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Title: Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist
Author: Winthrop Packard
Release Date: September 2, 2021 [eBook #66205]
Language: English
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Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY PILGRIMAGES OF A
NATURALIST ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
LITERARY PILGRIMAGES
OF A NATURALIST
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| THE WORKS OF WINTHROP PACKARD |
| |
| |
| WOODLAND PATHS |
| WILD PASTURES |
| WOOD WANDERINGS |
| WILDWOOD WAYS |
| |
| _Each illustrated by Charles Copeland_ |
| |
| 12mo. Ornamental cloth, gilt top, each volume $1.20 _net_; |
| by mail, $1.28 |
| |
| These four volumes together constitute “The New England |
| Year” series, dealing, in the order given, with the four |
| seasons. Sold separately. |
| |
| |
| FLORIDA TRAILS |
| |
| As seen from Jacksonville to Key West, and from November to |
| April, inclusive |
| |
| _Illustrated from photographs by the author and others_ |
| |
| 8vo. Ornamental cloth, gilt top, boxed, $3.00 _net_; by |
| mail, $3.25 |
| |
| |
| LITERARY PILGRIMAGES OF A NATURALIST |
| |
| Visits to the haunts of Whittier, Emerson, Hawthorne, Celia |
| Thaxter, Webster, Aldrich, and others |
| |
| _Illustrated from photographs by the author and others_ |
| |
| 12mo. Ornamental cloth, gilt top, boxed, $2.00 _net_; by |
| mail, $2.20 |
| |
| |
| SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY |
| PUBLISHERS BOSTON |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
[Illustration: “No wonder Daniel Webster, wandering
southward over the hills in search of a country home, chose
this as his abiding place.”
_See page 2_ ]
LITERARY PILGRIMAGES
OF
A NATURALIST
BY
WINTHROP PACKARD
_Author of “Florida Trails,” “Wild Pastures,”
“Wood Wanderings,” etc._
ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE
AUTHOR AND OTHERS
[Illustration: (colophon)]
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD, AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1911_
BY SMALL, MAYNARD, AND COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
Entered at Stationers’ Hall
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
TO THE MEMORY
OF
CLARENCE H. BERRY
_A Schoolmaster of Long Ago_
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
The author wishes to express his thanks to the editors of
the “Boston Evening Transcript” for permission to reprint
in this volume matter which was originally contributed to
its columns.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. IN OLD MARSHFIELD 1
II. AT WHITTIER’S BIRTHPLACE 15
III. IN OLD PONKAPOAG 30
IV. AT THE ISLES OF SHOALS 44
V. THOREAU’S WALDEN 60
VI. ON THE FIRST TRAIL OF THE PILGRIMS 75
VII. IN OLD CONCORD 90
VIII. THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET 104
IX. IN OLD NEWBURYPORT 118
X. PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS 135
XI. OLD SALEM TOWN 148
XII. VERMONT MAPLE SUGAR 164
XIII. NATURE’S MEMORIAL DAY 183
XIV. BIRDS OF CHOCORUA 197
INDEX 213
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
“No wonder Daniel Webster, wandering southward over the
hills in search of a country home, chose this as his
abiding-place.” _See page 2_ _Frontispiece_
“Telling the pearls on this rosary of a path one is led
beyond the homestead.” 12
“Within this wide circle, with the house its core, and
the hearth its shrine, revolved the homely, cheerful,
whole-hearted life of the farm.” 22
“Watching the crane and pendant trammels grow black
against the blaze.” _See page 18_ 28
A corner of the room in which Whittier was born 28
“The study where Aldrich wrote some of his daintiest
verse looks forth upon a sweet valley.” 30
“The study window in what was ‘The Bemis Place’ of the
elder days of Ponkapoag.” _See page 35_ 36
Celia Thaxter’s home at the Isles of Shoals 44
“Chasms down which you may walk to the tide between sheer
cliffs.” 50
“Up to the smooth turf on this knoll crowd all the
pasture shrubs that she loved.” 58
“Here is the cairn erected to his memory, to which with
doffed hat you may well add a stone.” _See page 65_ 66
“Walden is Walden still, very much as Thoreau painted
it.” 70
“Pilgrim Lake,” where that first washing was done by the
Pilgrim mothers 78
“That little creek that blocked the way of doughty Myles
Standish and his men, sending them inland on a detour.”
_See page 85_ 86
“Here in a volley was the summing up of the nature of the
heroes that had grown up, quite literally, in the Concord
soil.” _See page 93_ 92
“Hither, too, came Hawthorne, to tramp the woods as did
the others, and feel as did they, the divine afflatus.” 98
“The water from the old well cooled the throat of his
memory, and sparkled to the eye of it as he recalled the
dripping bucket.” 114
The Newburyport home of Joshua Coffin, the early friend
and teacher of Whittier 126
“Down river to the old chain bridge the rough rocks of
the New Hampshire hills come to get a taste of salt.”
_See page 129_ 130
One angle of “The House of the Seven Gables.” 150
“A Salem dock of the old sea-faring days.” 150
“The only sound was the crunch of soft snow and the
splash of sap within the barrel.” _See page 171_ 172
“But here is a sweetness that the tree almost bursts to
deliver.” 178
“The farmhouse where Bolles lived and loved the woods and
all that therein lived with him.” _See page 197_ 198
Nightfall on Chocorua Lake 208
LITERARY PILGRIMAGES
OF A NATURALIST
LITERARY PILGRIMAGES OF A NATURALIST
I
IN OLD MARSHFIELD
_Glimpses of the Country about the Daniel Webster Place_
Down in Marshfield early morning brings to the roadside troops of
blue-eyed chicory blooms, shy memories of fair Pilgrim children
who once trod these ways. They do not stay long with the wanderer,
these early morning blooms. The turmoil and heat of the mid-summer
day close them, but the dreams they bring ramble with the roads in
happy freedom from all care among drumlins and kames, vanishing in
the flooding heat of some wood-enclosed pasture corner to spring
laughingly back again as the way tops a hill and gives a glimpse
of the purple velvet of the sea. No wonder Peregrine White, the
first fair-skinned child born in New England, strayed from the
boundaries of Plymouth and chose his home here. No wonder Daniel
Webster, New England’s most vivid great man, wandering southward
over the hills in search of a country home two centuries later,
fixed upon the spot just below Black Mount, looking down upon Green
Harbor marshes and the sea, and chose this for his abiding-place.
The statesman and orator, whose words still ring across the years
to us, with the trumpet sounding in them even from the printed
page, may well have breathed inspiration for them from the winds
that come from seaward across the aromatic marshes. There is cool
truthfulness in these winds, and understanding of the depths, and
the salty, wild flavor of the untamed marsh gives them a tang of
primal vitality. Breasting them at mid-day from under the wilt of
summer heat you seem to drink air rather than to breathe it, and
find intoxication in the draught. I never heard a robin sing in
mid-flight, soaring upward like a skylark, till I came to this bit
of sweet New England country. The east wind drifted in to him as
he sat on a treetop caroling, and he spread his wings to it and
fluttered upward, pouring out round notes of melody as he went.
Webster’s most famous speeches were composed while he tramped these
hills and marshes and sailed the blue velvet of the outlying sea,
and their richest phrases soar as they sing, even as did the robin.
You may come to Black Mount with its panoramic view of the Webster
farm, the surrounding pastures and marshes and the little Pilgrim
cemetery where he lies buried, from either the Marshfield railway
station or that of Green Harbor, both a mile or more away by road.
A better route lay for me through the woods by paths flecked
with sunlight and dappled with shadow, paths which the Pilgrims’
descendants first sought out and which are as fair to-day to our
feet as they were to theirs. One can easily fancy Peregrine and his
wife picking berries along here on days when the farm work allowed
them freedom, the children frolicking about with them and eating or
spilling half they picked, as the children do on these hills now.
Voices and laughter rang through the woods as I passed, and there
is small blame to the pickers if they do eat the berries as fast
as they pick them. They never taste quite so good as on this direct
route from producer to consumer. Along this path you may have your
choice of varieties as you go, from the pale blue ones that grow
so very near the earth on their tiny bushes that they seem the
salt of it, giving the day its zest, through the low-bush-blacks,
crisp with seeds and aromatic in flavor as if smoked with the
incense of the sweet-fern, to those other black ones that grow
on the high bushes and rightfully take the name of huckleberry.
The soil of these sandy hills may be thin and not worth farming,
but it produces fruit whose quality puts to shame the product
of well-cultivated gardens. The good bishop of England who once
said, “Doubtless God could have produced a better berry than the
strawberry, but doubtless He never did,” never ate blueberries from
the bush in a New England pasture.
From the summit of Black Mount the grassy hill slopes sharply
beneath your feet to the road and beyond this to the home acres
of the Webster place, the roof tree far below you and the house
snuggling among the trees that the great statesman loved, many
of which he planted. A little farther on stands a great barn with
huge mows and the big hay doors front and rear always hospitably
open to the scores of barn swallows that build on the beams up next
the roof. In no barn have I found quite so many swallows at home.
At every vantage point on a beam, wherever a corner of a timber or
a locking pin protrudes to give a support, nests have been built,
generation following generation till some of the structures are
curious, deep, inverted mud pyramids, topped with straw and grass
and lined with feathers, downy beds for the clamorous young. I
can think of no finer picture of rural peace than such a barn as
this, the cool wind sighing gently through the wide doors, the
beams stretching across the cavernous space above dotted with the
gray nests, the air full of the friendly, homey twittering of the
birds, some resting and preening their feathers on the beams,
others swinging in amazing flight down and out through the doors
to skim the grass of the neighboring fields and marshes for food,
then flashing back again to the hungry nestlings. Such barns
grow fewer year by year here in eastern Massachusetts, and the
pleasant intimacy of the barn swallows is but a happy recollection
in the mind of many of us, more is the pity. It is worth a trip to
Marshfield just to foregather with such a colony.
