the fine violet
+and indigo rays are; but all the lifting, rounding, fructifying
+powers of the system are in the coarse, dark rays--the black devil--
+at the base. The angel of light is yoked with the demon of
+darkness, and the pair create and sustain the world.
+
+In rare souls like Emerson, the fruit of extreme culture, it is
+inevitable that at least some of the heat rays should be lost, and
+we miss them especially when we contrast him with the elder
+masters. The elder masters did not seem to get rid of the coarse or
+vulgar in human life, but royally accepted it, and struck their
+roots into it, and drew from it sustenance and power: but there is
+an ever-present suspicion that Emerson prefers the saints to the
+sinners; prefers the prophets and seers to Homer, Shakespeare, and
+Dante. Indeed, it is to be distinctly stated and emphasized, that
+Emerson is essentially a priest, and that the key to all he has
+said and written is to be found in the fact that his point of view
+is not that of the acceptor, the creator,--Shakespeare's point of
+view,--but that of the refiner and selector, the priest's point of
+view. He described his own state rather than that of mankind when
+he said, "The human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding
+intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each without
+the other."
+
+Much surprise has been expressed in literary circles in this
+country that Emerson has not followed up his first off-hand
+indorsement of Walt Whitman with fuller and more deliberate
+approval of that poet, but has rather taken the opposite tack. But
+the wonder is that he should have been carried off his feet at all
+in the manner he was; and it must have been no ordinary breeze that
+did it. Emerson shares with his contemporaries the vast
+preponderance of the critical and discerning intellect over the
+fervid, manly qualities and faith. His power of statement is
+enormous; his scope of being is not enormous. The prayer he uttered
+many years ago for a poet of the modern, one who could see in the
+gigantic materialism of the times the carnival of the same deities
+we so much admire in Greece and Rome, seems to many to have even
+been explicitly answered in Whitman; but Emerson is balked by the
+cloud of materials, the din and dust of action, and the moving
+armies, in which the god comes enveloped.
+
+But Emerson has his difficulties with all the poets. Homer is too
+literal, Milton too literary, and there is too much of the whooping
+savage in Whitman. He seems to think the real poet is yet to
+appear; a poet on new terms, the reconciler, the poet-priest,--one
+who shall unite the whiteness and purity of the saint with the
+power and unction of the sinner; one who shall bridge the chasm
+between Shakespeare and St. John. For when our Emerson gets on his
+highest horse, which he does only on two or three occasions, he
+finds Shakespeare only a half man, and that it would take Plato and
+Manu and Moses and Jesus to complete him. Shakespeare, he says,
+rested with the symbol, with the festal beauty of the world, and
+did not take the final step, and explore the essence of things, and
+ask, "Whence? What? and Whither?"  He was not wise for himself; he
+did not lead a beautiful, saintly life, but ate, and drank, and
+reveled, and affiliated with all manner of persons, and quaffed the
+cup of life with gusto and relish. The elect, spotless souls will
+always look upon the heat and unconscious optimism of the great
+poet with deep regret. But if man would not become emasculated, if
+human life is to continue, we must cherish the coarse as well as
+the fine, the root as well as the top and flower. The poet-priest
+in the Emersonian sense has never yet appeared, and what reason
+have we to expect him? The poet means life, the whole of life,--all
+your ethics and philosophies, and essences and reason of things, in
+vital play and fusion, clothed with form and color, and throbbing
+with passion: the priest means a part, a thought, a precept; he
+means suppression, expurgation, death. To have gone farther than
+Shakespeare would have been to cease to be a poet, and to become a
+mystic or a seer.
+
+Yet it would be absurd to say, as a leading British literary
+journal recently did, that Emerson is not a poet. He is one kind of
+a poet. He has written plenty of poems that are as melodious as the
+hum of a wild bee in the air,--chords of wild aeolian music.
+
+Undoubtedly his is, on the whole, a bloodless kind of poetry. It
+suggests the pale gray matter of the cerebrum rather than flesh and
+blood. Mr. William Rossetti has made a suggestive remark about him.
+He is not so essentially a poet, says this critic, as he is a Druid
+that wanders among the bards, and strikes the harp with even more
+than bardic stress.
+
+Not in the poetry of any of his contemporaries is there such a
+burden of the mystery of things, nor are there such round wind-harp
+tones, nor lines so tense and resonant, and blown upon by a breeze
+from the highest heaven of thought. In certain respects he has gone
+beyond any other. He has gone beyond the symbol to the thing
+signified. He has emptied poetic forms of their meaning and made
+poetry of that. He would fain cut the world up into stars to shine
+in the intellectual firmament. He is more and he is less than the
+best.
+
+He stands among other poets like a pine-tree amid a forest of oak
+and maple.  He seems to belong to another race, and to other climes
+and conditions. He is great in one direction, up; no dancing
+leaves, but rapt needles; never abandonment, never a tossing and
+careering, never an avalanche of emotion; the same in sun and snow,
+scattering his cones, and with night and obscurity amid his
+branches. He is moral first and last, and it is through his
+impassioned and poetic treatment of the moral law that he gains
+such an ascendency over his reader. He says, as for other things he
+makes poetry of them, but the moral law makes poetry of him. He
+sees in the world only the ethical, but he sees it through the
+aesthetic faculty. Hence his page has the double charm of the
+beautiful and the good.
+
+
+
+II
+
+One of the penalties Emerson pays for his sharp decision, his
+mental pertinence and resistance, is the curtailment of his field
+of vision and enjoyment. He is one of those men whom the gods drive
+with blinders on, so that they see fiercely in only a few
+directions. Supreme lover as he is of poetry,--Herrick's poetry,--
+yet from the whole domain of what may be called emotional poetry,
+the poetry of fluid humanity, tallied by music, he seems to be shut
+out. This may be seen by his reference to Shelley in his last book,
+"Letters and Social Aims," and by his preference of the
+metaphysical poet throughout his writings. Wordsworth's famous
+"Ode" is, he says, the high-water mark of English literature. What
+he seems to value most in Shakespeare is the marvelous wit, the
+pregnant sayings. He finds no poet in France, and in his "English
+Traits" credits Tennyson with little but melody and color. (In our
+last readings, do we not surely come to feel the manly and robust
+fibre beneath Tennyson's silken vestments?) He demands of poetry
+that it be a kind of spiritual manna, and is at last forced to
+confess that there are no poets, and that when such angels do
+appear, Homer and Milton will be tin pans.
+
+One feels that this will not do, and that health, and wholeness,
+and the well-being of man are more in the keeping of Shakespeare
+than in the hands of Zoroaster or any of the saints. I doubt if
+that rarefied air will make good red blood and plenty of it.
+
+But Emerson makes his point plain, and is not indebted to any of
+his teachers for it. It is the burden of all he writes upon the
+subject. The long discourse that opens his last volume [footnote:
+_Letters and Social Aims_] has numerous subheadings, as "Poetry,"
+"Imagination," "Creation," "Morals," and "Transcendency;" but it!s
+all a plea for transcendency. I am reminded of the story of an old
+Indian chief who was invited to some great dinner where the first
+course was "succotash." When the second course was ready the old
+Indian said he would have a little more succotash, and when the
+third was ready he called for more succotash and so with the fourth
+and fifth, and on to the end. In like manner Emerson will have
+nothing but the "spiritual law" in poetry, and he has an enormous
+appetite for that.  Let him have it, but why should
+he be so sure that mankind all want succotash? Mankind finally
+comes to care little for what any poet has to _say,_ but only for
+what he has to _sing._ We want the pearl of thought dissolved in
+the wine of life. How much better are sound bones and a good
+digestion in poetry than all the philosophy and transcendentalism
+in the world!
+
+What one comes at last to want is power, mastery; and, whether it
+be mastery over the subtleties of the intellect, as in Emerson
+himself, or over the passions and the springs of action, as in
+Shakespeare, or over our terrors and the awful hobgoblins of hell
+and Satan, as in Dante, or over vast masses and spaces of nature
+and the abysms of aboriginal man, as in Walt Whitman, what matters
+it? Are we not refreshed by all? There is one mastery in Burns,
+another in Byron, another in Rabelais, and in Victor Hugo, and in
+Tennyson; and though the critic has his preferences, though he
+affect one more than another, yet who shall say this one is a poet
+and that one is not? "There may be any number of supremes," says
+the master, and "one by no means contravenes another." Every gas is
+a vacuum to every other gas, says Emerson, quoting the scientist;
+and every great poet complements and leaves the world free to every
+other great poet.
+
+Emerson's limitation or fixity is seen also in the fact that he has
+taken no new step in his own direction, if indeed another step
+could be taken in that direction and not step off. He is a prisoner
+on his peak. He cannot get away from the old themes. His later
+essays are upon essentially the same subjects as his first. He
+began by writing on nature, greatness, manners, art, poetry, and he
+is still writing on them. He is a husbandman who practices no
+rotation of crops, but submits to the exhaustive process of taking
+about the same things from his soil year after year. Some readers
+think they detect a falling off. It is evident there is not the
+same spontaneity, and that the soil has to be more and more stirred
+and encouraged, which is not at all to be wondered at.
+
+But if Emerson has not advanced, he has not receded, at least in
+conviction and will, which is always the great danger with our bold
+prophets. The world in which he lives, the themes upon which he
+writes, never become hackneyed to him. They are always fresh and
+new.  He has hardened, but time has not abated one jot or tittle
+his courage and hope,--no cynicism and no relaxing of his hold, no
+decay of his faith, while the nobleness of his tone, the chivalry
+of his utterance, is even more marked than at first. Better a
+hundred-fold than his praise of fine manners is the delicacy and
+courtesy and the grace of generous breeding displayed on every
+page. Why does one grow impatient and vicious when Emerson writes
+of fine manners and the punctilios of conventional life, and feel
+like kicking into the street every divinity enshrined in the
+drawing-room? It is a kind of insult to a man to speak the word in
+his presence. Purify the parlors indeed by keeping out the
+Choctaws, the laughers! Let us go and hold high carnival for a
+week, and split the ears of the groundlings with our "contemptible
+squeals of joy." And when he makes a dead set at praising
+eloquence, I find myself instantly on the side of the old clergyman
+he tells of who prayed that he might never be eloquent; or when he
+makes the test of a man an intellectual one, as his skill at
+repartee, and praises the literary crack shot, and defines
+manliness to be readiness, as he does in this last volume and in
+the preceding one, I am filled with a perverse envy of all the
+confused and stammering heroes of history. Is Washington faltering
+out a few broken and ungrammatical sentences, in reply to the vote
+of thanks of the Virginia legislature, less manly than the glib
+tongue in the court-room or in the club that can hit the mark every
+time? The test of a wit or of a scholar is one thing; the test of a
+man, I take it, is quite another. In this and some other respects
+Emerson is well antidoted by Carlyle, who lays the stress on the
+opposite qualities, and charges his hero to hold his tongue. But
+one cheerfully forgives Emerson the way he puts his thumb-nail on
+the bores. He speaks feelingly, and no doubt from as deep an
+experience as any man in America.
