The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 27, January, 1860. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
to scramble and to climb, must be added by Mr. Phillips, in the new editions of his exquisite and inexhaustible Lecture, to the catalogue of the "Lost Arts."
Yet Nature never grows outworn,—is unwearied in the bounty which she bestows on the seeker. I said a strip of sandy beach, just now. For that I beg leave to refer the reader to Mr. Kingsley's fascinating "Glaucus," and to the delightful papers which appeared in "Blackwood" a year or two ago. My business is with the woods and fields. Certainly some who read my pages will have leisure to climb a stone wall now and then, and for them the following sketches of New England wood-walks may serve to show how much enjoyment may be got with but little outlay of appliances. Of course the most tempting thing to seek is sport. But the gun and the fishing-rod are useless in many towns, from the disappearance of all worthy objects for their exercise. The birds are wild and shy; the trout have been coculus-indicused out of the mountain-brooks to supply metropolitan hotel-tables and Delmonican larders. Let us go after more attainable things. And first, being a true nemophilist, I protest against botany. A flower worth a five-mile walk and a wet foot is worthy of something better than dissection with the Linnaean classification, afterward adding insult to injury. The botanist is not a discoverer; he is only a pedant. He finds out nothing about the plant; he serves it as we might fancy a monster doing, who should take this number of the "Atlantic" and sit down, not to read it, not to inhale the delicate fragrance of its thought, but to count its articles, examine their titles, and, having compared them with the newspaper advertisement, sweep the whole contentedly into the dust-heap. To study the plant, to see how it gets its living, why it will grow on one side of a brook in profusion, and yet refuse to seek the other bank, is not his care. It is simply to see whether he can abuse its honest English or New-English simplicity by calling it by one set or another of barbarous Latin and Greek titles. Pray, my good Sir, does a man go to see the elephant only to call him a pachydermatous quadruped?
But we are wasting time and shall never get into the woods. In the winter wild you will hardly get far into them, except at the Christmas season for greenery. Gathering this by deputy is poor business. It is all very well, if you can do no better, to engage Mr. Brown to engage some one else to bring in the needed spruce, fir, and hemlock with which to obscure the fresco deformities of St. Boniface's; but it is far better to hunt for them yourself. There is something intensely delightful in the changes of the search; for it begins dull enough. You start in the drear December weather, with a gray sky and leaden clouds softly shaded in regular billows, like an India-ink ocean, overhead, and a somewhat muddy lane before you. Then to pick one's way across the plashy meadows, and, after a ticklish pass of jumping from one reedy tussock to another, to get once more upon the firm soil, while the grass, dry and crisp under your feet, gives a pleasant whish, whish, as it does the duty of street-door-mat to your mud-beclogged sandals. Now for the stone wall. On the other side are thick set the thorny stalks of last summer's "high-bush" blackberries. A plunge and a scramble take you through in comparative safety; and stopping only to disengage your skirts from a too-fond bramble, you are in the woodland. Thick-strewn the dead leaves lie under foot. What music there is in the rustling murmur with which they greet your invading step! On, deeper and deeper into the wood,—now dodging under the green and snaky cat-briers, with their retractile thorns and vicious clinging grasp,—now dashing along the woodman's paths,—now struggling among the opposing underwood. At last a little sprig of feathery green catches the eye. It is a tuft of moss. No,—it is the running ground-pine; and clearing away, with both eager hands, leaves, sticks, moss, and all the fallen exuciae of the summertime, you tear up long wreaths of that most graceful of evergreens. Then, in another quarter of the woodland, where the underbrush has been killed by the denser shade, there rise the exquisite fan-shaped plumes of the feather-pine, of deepest green, or brown-golden with the pencil of the frost;—for cross or star or thick festoon, there is nothing so beautiful. And again you are attracted into the thickets of laurel, and wage fierce war upon the sturdy and tenacious, yet brittle branches, till you are transformed into a walking jack-o'-the-green. The holly of the English Christmas, all-besprent with crimson drops, is hard to be found in New England, and you will have to thread the courses of the brooks to seek the swamp-loving black alder, which will furnish as brilliant a berry, but without the beautiful thorny leaf. Only in one patch of woodland do I know of the holly. In the southeastern corner of Massachusetts,—if you will take the trouble to follow up a railroad-track for a couple of miles and then plunge into the pine woods, you will come upon a few lonely, stunted scraps of it. The warmer airs which the Gulf Stream sends upon that coast have, it is said, something to do therewith. Of course, if I am wrong, the botanists will take vengeance upon me; but I can only say what has been said to me. We nemophilists are apt to be careless of solemn science and go upon all sorts of uncertain tradition.