Eastward again the eye passes over wide mowing fields, rough
pastures and hills clad with short, brown grass and red cedars,
the thousand-tree orchard of Baldwin apples which Webster planted,
the tiny Pilgrim cemetery on a little hillock where he lies buried
among the pioneers of the place, the brown-green marshes flecked
with the silver of the full tide, to the deep, velvety blue rim
of the sea, which sweeps in its splendid curve uninterrupted from
north to south. Behind your back is the rich green of Massachusetts
woodland, beneath your feet this landscape of pasture, field and
marsh, scarcely changed since Webster’s day, changed but little
indeed since the days of Peregrine White and his pioneer neighbors,
and rimming it round the deep sapphire romance of the sea. Across
this blue romance of sea the winds of the world, fresh and vital
with brine, come to woo you on your way. They croon in your ears
the strange sagas that the blood of no wanderer can resist, and you
know something of the lure that led the vikings of old ever onward
to new shores as you plunge down the grassy slope to meet them.
The stately beauty of the home place may thrall you for a while
beneath the trees and the friendly great barn try to lull you to
contentment with the cradle songs of the swallows, but the marsh
adds its wild, free tang to the muted trumpets which these east
winds blow in your ears, and so you fare onward through a country
of enchantment, toward the ocean.
Webster’s well house, where still the ancient spring flows, cool
and clear, gave me a drink as I went by. The dyke which borders
his cranberry bog and separates it from a tiny pond where white
pond lilies floated and perfumed the air, gave further progress
eastward, and soon I passed naturally into an old, old path which
led me purposefully in the desired direction. Without looking for
it I had found the footpath way which rambles from the farm across
country to Green Harbor, where the statesman kept his boats, a path
without doubt often trodden by his feet in seaward excursions.
He could have found no pleasanter way. The pastures which lie
between upland and marsh in this region are covered with a wild,
free growth of shrub and vine which no herds, however ravenous,
can keep down. The best that the cattle can do with them is to
beat paths through the lush tangle along which wild grasses find
room to work upward toward the light and add to the browse. Here
the greenbrier grows greener and more briery than anywhere else
that I know, and the staghorn sumac emulates it in vigor of growth
if not in convolutions. In places these reach almost the dignity
of young trees, and the pinnate leaves spread a wide, fern-like
shade as I walked beneath the antler-like branches. The staghorn
sumac is surely rightly named. Its antlers are covered now with an
exquisite, deep, soft velvet which clothes them to the leafbud tips
and along the very petioles of the leaves. Now it is a clear green
which with later growth will become purple and pass into brown,
the promise of autumn showing now in a slight purple tinge on the
sun-ripened petioles of the older leaves. This soft fuzz clothes
the crowded, conical heads of bloom also, heads that are of the
same sweet pink as the petals of the wild roses which grow near by
as you may see if you will hold one up against the other. But the
pink of the wild rose seems flat against that of the sumac, for it
has only a smooth surface on which to show itself, while that of
the sumac is full of soft, shadowy withdrawals and shows a yellow
background in the interstices of the blossom spike.
Skirting this jungle so aromatic with scent of sassafras and
bayberry, perfumed with wild rose and azalea, pulsing with the
flight of unseen birds in its cool depth and echoing with their
song, the path crosses a brook that gently chuckles to itself
over its escape from the monotony of a big mowing field to the
salt freedom of the marsh, then suddenly breasts the steep
northern side of a drumlin. Here the press of toiling feet has
been supplemented by the wash of torrential rains till the narrow
way becomes a miniature chasm in places, worn down in the gravel
among great red cedars, hoary with age and lichens. To know the
slow growth of a red cedar and to calculate the age of these by
dividing their present bulk with the slight increase that each
year brings is to place the birth of these trees far back in the
centuries. Not one hundred years will account for it, nor two, and
I am quite sure that these trees were growing where they now stand
when Peregrine White’s mother first embarked on the Mayflower at
Southampton. Webster’s path may have gone through them then, and
no one knows how long before, for it is worn deep not only on the
steep hillsides where the rains have helped it but in level reaches
beyond where only the passing and re-passing of feet through
centuries would have done it. It was as direct a route from the
hills to the mouth of Cut River at Green Harbor before the white
man’s time as after, and if I am not mistaken the red men trod it
long before the first ship’s keel furrowed Plymouth Bay.
As I topped the rise I found myself in a hilltop pasture a
half-mile long which covers the rest of the hill. Once it was a
cultivated field, and the corn-hills of the last planter still show
in spots, these, like the rest of it, now overgrown with close-set
grass and crisp reindeer lichen. The patriarchal cedars I had
left behind, old men of their tribe sitting solemn and motionless
in council. Here I had come upon a vast but scattered concourse of
young people, lithe and slender folk who seemed to stroll gayly
all about the place. Here were plumed youths and debonair maidens
regarding one another, family groups, mothers with children at the
knee and other little folk in the very attitude of playing romping
games. But there were tinier folk than these, too small to be real
cedars, gamboling among the others, as if underworld sprites also
in cedar guise had come forth to join the festivities. Nowhere else
have I seen such a merry concourse of cedars as on the long top of
this hill that some Pilgrim father first cleared for a cornfield
two centuries and a half ago. Here and there little groups of wee
wild rose shrubs seemed to dance up and scatter perfume about their
feet in tribute, then stand motionless like diffident children,
finger in mouth, stolid and uncommunicative. Hilltops are often
lonely, but this one could never be. It gladdens with its quaint
fancies. Through a veritable picnic of young cedars I tramped down
the eastward slope to the dusty road that leads on to Green Harbor
and the slumbrous uproar of the surf.
[Illustration: “Telling the pearls on this rosary of a path one is
led beyond the homestead.”]
Telling the pearls on this rosary of a path in the homeward
direction one is led beyond the homestead and on, by a slenderer,
less trodden way to the old Pilgrim cemetery where the great man
lies buried among the pioneers of the neighborhood, Peregrine
White, the Winslows, and a host of others whose fame has not
gone so far perhaps, but those names may be written in the final
domesday book in letters as large as his. Nor does any storied
monument recite the deeds of the statesman or bear his name higher
than that of his fellows. A simple slab with the name only stands
above the mound beneath which he lies, and in the side of this
mound a woodchuck has his burrow, seeming to emphasize by his
presence the cosy friendliness of the little spot. It is a hillock,
just a little way from the house, just a little way from the big
orchard which Webster loved so well, surrounded by pasture and
cranberry bog and with the marsh drawing lovingly up to it on one
side. Over this marsh comes the free salt air of the sea, but a
little more gently to the lowly hillock than to the summit of Black
Mount. Because of this loitering gentleness it has time to drop
among the lingerers there all the wild aromas and soft perfumes of
the marsh and pasture and bring all the soothing sounds of life to
ears that for all I know hear them dreamily and approve. Quail,
the first I have heard in New England for a long time, whistled
cheerily one to another from nearby thickets. Nor did these seem
fearful of man. One whistled as a wagon rattled by his hiding place
on the dusty winding road, and held his perch beneath a berry bush
till I approached so near that I could hear the full inflection of
the soft note with which he prefixed his “bob white,” see the swell
of his white throat and the tilt of his head as he sent forth the
call. A pair of mourning doves crooned in the old apple orchard
and flew on whistling wings as I approached too near. I have heard
heartache in the tones of these birds, but here their mourning
seemed only the gentle sorrow of a mother’s tones as she soothes a
weary child, a mourning that voiced love and sympathy rather than
pain. On a tree nearby a great-crested flycatcher sat and seemed
to say to himself, “grief, grief.” These were the only notes of
sorrow that the place held. All else in sky and field, marsh and
hillside, seemed to thrill with a gentle optimism, and the hillock
itself rested amidst this in a patriarchal peace and simplicity
that became it well. Memory of this gentle peace and simplicity
lingers long and runs like a tender refrain through the harmony
of fragrant, vivid life that marks this lovely section of old
Marshfield.
II
AT WHITTIER’S BIRTHPLACE
_The Homestead two Centuries Old and the Unspoiled Country about it_
They lighted a fire for me in Whittier’s fireplace. The day had
been one of wilting July heat and sun glare till storm clouds
from the New Hampshire hills brought sudden cool winds and black
shadows. Twilight settled down in the wide, ancient living-room,
bringing brooding darkness and mystery. The little light that came
through the tiny, lilac-shaded windows seemed to half reveal ghosts
of legends and romance, wrapped in darkness, slipping indistinctly
from the black cavern of the fireplace, standing close before it
and hiding it, and gathering in formless groups in the corners
of the room. They whispered and the leaves on the trees outside
rustled the tale, while echoes of warlock warfare rumbled in the
sky above and witch fires flared. A witches’ twilight had come
down the Merrimac and brought under its blanket shades of all the
mountain legends that had in times past trooped to the mind of the
poet as he sat there with sensitive soul a-quiver to their touch,
photographing them in black and white for the minds of all men
forever. From the fireplace stalked Mogg Megone and the powwows of
his tribe, bringing with them all the dusky people of the weird
stories of his day. The wind wailed their lone songs outside, and
in its deep throat the aged chimney mumbled to itself old, old
tales of night and darkness.
Then a slender flame slipped upward from the hearth, showing the
form of the caretaker faintly shadowed and edged with light against
the black background, and if I saw not her but the outline of
Whittier’s mother bending to light the fire and drive from the
minds of the children the fancies of the dusk it must have been
because the witches’ twilight still held the room under its spell.