+
+I really hold Emerson in such high esteem that I think I can safely
+indulge myself in a little more fault-finding with him.
+
+I think it must be admitted that he is deficient in sympathy. This
+accounts in a measure for his coolness, his self-possession, and
+that kind of uncompromising rectitude or inflexibleness that marks
+his career, and that he so lauds in his essays. No man is so little
+liable to be warped or compromised in any way as the unsympathetic
+man. Emerson's ideal is the man who stands firm, who is unmoved,
+who never laughs, or apologizes, or deprecates, or makes
+concessions, or assents through good-nature, or goes abroad; who is
+not afraid of giving offense; "who answers you without supplication
+in his eye,"--in fact, who stands like a granite pillar amid the
+slough of life. You may wrestle with this man, he says, or swim
+with him, or lodge in the same chamber with him, or eat at the same
+table, and yet he is a thousand miles off, and can at any moment
+finish with you.  He is a sheer precipice, is this man, and not to
+be trifled with.  You shrinking, quivering, acquiescing natures,
+avaunt! You sensitive plants, you hesitating, indefinite creatures,
+you uncertain around the edges, you non-resisting, and you heroes,
+whose courage is quick, but whose wit is tardy, make way, and let
+the human crustacean pass. Emerson is moulded upon this pattern.
+It is no mush and milk that you get at this table. "A great man is
+coming to dine with me; I do not wish to please him; I wish that he
+should wish to please me." On the lecture stand he might be of
+wood, so far as he is responsive to the moods and feelings of his
+auditors. They must come to him; he will not go to them: but they
+do not always come. Latterly the people have felt insulted, the
+lecturer showed them so little respect. Then, before a promiscuous
+gathering, and in stirring and eventful times like ours, what
+anachronisms most of his lectures are, even if we take the high
+ground that they are pearls before swine! The swine may safely
+demand some apology of him who offers them pearls instead of corn.
+
+Emerson's fibre is too fine for large public uses. He is what he
+is, and is to be accepted as such, only let us _know_ what he is.
+He does not speak to universal conditions, or to human nature in
+its broadest, deepest, strongest phases. His thought is far above
+the great sea level of humanity, where stand most of the world's
+masters. He is like one of those marvelously clear mountain lakes
+whose water-line runs above all the salt seas of the globe. He is
+very precious, taken at his real worth. Why find fault with the
+isolation and the remoteness in view of the sky-like purity and
+depth?
+
+Still I must go on sounding and exploring him, reporting where I
+touch bottom and where I do not. He reaps great advantage from his
+want of sympathy. The world makes no inroads upon him through this
+channel. He is not distracted by the throng or maybe the mob of
+emotions that find entrance here. He shines like a star undimmed by
+current events. He speaks as from out the interstellar spaces. 'T
+is vulgar sympathy makes mortals of us all, and I think Emerson's
+poetry finally lacks just that human coloring and tone, that flesh
+tint of the heart, which vulgar sympathy with human life as such
+imparts.
+
+But after we have made all possible deductions from Emerson, there
+remains the fact that he is a living force, and, tried by home
+standards, a master.  Wherein does the secret of his power lie? He
+is the prophet and philosopher of young men. The old man and the
+man of the world make little of him, but of the youth who is ripe
+for him he takes almost an unfair advantage. One secret of his
+charm I take to be the instant success with which he transfers our
+interest in the romantic, the chivalrous, the heroic, to the sphere
+of morals and the intellect. We are let into another realm unlooked
+for, where daring and imagination also lead. The secret and
+suppressed heart finds a champion.  To the young man fed upon the
+penny precepts and staple Johnsonianism of English literature, and
+upon what is generally doled out in the schools and colleges, it is
+a surprise; it is a revelation. A new world opens before him.  The
+nebulae of his spirit are resolved or shown to be irresolvable. The
+fixed stars of his inner firmament are brought immeasurably near.
+He drops all other books. He will gaze and wonder. From Locke or
+Johnson or Wayland to Emerson is like a change from the school
+history to the Arabian Nights. There may be extravagances and some
+jugglery, but for all that the lesson is a genuine one, and to us
+of this generation immense.
+
+Emerson is the knight-errant of the moral sentiment. He leads, in
+our time and country, one illustrious division, at least, in the
+holy crusade of the affections and the intuitions against the
+usurpations of tradition and theological dogma. He marks the
+flower, the culmination, under American conditions and in the finer
+air of the New World, of the reaction begun by the German
+philosophers, and passed along by later French and English
+thinkers, of man against circumstance, of spirit against form, of
+the present against the past. What splendid affirmation, what
+inspiring audacity, what glorious egoism, what generous brag, what
+sacred impiety! There is an _eclat_ about his words, and a brave
+challenging of immense odds, that is like an army with banners. It
+stirs the blood like a bugle-call: beauty, bravery, and a sacred
+cause,--the three things that win with us always. The first essay
+is a forlorn hope. See what the chances are: "The world exists for
+the education of each man. . . . He should see that he can live all
+history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not
+suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he
+is greater than all the geography and all the government of the
+world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is
+commonly read from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and not
+deny his conviction that he is the court, and, if England or Egypt
+have anything to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them
+forever be silent."  In every essay that follows, there are the
+same great odds and the same electric call to the youth to face
+them. It is, indeed, as much a world of fable and romance that
+Emerson introduces us to as we get in Homer or Herodotus. It is
+true, all true,--true as Arthur and his knights, or Pilgrim's
+Progress, and I pity the man who has not tasted its intoxication,
+or who can see nothing in it.
+
+The intuitions are the bright band, without armor or shield, that
+slay the mailed and bucklered giants of the understanding.
+Government, institutions, religions, fall before the glance of the
+hero's eye. Art and literature, Shakespeare, Angelo, Aeschylus, are
+humble suppliants before you, the king. The commonest fact is
+idealized, and the whole relation of man to the universe is thrown
+into a kind of gigantic perspective. It is not much to say there is
+exaggeration; the very start makes Mohammed's attitude toward the
+mountain tame. The mountain _shall_ come to Mohammed, and, in the
+eyes of all born readers of Emerson, the mountain does come, and
+comes with alacrity.
+
+Some shrewd judges apprehend that Emerson is not going to last;
+basing their opinion upon the fact, already alluded to, that we
+outgrow him, or pass through him as through an experience that we
+cannot repeat. He is but a bridge to other things; he gets you
+over. He is an exceptional fact in literature, say they, and does
+not represent lasting or universal conditions. He is too fine for
+the rough wear and tear of ages. True, we do not outgrow Dante, or
+Cervantes, or Bacon; and I doubt if the Anglo-Saxon stock at least
+ever outgrows that king of romancers, Walter Scott. These men and
+their like appeal to a larger audience, and in some respects a more
+adult one, at least one more likely to be found in every age and
+people. Their achievement was more from the common level of human
+nature than are Emerson's astonishing paradoxes. Yet I believe his
+work has the seal of immortality upon it as much as that of any of
+them. No doubt he has a meaning to us now and in this country that
+will be lost to succeeding time. His religious significance will
+not be so important to the next generation. He is being or has been
+so completely absorbed by his times, that readers and hearers
+hereafter will get him from a thousand sources, or his contribution
+will become the common property of the race. All the masters
+probably had some peculiar import or tie to their contemporaries
+that we at a distance miss. It is thought by scholars that we have
+lost the key, or one key, to Dante, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare,--
+the key or the insight that people living under the same roof get
+of each other.
+
+But, aside from and over and above everything else, Emerson
+_appeals to youth and to genius._ If you have these, you will
+understand him and delight in him; if not, or neither of them, you
+will make little of him. And I do not see why this should not be
+just as true any time hence as at present.
+
+
+
+
+X THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE
+
+                        TO WALT WHITMAN
+
+       "'I, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
+         Hoping to cease not till death.'"
+                                       CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.
+
+
+       "They say that thou art sick, art growing old,
+           Thou Poet of unconquerable health,
+           With youth far-stretching, through the golden wealth
+        Of autumn, to Death's frostful, friendly cold.
+        The never-blenching eyes, that did behold
+           Life's fair and foul, with measureless content,
+           And gaze ne'er sated, saddened as they bent
+        Over the dying soldier in the fold
+           Of thy large comrade love;--then broke the tear!
+        War-dream, field-vigil, the bequeathed kiss,
+           Have brought old age to thee; yet, Master, now,
+        Cease not thy song to us; lest we should miss
+           A death-chant of indomitable cheer,
+        Blown as a gale from God;--oh sing it thou!"
+                                       ARRAN LEIGH (England).
+
+I
+
+Whoever has witnessed the flight of any of the great birds, as the
+eagle, the condor, the sea-gulls, the proud hawks, has perhaps felt
+that the poetic suggestion of the feathered tribes is not all
+confined to the sweet and tiny songsters,--the thrushes, canaries,
+and mockingbirds of the groves and orchards, or of the gilded cage
+in my lady's chamber. It is by some such analogy that I would
+indicate the character of the poetry I am about to discuss,
+compared with that of the more popular and melodious singer,--the
+poetry of the strong wing and the daring flight.
+
+Well and profoundly has a Danish critic said, in "For Ide og
+Virkelighed" ("For the Idea and the Reality"), a Copenhagen
+magazine:--
+
+"It may be candidly admitted that the American poet has not the
+elegance, special melody, nor _recherché_ aroma of the accepted
+poets of Europe or his own country; but his compass and general
+harmony are infinitely greater. The sweetness and spice, the poetic
+_ennui,_ the tender longings, the exquisite art-finish of those
+choice poets are mainly unseen and unmet in him,--perhaps because
+he cannot achieve them, more likely because he disdains them. But
+there is an electric _living soul_ in his poetry, far more
+fermenting and bracing. His wings do not glitter in their movement
+from rich and varicolored plumage, nor are his notes those of the
+accustomed song-birds; but his flight is the flight of the eagle."
+
+Yes, there is not only the delighting of the ear with the
+outpouring of sweetest melody and its lessons, but there is the
+delighting of the eye and soul through that soaring and circling in
+the vast empyrean of "a strong bird on pinions free,"--lessons of
+freedom, power, grace, and spiritual suggestion,--vast,
+unparalleled, _formless_ lessons.
+
+It is now upwards of twenty years since Walt Whitman printed (in
+1855) his first thin beginning volume of "Leaves of Grass;" and,
+holding him to the test which he himself early proclaimed, namely,
+"that the proof of the poet shall be sternly deferred till his
+country has absorb'd him as affectionately as he has absorb'd it,"
+he is yet on trial, yet makes his appeal to an indifferent or to a
+scornful audience. That his complete absorption, however, by his
+own country and by the world, is ultimately to take place, is one
+of the beliefs that grows stronger and stronger within me as time
+passes, and I suppose it is with a hope to help forward this
+absorption that I write of him now. Only here and there has he yet
+effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and more virile minds.
