P. M. — To Melvin's Preserve.
Was that a flock of grackles on the meadow? I have not seen half a dozen blackbirds, methinks, for a month.
I have many affairs to attend to, and feel hurried these days. Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created. The artist cannot be in [a] hurry. The earth moves round the sun with inconceivable rapidity, and yet the surface of the lake is not ruffled by it.
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| September 24, 2013 |
It is not by a compromise, it is not by a timid and feeble repentance, that a man will save his soul and live, at last. He has got to conquer a clear field, letting Repentance & Co. go. That 's a well-meaning but weak firm that has assumed the debts of an old and worthless one. You are to fight in a field where no allowances will be made, no courteous bowing to one-handed knights. You are expected to do your duty, not in spite of every thing but one, but in spite of everything.
See a green snake.
Stedman Buttrick's handsome maple and pine swamp is full of cinnamon ferns. I stand on the elevated road, looking down into it. The trees are very tall and slender, without branches for a long distance. All the ground, which is perfectly level, is covered and concealed, as are the bases of the trees, with the tufts of cinnamon fern, now a pale brown. It is a very pretty sight, these northern trees springing out of a ground work of ferns. It is like pictures of the tropics, except that here the palms are the undergrowth. You could not have arranged a nosegay more tastefully. It is a rich groundwork, out of which the maples and pines spring.
But outside the wood and by the roadside, where they are exposed, these ferns are withered, shrivelled, and brown, for they are tenderer than the dicksonia. The fern, especially if large, is so foreign and tropical that these remind me of artificial groundworks set in sand, to set off other plants. These ferns (like brakes) begin to decay, i. e. to turn yellow or brown and ripen, as here, before they are necessarily frost-bitten. Theirs is another change and decay, like that of the brake and sarsaparilla in the woods and swamps, only later, while the exposed ones are killed before they have passed through all their changes. The exposed ones attained to a brighter yellow early and were then killed; the shaded ones pass through various stages of rich, commonly pale brown, as here, and last much longer. The brown ones are the most interesting.
Going along this old Carlisle road, — road for walkers, for berry-pickers, and no more worldly travellers; road for Melvin and Clark, not for the sheriff nor butcher nor the baker's jingling cart; road where all wild things and fruits abound, where there are countless rocks to jar those who venture there in wagons; which no jockey, no wheelwright in his right mind, drives over, no little spidery gigs and Flying Childers; road which leads to and through a great but not famous garden, zoological and botanical garden, at whose gate you never arrive, — as I was going along there, I perceived the grateful scent of the dicksonia fern, now partly decayed, and it reminds me of all up-country with its springy mountainsides and unexhausted vigor. Is there any essence of dicksonia fern, I wonder? Surely that giant who, my neighbor expects, is to bound up the Alleghanies will have his handkerchief scented with that. In the lowest part of the road the dicksonia by the wall-sides is more than half frost-bitten and withered, — a sober Quaker-color, brown crape! — though not so tender or early [?] as the cinnamon fern; but soon I rise to where they are more yellow and green, and so my route is varied. On the higher places there are very handsome tufts of it, all yellowish out side and green within. The sweet fragrance of decay!
When I wade through by narrow cow-paths, it is as if I had strayed into an ancient and decayed herb-garden. Proper for old ladies to scent their handkerchiefs with. Nature perfumes her garments with this essence now especially. She gives it to those who go a-barberrying and on dank autumnal walks. The essence of this as well as of new-mown hay, surely! The very scent of it, if you have a decayed frond in your chamber, will take you far up country in a twinkling. You would think you had gone after the cows there, or were lost on the mountains. It will make you as cool and well as a frog, — a wood frog, Rana sylvatica. It is the scent the earth yielded in the saurian period, before man was created and fell, before milk and water were invented, and the mints. Far wilder than they.
Rana sylvatica passed judgment on it, or rather that peculiar-scented Rana palustris. It was in his reign it was introduced. That is the scent of the Silurian Period precisely, and a modern beau may scent his handkerchief with it. Before man had come and the plants that chiefly serve him. There were no Rosacea nor mints then. So the earth smelled in the Silurian (?) Period, before man was created and any soil had been debauched with manure. The saurians had their handkerchiefs scented with it. For all the ages are represented still and you can smell them out.
A man must attend to Nature closely for many years to know when, as well as where, to look for his objects, since he must always anticipate her a little. Young men have not learned the phases of Nature; they do not know what constitutes a year, or that one year is like another. I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sports man knows when to look for plover.