Between the fore and back logs the brush of hemlock and of pine
crackled and sent incense across the gloom to me, and with the leap
of the flame all the weird shadows wavered into the corner and
vanished. In their stead trooped up-river the cheery hearthside
stories of the English settlers, sturdy tales and rough perhaps
but with the glow of the hearth log flickering gleefully through
them. The gusts drew whirling sparks upward, and in its deep throat
the chimney, no longer aged but stout and strong with vigorous
work to do, guffawed in cheerful content. The dancing firelight
sent gleams of quiet laughter over the face of Whittier himself,
that before had looked so grimly from the frame over his ancient
desk, and the room glowed with homey hospitality. If there were
shades there they were golden ones of gentle maids and rollicking
boys that we knew and loved so well, and though without the window
opposite the fireplace and right through the shading lilac bushes
a ghostly replica of the fireplace with its flickering flames
appeared and vanished and reappeared, there was nothing sinister in
its uncanniness, for
“under the tree
When fire outside burns merrily,
There the witches are making tea.”
Stormbound if not snowbound I sat for an hour by the hearth that
was the heart of a home for two hundred years, watching the
crane and pendent trammels show black against the blaze, seeing
the Turk’s heads on the andirons glow, reading by the firelight
verses which the poet wrote in that same home room, and when the
storm passed and I could go forth to his brook and his fields
and hills it could not fail to be with something of his love
for them in my heart. Some critic, whose visit must have been
shortened by homesick memories of a steam-heated flat, has said
that Whittier’s birthplace is lonely and that its loneliness had
its effect on his life and work. But how could such a place be
lonely to a man who was born there? Here was the great living-room
with its hearth, where the life of the home centered. Without
was the wonderful rolling country with all its majesty of hill,
whence he saw the crystal mountains to north and the blue lure
of the sea to eastward, with all its gentle delights of ravines
where brooks laughed, and meadows and swamps where they slipped
peacefully along, mirroring the sky, watering all wild flowers and
offering refuge to all wild creatures. Within this wide circle,
with the house its core and the hearth its shrine, revolved the
homely, cheerful, whole-hearted life of the farm. What chance for
loneliness was there?
After the shower had passed I climbed the gentle slope of the hill
back of the house, traversing the old garden where grow the plants
that came over with pioneers from England, hollyhocks and sweet
william, old-time poppies, marjoram and London pride, dear to every
housewife’s heart in the good old days when to wrest a farm from
the forest and build a home on it was still an ambition for which
a free-born New Englander need feel no shame. The witchery of
the hour had not been for the hearthside alone. The sooth of the
rain had been for the hearts of these also, and the joy of their
answering delight made all the fresh air sweet and kindly so far as
the gentle winds blew. The perfume of an old-time garden after rain
is made up of gracious memories. Wherever chance has taken their
seeds or care has transported their roots a thousand generations
of sweet-hearted, home-keeping mothers have tended these plants
and loved their flowers and the very leaves and stalks on which
they grew. The caress of the rain brings from each leaf and petal
but the aromatic essence of such lives, welling within and flowing
forth again through the unnumbered years.
Out of homely love of the hearth, out of wild Indian legends that
flowed down the Merrimac and English folk lore that flowered over
seas and blew westward with a sniff of the brine in it, Whittier
made his poems. But not out of these was born their greatness. That
was distilled from his own fiber where it grew out of the rugged,
honest, fearless life of generations whose home shrine had been
that glowing hearth, whose love and tenderness welled within and
overflowed like the scent of the old-time garden. To such a house
and such a hearth sweetness climbs and nestles. To stand on the
old door stone was to be greeted with dreams of meadows and lush
fields, for wild mint has left the brookside and come shyly to the
very door sill to toss its aroma to all comers. A spirit of the
meadows that the barefoot boy loved thus dwells ever by his door
and none may enter without its benediction. There is something
Quakerlike in the wild mint, that dwells apart, unnoticed and
wearing no flaunting colors, yet is so dearly fragrant and yields
its sweetness most when bruised.
A stone’s toss from the door I found his brook, its music muted
by the summer drought so that you must bend the ear close to hear
its song. With the foam brimming on its lip in spring the brook
roars good fellowship, a stein song in which its brothers over
nearby ridges join, filled with the potency which March brews from
snow-steeped woods. Now, its March madness long passed, repentant
and shriven by the kindly sun, it slips, a pure-souled hermit,
from pool to pool, each pool so clear that in it the sky rests
content, while water striders mark changing constellations on its
surface. The pools are silent, only beneath the stones the passing
water chirps to itself a little cheerful song which the vireos in
the trees overhead faintly imitate. The trees love the brook’s
version best, for they bend their heads low to listen to it, beech
and maple, white oak and red, yellow birch and white birch and
black birch, hemlock and pine, dappling the pools with shade and
interlocking arms across the glen in which the brook flows. In the
dapple of shadow and sunlight beneath them ferns of high and low
degree, royal and lady, cinnamon, interrupted and hay-scented, wade
in the shallows and caress the deeps with their arching fronds.
The blue flags that waved beside the water a month ago are gone,
leaving only green pennants to mark their camp site for another
year; and it is well that it is thus marked, else it were lost, for
in the very brook bottom where the March flood crashed along have
come to usurp it those tender annuals, the jewel weeds. Their stems
almost transparent, their oval leaves so dark a green that it seems
as if some of the dancing shadows found rest in them, they press in
close groups into all shallow places and lean over the edges of the
clear pools to admire the gold pendants that tinkle in their ears.
[Illustration: “Within this wide circle, with the house its
core and the hearth its shrine, revolved the homely, cheerful,
whole-hearted life of the farm.”]
With these through the grassy shallows climb true forget-me-nots,
slenderest of brookside wanderers, each blue bloom a tiny turquoise
for the setting of the jewel-weeds’ gold. Thus shaded and carpeted
the little ravine wanders down from the hills, and the brook goes
with it, as if hand in hand, bringing to its side all sprightly
life, a place filled with boyhood fancies and echoes of boyhood
laughter. A chewink, singing on a treetop up the slope, voiced
this feeling. Someone has called the chewink the tambourine bird.
His song makes the name a deserved one. It consists of one clear,
melodious call and then an ecstatic tinkling as of a tambourine
skillfully shaken and dripping joyous notes. Always before the
chewink’s song has been without words to me. This one sang so
clearly “Whittier; ting-a-ling-a-ling” that I knew the bird and his
ancestors had made the glen home since the boyhood of the poet,
learning to sing the name that rang oftenest through the tinkle of
the brook.
You begin to climb Job’s Hill right from the glen, passing from
beneath its trees to stone-walled mowing fields where rudbeckias
dance in the morning wind, their yellow sunbonnets flapping and
flaring about homely black faces. I fancy these fields were white
with ox-eye daisies in the spring. They are yellow now with the
sunbonnets of these jolly wenches. It is like getting from Alabama
to New England to step over the last wall which divides the fields
of the hill’s shoulder from its summit, which is a close-cropped
cow pasture. Here the winds of all the world blow keen and free and
you may look north to the crystal hills of New Hampshire whence
come their strength. Eastward under the sun lies the pale rim of
the sea. Kenoza Lake opens two wide blue eyes at your feet, and
all along beneath you roll bare, round-topped hills sloping down
to dark woods and scattered fields, as unspoiled by man as in
Whittier’s days. The making of farms does not spoil the beauty of
a country; it adds to it. It is the making of cities that spells
havoc and desolation. Through the pasture, up the steep slopes to
the summit of Job’s Hill, that seems so bare at first glimpse,
climb all the lovely pasture things to revel in the free winds.
Foremost of these is the steeplebush, prim Puritan of the open
wold, erect, trying to be just drab and green and precise, but
blushing to the top of his steeple because the pink wild roses have
insisted on dancing with him up the hill, their cheeks rosy with
the wind, their arms twined round one another at first, then round
him as well. Somehow this bachelor bush which would be so austere
reminds one of the Quaker youth at the academy, surrounded by
those rosy maidens of the world’s people, one of whom we suspect
he loved, yet could no more tell it than can the steeplebush
acknowledge how sweet is the companionship of the wild rose and how
he hopes it may go on forever. Stray red cedars stroll about the
lower slopes and climb gravely, while juniper, in close-set prickly
clumps, seems to follow their leadership. The canny, chancy thistle
holds its rosy pompons up to the bumble-bees, that fairly burrow
in them for their Scotch honey, and the mullein would be even more
erect and more Quakerly drab than the steeplebush if it could.
It is erect and gray, but just as it means to look its grimmest
dancing whorls of yellow sunshine blossom up its stalk in spirals,
the last one fairly taking flight from the tip. Among all these
strays the yarrow, whose aroma is as much a New England odor as
that of sweet-fern or bayberry. The aromatic incense of this herb
follows you up the hill and seems to bring the pungent presence of
the poet himself.