+But considering the unparalleled audacity of his undertaking, and
+the absence in most critics and readers of anything like full-grown
+and robust aesthetic perception, the wonder really is not that he
+should have made such slow progress, but that he should have gained
+any foothold at all. The whole literary _technique_ of the race for
+the last two hundred years has been squarely against him, laying,
+as it does, the emphasis upon form and scholarly endowments instead
+of upon aboriginal power and manhood.
+
+My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, has doubtless been
+much facilitated by contact--talks, meals, and jaunts--with him,
+stretching through a decade of years, and by seeing how everything
+in his _personnel_ was resumed and carried forward in his literary
+expression; in fact, how the one was a living commentary upon the
+other. After the test of time, nothing goes home like the test of
+actual intimacy; and to tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine,
+fresh, magnetic personality, making you love him and want always to
+be with him, were to tell me that my whole past life is a
+deception, and all the impression of my perceptive faculties a
+fraud. I have studied him as I have studied the birds, and have
+found that the nearer I got to him the more I saw. Nothing about a
+first-class man can be overlooked; he is to be studied in every
+feature,--in his physiology and phrenology, in the shape of his
+head, in his brow, his eye, his glance, his nose, his ear (the ear
+is as indicative in a man as in a horse), his voice. In Whitman all
+these things are remarkably striking and suggestive. His face
+exhibits a rare combination of harmony and sweetness with
+strength,--strength like the vaults and piers of the Roman
+architecture. Sculptor never carved a finer ear or a more
+imaginative brow. Then his heavy-lidded, absorbing eye, his
+sympathetic voice, and the impression which he makes of starting
+from the broad bases of the universal human traits. (If Whitman was
+grand in his physical and perfect health, I think him far more so
+now (1877), cheerfully mastering paralysis, penury, and old age.)
+You know, on seeing the man and becoming familiar with his
+presence, that, if he achieve the height at all, it will be from
+where every man stands, and not from some special genius, or
+exceptional and adventitious point. He does not make the impression
+of the scholar or artist or _littérateur,_ but such as you would
+imagine the antique heroes to make,--that of a sweet-blooded,
+receptive, perfectly normal, catholic man, with, further than that,
+a look about him that is best suggested by the word elemental or
+cosmical.  It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau to write, after
+an hour's interview, that he suggested "something a little more
+than human." In fact, the main clew to Walt Whitman's life and
+personality, and the expression of them in his poems, is to be
+found in about the largest emotional element that has appeared
+anywhere. This, if not controlled by a potent rational balance,
+would either have tossed him helplessly forever, or wrecked him as
+disastrously as ever storm and gale drove ship to ruin. These
+volcanic emotional fires appear everywhere in his books; and it is
+really these, aroused to intense activity and unnatural strain
+during the four years of the war and his persistent labors in the
+hospitals, that have resulted in his illness and paralysis since.
+
+It has been impossible, I say, to resist these personal impressions
+and magnetisms, and impossible with me not to follow them up in the
+poems, in doing which I found that his "Leaves of Grass" was really
+the _drama of himself,_ played upon various and successive stages
+of nature, history, passion, experience, patriotism, and that he
+had not made, nor had he intended to make, mere excellent "poems,"
+tunes, statues, or statuettes, in the ordinary sense.
+
+Before the man's complete acceptance and assimilation by America,
+he may have to be first passed down through the minds of critics
+and commentators, and given to the people with some of his rank new
+quality taken off,--a quality like that which adheres to objects in
+the open air, and makes them either forbidding or attractive, as
+one's mood is healthful and robust or feeble and languid. The
+processes are silently at work. Already seen from a distance, and
+from other atmospheres and surroundings, he assumes magnitude and
+orbic coherence; for in curious contrast to the general denial of
+Whitman in this country (though he has more lovers and admirers
+here than is generally believed) stands the reception accorded him
+in Europe. The poets there, almost without exception, recognize his
+transcendent quality, the men of science his thorough scientific
+basis, the republicans his inborn democracy, and all his towering
+picturesque personality and modernness. Professor Clifford says he
+is more thoroughly in harmony with the spirit and letter of
+advanced scientism than any other living poet. Professor Tyrrell
+and Mr. Symonds find him eminently Greek, in the sense in which to
+be natural and "self-regulated by the law of perfect health" is to
+be Greek. The French "Revue des Deux Mondes" pronounces his war
+poems the most vivid, the most humanly passionate, and the most
+modern, of all the verse of the nineteenth century. Freiligrath
+translated him into German, and hailed him as the founder of a new
+democratic and modern order of poetry, greater than the old. But I
+do not propose to go over the whole list here; I only wish to
+indicate that the absorption is well commenced abroad, and that
+probably her poet will at last reach America by way of those far-
+off, roundabout channels. The old mother will first masticate and
+moisten the food which is still too tough for her offspring.
+
+When I first fell in with "Leaves of Grass," I was taken by
+isolated passages scattered here and there through the poems; these
+I seized upon, and gave myself no concern about the rest. Single
+lines in it often went to the bottom of the questions that were
+vexing me. The following, though less here than when encountered in
+the frame of mind which the poet begets in you, curiously settled
+and stratified a certain  range of turbid, fluctuating inquiry:--
+
+ "There was never any more inception than there is now,--
+  Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
+  And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
+  Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."
+
+These lines, also, early had an attraction for me I could not
+define, and were of great service:--
+
+ "Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
+  Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
+  The whole universe indicates that it is good,
+  The past and the present indicate that it is good."
+
+In the following episode, too, there was to me something far deeper
+than the words or the story:--
+
+ "The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside;
+  I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the wood-pile;
+  Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
+  And went where he sat on a log, and led him in, and assured him,
+  And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and
+     bruis'd feet,
+  And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some
+     coarse clean clothes;
+  And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
+  And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles:
+  He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd North;
+  (I had him sit next me at table--my firelock lean'd in the corner.)"
+
+But of the book as a whole I could form no adequate conception, and
+it was not for many years, and after I had known the poet himself,
+as already stated, that I saw in it a teeming, rushing globe well
+worthy my best days and strength to surround and comprehend.
+
+One thing that early took me in the poems was (as before alluded
+to) the tremendous personal force back of them, and felt through
+them as the sun through vapor; not merely intellectual grasp or
+push, but a warm, breathing, towering, magnetic Presence that there
+was no escape from.
+
+Another fact I was quick to perceive, namely, that this man had
+almost in excess a quality in which every current poet was
+lacking,--I mean the faculty of being in entire sympathy with
+actual nature, and the objects; and shows of nature, and of rude,
+abysmal man; and appalling directness of utterance therefrom, at
+first hand, without any intermediate agency or modification.
+
+The influence of books and works of art upon an author may be seen
+in all respectable writers. If knowledge alone made literature, or
+culture genius, there would be no dearth of these things among the
+moderns. But I feel bound to say that there is something higher and
+deeper than the influence or perusal of any or all books, or all
+other productions of genius,--a quality of information which the
+masters can never impart, and which all the libraries do not hold.
+This is the absorption by an author, previous to becoming so, of
+the spirit of nature, through the visible objects of the universe,
+and his affiliation with them subjectively and objectively. Not
+more surely is the blood quickened and purified by contact with the
+unbreathed air than is the spirit of man vitalized and made strong
+by intercourse with the real things of the earth. The calm, all-
+permitting, wordless spirit of nature,--yet so eloquent to him who
+hath ears to hear! The sunrise, the heaving sea, the woods and
+mountains, the storm and the whistling winds, the gentle summer
+day, the winter sights and sounds, the night and the high dome of
+stars,--to have really perused these, especially from childhood
+onward, till what there is in them, so impossible to define, finds
+its full mate and echo in the mind,--this only is the lore which
+breathes the breath of life into all the rest. Without it, literary
+productions may have the superb beauty of statues, but with it only
+can they have the beauty of life.
+
+I was never troubled at all by what the critics called Whitman's
+want of art, or his violation of art. I saw that he at once
+designedly swept away all which the said critics have commonly
+meant by that term. The dominant impression was of the living
+presence and voice. He would have no curtains, he said, not the
+finest, between himself and his reader; and in thus bringing me
+face to face with his subject I perceived he not only did not
+escape conventional art, but I perceived an enlarged, enfranchised
+art in this very abnegation of art. "When half-gods go, whole gods
+arrive." It was obvious to me that the new style gained more than
+it lost, and that in this fullest operatic launching forth of the
+voice, though it sounded strange at first, and required the ear to
+get used to it, there might be quite as much science, and a good
+deal more power, than in the tuneful but constricted measures we
+were accustomed to.
+
+To the eye the page of the new poet presented about the same
+contrast with the page of the popular poets that trees and the
+free, unbidden growths of nature do with a carefully clipped hedge;
+and to the spirit the contrast was about the same. The hedge is the
+more studiedly and obviously beautiful, but, ah! there is a kind of
+beauty and satisfaction in trees that one would not care to lose.
+There are symmetry and proportion in the sonnet, but to me there is
+something I would not exchange for them in the wild swing and
+balance of many free and unrhymed passages in Shakespeare; like the
+one, for instance, in which these lines occur:--
+
+       "To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
+        And blown with restless violence round
+        About the pendent world."
+
+Here is the spontaneous grace and symmetry of a forest tree, or a
+soughing mass of foliage.
+
+And this passage from my poet I do not think could be improved by
+the verse-maker's art:--
+
+ "This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded
+     heaven,
+  And I said to my Spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those orbs
+     and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be
+     fill'd and satisfied then?_
+  And my Spirit said, No, _we but level that lift, to pass and continue
+     beyond."_
+
+Such breaking with the routine poetic, and with the grammar of
+verse, was of course a dangerous experiment, and threw the composer
+absolutely upon his intrinsic merits, upon his innately poetic and
+rhythmic quality. He must stand or fall by these alone, since he
+discarded all artificial, all adventitious helps. If interior,
+spontaneous rhythm could not be relied on, and the natural music
+and flexibility of language, then there was nothing to shield the
+ear from the pitiless hail of words,--not one softly padded verse
+anywhere.
+
+All poets, except those of the very first order, owe immensely to
+the form, the art, the stereotyped metres, and stock figures they
+find ready to hand. The form is suggestive,--it invites and aids
+expression, and lends itself readily, like fashion, to conceal, or
+extenuate, or eke out poverty of thought and feeling in the verse.
+The poet can "cut and cover," as the farmer says, in a way the
+prose-writer never can, nor one whose form is essentially prose,
+like Whitman's.