But "Christmas comes but once a year." After chancel and nave have been duly adorned, and again disrobed against the coming sobrieties of Lent, there are other temptations to the woods. Before the snow has wholly vanished from the shelter of the wood-lots, the warm, hazy, wooing days of April come upon us. On such a day,—how well in this snow-season I remember it!—I have been lured out by the hope of the Mayflower, the delicate epigae repens, miscalled the trailing arbutus. Up the rocky hill-side, from whose top you catch glimpses of the far-off sparkling sea, with a blue haze of island ranges belting it,—up among the rocks, into warm, sheltered, sunny nooks, you go upon your quest. For the Mayflower, though found in almost every township in New England, has secret and unaccountable whims of its own,—will persist in blooming in just one spot, where you ought not to expect it, and in avoiding all likely places. Yet when you come to its traditionary habitat, it is not there. Round and round we pace, hoping and despairing, till a faint, most delicate odor, indescribably suggestive of woodland freshness, catches the roused sense; or else one silvery star peeps out from under an upturned birch-leaf. Then down on hands and knees; tear up brush to right and left, the brown skeletons of the withered foliage. The ground is white with stars. Some are touched with delicate pink, some creamy white,—but all breathing out the evanescent secret of the early spring. Such the children of Plymouth used to hang in garlands about the Pilgrim stone, in honor of the never-to-be-forgotten name of the New England Argo.
Later in the year come the beautiful blue violets, which are, I am sorry to say, scentless. Yet their little white cousin, which delights in all swampy places, is sometimes, in the first days of its appearing, more regardful of the prime duty of all flowers. I have gathered tufts of them which (botanists to the contrary notwithstanding) were wellnigh as odorous as if reared in the sunniest Warwickshire lane; but, as with a perfect specimen of the cast skin of a snake, such a boon is to be hoped for only once in a lifetime. With the violets, the beautiful blush-bells of the anemone come garlanded with their graceful leaves, plentifully enough. But did the rambler ever find the sensitive fern, which resented the intrusive hand with all Mimosa's coyness? I never did but once. I have wooed many a delicate frond of all varieties of fern since, but never one so conscious. Now, too, ere the trees come into leaf, is the time to seek the boxwood, called, I hope improperly, by the ominous name of the Southern dogwood. It is worth an afternoon's ramble to come upon one of those trees, standing in an open glade of the forest, a pyramid of white or cream-colored blossoms. Before a leaf is on the tree, it clothes itself in this lovely livery, and at a little distance seems like a snowy cloud rather than a shrub.
But with June comes the most exquisite of our New England wild-flowers, the arethusa, or swamp-pink, as it is often styled, to the great confusion of its delicate, high-born nature with the great, vulgar, flaunting azalea. When June comes,—when the clethra is heaped with its bee-beloved blossoms, and the grass is green and bright as never again in the year, then the arethusa is to be sought. A most unaccountable flower, of all shades, from pale pink to a deep purple, with a lovely shape that I can liken to nothing so nearly as the fleur-de-lis on French escutcheons, it has a delicate, yet powerful, aromatic scent, as if it were an estray from the tropics. One specimen, snowy white, I have seen, and can tell you where to find another. You are to go out along the President's highway, due northward from a certain seaport of Massachusetts. Take the eastward turn at the little village which lies at the head of its harbor, and so north again by the old Friends' meeting-house, which looks in brown placidity away toward the distant shipping and the wicked steeple-houses, into the which so many of its lost lambs have been inveigled. Then be not tempted to strike off down yonder lane, to see the curious old farm-house, relic of Colony times, with its odd stone chimney,