Job’s steepest hillside drops you in one long swoop to the road
which leads through woodland windings to the haunted bridge over
Country Brook. The way itself is haunted by woodland fragrance and
chant of birds innumerable, and in the freshness of the morning
after the shower it seemed as if built new. The world is apt to be
this way after rain. Yet if the vivid morning sun and exhilarating
north wind had driven all ghosts away there had been necromancy at
work. All the day before the blossoms on the staghorn sumac had
been of that velvety pink that rivals the wild rose. Over night
they had turned a warm, rich red. Autumn brings this richer, more
stable color to the sumac blooms as they ripen toward seed time,
but it does not do it in July, over night. The pukwudgies had been
at work, painting with the rain, filling the sumac heads with it
till they hung heavy. The water had massed the tiny pubescence of
the blooms till pink had deepened into red and autumn had seemed
to come for the sumacs in a night. It took the sun and the wind
all day to dry them out and bring back the witchery of pink that
the necromancy of the rain had banished. But the spell was not
altogether broken, nor will it be till autumn has worked its will
with the world about Country Brook. Out of the birches the fresh
wind threshed here and there yellow leaves that fluttered like
colias butterflies before it. There and here among the sumacs hung
a crimson leaf, more vivid in its color than the blossoms or the
berries could ever be, and as in the woodland all news flashes from
shrub to shrub and from creature to creature, so it seemed as in
the hint of autumn, first born, a simulacrum merely, in the wet
sumac heads, had gone by birch leaf messengers to all distances.
Along the way flashed out of invisibility the yellow of tall
goldenrod heads and the blue and white of the earliest asters and,
once materialized, remained.
August may bring vivid heat and wilting humidity if it will. The
witches’ twilight had brought down the Merrimac from the far north
the flavor of autumn which is later to follow in full force, nor
will it wholly leave us again. The ghostliest thing about Country
Brook was a sound which seemed to come up it from the cool depths
of the woods into which it flows, a soft breathing sigh, now
regular, now intermittent, as if a spirit of the woodland slept
peacefully for a little, then gasped with troubled dreams. Seeking
to discover this ghost I found a little way along the road from
the bridge a broad grassy avenue that led with a certain majesty
in its sweep as if to some woodland castle whose people were so
light-footed that they wore no paths in their broad green avenue.
Yet after all it led me only to a wide meadow where the sighing
I had heard was that of the grass going to sleep under the magic
passes of a mower’s scythe. No clatter of mowing machine was here,
just the swish of a scythe such as the meadow has heard yearly
since the pioneers came. There were deer tracks here along the
margin of Country Brook, and all the gentle wild life of woods and
meadows seemed to pass freely, without care or fear.
[Illustration: “Watching the crane and pendant trammels grow black
against the blaze.”
_See page 18_ ]
[Illustration: A corner of the room in which Whittier was born]
And so I found all the country about the Whittier homestead an
epitome of the free, cheerful, country life of the New England
of a century ago. They lighted a fire for me in Whittier’s
fireplace--and as the rose glow on the walls of the old living-room
brought back the hearth-cheer of bygone years, as the witches,
daintily making tea without under the lilac bush, brought the
romance and legend of the olden time to the threshold, so the
crackling draft of the fire up the deep throat of the chimney
seemed to draw in to the place the free, hearty, farming,
wood-loving life of the men of the earlier centuries out of
which the poet drew what was best in him, to be given out in
unforgettable verse to us all. If such a place was ever lonely it
was that gentle and desirable loneliness which great souls love.
III
IN OLD PONKAPOAG
_Glimpses from a Study Window of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_
The study where Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote some of his daintiest
verse looks forth upon a sweet valley. Down this valley prattle
clear-eyed brooks that meet and grow, and water lush meadows filled
with all lovely things of summer, while low woods beyond set a dark
green line against the sunsets. Looking toward these of a day when
rosy mists tangle the sun’s rays and anon let them slip in arrow
flight earthward, we have pictured for us how
“We knew it would rain, for all the morn,
A spirit on slender ropes of mist
Was lowering its golden buckets down
Into the vapory amethyst.”
[Illustration: “The study where Aldrich wrote some of his daintiest
verse looks forth upon a sweet valley.”]
Wherever written, this and a hundred other dainty things seem to
flock into the tiny valley upon which he looked from the study
window of his later life in what was then the quaint old village
of Ponkapoag, as if the flowers of fancy to which he gave wings
still hovered there. At nightfall it is easy along these meadows to
“See where at intervals the firefly’s spark
Glimmers and melts into the fragrant dark;
Gilds a leaf’s edge one happy instant, then
Leaves darkness all a mystery again.”
The quaint old Ponkapoag of not so very many years ago is changing
fast. The trolley car passes and re-passes in what was once its
one street. The real estate man has come and modern houses grow up
over night, almost, in the empty spaces over the old stone walls,
while in the surrounding pastures and woodland appear the mansions
of those who seek large estates not too far from the city. Suburban
life begins to crowd Ponkapoag and the little self-centered country
village of the genuine New England type passes. Most, however, of
the sturdy old houses of a century or more ago remain and much
of the beauty of the country round about them. On Sundays and
holidays Ponkapoag Pond teems with an uproarious holiday crowd, but
on weekdays one may still enjoy its beauty unmolested, hear the
blackbird’s music tinkle along the bogs, and see the pond lily, the
pure white spirit of Miantowonah, sit on the water. On such days
Ponkapoag Pond, “the spring bubbling from red earth,” seems still
to belong as much to the Indians, whose favorite fishing ground it
was, as to us latter-day usurpers, and the outlook across it to the
dusky loom of Blue Hill is as wild now as it was in their day.
From the north-facing window of the poet’s study you may see the
hill again, with all its beauty of color which changes with the
whim of the day. At dawn of a clear morning it looms blue-black
against the rosy deep of the sky. At noon it looms still but
friendly and green, so near that the eye may pick out the shape of
each tree that feathers the jutting crags. At noon of such a day
Ponkapoag hill with its houses bowered in green seems a part of
it, the half mile of intervening space making no impression on the
eye. As the sun sinks a haze rises from the rich farming land which
lies level between the two hills. The spirit on slender ropes of
mist is at work, and through this vapory amethyst the larger hill
withdraws into soft colors of blue that grow violet purple with
the coming of dusk below and the rosy afterglow of reflected sunset
in the sky above. Captain John Smith named the range “The Cheviot
Hills” in recollection of old England, but all the countryside
named it Blue Hill because of the changing wonder of its coloring,
which is a constant delight to the eye. On stormy days when gray
northeasters send torn clouds, fragrant with the tonic smell of the
brine, whirling over it, the hill looms misty and vague, as if it
might well be a mountain scores of miles distant, instead of the
single mile it is along the straight road. On such days all the
wild sea myths and northland sagas seem to be blown in over the
hill barrier and trail down from the skirts of the clouds into the
secluded peace of Ponkapoag valley. Hence, to those who dream, come
sea longings.
“The first world-sound that fell upon my ear
Was that of the great winds along the coast
Crushing the deep-sea beryl on the rocks--
The distant breakers’ sullen cannonade.
Against the spires and gables of the town
The white fog drifted, catching here and there
At over-leaning cornice or peaked roof,
And hung--weird gonfalons. The garden walks
Were choked with leaves, and on their ragged biers
Lay dead the sweets of summer--damask rose,
Clove pink, old-fashioned, loved New England flowers.
Only keen, salt-sea odors filled the air.
Sea-sounds, sea-odors--these were all my world.
Hence it is that life languishes with me inland.”
Infinite variance of changing moods has the hill which lifts such
abrupt crags above the Ponkapoag plain. At times the poet may have
seen it as it was one day not long ago, when a great thunderstorm,
born of the sweltering, blue haze of a fiercely hot July day,
swept across it. On that day the hill withdrew itself into the
menacing black sky, looming against it, then vanishing, becoming
part of a night like that of the apocalypse, in which hung the
observatory and the higher houses of Ponkapoag hill “as glaring as
our sins on judgment day.” The storm in which the miracle of “The
Legend of Ara-Cœli” was wrought could not have been blacker than
the sky, nor the face of the monk, when he saw the toes of the
bambino beneath the door, whiter than gleamed those houses. The
weirder, greater things of nature loom often through the poems of
the man who looked upon such scenes from the study window in what
was “The Bemis Place” of the elder days of Ponkapoag village. It
seems as if all the lighter, sweeter fancies that laugh or slip,
tear in eye, through his verse, whirled like rose petals on summer
winds or danced like butterflies into the little valley on which
the westward study windows looked. Through this, right in the
foreground, flows Ponkapoag brook, and on it falls slowly into
decay an ancient mill, a relic of the early days of the village.
The old dam no longer restrains the water which gurgles along the
stones below it, humming to itself a quatrain which never was
meant for it, but which voices the fate of the shallow mill pond,
which has been empty for so many long years that it is no longer
a pond but a tiny meadow in which cattle cool their feet and feed
contentedly. Here the spendthrift brook sings contentedly:
“The fault’s not mine, you understand;
God shaped my palm, so I can hold
But little water in my hand
And not much gold.”
[Illustration: “The study window in what was ‘The Bemis Place’ of
the elder days of Ponkapoag.”
_See page 35_]
In the meadow and along the brookside blooms to-day the Habenaria
psycodes, the smaller purple-fringed orchid, its dainty petal-mist
rising like flower steam of an August noon, a shy child of woodland
bogs, which often runs away out into the open meadow to hear the
blackbirds sing. This year I have not found the larger fringed
orchid, the Habenaria fimbriata, which comes to the meadow less
often, a flower which one might fancy the mother of the other,
coming to lead the truant home again to the seclusion of the
woodland shadows. In all the fairy nooks of this valley ferns
spring up like vagrant, delicate fancies that are real while you
hold them in close contemplation, yet vanish into the green of the
surroundings, as the form of a poet’s thought fades when you take
your eye from the printed page, though the thought itself lingers
long in your memory. In the shallow meadow that was once the tiny
pond stands, shoulder high to the feeding cattle, a solid, serried
phalanx of the tall sagittaria, its heart-shaped, lanceolate,
pointed leaves aiming this way and that, as if to fend it with keen
tips from the eager browsers. These wade through it indeed, but do
not feed on it, plunging their heads deep amoung the spear points
to gather the tender herbage beneath. While I watched them two
of these, half-grown Holstein heifers, bounded friskily to the hard
turf of the cedar-guarded pasture above and raced in a satyr-like
romp over the close turf and among the cedars for a time. It was
as if they knew that Corydon had just vanished up that roadside in
Arcady in pursuit of the maiden that the Pilgrim described to him,
and the valley was free from all supervision for a time. The white
spikes of bloom on the water-plantain nodded to let them pass, and
nodded again as if they too knew why the satyrs frisked and on what
errand the shepherd had gone.