Though you may have sauntered near to heaven's gate, when at length you return toward the village you give up the enterprise a little, and you begin to fall into the old ruts of thought, like a regular roadster. Your thoughts very properly fail to report themselves to headquarters. Your thoughts turn toward night and the evening mail and become begrimed with dust, as if you were just going to put up at (with ?) the tavern, or even come to make an exchange with a brother clergyman here on the morrow.
Some eyes cannot see, even through a spy-glass. I showed my spy-glass to a man whom I met this afternoon, who said that he wanted to see if he could look through it. I tried it carefully on him, but he failed. He said that he tried a lot lately on the muster-field but he never could see through them, somehow or other everything was all a blur. I asked him if he considered his eyes good. He answered that they were good to see far. They looked like two old-fashioned china saucers. He kept steadily chewing his quid all the while he talked and looked. This is the case with a great many, I suspect. Everything is in a blur to them. He enjoys the distinction of being the only man in the town who raises his own tobacco. Seeing is not in them. No focus will suit them. You wonder how the world looks to them, — if those are eyes which they have got, or bits of old china, familiar with soap suds.
As I stood looking over a wall this afternoon at some splendid red sumach bushes, now in their prime, I saw Melvin the other side of the wall and hailed him.
"What are you after there?" asked he.
"After the same thing that you are, perhaps," answered I.But I mistook, this time, for he said that he was looking amid the huckleberry bushes for some spectacles which a woman lost there in the summer. It was his mother, no doubt.
Road — that old Carlisle one — that leaves towns behind; where you put off worldly thoughts; where you do not carry a watch, nor remember the proprietor; where the proprietor is the only trespasser, — looking after his apples ! — the only one who mistakes his calling there, whose title is not good; where fifty may be a-barberrying and you do not see one. It is an endless succession of glades where the barberries grow thickest, successive yards amid the barberry bushes where you do not see out.
There I see Melvin and the robins, and many a nut-brown maid sashe-ing to the barberry bushes in hoops and crinoline, and none of them see me. The world-surrounding hoop! faery rings! Oh, the jolly cooper's trade it is the best of any! Carried to the furthest isles where civilized man penetrates. This the girdle they've put round the world! Saturn or Satan set the example. Large and small hogsheads, barrels, kegs, worn by the misses that go to that lone schoolhouse in the Pinkham notch.
The lonely horse in its pasture is glad to see company, comes forward to be noticed and takes an apple from your hand.
Others are called great roads, but this is greater than they all. The road is only laid out, offered to walkers, not accepted by the town and the travelling world. To be represented by a dotted line on charts, or drawn in lime-juice, undiscoverable to the uninitiated, to be held to a warm imagination. No guide-boards indicate it. No odometer would indicate the miles a wagon had run there. Rocks which the druids might have raised — if they could.
There I go searching for malic acid of the right quality, with my tests. The process is simple. Place the fruit between your jaws and then endeavor to make your teeth meet. The very earth contains it. The Easterbrooks Country contains malic acid.
To my senses the dicksonia fern has the most wild and primitive fragrance, quite unalloyed and untamable, such as no human institutions give out, — the early morning fragrance of the world, antediluvian, strength and hope imparting. They who scent it can never faint. It is ever a new and untried field where it grows, and only when we think original thoughts can we perceive it. If we keep that on [sic] our boudoir we shall be healthy and evergreen as hemlocks. Older than, but related to, strawberries. Before strawberries were, it was, and it will outlast them. Good for the trilobite and saurian in us; death to dandies. It yields its scent most morning and evening. Growing without manure; older than man; refreshing him; preserving his original strength and innocence.
When the New Hampshire farmer, far from travelled roads, has cleared a space for his mountain home and conducted the springs of the mountain to his yard, already it grows about the sources of that spring, before any mint is planted in his garden. There his sheep and oxen and he too scent it, and he realizes that the world is new to him. There the pastures are rich, the cattle do not die of disease, and the men are strong and free. The wild original of strawberries and the rest. Nature, the earth herself, is the only panacea. They bury poisoned sheep up to the necks in earth to take the poison out of them.
After four days cloud and rain we have fair weather. A great many have improved this first fair day to come a-barberrying to the Easterbrooks fields. These bushy fields are all alive with them, though I scarcely see one.
I meet Melvin loaded down with barberries, in bags and baskets, so that he has to travel by stages and is glad to stop and talk with me. It is better to take thus what Nature offers, in her season, than to buy an extra dinner at Parker's.
The sumach berries are probably past their beauty.
Fever-bush berries are scarlet now, and also green. They have a more spicy taste than any of our berries, carrying us in thought to the spice islands. Taste like lemon-peel.
The panicled andromeda berries (?) begin to brown.