+
+I, too, love to see the forms worthily used, as they always are by
+the master; and I have no expectation that they are going out of
+fashion right away. A great deal of poetry that serves, and helps
+sweeten one's cup, would be impossible without them,--would be
+nothing when separated from them. It is for the ear, and for the
+sense of tune and of carefully carved and modeled forms, and is not
+meant to arouse the soul with the taste of power, and to start off
+on journeys for itself. But the great inspired utterances, like the
+Bible,--what would they gain by being cast in the moulds of
+metrical verse? In all that concerns art, viewed from any high
+standpoint,--proportion, continence, self-control, unfaltering
+adherence to natural standards, subordination of parts, perfect
+adjustment of the means to the end, obedience to inward law, no
+trifling, no levity, no straining after effect, impartially
+attending to the back and loins as well as to the head, and even
+holding toward his subject an attitude of perfect acceptance and
+equality,--principles of art to which alone the great spirits are
+amenable,--in all these respects, I say, this poet is as true as an
+orb in astronomy.
+
+To his literary expression pitched on scales of such unprecedented
+breadth and loftiness, the contrast of his personal life comes in
+with a foil of curious homeliness and simplicity. Perhaps never
+before has the absolute and average _commonness of humanity_ been
+so steadily and unaffectedly adhered to. I give here a glimpse of
+him in Washington on a Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the
+war, one summer day at sundown. The car is crowded and
+suffocatingly hot, with many passengers on the rear platform, and
+among them a bearded, florid-faced man, elderly but agile, resting
+against the dash, by the side of the young conductor, and evidently
+his intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim white hat. Among
+the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of the working
+class, with two children, has had trouble all the way with the
+youngest, a strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or
+fifteen months, who bids fair to worry the mother completely out,
+besides becoming a howling nuisance to everybody. As the car tugs
+around Capitol Hill the young one is more demoniac than ever, and
+the flushed and perspiring mother is just ready to burst into tears
+with weariness and vexation. The car stops at the top of the hill
+to let off most of the rear platform passengers, and the white-
+hatted man reaches inside, and, gently but firmly disengaging the
+babe from its stifling place in the mother's arms, takes it in his
+own, and out in the air. The astonished and excited child, partly
+in fear, partly in satisfaction at the change, stops its screaming,
+and, as the man adjusts it more securely to his breast, plants its
+chubby hands against him, and, pushing off as far as it can, gives
+a good long look squarely in his face,--then, as if satisfied,
+snuggles down with its head on his neck, and in less than a minute
+is sound and peacefully asleep without another whimper, utterly
+fagged out. A square or so more and the conductor, who has had an
+unusually hard and uninterrupted day's work, gets off for his first
+meal and relief since morning. And now the white-hatted man,
+holding the slumbering babe, also acts as conductor the rest of the
+distance, keeping his eye on the passengers inside, who have by
+this time thinned out greatly. He makes a very good conductor, too,
+pulling the bell to stop or to go on as needed, and seems to enjoy
+the occupation. The babe meanwhile rests its fat cheeks close on
+his neck and gray beard, one of his arms vigilantly surrounding it,
+while the other signals, from time to time, with the strap; and the
+flushed mother inside has a good half hour to breathe, and to cool
+and recover herself.
+
+
+
+II
+
+No poem of our day dates and locates itself as absolutely as
+"Leaves of Grass;" but suppose it had been written three or four
+centuries ago, and
+had located itself in mediaeval Europe, and was now first brought
+to light, together with a history of Walt Whitman's simple and
+disinterested life, can there be any doubt about the cackling that
+would at once break out in the whole brood of critics over the
+golden egg that had been uncovered?  This
+reckon would be a favorite passage with all:--
+
+ "You sea! I resign myself to you also--I guess what you mean;
+  I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers;
+  I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;
+  We must have a turn together--I undress--hurry me out of sight of
+     the land;
+  Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse;
+  Dash me with amorous wet--I can repay you.
+
+ "Sea of stretch'd ground-swells!
+  Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths!
+  Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovel'd yet always ready graves!
+  Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!
+  I am integral with you--I too am of one phase, and of all phases."
+
+This other passage would afford many a text for the moralists and
+essayists:--
+
+ "Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, scholarship,
+     and the like;
+  To me, all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them,
+     except as it results to their Bodies and Souls,
+  So that often, to me, they appear gaunt and naked,
+  And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself
+     or herself,
+  And of each one, the core of life, namely happiness, is full of
+     the rotten excrement of maggots;
+  And often, to me, those men and women pass unwittingly the true
+     realities of life, and go toward false realities,
+  And often, to me, they are alive after what custom has served
+     them, but nothing more,
+  And often, to me, they are sad, hasty, unwaked somnambules,
+     walking the dusk."
+
+Ah, Time, you enchantress! what tricks you play with us! The old is
+already proved,--the past and the distant hold nothing but the
+beautiful.
+
+Or let us take another view. Suppose Walt Whitman had never
+existed, and some bold essayist, like Mr. Higginson or Matthew
+Arnold, had projected him in abstract, outlined him on a scholarly
+ideal background, formulated and put in harmless critical periods
+the principles of art which he illustrates, and which are the
+inevitable logic of his poems,-- said essayist would have won great
+applause. "Yes, indeed, that were a poet to cherish; fill those
+shoes and you have a god."
+
+How different a critic's account of Shakespeare from Shakespeare
+himself,--the difference between the hewn or sawed timber and the
+living tree! A few years ago we had here a lecturer from over seas,
+who gave to our well-dressed audiences the high, moral, and
+intellectual statement of the poet Burns. It was very fine, and
+people were greatly pleased, vastly more so, I fear, than they were
+with Burns himself. Indeed, I could not help wondering how many of
+those appreciative listeners had any original satisfaction in the
+Scotch poet at first hand, or would have accepted him had he been
+their neighbor and fellow-citizen. But as he filtered through the
+scholarly mind in trickling drops, oh, he was so sweet!
+
+Everybody stirred with satisfaction as the lecturer said: "When
+literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth
+grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be
+done; and to give life to that dying literature a man must be found
+_not educated under its influence."_ I applauded with the rest, for
+it was a bold saying; but I could not help thinking how that
+theory, brought home to ourselves and illustrated in a living
+example, would have sent that nodding millinery and faultless
+tailory flying downstairs, as at an alarm of fire.
+
+One great service of Walt Whitman is that he exerts a tremendous
+influence to bring the race up on this nether side,--to place the
+emotional, the assimilative, the sympathetic, the spontaneous,
+intuitive man, the man of the fluids and of the affections, flush
+with the intellectual man. That we moderns have fallen behind here
+is unquestionable, and we in this country more than the Old World
+peoples. All the works of Whitman, prose and verse, are embosomed
+in a sea of emotional humanity, and they float deeper than they
+show; there is far more in what they necessitate and imply than in
+what they say.
+
+It is not so much of fatty degeneration that we are in danger in
+America, but of calcareous. The fluids, moral and physical, are
+evaporating; surfaces are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of
+flint in the veins and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp and
+hard, nothing is held in solution, all is precipitated in well-
+defined ideas and opinions.
+
+But when I think of the type of character planted and developed by
+my poet, I think of a man or a woman rich above all things in the
+genial human attributes, one "nine times folded" in an atmosphere
+of tenderest, most considerate humanity,--an atmosphere warm with
+the breath of a tropic heart, that makes your buds of affection and
+of genius start and unfold like a south wind in May. Your
+intercourse with such a character is not merely intellectual; it is
+deeper and better than that. Walter Scott carried such a fund of
+sympathy and goodwill that even the animals found fellowship with
+him, and the pigs understood his great heart.
+
+It was the large endowment of Whitman, in his own character in this
+respect, that made his services in the army hospitals during the
+war so ministering and effective, and that renders his "Drum-Taps"
+the tenderest and most deeply yearning and sorrowful expression of
+the human heart in poetry that ever war called forth. Indeed, from
+my own point of view, there is no false or dangerous tendency among
+us, in life or in letters, that this poet does not offset and
+correct. Fret and chafe as much as we will, we are bound to
+gravitate, more or less, toward this mountain, and feel its
+bracing, rugged air.
+
+Without a certain self-surrender there is no greatness possible in
+literature, any more than in religion, or in anything else. It is
+always a trait of the master that he is not afraid of being
+compromised by the company he keeps. He is the central and main
+fact in any company. Nothing so lowly but he will do it reverence;
+nothing so high but he can stand in its presence. His theme is the
+river, and he the ample and willing channel. Little natures love to
+disparage and take down; they do it in self-defense; but the master
+gives you all, and more than your due. Whitman does not stand
+aloof, superior, a priest or a critic: he abandons himself to all
+the strong human currents; he enters into and affiliates with every
+phase of life; he bestows himself royally upon whoever and whatever
+will receive him. There is no competition between himself and his
+subject; he is not afraid of over-praising, or making too much of
+the commonest individual. What exalts others exalts him.
+
+We have had great help in Emerson in certain ways,--first-class
+service. He probes the conscience and the moral purpose as few men
+have done, and gives much needed stimulus there. But, after him,
+the need is all the more pressing for a broad, powerful, opulent,
+human personality to absorb these ideals, and to make something
+more of them than fine sayings. With Emerson alone we are rich in
+sunlight, but poor in rain and dew,--poor, too, in soil, and in the
+moist, gestating earth principle. Emerson's tendency is not to
+broaden and enrich, but to concentrate and refine.
+
+Then, is there not an excessive modesty, without warrant in
+philosophy or nature, dwindling us in this country, drying us up in
+the viscera? Is there not a decay--a deliberate, strange abnegation
+and dread--of sane sexuality, of maternity and paternity, among us,
+and in our literary ideals and social types of men and women? For
+myself, I welcome any evidence to the contrary, or any evidence
+that deeper and counteracting agencies are at work, as unspeakably
+precious. I do not know where this evidence is furnished in such
+ample measure as in the pages of Walt Whitman. The great lesson of
+nature, I take it, is that a sane sensuality must be preserved at
+all hazards, and this, it seems to me, is also the great lesson of
+his writings. The point is fully settled in him that, however they
+may have been held in abeyance or restricted to other channels,
+there is still sap and fecundity, and depth of virgin soil in the
+race, sufficient to produce a man of the largest mould and the most
+audacious and unconquerable egotism, and on a plane the last to be
+reached by these qualities; a man of antique stature, of Greek
+fibre and gripe, with science and the modern added, without abating
+one jot or tittle of his native force, adhesiveness, Americanism,
+and democracy.
+
+As I have already hinted, Whitman has met with by far his amplest
+acceptance and appreciation in Europe. There is good reason for
+this, though it is not what has been generally claimed, namely,
+that the cultivated classes of Europe are surfeited with
+respectability, half dead with _ennui_ and routine, and find an
+agreeable change in the daring unconventionality of the new poet.
+For the fact is, it is not the old and jaded minds of London, or
+Paris, or Dublin, or Copenhagen, that have acknowledged him, but
+the fresh, eager, young minds. Nine tenths of his admirers there
+are the sturdiest men in the fields of art, science, and
+literature.