Daintiest of embodied thoughts which flit along this sequestered
valley are the butterflies. This is their feasting time of year,
for now the milkweed blooms hang crowded umbels of sticky sweetness
that no honey-loving insect can resist. Commonest of these by the
brookside is Asclepias cornuti with its large pale leaves and its
dull greenish-purplish flowers. It is rather odd that out of the
same brook water and the salts and humus in the black earth through
which it flows one plant should grow these dull, heavy, loutish
flowers, while just beside it, perhaps, the Habenaria psycodes
gets its misty delicacy of purple bloom from the same source. With
plants as with people it is not that on which we feed nor the spot
on which we stand that counts in the final moulding of character.
Some subtle essence, some fire of spirit within the orchid makes
its bloom. Some grosser ideal within the milkweed matures in the
dull, sticky umbels. Thus within the town, attending the same
schools, and fed by the same butcher and baker, one boy grows up a
poet and another a yokel. Even in the same family you may see it,
for the milkweeds are not all alike. Along the dry hillsides the
Asclepias tuberosa gives us bright orange flowers, exudes little
if any stickiness, and even gets a better name from the botanist,
being called the butterfly-weed.
But however gross and homely the milkweed blooms the butterflies
find rich pasturage there and sip and cling till they fairly
fall off in satiety. Winging to the milkweed out of the chestnut
and maple shade of the deep wood comes Papilio turnus, striped
tigerwise with rich yellow and black. Out of the long saw-edged
grass that grows long in the meadow and bows before the wind
as do fields of grain sails Argynnis cybele, the great spangled
fritillary, the fulvous glory of his broad wings spangled beneath
with silver, as if he carried his coin of a fairy realm with him
wherever he goes. Over the very pine tops soars the monarch, his
rich dark red and black borne on wings that are the strongest in
butterfly flight. These three, most conspicuous sprites in the
meadow tangle, give rich coloring and the poetry of motion as
they bear down upon the milkweed blooms, to leave them no more
save for short flights taken merely to secure a better strategic
position on the umbels, till they are cloyed with the rich nectar,
and smeared with the sticky exudation which the plant puts out on
the blooms for purposes of its own. I fancy the butterflies are
vexed and indignant at this stickiness which smears their legs and
makes yellow pollen masses cling to them when, satiated and lazy,
they next take flight. Yet the whole is cleverly arranged. On
the smeared legs as they sail away cling pollen masses which the
insect is not likely to get rid of till it lights on another head
of bloom, very likely one of some distant plant. There the sticky
masses cling closer to the quaint horns which each bloom protrudes
from behind the anthers, there to drop pollen grains on the stigma
and insure the cross-fertilization of the flower. Thus unwittingly
butterfly and bee as they sail about the sun-steeped meadow suffer
discomfort for their own good, insuring vigorous crops of milkweed
for another summer, for themselves or their descendants.
With these comes the smaller, Colias philodice, the sulphur,
bringing with him the very gold of the sunlight. Colias philodice
has many changes. Sometimes the black margins of his wings are
missing and his gold melts into the sunshine and vanishes before
your eyes. Another may come that is white instead of gold, a wan
ghost of a colias that seems born of the mist instead of the
sunshine and to vanish into nothing when he flies away, as mist
does. Sometimes the colias flies up into the wood and lights, and
as I come to the spot where I think I saw him stop I find nothing
but a single bloom of the golden gerardia which now slips from
glade to glade all along where the hardwood growth comes down to
meet the meadow grasses. The gerardia might very well explain all
this if it would, but it is born close-mouthed. If you will look at
the yellow buds which later open into the golden bells into which
the bumble-bees love to scramble, bumbling as they go, you will
see how tightly their lips are pressed together. No word can you
get from these by the most insistent questioning, and even when
they open it is easy to see that they have learned that silence is
golden.
The Baltimore butterfly, wearing Lord Baltimore’s colors of orange
and black, is a common visitant to these meadows, too. He loves to
tipple the lees of the milkweed blooms, but he does not frequent
the meadow for that. It is because along its shoreward edges where
the cool water oozes from black mud grows his home plant, the
turtle-head. On this he was born and to it he goes for the housing
and feeding of his children. Like Gerardia flava, Chelone glabra
is close-mouthed, but its silence is a wan white one which only
blushes pink with embarrassment when questioned, but yields no
reply. You cannot learn any mysteries of the meadow from these.
Palest and most ghostlike of all flowers that one finds as he
climbs from the meadow to the woods beyond is that of the Monotropa
uniflora, or Indian pipe. Round about it its cousins, the pyrola
and the pipsissewa, grow green leaves and show waxy white or
flesh-pink blossoms. The only color in the Indian pipe is that
of the yellow stamens, which shrink in a close circle within the
wax-white bloom that stands on a scaly, wax-white stem. A very
ghost of a flower is this, nor may we account for its ghostliness.
When, long ago, Miantowonah fled to drown her grief in the lake and
later rise from it the spirit of a flower which is the regal white
pond lily that scatters incense all along the borders of Ponkapoag
Pond, her Indian lover followed, too late to prevent the sacrifice.
Did he drop his peace pipe in the race through the wood, and did
this ghost flower spring from the spot, a faintly fragrant, almost
transparent ghostly reminder of it? If so, it has passed into no
legend.
Coming back through the meadow, with its butterfly sprites of fancy
dancing among the flowers, I find one which always seems a reminder
of the poet’s work at its daintiest and best. That is the bloom of
the wild caraway. Here is a mist of delicate thought which speaks
to you with lace-like beauty. Nor does the closest inspection
reveal any fault. The bloom appeals as a delightful bit of
sentiment, at first glance. It is only as you examine it minutely
that you marvel at its exquisite workmanship. However carefully you
pick it to pieces you find each part perfect and as admirable in
its ingenuity as in its appeal to the imagination. And after you
have done this you pass on, touched with the white purity of it and
bearing far a gentle, aromatic pungency which is the essence of the
parent stem that bore the bloom.
IV
AT THE ISLES OF SHOALS
_The Island and the Garden which Celia Thaxter Loved_
The poppies that grow in Celia Thaxter’s garden nod bright heads in
welcome to all who come. It is as if the sunny presence of their
mistress dwelt always in the spot, finding voice in these blooms
which are so delicate, yet so regnant in spirit. To these all the
other flowers which speak of the homely virtues, marigolds and red
geraniums, coreopsis and pinks and love-in-a-mist, seem subordinate
at first approach, though they occupy the bulk of the garden,
which seems to epitomize the life of the mistress who tended it
so long. There is no square of it without its rich aroma of love
and womanliness, yet it is the vivid personality of the poppies,
flowers for dreams, which touches first the comer from the outside
world.
[Illustration: Celia Thaxter’s home at the Isles of Shoals]
Round about the garden lies Appledore, the largest of the Isles
of Shoals, rocked gently on the bosom of blue seas, its margin
flashing with beryl and pearl where rocks and breakers touch, its
rounded ridges white and green again with the granite of which it
is built and the verdure with which it is clothed. Over it all
bends the blue of the summer sky, and as you look up to this from
the little garden it seems to lean lovingly upon the hill which is
the island’s highest part, heaven so near that the scent of the
flowers may easily pass to it by way of the little winding path.
To climb this path yourself is to find the sky not so near after
all. Standing on the summit, you realize first the depth of its
great dome and the wide sweep of sea that rims the islands round.
Here are but gray ledges that rise out of an immensity which dwarfs
them. Far to the north and west is a thin, blue line of land that
lifts in the farthest distance the peaks of the White Mountains.
All else is but a vast expanse of sea that seems as if it might
rise in a storm and overwhelm these rocks that it has washed so
white and smooth. Somewhere to the eastward of our coast lies, they
tell us, the lost Atlantis, submerged beneath this great sweep of
blue that smiles beryl and laughs pearl-white in wave crests. Who
knows but this granite dome of Appledore on which we seem to loom
so high in air is the westernmost peak of the vanished continent?
We are but seventy-five feet above the sea’s surface. It must be
the thought of its depths that gives us the feeling of being upon
a mountain peak. For all that, this height and distance so make us
dominate the other islands that they seem but ledges, wave-washed
reefs in comparison, and one wonders how such of them as have
buildings on them hold them during the sweep of winter gales and
full-moon tides.
In the smile of summer it is easy to forget this. It is but a
step from the rough rocks of the island to the dense verdure of
its shrubbery. At first one wonders where the soil came from that
nourishes herb and shrub in such profusion. Here among the gray
granite grow most of the beauties of any shore-sheltered New
England pasture. Here is elder showing white, lace-like blooms,
bayberry and staghorn sumac each striving to overtop the other,
wild cherry and shadbush, and beneath and around these low-bush
black huckleberries, raspberries and blackberries, the last two
blessing the tangle with fruit. Among the grasses grow yarrow, St.