The bayberry berries are apparently ripe, though not so gray as they will be, — more lead-colored. They bear sparingly here. Leaves not fallen nor changed, and I the more easily find the bushes amid the changed huckleberries, brakes, etc., by their greenness.
The poke on Eb. Hubbard's hillside has been considerably frost-bitten before the berries are one-third ripe. It is in flower still. Great drooping cylindrical racemes of blackish-purple berries, six inches or more in length, tapering a little toward the end; great flat blackish and ripe berries at base, with green ones and flowers at the other end; all on brilliant purple or crimson-purple peduncle and pedicels.
Those thorns by Shattuck's barn, now nearly leafless, have hard green fruit as usual.
The shrub oak is apparently the most fertile of our oaks. I count two hundred and sixty-six acorns on a branch just two feet long. Many of the cups are freshly empty now, showing a pretty circular pink scar at the bottom, where the acorn adhered. They are of various forms and sizes on different shrubs; are now turning dark-brown and showing their converging meridional light-brown lines.
Never fear for striped squirrels in our shrub oak land.
Am surprised to find, by Botrychium Swamp, a Rhus radicans which is quite a tree by itself. It is about nine feet high by nine in width, growing in the midst of a clump of barberry bushes, which it overhangs. It is now at the height of its change, very handsome, scarlet and yellow, and I did not at first know what it was. I found it to consist of three or four branches, each nearly two inches thick and covered with those shaggy fibres, and these are twined round some long-since rotted barberry stems, and around one another, and now make a sizable-looking trunk, which rises to the height of four feet before it branches, and then spreads widely every way like an oak. It was, no doubt, indebted to the barberry for support at first, but now its very branches are much larger than that, and it far overtops and over spreads all the barberry stems.
H. D Thoreau, Journal, September 24, 1859
Great works of art have endless leisure for a background . . . Time stands still while they are created. The artist cannot be in [a] hurry. The earth moves round the sun with inconceivable rapidity, and yet the surface of the lake is not ruffled by it. See September 17, 1839 ("If the setting sun seems to hurry him to improve the day while it lasts, the chant of the crickets fails not to reassure him, even-measured as of old, teaching him to take his own time henceforth forever. The wise man is restful, never restless or impatient. He each moment abides there where he is, as some walkers actually rest the whole body at each step. As the wise is not anxious that time wait for him, neither does he wait for it.") July 19, 1851 ("This rapid revolution of nature, even of nature in me, why should it hurry me?"); January 11, 1852 ("We cannot live too leisurely. Let me not live as if time was short"); December 28, 1852 ("A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?"); Walden, An artist in the city of Kouroo ("In an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter. ")
The tufts of cinnamon fern, now a pale brown. See September 6, 1854 ("The cinnamon ferns along the edge of woods next the meadow are many yellow or cinnamon, or quite brown and withered."); September 12, 1858 ("The cinnamon fern has begun to yellow and wither."); September 25, 1859 ("The cinnamon ferns are all a decaying brown. . . in harmony with the twilight of the swamp"); September 27, 1857 ("The large common ferns (either cinnamon or interrupted) are yellowish, and also many as rich a deep brown now as ever."); October 1, 1858 ("The cinnamon ferns are crisp and sour in open grounds"); October 2, 1857 ("They are now generally imbrowned or crisp. In the more open swamp beyond, these ferns, recently killed by the frost and exposed to the sun, fill the air with a very strong sour scent"); October 2, 1859 ("I perceive in various places, in low ground, this afternoon, the sour scent of cinnamon ferns decaying. It is an agreeable phenomenon, reminding me of the season and of past years."); October 6, 1858 ("Cinnamon ferns are generally crisped, but in the swamp I saw some handsomely spotted green and yellowish, and one clump, the handsomest I ever saw, ");October 17, 1857 ("The cinnamon ferns . . .have acquired their November aspect") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cinnamon Fern
He enjoys the distinction of being the only man in the town who raises his own tobacco. See September 22, 1859 ("Temple, . . .thinks he is the only one who has cultivated any in C[oncord]. of late years.")
There I see Melvin and the robins, and many a nut-brown maid sashe-ing to the barberry bushes. See October 20, 1857 ("What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country! . . . the miles of huckleberries, and of barberries, and of wild apples, so fair, both in flower and fruit, resorted to by men and beasts; Clark, Brown, Melvin, and the robins, these, at least, were attracted thither this afternoon")
I meet Melvin loaded down with barberries, in bags and baskets. See September 18, 1856 ("I get a full peck from about three bushes.”); September 25, 1855 (We get about three pecks of barberries from four or five bushes”). October 1, 1853 (" Got three pecks of barberries.")
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