+
+In many respects, as a race, we Americans have been pampered and
+spoiled; we have been brought up on sweets. I suppose that,
+speaking literally, no people under the sun consume so much
+confectionery, so much pastry and cake, or indulge in so many gassy
+and sugared drinks. The soda-fountain, with its syrups, has got
+into literature, and furnishes the popular standard of poetry. The
+old heroic stamina of our ancestors, that craved the bitter but
+nourishing home-brewed, has died out, and in its place there is a
+sickly cadaverousness that must be pampered and cosseted. Among
+educated people here there is a mania for the bleached, the double-
+refined,--white houses, white china, white marble, and white skins.
+We take the bone and sinew out of the flour in order to have white
+bread, and are bolting our literature as fast as possible.
+
+It is for these and kindred reasons that Walt Whitman is more read
+abroad than in his own country. It is on the rank, human, and
+emotional side-- sex, magnetism, health, physique,--that he is so
+full. Then his receptivity and assimilative powers are enormous,
+and he demands these in his reader. In fact, his poems are
+physiological as much as they are intellectual. They radiate from
+his entire being, and are charged to repletion with that blended
+quality of mind and body--psychic and physiologic--which the living
+form and presence send forth. Never before in poetry has the body
+received such ennoblement. The great theme is IDENTITY, and
+identity comes through the body; and all that pertains to the body,
+the poet teaches, is entailed upon the spirit. In his rapt gaze,
+the body and the soul are one, and what debases the one debases the
+other. Hence he glorifies the body. Not more ardently and purely
+did the great sculptors of antiquity carve it in the enduring
+marble than this poet has celebrated it in his masculine and
+flowing lines. The bearing of his work in this direction is
+invaluable. Well has it been said that the man or the woman who has
+"Leaves of Grass" for a daily companion will be under the constant,
+invisible influence of sanity, cleanliness,  strength, and a
+gradual severance from all that corrupts and makes morbid and mean.
+
+In regard to the unity and construction of the poems, the reader
+sooner or later discovers the true solution to be, that the
+dependence, cohesion, and final reconciliation of the whole are in
+the Personality of the poet himself.  As in Shakespeare everything
+is strung upon the plot, the play, and loses when separated from
+it, so in this poet every line and sentence refers to and
+necessitates the Personality behind it, and derives its chief
+significance therefrom.  In other words, "Leaves of Grass" is
+essentially a dramatic poem, a free representation of man in his
+relation to the outward world,--the play, the interchanges between
+him and it, apart from social and artificial considerations,--in
+which we discern the central purpose or thought to be for every man
+and woman his or her Individuality, and around that, Nationality.
+To show rather than to tell,--to body forth as in a play how these
+arise and blend; how the man is developed and recruited, his
+spirit's descent; how he walks through materials absorbing and
+conquering them; how he confronts the immensities of time and
+space; where are the true sources of his power, the soul's real
+riches,--that which "adheres and goes forward and is not dropped by
+death;" how he is all defined and published and made certain
+through his body; the value of health and physique; the great
+solvent, Sympathy,--to show the need of larger and fresher types in
+art and in life, and then how the state is compacted, and how the
+democratic idea is ample and composite, and cannot fail us,--to
+show all this, I say, not as in a lecture or a critique, but
+suggestively and inferentially,--to work it out freely and
+picturesquely, with endless variations, with person and picture and
+parable and adventure, is the lesson and object of "Leaves of
+Grass." From the first line, where the poet says,
+
+       "I loafe and invite my Soul,"
+
+to the last, all is movement and fusion,--all is clothed in flesh
+and blood. The scene changes, the curtain rises and falls, but the
+theme is still Man,--his opportunities, his relations, his past,
+his future, his sex, his pride in himself, his omnivorousness, his
+"great hands," his yearning heart, his seething brain, the abysmal
+depths that underlie him and open from him, all illustrated in the
+poet's own character,--he the chief actor always. His personality
+directly facing you, and with its eye steadily upon you, runs
+through every page, spans all the details, and rounds and completes
+them, and compactly holds them. This gives the form and the art
+conception, and gives homogeneousness.
+
+When Tennyson sends out a poem, it is perfect, like an apple or a
+peach; slowly wrought out and dismissed, it drops from his boughs
+holding a conception or an idea that spheres it and makes it whole.
+It is completed, distinct, and separate,--might be his, or might be
+any man's. It carries his quality, but it is a thing of itself, and
+centres and depends upon itself.  Whether or not the world will
+hereafter consent, as in the past, to call only beautiful creations
+of this sort _poems,_ remains to be seen. But this is certainly not
+what Walt Whitman does, or aims to do, except in a few cases.  He
+completes no poems apart and separate from himself, and his pages
+abound in hints to that effect:--
+
+ "Let others finish specimens--I never finish specimens;
+  I shower them by exhaustless laws, as Nature does, fresh
+     and modern continually."
+
+His lines are pulsations, thrills, waves of force, indefinite
+dynamics, formless, constantly emanating from the living centre,
+and they carry the quality of the author's personal presence with
+them in a way that is unprecedented in literature.
+
+Occasionally there is a poem or a short piece that detaches itself,
+and assumes something like ejaculatory and statuesque proportion,
+as "O Captain, my Captain," "Pioneers," "Beat, Beat, Drums," and
+others in "Drum-Taps;" but all the great poems, like "Walt
+Whitman," "Song of the Open Road," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "To
+Working Men," "Sleep-Chasings," etc., are out-flamings, out-
+rushings, of the pent fires of the poet's soul. The first-named
+poem, which is the seething, dazzling sun of his subsequent poetic
+system, shoots in rapid succession waves of almost consuming
+energy. It is indeed a central orb of fiercest light and heat,
+swept by wild storms of emotion, but at the same time of sane and
+beneficent potentiality. Neither in it nor in either of the others
+is there the building-up of a fair verbal structure, a symmetrical
+piece of mechanism, whose last stone is implied and necessitated in
+the first.
+
+"The critic's great error," says Heine, "lies in asking, 'What
+ought the artist to do?' It would be far more correct to ask, 'What
+does the artist intend?'"
+
+It is probably partly because his field is so large, his demands so
+exacting, his method so new (necessarily so), and from the whole
+standard of the poems being what I may call an astronomical one,
+that the critics complain so generally of want of form in him. And
+the critics are right enough, as far as their objection goes. There
+is no deliberate form here, any more than there is in the forces of
+nature. Shall we say, then, that nothing but the void exists? The
+void is filled by a Presence. There is a controlling, directing,
+overarching will in every page, every verse, that there is no
+escape from. Design and purpose, natural selection, growth,
+culmination, are just as pronounced as in any poet.
+
+There is a want of form in the unfinished statue, because it is
+struggling into form; it is nothing without form; but there is no
+want of form in the elemental laws and effusions,--in fire, or
+water, or rain, or dew, or the smell of the shore or the plunging
+waves. And may there not be the analogue of this in literature,--a
+potent, quickening, exhilarating quality in words, apart from and
+without any consideration of constructive form? Under the influence
+of the expansive, creative force that plays upon me from these
+pages, like sunlight or gravitation, the question of form never
+comes up, because I do not for one moment escape the eye, the
+source from which the power and action emanate.
+
+I know that Walt Whitman has written many passages with reference
+far more to their position, interpretation, and scanning ages
+hence, than for current reading. Much of his material is too near
+us; it needs time. Seen through the vista of long years, perhaps
+centuries, it will assume quite different hues.  Perhaps those long
+lists of trades, tools, and occupations would not be so repellent
+if we could read them, as we read Homer's catalogue of the ships,
+through the retrospect of ages. They are justified in the poem
+aside from their historic value, because they are alive and full of
+action,--panoramas of the whole mechanical and industrial life of
+America, north, east, south, west,--bits of scenery, bird's-eye
+views, glimpses of moving figures, caught as by a flash,
+characteristic touches indoors and out, all passing in quick
+succession before you. They have in the fullest measure what
+Lessing demands in poetry,--the quality of ebbing and flowing
+action, as distinct from the dead water of description; they are
+thoroughly dramatic, fused, pliant, and obedient to the poet's
+will. No glamour is thrown over them, no wash of sentiment; and if
+they have not the charm of novelty and distance, why, that is an
+accident that bars them in a measure to us, but not to the future.
+Very frequently in these lists or enumerations of objects, actions,
+shows, there are sure to occur lines of perfect description:--
+
+ "Where the heifers browse--where geese nip their food with short
+     jerks;
+  Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome
+     prairie;
+  Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles
+     far and near;
+  Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon;
+  Where the katydid works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree
+     over the well."
+
+ "Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown
+     apprentices,
+  The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log, shaping it toward
+     the shape of a mast,
+  The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,
+  The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,
+  The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes."
+
+ "Always these compact lands--lands tied at the hips with the belt
+     stringing the huge oval lakes."
+
+ "Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd!--the diverse!
+     the compact!"
+
+Tried by the standards of the perfect statuesque poems, these pages
+will indeed seem strange enough; but viewed as a part of the poetic
+compend of America, the swift gathering-in, from her wide-
+spreading, multitudinous, material life, of traits and points and
+suggestions that belong here and are characteristic, they have
+their value. The poet casts his great seine into events and doings
+and material progress, and these are some of the fish, not all
+beautiful by any means, but all terribly alive, and all native to
+these waters.
+
+In the "Carol of Occupations" occur, too, those formidable
+inventories of the more heavy and coarsegrained trades and tools
+that few if any readers have been able to stand before, and that
+have given the scoffers and caricaturists their favorite weapons.
+If you detach a page of these and ask, "Is it poetry? have the
+'hog-hook,' the 'killing-hammer,' 'the cutter's cleaver,' 'the
+packer's maul,' met with a change of heart, and been converted into
+celestial cutlery?" I answer, No, they are as barren of poetry as a
+desert is of grass; but in their place in the poem, and in the
+collection, they serve as masses of shade or neutral color in
+pictures, or in nature, or in character,--a negative service, but
+still indispensable. The point, the moral of the poem, is really
+backed up and driven home by this list. The poet is determined
+there shall be no mistake about it. He will not put in the dainty
+and pretty things merely,--he will put in the coarse and common
+things also, and he swells the list till even his robust muse
+begins to look uneasy.  Remember, too, that Whitman declaredly
+writes the lyrics of America, of the masses, of democracy, and of
+the practical labor of mechanics, boatmen, and farmers:--
+
+ "The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are;
+  All doctrines, all politics and civilization, exude from you;
+  All sculpture and monuments, and anything inscribed anywhere, are
+     tallied in you;
+  The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
+     reach, is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same:
+  If you were  not  breathing and walking here, where would they
+     all be?
+  The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and plays would
+     be vacuums.
+
+ "All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
+ (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
+     the arches and cornices?)
+
+ "All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the
+     instruments;
+  It is not the violins and the cornets--it is not the oboe, nor
+     the beating drums--nor the score of the baritone singer singing
+     his sweet romanza--nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of
+     the women's chorus,
+  It is nearer and farther than they."