John’s-wort, mullein, toad-flax, cranes-bill, evening primrose
and other herbs, while Virginia creeper and fragrant clematis
make many a spot a bower of climbing vines. Not only do all these
familiar pasture folk grow here, but in many instances they seem
to grow with a luxuriance that exceeds that of their favorite
shore locations. Their tangle makes passage difficult except by
established paths, and the road which circumnavigates the island
is cut almost as much through the compacted shrubbery as through
the rough rocks along the tops of the cliffs. Rainfall collects
in the hollows of the granite in some places and makes miniature
marshes, and in one spot a tiny pond which is big enough to supply
ice to the islanders, filling to the brim with the winter rains and
in some winters freezing pretty nearly solid. In August this pond,
which is high in the middle of the island, is dry, its bottom green
with rushes and its sides rampant with the spears of the blue flag.
Often in the tiny valleys in the heart of the island, surrounded
by its dense shrubbery, you lose sight of the sea, but you cannot
forget it. However still the day, you can hear the deep breathing
of the tides, sighing as they sleep, and a mystical murmur running
through the swish of the breakers, that is the song of the deep sea
waves, riding steadily in shore, ruffled but in no wise impeded by
the west winds that vainly press them in the contrary direction.
However rich the perfume of the clematis the wind brings with it
the cool, soothing odor that is born of wild gardens deep in the
brine and loosed with nascent oxygen as the curling wave crushes
to a smother of white foam. It may be that the breathing of this
nascent oxygen and the unknown life-giving principles in this deep
sea odor gives the plants of Appledore their vigor and luxuriance
of growth. Certainly it would not seem to be the soil that does
it. Down on the westward shore of the island, in an angle of the
white granite, where there was but a thin crevice for its roots
and no sign of humus, I found a single yarrow growing. Its leaves
were so luxuriant, yet delicate, so fern-like and beautiful, such
feathery fronds of soft, rich green as to make one, though knowing
it but yarrow, yet half believe it a tropic fern by some strange
chance transplanted to the rugged ledges of the lonely island. With
something in the air, and perhaps in the granite, that makes this
common roadside plant develop such luxuriance, it is no wonder that
other common pasture folk, goldenrod and aster, morning glory and
wild parsnip, and a dozen others, growing in abundant soil in the
tiny levels and hollows, are taller and fuller of leaf and petal
than elsewhere. In the richness and beauty of the yarrow leaves
growing in the very hollow of the granite’s hand, as in the height
and splendor of the Shirley poppies in the little garden, one seems
to find a parallel to Celia Thaxter, whose own character, nurtured
on the same sea air, sheltered in the hollow hand of the same
granite, grew equally rich and beautiful.
[Illustration: “Chasms down which you may walk to the tide between
sheer cliffs.”]
All Appledore, indeed all the Isles of Shoals are built of this
rock, which is white in the distance, but which near to shows
silver fleckings of mica that flash in the sun. Through the granite
run narrow veins of quartz that is as hard as flint, but that
has scattered among its crystals also a silvering of these mica
flecks which are in strange contrast to the tiny pin points of a
softer, darker rock which one finds evenly sprinkled through the
white. This dark rock softens to wind and weather first and leaves
these white cliffs honeycombed with the tiniest of fissures, so
that they are as rough to the hand as sandpaper. Dykes of trap run
through the island, and as this rock too is softer than its casing
the winds and waves of centuries have worn it away, leaving chasms
down which you may walk to the tide, between the sheer cliffs. One
such chasm runs quite across Appledore from east to west near the
northern end of the island, almost cutting off a round dome of
granite from its fellow rock. The soil lies rich in this narrow
hollow between ledges, and many things grow in it, lush with leaves
and beautiful with bloom. Here the shadbush had already ripened its
fruit. Here the island’s one apple tree grows vigorously, though
it dares not lift its head above the level of the rocks against
which it snuggles, lest the zero gales of winter nip it off.
Crowding round it grow wild cherry and wild rose, elder and sumac
and huckleberry and chokeberry, all eager to fend it from rough
winds in that friendliness which seems, like foliage, to flourish
in the place. Here is a soft turf of grass in which grow violets
and dandelions, both spring and fall, and plantain, cinquefoil and
evening primrose have come to make the place homelike. If rough
winds blow here rougher rocks fend them off, and though they may
whistle over the tops of these in the little valley between there
is quiet, and floods of sunshine gather and well up till the place
is full.
This tiny valley dips toward the sea at the west and broadens
to a meadow where I fancy the islanders have at some time grown
cranberries, for a few plants remain. For the most part, however,
this meadow is set thick with the green spears of the bog rushes
which grow so close together that there is little room for anything
else. To crush your way in among these is to pass through a very
forest of dark green lances whose tips stretch upward to stab
your chin, yet burst into bloom from the sides near these tips,
as if the full life within them which could not be restrained yet
which finds no outlet in leaves, exploded in a lance pennant of
olive-brown beauty. A Maryland yellow-throat whose nest stands
empty in the grass on the borders of this little, lance-serried
marsh fluttered and chirped and clung among these rushes and from
the top of a near-by bayberry shrub a song sparrow trilled a note
or two, despite the fact that it is moulting time and few birds
have the heart to sing in dishabille. Nightfall brought no sound
of frog voices from this little marsh, yet I cannot fancy it in
spring without a hyla or two to pipe flute notes from its margin.
Near this I found the one ophidian of the island, a beautiful,
slender, graceful green snake, little more than a foot long. This
lovely little creature feeds on crickets and insect larvæ and is
the very gentlest snake that ever crawled. Jarred by my footfall
in the grass he glided away among the tangle, trusting to his
coloration, which is a perfect grass green, to hide him, which it
soon did. If Appledore must have its serpent no sweeter-natured nor
lovelier variety could be found. If modern Eves sit upon the rocks
of moonlight nights and listen to this one’s promptings one can
scarcely blame them.
Under the eaves and under the verandas of the houses are the
nests of barn swallows, gray mud stippled up against a rafter,
the fast-growing young almost crowding one another out. So gently
familiar are these birds, and so little afraid of people, that one
has built a nest under the frequented piazza of the big hotel,
and the parent birds flit back and forth unconcerned by the rows
of guests that often take chairs and watch the nestlings for long
periods. Not only do the parents feed their young while thus
watched by crowds but a few feet away, but they fly in under the
veranda and capture food right over the heads of the promenaders
with equal freedom from fear. Barn swallows are usually friendly,
confiding birds. They seem here to have caught the sense of
protection and safety which comes to all on the little island, and
become even more fearless. It is much the same way with the tree
swallows, which, having no hollow trees, build in bird boxes all
about. These already have young in flight. Standing on the cliffs
you see their steel blue backs as they swirl with the little waves
in and out among the rockweed at low tide, seeking their food
very close to land or water. Often the young sit on some safe
pinnacle and are fed there, the old bird flashing up, twittering,
delivering a message and a mouthful at the same time, then flashing
away again, whirling and wheeling, never beyond call of the eager
fledgling. Often the fledgling soars into space, hardly to be
distinguished then from the older bird, and twitters back and
forth near the parent. Then when the latter comes with a mouthful
the former simply poises fluttering while the old bird dashes up,
twitters and feeds, and is off again in the flash of an eye, so
fleet of motion, so agile of turn, that it puzzles the watcher to
follow the course of flight.
At the bottom of the tide the rocks over which the tree swallows
swirl with the waves are a golden olive with the sun-touched tips
of the carrageen. Higher up the boulders lift their heads with the
air-celled rockweed falling all about them like wet hair. Some of
these tresses hang down in golden luxuriance, others are dark,
almost black, as if blondes and brunettes were to be found among
tide rocks as among men. Between these rocks are still pools of
brine where mussels and crabs wait the deliverance of the full sea
and kelp waves its long, dark-olive, ruffle-margined banners. Down
among these with the ear close to the smooth, undulating surface
you may catch the eerie plaint of the whistling buoy off the
channel some miles to landward, telling its loneliness in recurrent
moans.
Up on the rocks again in the bright sunlight, one finds the land
birds numerous, chief among which are the song sparrows. In the
secluded peace of the place these also, evidently making their
summer home here and nesting in the shrubbery that is all about,
have lost most of their fear of man and will approach very near to
gather crumbs about your feet. A small flock of robins goes by,
stopping a moment to feed, then taking wing again as if practising
for that southward migration which will begin before very long.
Olive-sided flycatchers, already working toward the sun, flit to
catch flies and light alternately almost as if playing leapfrog
from bush to bush. So far as I have observed, the olive-sided
flycatchers do most of their migrating thus, hippety-hop from perch
to perch, with a fly well caught at every hop and well swallowed
at every perch. A kingbird sat haughtily, as if mounted, on a
stub, monarch of all he surveyed, now and then giving his piercing
little cry and sailing out to the destruction of a moth or beetle,
then sailing leisurely back again. A lone gull fished and cried
lonesomely in the surf, and a few pairs of sandpipers slipped with
twinkling feet along the rocks, feeding in the moist path of the
receding wave and lifting on long, slender wings to safety at the
crash of the next one. These were the only day birds to be found of
a pleasant day at Appledore. Monarch butterflies were plentiful,
migrants these over the seven miles or more of sea between the
island and the mainland. A few cabbage butterflies fluttered white
wings over the Cruciferæ which grow in the vegetable gardens of
the place. The cabbage butterflies may well be natives, and so
might that other which danced away so rapidly that I could not be
sure of him, though I am confident that he was either a hunter’s
butterfly or an angle-wing. Yet these, too, may have come from
the mainland on a still day or with the wind right and not too
strong, such extraordinary distances do these seemingly frail and
impotent insects cover sometimes. Honey bees from hives ashore make
a regular business of flying to the islands and back laden with
honey. Students of bees ordinarily give them a range of two and a
half to four miles, yet these Appledore bees must come at least
seven miles and probably ten for their harvesting.
At nightfall three great blue herons came flapping out from the
mainland to fish among the kelp and rockweed of the outlying reefs.
All along the western horizon the soft blue line of land began to
melt into the steel blue of the sea that the sunset fire seemed
then to temper to a violet hardness. The southwest wind had blown
the sky full of blowsy cumulus clouds that were touched with fire
from the setting sun, yet in the main had the color of the steel
sea, as if they were the flaked dross from its melting. Then the
sun for a moment burned through the thin blue line of land and set
the sea ablaze with a gentle radiance of crimson and gold that
slipped along the level miles and wrapped the blessed isles in its
arms, radiant arms that unclasped themselves in a moment, lifted
above the islands in benediction and then passed. The poppies in
Celia Thaxter’s garden folded their two inner petals like slim
hands, clasped in prayer, lifted trustfully to the sky.
[Illustration: “Up to the smooth turf on this knoll crowd all the
pasture shrubs that she loved.”]
A little way from the garden that she loved and tended so long
is Celia Thaxter’s grave, on a knoll to which the sky bends so
gently that it seems as if you might step off into it. Up to the
smooth turf of this knoll crowd all the pasture shrubs that she
loved, sheltering it from the wind on three sides and letting the
sun smile in upon it all day long without hindrance. The sumacs
come nearest as if they were the very guard of honor, but close
behind them press the wild roses, the St. John’s-wort, the evening
primroses and even the shy white clover slipping in between the
others, very close to the ground, and tossing soft perfumes out
over the brown grass. On the grave itself someone in loving
remembrance scatters the petals of red geranium, which seems of
all things the home-loving, home-keeping flower. The poppies are
for poets’ dreams which write themselves in the dancing morning
wind, clasp hands in prayer at sunset, and flutter away. Red
geraniums seem born of the fireside where home has been since fire
first came down out of heaven. Dreams and hearthfire both were dear
to the sweet lady of Appledore, and both flowers commemorate her
there.
V
THOREAU’S WALDEN
_A Survey of the Pond and its Surroundings_
He who would know Thoreau’s Walden will do well to bathe in it. His
first plunge may well be in Thoreau’s story of the pond and his
life on its bank, and when he comes dripping from this and puts on
the garments of everyday life he still must feel a little of the
glow of the fire with which this alchemist of the woods transmuted
all things, showing us how rough granite, hard iron and base lead
are gold. Thoreau lived on the borders of the little clear pond but
two years. He knew it in the flesh for just his short life. But his
spirit had birth in something akin to its pure, profound waters and
dwells above them now for all centuries.
The next plunge should be in the waters themselves, and only thus
shall you learn to the full what a miracle the pond is. Here is a
crater of glacier-crushed granite, out of which never came smoke
nor lava, only a white fire from unexplored depths, a fire of cool
austerity which burns the dross out of all that may be put into it.
There is no inflowing stream. Its waters well up from a mysterious
source within the very earth. Their outflow is equally invisible.
In their going they leap spirit-like along the golden stairs which
the sun lets down to them and pass up for the building of rainbows,
their white light breaking in its mystical seven colors, a visible
ecstasy to all who watch the heavens. To plunge in these waters at
dawn is to feel this cool fire thrill through the marrow of your
bones, and only by total immersion shall you know to the full its
purity.
Coming to such a flight with Eos through the dusky solemnity of
the trees of the western bank, I saw the pond silvered beneath
its tense level with the frosty scintillations of the stars that
had shone into it all night. It was as if their radiance had but
penetrated the water-tension film of the surface and collected just
beneath it, making a white mirror which my plunge shattered into a
thousand prisms of scintillant light. The dancing night winds had
shaken all the rich odors from the white clethra blooms that grow
all about the pond’s rim and stored them along its surface, and to
swim out toward the center was to enter a sweetly perfumed bath.
The forest to eastward, full of black density, as it was, could not
bar out the rose of the morning from the sight. Instead it stood in
a silhouetted fretting against it and let its glow shine through a
million tiny windows of the day, blossoming again in the ripples
ahead. Here was a moving picture of the blooming and vanishing of
pink meadow-flowers, flashing a brief life upon the film, vanishing
and growing again. The cinematograph is nothing new. Walden has
operated it for those who will swim toward the dawn in its waters
since the centuries began. In our theaters we are but tawdry
imitators of its film productions.
Chin deep in its middle you begin to feel that you know the pond.
In a sense you are its eye and look upon the world as it does. Day
breaks for the swimmer as it does for Walden, and the flash of the
sun above the wood to eastward warms you both with the same sudden
sweep of its August fire. In the same sense you are the pond’s ear
and hear as it does. The morning rustle of the trees, shaking the
dusk from their boughs, comes to you as a clear ecstasy, and you
think you can hear the wan tinkling of the invisible feet of fairy
mists as they leap sunward from the surface and vanish in the day.
Over the wood comes the intermittent pulse of Concord waking, and
by fainter reverberations the pond knows that Lincoln and more
distant villages are astir. Then the first train of the day crashes
by the southern margin and stuns the tympanum with a vast avalanche
of uproar.
To plunge beneath the surface and escape this is to learn the
real color of the pond. From without, on the banks, this varies.
Oftenest it is a dull, clear green like that of alexandrite, a
chrysoberyl gem from the mines of Ceylon and the Ural mountains.
You see this best from the higher points of the hills along the
borders and at certain angles of the sun the green shows red
reflections and tints of blue as does the gem. If, swimming in the
center, you will tip up as a duck does and go head foremost with
open eyes into the depths, you will see none of this color. There
with all the influences of reflection and refraction eliminated
you find yourself moving through an infinitely soft blue that
is semi-opaque merely because a million generations of use has
fitted the human eye for seeing details through air only. Yet the
perception of color remains. Hold your breath desperately and swim
as far down as you may and there is no change. The color has all
the softness and gentle beauty of the turquoise. In certain lights
among the Florida Keys I have seen this sweetest, gentlest of blues
in the Gulf Stream, but in no other water.
To turn and look at yourself in this water is to have another
surprise. Already it seems as if the mystic fires of its depths
had begun to inform you with a pure whiteness that should be akin
to nobility of soul, and as you step forth on the shore mayhap
this quality, passing subtly to the blood and brain, lingers for a
while, and in the clear fire of renewed vitality you feel that the
morning has indeed brought back to you the heroic age.
To come to Walden at mid-day, even with Thoreau’s account of it in
the back of your head, is not at first to be impressed with the
clear spirituality of its waters nor their depth. Here, you say,
is the path from Concord, lightly worn by the spring of his tread,
clumsily rutted by the heavy footsteps of many who follow, having
indeed hitched their wagon to a star. Here is the cairn erected
in his memory, to which with doffed hat you may well add a stone
from the pond shore. And here is the pond itself, a gem of silvered
water set among low, wooded hills. Your eye may well catch first
a sight of the driftwood on the shore, of which there is much and
think it makes the place untidy and wish that the Concord selectmen
might have it removed. But the thought which this first mid-day
glimpse stirs soon passes from you and standing on the very brink
you realize the limpidity of the water and the spirit of dignity
and peace which prevails over all. The world grows up around many
shrines of its great ones and so changes the environment that you
go away sorry that you came, wishing that you had let the place
live in your imagination as it was in its heroic age, rather than
as it has since degenerated.
[Illustration: “Here is the cairn erected to his memory, to which
with doffed hat you may well add a stone.”
_See page 65_ ]
Walden is Walden still, very much as Thoreau painted it. No chimney
smoke rises in view from its shore. No picnic pavilion disturbs
its outline or jangle of trolley echoes within its spaces. The
woods grow tall all about it, and if they are more frequented by
men than in his day and less by wild creatures the casual visitor
need hardly know the difference. The pond was low when he wrote
of Walden. So it is now and the same stones with which it was
“walled-in” then pave the wide margins to-day. You may walk all
around it on this crushed granite and note the sparkle of plentiful
mica in the pebbles. Near the beach where he took his morning swim
is the tiny meadow which in the years of high water is a cove to
be fished in. You may throw a stone across this meadow cove and
in any direction save at its narrow entrance from the pond you
will hit tall woods that in dense array lean lovingly over it and
give it cool shadows except when the sun is high. Between the tall
trees and the meadow grasses grows the clethra, its white spikes
of perfume seeming to make a lace collar all about the place.
In the bottom of this meadow grows much thoroughwort, which is a
plain, homely weed to the passing glance, not considered fit for
a garden nor thought to beautify a roadside as do so many fairer
pasture blooms. Yet its gray-white heads add a soft friendliness
to the coarse meadow grasses and give delicacy to the whole place,
seeming to invite invasion and preparing the invader to find the
more fragile flowers of the Gerardia tenuifolia that nestles
beneath it, its pink bells set by some fairy bell-ringer of the
dawn with mute throats open toward the sky. The little enclosure is
as deep as a well, stoned in by forest walls, and is beloved of the
argynnis butterflies whose spangled underwings shine with the same
silver as the mica along the pond shore. Meadowsweet and a half
dozen other August flowers warm their heads in the sun and cool
their feet in the shadows of this same meadow, but the thoroughwort
seems to possess it most and to have a feeling of rightful
ownership as if it were Thoreau’s own plant. All about the pond you
will find it blossoming in the same way, standing bravely out from
the wood with its feet among the close-set stones. Always before
thoroughwort has seemed to me coarse and unattractive. Here it
seems to belong and to give and take a certain beauty of virility
and appropriateness. Perhaps it is because with it came so often
the fond fragrance of the white alders and the soft, rose-pink
beauty of the gerardia bells. In many places the stones of the
beach are set so close together and have so little soil beneath
them that nothing can grow, yet in others the plucky, bright-faced
hedge hyssop has crept into the interstices among them and made a
carpet pattern of soft green that is all flecked with the golden
yellow of their blooms. And all behind these rise the woods, oak
and chestnut, maple and scattered pines, whose plumed tops seem
like the war-bonnets of Indian chiefs, standing guard over the
homely, beautiful, simple, mysterious little pond which seems to
excite love and reverence in the hearts of all who remain long on
its banks.