+
+Out of this same spirit of reverence for man and all that pertains
+essentially to him, and the steady ignoring of conventional and
+social distinctions and prohibitions, and on the same plane as the
+universal brotherhood of the poems, come those passages in "Leaves
+of Grass" that have caused so much abuse and fury,--the allusions
+to sexual acts and organs,--the momentary contemplation of man as
+the perpetuator of his species. Many good judges, who have followed
+Whitman thus far, stop here and refuse their concurrence. But if
+the poet has failed in this part, he has failed in the rest. It is
+of a piece with the whole. He has felt in his way the same
+necessity as that which makes the anatomist or the physiologist not
+pass by, or neglect, or falsify, the loins of his typical
+personage. All the passages and allusions that come under this head
+have a scientific coldness and purity, but differ from science, as
+poetry always must differ, in being alive and sympathetic, instead
+of dead and analytic. There is nothing of the forbidden here, none
+of those sweet morsels that we love to roll under the tongue, such
+as are found in Byron and Shakespeare, and even in austere Dante.
+If the fact is not lifted up and redeemed by the solemn and far-
+reaching laws of maternity and paternity, through which the poet
+alone contemplates it, then it is irredeemable, and one side of our
+nature is intrinsically vulgar and mean.
+
+Again: Out of all the full-grown, first-class poems, no matter what
+their plot or theme, emerges a sample of Man, each after its kind,
+its period, its nationality, its antecedents. The vast and cumbrous
+Hindu epics contribute their special types of both man and woman,
+impossible except from far-off Asia and Asian antiquity.  Out of
+Homer, after all his gorgeous action and events, the distinct
+personal identity, the heroic and warlike chieftain of Hellas only
+permanently remains. In the same way, when the fire and fervor of
+Shakespeare's plots and passions subside, the special feudal
+personality, as lord or gentleman, still towers in undying
+vitality. Even the Sacred Writings themselves, considered as the
+first great poems, leave on record, out of all the rest, the
+portraiture of a characteristic Oriental Man. Far different from
+these (and yet, as he says, "the same old countenance pensively
+looking forth," and "the same red running blood"), "Leaves of
+Grass" and "Two Rivulets" also bring their contribution; nay,
+behind every page _that_ is the main purport,--to outline a New
+World Man and a New World Woman, modern, complete, democratic, not
+only fully and nobly intellectual and spiritual, but in the same
+measure physical, emotional, and even fully and nobly carnal.
+
+An acute person once said to me, "As I read and re-read these
+poems, I more and more think their inevitable result in time must
+be to produce
+
+       'A race of splendid and savage _old men,_'
+
+of course dominated by moral and spiritual laws, but with volcanoes
+of force always alive beneath the surface."
+
+And still again: One of the questions to be put to any poem
+assuming a first-class importance among us--and I especially invite
+this inquiry toward "Leaves of Grass"--is, How far is this work
+consistent with, and the outcome of, that something which secures
+to the race ascendency, empire, and perpetuity? There is in every
+dominant people a germ, a quality, an expansive force, that, no
+matter how it is overlaid, gives them their push and their hold
+upon existence,--writes their history upon the earth, and stamps
+their imprint upon the age. To what extent is your masterpiece the
+standard-bearer of this quality,--helping the race to victory?
+helping me to be more myself than I otherwise would?
+
+
+
+III
+
+Not the least of my poet's successes is in his thorough
+assimilation of the modern sciences, transmuting them into strong
+poetic nutriment, and in the extent to which all his main poems are
+grounded in the deepest principles of modern philosophical inquiry.
+
+Nearly all the old literatures may be said to have been founded
+upon fable, and upon a basis and even superstructure of ignorance,
+that, however charming it may be, we have not now got, and could
+not keep if we had. The bump of wonder and the feeling of the
+marvelous,--a kind of half-pleasing fear, like that of children in
+the dark or in the woods,--were largely operative with the old
+poets, and I believe are necessary to any eminent success in this
+field; but they seem nearly to have died out of the modern mind,
+like organs there is no longer any use for. The poetic temperament
+has not yet adjusted itself to the new lights, to science, and to
+the vast fields and expanses opened up in the physical cosmos by
+astronomy and geology, and in the spiritual or intellectual world
+by the great German metaphysicians. The staple of a large share of
+our poetic literature is yet mainly the result of the long age of
+fable and myth that now lies behind us. "Leaves of Grass" is,
+perhaps, the first serious and large attempt at an expression in
+poetry of a knowledge of the earth as one of the orbs, and of man
+as a microcosm of the whole, and to give to the imagination these
+new and true fields of wonder and romance. In it fable and
+superstition are at an end, priestcraft is at an end, skepticism
+and doubt are at an end, with all the misgivings and dark
+forebodings that have dogged the human mind since it began to relax
+its hold upon tradition and the past; and we behold man reconciled,
+happy, ecstatic, full of reverence, awe, and wonder, reinstated in
+Paradise,-- the paradise of perfect knowledge and unrestricted
+faith.
+
+It needs but a little pondering to see that the great poet of the
+future will not be afraid of science, but will rather seek to plant
+his feet upon it as upon a rock. He knows that, from an enlarged
+point of view, there is no feud between Science and Poesy, any more
+than there is between Science and Religion, or between Science and
+Life. He sees that the poet and the scientist do not travel
+opposite but parallel roads, that often approach each other very
+closely, if they do not at times actually join. The poet will
+always pause when he finds himself in opposition to science; and
+the scientist is never more worthy the name than when he escapes
+from analysis into synthesis, and gives us living wholes. And
+science, in its present bold and receptive mood, may be said to be
+eminently creative, and to have made every first-class thinker and
+every large worker in any aesthetic or spiritual field immeasurably
+its debtor.  It has dispelled many illusions, but it has more than
+compensated the imagination by the unbounded vistas it has opened
+up on every hand. It has added to our knowledge, but it has added
+to our ignorance in the same measure: the large circle of light
+only reveals the larger circle of darkness that encompasses it, and
+life and being and the orbs are enveloped in a greater mystery to
+the poet to-day than they were in the times of Homer or Isaiah.
+Science, therefore, does not restrict the imagination, but often
+compels it to longer flights.  The conception of the earth as an
+orb shooting like a midnight meteor through space, a brand cast by
+the burning sun with the fire at its heart still unquenched, the
+sun itself shooting and carrying the whole train of worlds with it,
+no one knows whither,--what a lift has science given the
+imagination in this field! Or the tremendous discovery of the
+correlation and conservation of forces, the identity and
+convertibility of heat and force and motion, and that no ounce of
+power is lost, but forever passed along, changing form but not
+essence, is a poetic discovery no less than a scientific one. The
+poets have always felt that it must be so, and, when the fact was
+authoritatively announced by science, every profound poetic mind
+must have felt a thrill of pleasure.  Or the nebular hypothesis of
+the solar system,--it seems the conception of some inspired madman,
+like William Blake, rather than the cool conclusion of reason, and
+to carry its own justification, as great power always does. Indeed,
+our interest in astronomy and geology is essentially a poetic one,--
+the love of the marvelous, of the sublime, and of grand harmonies.
+The scientific conception of the sun is strikingly Dantesque, and
+appalls the imagination. Or the hell of fire through which the
+earth has passed, and the aeons of monsters from which its fair
+forms have emerged,--from which of the seven circles of the Inferno
+did the scientist get his hint? Indeed, science everywhere reveals
+a carnival of mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic
+tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, or to
+Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its
+ineffectual fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets are
+eclipsed.
+
+The vibratory theory of light and its identity with the laws of
+sound, the laws of the tides and the seasons, the wonders of the
+spectroscope, the theory of gravitation, of electricity, of
+chemical affinity, the deep beneath deep of the telescope, the
+world within world of the microscope,--in these and many other
+fields it is hard to tell whether it is the scientist or the poet
+we are listening to. What greater magic than that you can take a
+colorless ray of light, break it across a prism, and catch upon a
+screen all the divine hues of the rainbow?
+
+In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim
+foreshadowings of the human breast. Man in his simplicity has
+called the sun father and the earth mother. Science shows this to
+be no fiction, but a reality; that we are really children of the
+sun, and that every heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a
+solar emanation. The power with which you now move and breathe came
+from the sun just as literally as the bank-notes in your pocket
+came from the bank.
+
+The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of
+Atlas, and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle
+stood upon was a puzzle. An acute person says that science has but
+changed the terms of the equation, but that the unknown quantity is
+the same as ever. The earth now rests upon the sun,--in his
+outstretched palm; the sun rests upon some other sun, and that upon
+some other; but what they all finally rest upon, who can tell? Well
+may Tennyson speak of the "fairy tales of science," and well may
+Walt Whitman say:--
+
+ "I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the
+     reasons of things;
+  They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen."
+
+But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger
+attending it that the poet alone can save us from,--the danger that
+science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man. Hence
+the especial office of the poet with reference to science is to
+endow it with a human interest. The heart has been disenchanted by
+having disclosed to it blind, abstract forces where it had
+enthroned personal humanistic divinities. In the old time, man was
+the centre of the system; everything was interested in him, and
+took sides for or against him. There were nothing but men and gods
+in the universe. But in the results of science the world is more
+and more, and man is less and less. The poet must come to the
+rescue, and place man again at the top, magnify him, exalt him,
+reinforce him, and match these wonders from without with equal
+wonders from within. Welcome to the bard who is not appalled by the
+task, and who can readily assimilate and turn into human emotions
+these vast deductions of the savants! The minor poets do nothing in
+this direction; only men of the largest calibre and the most heroic
+fibre are adequate to the service. Hence one finds in Tennyson a
+vast deal more science than he would at first suspect; but it is
+under his feet; it is no longer science, but faith, or reverence,
+or poetic nutriment. It is in "Locksley Hall," "The Princess," "In
+Memoriam," "Maud," and in others of his poems. Here is a passage
+from "In Memoriam:"--
+
+                                   "They say,
+        The solid earth whereon we tread
+
+       "In tracts of fluent heat began,
+           And grew to seeming-random forms,
+           The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
+        Till at the last arose the man;
+
+       "Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
+           The herald of a higher race,
+           And of himself in higher place
+        If so he type this work of time
+
+       "Within himself, from more to more;
+           Or, crown'd with attributes of woe,
+           Like glories, move his course, and show
+        That life is not as idle ore,
+
+       "But iron dug from central gloom,
+           And heated hot with burning fears,
+           And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
+        And batter'd with the shocks of doom
+
+       "To shape and use. Arise and fly
+           The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
+           Move upward, working out the beast,
+        And let the ape and tiger die."
+
+Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned
+into the sweetest music:--
+
+       "Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
+           Yon orange sunset waning slow;
+        From fringes of the faded eve,
+           O happy planet, eastward go;
+           Till over thy dark shoulder glow
+        Thy silver sister-world, and rise
+        To glass herself in dewy eyes
+           That watch me from the glen below."
+
+A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that
+the earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender
+love-song!
+
+But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical
+absorption, and re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that
+the earth is a star in the heavens like the rest, and that man, as
+the crown and finish, carries in his moral consciousness the
+flower, the outcome, of all this wide field of turbulent
+unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it is no longer
+science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent heat of
+the poet's heart, and charged with emotion. "The words of true
+poems," he says, "are the tufts and final applause of science."
+Before Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doctrine of evolution:--
+
+ "I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over,
+  And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
+  And call anything close again when I desire it.
+
+ "In vain the speeding and shyness;
+  In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach;
+  In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones;
+  In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes;
+  In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters
+     lying low."
+
+In the following passage the idea is more fully carried out, and
+man is viewed through a vista which science alone has laid open;
+yet how absolutely a work of the creative imagination is revealed:--
+
+ "I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am incloser of things
+     to be.
+  My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs;
+  On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the
+     steps;
+  All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.
+
+ "Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me;
+  Afar down I see the huge first Nothing--I know I was even there;
+  I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
+  And took my time, and took no hurt from the foetid carbon.
+
+ "Long I was hugg'd close--long and long,
+  Immense have been the preparations for me,
+  Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me,
+  Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
+     boatmen;
+  For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings;
+  They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
+
+ "Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me;
+  My embryo has never been torpid--nothing could overlay it,
+  For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
+  The long low strata piled to rest it on,
+  Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
+  Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited
+     it with care;
+  All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight
+     me:
+  Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul."
+
+I recall no single line of poetry in the language that fills my
+imagination like that beginning the second stanza:--
+
+       "Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me."
+
+One seems to see those huge Brocken shadows of the past sinking and
+dropping below the horizon like mountain peaks, as he presses
+onward on his journey. Akin to this absorption of science is
+another quality in my poet not found in the rest, except perhaps a
+mere hint of it now and then in Lucretius,--a quality easier felt
+than described. It is a tidal wave of emotion running all through
+the poems, which is now and then crested with such passages as
+this:--
+
+ "I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
+  I call to the earth and sea, half held by the night.
+
+ "Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
+     nourishing night!
+  Night of south winds! night of the large, few stars!
+  Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night.
+
+ "Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath'd earth!
+  Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
+  Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains, misty topt!
+  Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with
+     blue!
+  Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!
+  Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my
+     sake!
+  Far-swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossom'd earth!
+  Smile, for your lover comes!"
+
+Professor Clifford calls it "cosmic emotion,"--a poetic thrill and
+rhapsody in contemplating the earth as a whole,--its chemistry and
+vitality, its bounty, its beauty, its power, and the applicability
+of its laws and principles to human, aesthetic, and art products.
+It affords the key to the theory of art upon which Whitman's poems
+are projected, and accounts for what several critics call their
+sense of magnitude,--"something of the vastness of the succession
+of objects in Nature."
+
+ "I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those
+     of the earth!
+  I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it corroborate
+     the theory of the earth!
+  No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
+     unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
+  Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude
+     of the earth."
+
+Or again, in his "Laws for Creation:"--
+
+ "All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
+     compact truth of the world,
+  There shall be no subject too pronounced--All works shall illustrate
+     the divine law of indirections."
+
+Indeed, the earth ever floats in this poet's mind as his mightiest
+symbol,--his type of completeness and power. It is the armory from
+which he draws his most potent weapons. See, especially, "To the
+Sayers of Words," "This Compost," "The Song of the Open Road," and
+"Pensive on her Dead gazing I heard the Mother of all."
+
+The poet holds essentially the same attitude toward cosmic
+humanity, well illustrated in "Salut au Monde:"--
+
+ "My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the
+     whole earth;
+  I have look'd for equals and lovers, and found them ready for me
+     in all lands;
+  I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.
+
+ "O vapors! I think I have risen with you and moved away to distant
+     continents, and fallen down there for reasons;
+  I think I have blown with you, O winds;
+  O waters, I have finger'd every shore with you."
+
+Indeed, the whole book is leavened with vehement Comradeship. Not
+only in the relations of individuals to each other shall loving
+good-will exist and be cultivated,--not only between the different
+towns and cities, and all the States of this indissoluble,
+compacted Union,--but it shall make a tie of fraternity and fusion
+holding all the races and peoples and countries of the whole earth.
+
+Then the National question. As Whitman's completed works now stand,
+in their two volumes, it is certain they could only have grown out
+of the Secession War; and they will probably go to future ages as
+in literature the most characteristic identification of that war,--
+risen from and portraying it, representing its sea of passions and
+progresses, partaking of all its fierce movements and perturbed
+emotions, and yet sinking the mere military parts of that war,
+great as those were, below and with matters far greater, deeper,
+more human, more expanding, and more enduring.
+
+I must not close this paper without some reference to Walt
+Whitman's prose writings, which are scarcely less important than
+his poems. Never has Patriotism, never has the antique Love of
+Country, with even doubled passion and strength, been more fully
+expressed than in these contributions. They comprise two thin
+volumes,--now included in "Two Rivulets,"--called  "Democratic
+Vistas" and "Memoranda during the War;" the former exhibiting the
+personality of the poet in more vehement and sweeping action even
+than do the poems, and affording specimens of soaring vaticination
+and impassioned appeal impossible to match in the literature of our
+time. The only living author suggested is Carlyle; but so much is
+added, the _presence_ is so much more vascular and human, and the
+whole page so saturated with faith and love and democracy, that
+even the great Scotchman is overborne. Whitman, too, radiates
+belief, while at the core of Carlyle's utterances is despair. The
+style here is eruptive and complex, or what Jeremy Taylor calls
+_agglomerative,_ and puts the Addisonian models utterly to rout,--a
+style such as only the largest and most Titanic workman could
+effectively use. A sensitive lady of my acquaintance says reading
+the "Vistas" is like being exposed to a pouring hailstorm,--the
+words fairly bruise her mind. In its literary construction the book
+is indeed a shower, or a succession of showers, multitudinous,
+wide-stretching, down-pouring,--the wrathful bolt and the quick
+veins of poetic fire lighting up the page from time to time. I can
+easily conceive how certain minds must be swayed and bent by some
+of these long, involved, but firm and vehement passages. I cannot
+deny myself the pleasure of quoting one or two pages. The writer is
+referring to the great literary relics of past times:--
+
+"For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand,--
+those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn
+through all the nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs;
+Hindus, with hymn and apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet,
+with spirituality, as in flames of lightning, conscience like red-
+hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies
+and enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding love and peace,
+like a dove; Greek, creating eternal shapes of physical and
+aesthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, and the
+codex,--of the figures, some far off and veiled, others near and
+visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a
+grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters,
+architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun,
+artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous
+colors, owner thereof, and using them at will;--and so to such as
+German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the
+ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods.
+Of these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, to return
+to our favorite figure, and view them as orbs, moving in free paths
+in the spaces of that other heaven, the cosmic intellect, the Soul?
+
+"Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in your atmospheres,
+grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the
+old--while our genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye,
+indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World's
+nostrils--not to enslave us as now, but, for our needs, to breed a
+spirit like your own--perhaps (dare we to say it?) to dominate,
+even destroy what you yourselves have left! On your plane, and no
+less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and measure for our
+wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, with
+unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic
+despots of the west!"
+
+Here is another passage of a political cast, but showing the same
+great pinions and lofty flight:--
+
+"It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts
+of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of
+blood, and many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of
+cankerous imperfection,--saying, Lo! the roads, the only plans of
+development, long, and varied with all terrible balks and
+ebullitions. You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires,
+overshadowing all else, past and present, putting the history of
+Old World dynasties, conquests, behind me as of no account,--making
+a new history, the history of Democracy, making old history a
+dwarf,--I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If these,
+O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of
+your Soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens of
+the cost. Behold the anguish of suspense, existence itself wavering
+in the balance, uncertain whether to rise or fall; already, close
+behind you and around you, thick winrows of corpses on
+battlefields, countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery
+among Generals, folly in the Executive and Legislative departments,
+schemers, thieves everywhere,--cant, credulity, make-believe
+everywhere. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you, like a
+pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it
+through ages, centuries,--must pay for it with a proportionate
+price. For you, too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor,
+the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of
+prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay
+of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the
+ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths,
+births, new projections, and invigorations of ideas and men."
+
+The "Memoranda during the War" is mainly a record of personal
+experiences, nursing the sick and wounded soldiers in the
+hospitals: most of it is in a low key, simple, unwrought, like a
+diary kept for one's self; but it reveals the large, tender,
+sympathetic soul of the poet even more than his elaborate works,
+and puts in practical form that unprecedented and fervid
+comradeship which is his leading element. It is printed almost
+verbatim, just as the notes were jotted down at the time and on the
+spot. It is impossible to read it without the feeling of tears,
+while there is elsewhere no such portrayal of the common soldier,
+and such appreciation of him, as is contained in its pages. It is
+heart's blood, every word of it, and along with "Drum-Taps" is the
+only literature of the war thus far entirely characteristic and
+worthy of serious mention. There are in particular two passages in
+the "Memoranda" that have amazing dramatic power, vividness, and
+rapid action, like some quick painter covering a large canvas. I
+refer to the account of the assassination of President Lincoln, and
+to that of the scenes in Washington after the first battle of Bull
+Run. What may be called the mass-movement of Whitman's prose style--
+the rapid marshaling and grouping together of many facts and
+details, gathering up, and recruiting, and expanding as the
+sentences move along, till the force and momentum become like a
+rolling flood, or an army in echelon on the charge--is here
+displayed with wonderful effect.
+
+Noting and studying what forces move the world, the only sane
+explanation that comes to me of the fact that such writing as these
+little volumes contain has not, in this country especially, met
+with its due recognition and approval, is that, like all Whitman's
+works, they have really never yet been published at all in the true
+sense,--have never entered the arena where the great laurels are
+won. They have been printed by the author, and a few readers have
+found them out, but to all intents and purposes they are unknown.
+
+I have not dwelt on Whitman's personal circumstances, his age (he
+is now, 1877, entering his fifty-ninth year), paralysis, seclusion,
+and the treatment of him by certain portions of the literary
+classes, although these have all been made the subjects of wide
+discussion of late, both in America and Great Britain, and have, I
+think, a bearing under the circumstances on his character and
+genius. It is an unwritten tragedy that will doubtless always
+remain unwritten. I will but mention an eloquent appeal of the
+Scotch poet, Robert Buchanan, published in London in March, 1876,
+eulogizing and defending the American bard, in his old age,
+illness, and poverty, from the swarms of maligners who still
+continue to assail him. The appeal has this fine passage:--
+
+"He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely
+Donegal may often behold the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with
+age or famine, or with both, passing with weary waft of wing from
+promontory to promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of
+rooks and crows, which fall back screaming whenever the noble bird
+turns his indignant head, and which follow frantically once more,
+hooting behind him, whenever he wends again upon his way."
+
+Skipping many things I should yet like to touch upon,--for this
+paper is already too long,--I will say in conclusion that, if any
+reader of mine is moved by what I have here written to undertake
+the perusal of "Leaves of Grass," or the later volume, "Two
+Rivulets," let me yet warn him that he little suspects what is
+before him. Poetry in the Virgilian, Tennysonian, or Lowellian
+sense it certainly is not. Just as the living form of man in its
+ordinary garb is less beautiful (yet more beautiful) than the
+marble statue; just as the living woman and child that may have sat
+for the model is less beautiful (yet more so) than one of Raphael's
+finest Madonnas, or just as a forest of trees addresses itself less
+directly to the feeling of what is called art and form than the
+house or other edifice built from them; just as you, and the whole
+spirit of our current times, have been trained to feed on and
+enjoy, not Nature or Man, or the aboriginal forces, or the actual,
+but pictures, books, art, and the selected and refined,--just so
+these poems will doubtless first shock and disappoint you. Your
+admiration for the beautiful is never the feeling directly and
+chiefly addressed in them, but your love for the breathing flesh,
+the concrete reality, the moving forms and shows of the universe. A
+man reaches and moves you, not an artist. Doubtless, too, a certain
+withholding and repugnance has first to be overcome, analogous to a
+cold sea plunge; and it is not till you experience the reaction,
+the after-glow, and feel the swing and surge of the strong waves,
+that you know what Walt Whitman's pages really are. They don't give
+themselves at first,--like the real landscape and the sea, they are
+all indirections. You may have to try them many times; there is
+something of Nature's rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the
+first, but probably always. But after you have mastered them by
+resigning yourself to them, there is nothing like them anywhere in
+literature for vital help and meaning. The poet says:--
+
+ "The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
+  That scorn the best I can do to relate them."
+
+And the press of your mind to these pages will certainly start new
+and countless problems that poetry and art have never before
+touched, and that afford a perpetual stimulus and delight.
+
+It has been said that the object of poetry and the higher forms of
+literature is to escape from the tyranny of the real into the
+freedom of the ideal; but what is the ideal unless ballasted and
+weighted with the real?  All these poems have a lofty ideal
+background; the great laws and harmonies stretch unerringly above
+them, and give their vista and perspective. It is because Whitman's
+ideal is clothed with rank materiality, as the soul is clothed with
+the carnal body, that his poems beget such warmth and desire in the
+mind, and are the reservoirs of so much power. No one can feel more
+than I how absolutely necessary it is that the facts of nature and
+experience be born again in the heart of the bard, and receive the
+baptism of the true fire before they be counted poetical; and I
+have no trouble on this score with the author of "Leaves of Grass."
+He never fails to ascend into spiritual meanings.  Indeed, the
+spirituality of Walt Whitman is the chief fact after all, and
+dominates every page he has written.
+
+Observe that this singer and artist makes no _direct_ attempt to be
+poetical, any more than he does to be melodious or rhythmical. He
+approaches these qualities and results as it were from beneath, and
+always indirectly; they are drawn to him, not he to them; and if
+they appear absent from his page at first, it is because we have
+been looking for them in the customary places on the outside, where
+he never puts them, and have not yet penetrated the interiors. As
+many of the fowls hide their eggs by a sort of intuitive prudery
+and secretiveness, Whitman always half hides, or more than half
+hides, his thought, his glow, his magnetism, his most golden and
+orbic treasures.
+
+Finally, as those men and women respect and love Walt Whitman best
+who have known him longest and closest personally, the same rule
+will apply to "Leaves of Grass" and the later volume, "Two
+Rivulets." It is indeed neither the first surface reading of those
+books, nor perhaps even the second or third, that will any more
+than prepare the student for the full assimilation of the poems.
+Like Nature, and like the Sciences, they suggest endless suites of
+chambers opening and expanding more and more and continually.
+
+
+INDEX
+
+    [Transcribist's note:  Index has been shortened to names
+    of authors and to birds, with scientific names.]
+
+Aeschylus
+Akers, Elizabeth.
+Apuleius.
+Audubon, John Jaines.
+
+Bacon, Francis.
+Benton, Myron.
+Bible.
+Bittern, American (_Botaurus lentiginosus_).
+Björnson, Björnstjerne.
+Blackbird, cow, or cowbird (_Molothrus ater_).
+Blackbird, European.
+Bluebird (_Sialia sialis_).
+Bobolink (_Dolichonyx oryzivorus_).
+Bryant, William Cullen.
+Buchanan, Robert.
+Bunting, snow, or snowflake (_Passerina nivalis_).
+Burke, Edmund.
+Burns, Robert.
+Byron, Lord.
+
+Cardinal. See Grosbeak, cardinal.
+Carlyle, Thomas.
+Cedar-bird, or cedar waxwing (_Ampelis cedrorum_).
+Chat, yellow-breasted (_Icteria virens_).
+Chewink, or towhee (_Pipilo erythrophthalmus_).
+Chickadee (_Parus atricapillus_).
+Cicada.
+Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
+Cowper, William.
+Crow, American (_Corvis brachyrhynchos_).
+Cuckoo, American.
+Cuckoo, European.
+Dante.
+Darwin, Charles.
+Dove, mourning (_Zenaidura macroura_).
+
+Eagle.
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo.
+Everett, Edward.
+
+Flagg, Wilson.
+Flicker. See High-hole.
+Flycatcher, great crested (_Myiarchus crinitus_).
+Frogs. See Hyla.
+
+Gilder, Richard Watson.
+Grasshopper of Greek poetry.
+Grosbeak, cardinal, or cardinal (_Cardinalis cardinalis_).
+Grosbeak, pine (_Pinicola enucleator leucura_).
+Grouse, ruffed (_Bonasa umbellus_).
+
+Hamerton, Philip Gilbert.
+Hawk.
+High-hole, or yellow-hammer, or golden-shafted woodpecker, or
+   flicker (_Colaptes auratus luteus_).
+Hogg, James.
+Homer.
+Hood, Thomas.
+Hornets, black.
+Hudson River valley.
+Hummingbird, ruby-throated (_Trochilus colubris_).
+Hyla, green.
+Hyla, Pickering's.
+
+Ingelow, Jean.
+
+Jefferson, Thomas.
+Jonson, Ben.
+
+Keats, John.
+Kingbird (_Tyrannus tyrannus_).
+
+Lamb, Charles.
+Lark.  See Skylark.
+Lark, shore or horned (_Otocoris alpestris_).
+Lathrop, George Parson.
+Lincoln, Abraham.
+Lizard.
+Locust.
+Logan, John.
+Loon (_Gavia imber_).
+Lowell, James Russell.
+Lyly, John.
+
+Macaulay, Thomas Babington.
+Meadowlark (_Sturnella magna_).
+Michael Angelo.
+Milton, John.
+Mockingbird (_Mimus polyglottos_).
+
+Oriole, Baltimore (_Icterus galbula_).
+Oven-bird, or golden-crowned thrush (_Seiurus aurocapillus_).
+Owl.
+
+Partridge. See Grouse, ruffed.
+Pewee, wood (_Contopus virens_).
+Phaedrus.
+Phoebe-bird (_Sayornis phoebe_).
+Pigeon, passenger (_Ectopistes migratorius_).
+Pipit, American, or titlark (_Anthus pensilvanicus_).
+Pipit, Sprague's (_Anthus spragueii_).
+Pope, Alexander.
+
+Quail, or bob-white (_Colinus virginianus_).
+
+Redpoll (_Acanthis linaria_).
+Robin, American (_Merula migratoria_).
+
+Sandpiper, spotted, or "tip-up" (_Actitis macularia_).
+Sandpipers.
+Shelley, Percy Bysshe.
+
+Snake.
+Snake, garter.
+Socrates.
+Solomon.
+Sparrow, social or chipping (_Spizella socialis_).
+Sparrow, song (_Melospiza cinerea melodia_).
+Sparrow, tree or Canada (_Spizella monticola_).
+Sparrow, vesper (_Pooecetes gramineus_).
+Sparrow, white-crowned (_Zonotrichia leucophrys_).
+Sparrow, white-throated (_Zonotrichia albicollis_).
+Spenser.
+Strawberry.
+Sugar-berry.
+Swallow, barn (_Hirundo erythrogastra_).
+Swallow, chimney, or chimney swift (_Chaetura pelagica_).
+Swallow, cliff (Petrochellidon lunifrons).
+Swift, chimney.  See Swallow.
+
+Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe.
+Tennyson, Alfred.
+Thaxter, Celia.
+Thomson, James.
+Thoreau, Henry D..
+Thrasher, brown, or long-tailed thrush (_Toxostoma rufum_).
+Thrush, golden-crowned. See Ovenbird.
+Thrush, hermit (_Hylocichla guttata pallasii_).
+Thrush, wood (_Hylocichla mustelina_).
+Tip-up. See Sandpiper, spotted.
+Titlark. See Pipit, American.
+Townee. See Chewink.
+Trowbridge, John T.
+Turgenieff.
+Turner, J. M. W.
+Turtles.
+
+Warbler, pine (_Dendroica vigorsii_).
+Water-thrush.
+Whip-poor-will (_Antrostomus vociferous_).
+Whitman, Walt.
+Whittier, John Greenleaf.
+Wilde, Richard Henry.
+Wilson, Alexander.
+Woodchuck.
+Woodpecker, downy (_Dryobates pubescens medianus_).
+Woodpecker, golden-shafted. See High-hole.
+Woodpecker, hairy (_Dryobates villosus_).
+Woodpecker, red-headed (_Melanerpes erythrocephalus_).
+Wordsworth, William.
+Wren, house (_Troglodytes aëdon_).
+
+Yellow-hammer. See High-hole.
+Yellow-throat, Maryland, or northern yellow-throat (_Geothlypis
+   trichas brachidactyla_).
+
+_____________________________________________________________
+
+[Transcribist's note: John Burroughs used some characters
+which are not standard to our writing in 2001.
+
+He used a dieresis in preeminent, and accented "e"s in
+debris and denouement, and in some French words. These have
+been replaced with plain English letters.
+
+I substituted the letters "oe" "ae" and for these ligatures, used
+Often in words such as phoebe and in scientific names.  Similarly
+the "e" in the golden eagle's scientific name is modernized.
+
+He also used symbols available to a typesetter which are
+unavailable to us in ASCII (plain vanilla text) to illustrate
+bird calls and notes.  I have replaced these with a description
+of what was there originally.
+
+Finally, he used italics throughout the book that I was
+unable to retain; I have used underlines on each side of an
+italicized word, phrase or paragraph.  _This phrase is italic_,
+for instance.
+_____________________________________________________________
+
+
+
+
+
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