The hills climb abruptly from the brink of Walden on all sides. The
woods climb the hills and top their summits with half-century-old
growth that yearly adds to its girth and stature.
Nor, one fancies, need these trees again fear the sweep of the
woodchopper’s axe. The spirit of reverence for its shores, which
through the one-time hermit of Walden has spread to us all, should
prevent that. For now the pond is much as Thoreau remembered it had
been in his boyhood, walled in by dense forests, a place of echoes.
Your spoken word comes back to you from this shore and from that,
refined and made more sonorous, as if the wood gods would fain
teach you oratory and had taken your phrase into their own mouths
and put it forth again as an example. To your ears it comes again
sweetened with the gentle essences of juniper, birch and sassafras,
rich with the melodies taught to bare boughs by winter winds. In
the haze of the August noon these other shores are distant to the
eye. The sight must swim a long way through the quivering air to
reach one or the other. The hearing, thanks to the kindly offices
of the wood gods, leaps the space at a bound.
The kingfisher seems as much a familiar of the place as the
echoes. Like them he flies back and forth from shore to shore till
you wonder whether he is trying to keep pace with them or whether
he is the embodiment of one that does not need to be set going by
a word but has volition of its own. The kingfisher’s voice hardly
seems to belong at Walden, it is so harsh and unlovely. Even in
this very school of sweet echoes it has learned neither modulation
nor singing quality. Far different is the gentle peet-weet of the
sandpipers which precede you along shore in scalloped flight.
Something of the bright sweetness of the hedge hyssop strolls along
the moist stones of the margin with them, as if the two became
yearly more and more related. Each fall I think the olive-fuscous
backs of these little birds get just a little more of a golden
tinge from this continual neighboring with the equally gentle,
friendly Gratiola aurea. If in return some fine summer the hedge
hyssop should blossom into twittering song no one need be terribly
surprised.
[Illustration: “Walden is Walden still, very much as Thoreau
painted it.”]
In contrast to the fearless rattle of the kingfisher as he echoed
from shore to shore and to the twittering, friendly sandpipers who
ran so fearlessly along the margin, was the single little green
heron that has made the pond his abiding place for a while. There
is but one, nor are there any signs that herons have nested about
the pond this year, so I fancy this bird is a bachelor visitor
seeking to reduce living to its lowest terms and finding on the
Walden shore the simplicity and seclusion that is the spirit of the
place. He is as taciturn and patient as any hermit could be. When
his country seat on one shore is invaded he simply flies silently
to another and there resumes that inward contemplation which is as
characteristic of the bird as the rattling, vibrating flight is of
the kingfisher. The little green heron was a recluse of the pond
shore long before the first pioneer planted his cabin in Concord.
His kin still cling to the place which is as lovely and lonely now
as it was then.
At nightfall deep peace settles upon the little pond. The shores
that were so distant to the eye in the noonday haze draw in
friendlily toward one another, and the last light slips through the
trees to westward and throws a coverlet of shadow over this sleepy
child of the woods. In the growing dusk there is no mystery about
the place. It is just a wee baby of a pond that is tired and has
been put to bed. But as children often do when we think them asleep
for the night the pond, as darkness gathered, seemed to dimple
with wakeful laughter, to kick off the shadow quilt and dance
with a new radiance of life. Gathering clouds of sultry August
thunderstorms had gloomed the sky with the passing of the sun,
and there was no star to give an answering twinkle, but the whole
surface of the pond laughed up to the clouds in silvery light. It
was as if all the mica-shine of all the granite ground together and
sifted to make its unfathomed bottom had come to the surface, the
infinitesimal flakes joining hands in a fairy dance to the tiny
tune of the little evening winds. The pond was such a gentle little
part of the vocal earth then that it did not seem as if it had ever
been mysterious and informed with all the deep wisdom of the stars.
Its surface was no bigger than the counterpane of a white crib on
which danced the fairy dreams of the child that slumbered happily
below.
Later someone lighted a fishing fire on the opposite shore, and
with a flash the mystery of the place returned. The cove where
it burned seemed infinitely far withdrawn, and about it stalked
shadowy giants who were the fishermen. Their voices, coming in
brief sentences and at long intervals, were as weird as their
shadows and as unsubstantial, from that immense distance to which
they seemed withdrawn. The whole was a mystery of the elder earth,
as if man had fished here before the flood and came, a shade among
the shadows, to try it again.
By and by the fishing fire ceased to flare and sank to a red glow
of embers. The dense clouds, tempest-drawn toward distant skies,
dropped southward. The moon rode out of them and all dignity and
crystal beauty returned to the pond, no longer little but wide and
deep and mysterious. Down the moon’s radiance a spirit of fire
strode, walking the water along a path of golden light, right into
Thoreau’s cove as I sat there on his shore. The pond was once again
a well of crystal, now leading from the zenith to the nadir, and
the white radiance of its spirit made mountain peaks of snow-white
grandeur of the receding clouds. In the dark depths below these
peaks flashed still the crimson scimitars of the lightning, but all
about them and the pond shone a radiance of purity and serenity
such as that in which we know Thoreau walked, day by day.
VI
ON THE FIRST TRAIL OF THE PILGRIMS
_Present-Day Aspects of the Route of Myles Standish and his
Scouts along the Tip of Cape Cod_
Cape Cod reaches like a vast fishhook into the sea, the tip of the
hook Race Point, Long Point the barb. It is as if the children of
giants had come down to the coast to play and had modeled a hook in
sand that Providence ordained should remain for all time, a sign
for the nations. For here if anywhere has been notable fishing. On
a November day in 1620 this hook caught and held for Massachusetts
the expedition of the Pilgrims that had planned to sail for the
mouth of Hudson River. Hence the epic which is William Bradford’s
account of the adventures of these argonauts is a New England epic.
Had not the Cape caught and held them, who knows if there had been
any story?
The present-day pilgrim to Provincetown comes by the Mayflower
route, in part, at least, if he come by sea, following in the
wave-washed track of destiny. Like Gosnold’s ship, like that which
bore Captain John Smith, and like that greatest of all small
vessels which carried Bradford and his friends, his ship glides by
Race Point, coasts the long convexity of sand to and round Long
Point, and heads northwest as if to go out to sea again, but is
fairly caught by the barb of the hook, and landed. Between Boston
Light and the tip of the Cape the voyager gets a taste of that same
sea which Bradford and his friends breasted for two long months. If
the sweet summer winds have been off shore for long enough there is
little trouble, even for the landsman in this sea. It is likely to
be smooth and smiling as an inland lake. If on the other hand the
salt vigor of the east winds has shouldered it for a day or two the
pilgrim of to-day may well hail the sight of the sand hills of the
Cape with a joy as great and a hope of early relief as intense as
did the lone voyagers of 1620. Fish out of water that rolls like
this bite eagerly at the hook of sand and are happy when they are
landed.
[Illustration: “Pilgrim Lake,” where that first washing was done by
the Pilgrim mothers]
The summer voyager of to-day finds this land which was so lone,
this sea which was so bleak to the Pilgrims, teeming with
humanity. The harbor waters sparkle within their rim of sand and
toss innumerable boats on their bright waves. Provincetown grows
steadily between the sand hills and the sea and stretches daily
nearer Long Point at one end of the curve and the North Truro
line on the other. The town which began with a single little row
of houses and the long slant of the beach for a street, is now
miles long, has grown somewhat back among its sand hills, and is
steadily topping some of them. The fishing hamlet seaport of a half
century ago is rapidly merging in the summer resort of to-day;
is fast becoming a Pilgrim shrine also, whither come Mayflower
descendants to comfortably worship their ancestors. So far as the
old town goes little of its early quaintness remains, and that
withdraws more closely within itself day by day. The hardy English
fisherman and sailor stock that settled the Cape, such of it as
remains, is smothered under Portuguese and summer boarders; not
bad people these, but vastly different. The wind and the sea make
minor changes in the Cape itself from year to year, especially this
end of it. The waves give and the waves take away sand bars, now
making an inlet where none was, now closing one that has existed
perhaps for centuries. The winds pack the sands hard in drifts of
rounded hills where once was a tiny valley, and again they come and
take these away and establish them elsewhere as suits their vagrant
fancy. Race Point, within the friendly shelter of whose barb the
Mayflower fleet first cast anchor, is Race Point still, but I doubt
if anyone can surely locate that pond on the margin of which the
Pilgrim mothers did that first tremendous two months’ wash. The
caprice of the shifting sands may have whelmed and re-dug it a half
dozen times since then. A century ago that little creek at what is
now North Truro, that blocked the way of doughty Myles Standish and
his men, sending them inland on a detour, was open still to the sea
and a port of safety for the North Truro fishing boats. A half
century later a storm brought sand and so effectually closed this
little harbor entrance that the North Truro fishermen have ever
since launched their boats from the bare beach and the little
inland sea thus enclosed has become a long, narrow, fresh-water
pond, on which the Truro children skate in winter while their
elders cut ice for the shipment of fish and the retention of summer
visitors.
But after all it is only man’s changes that make the tip of the
Cape and its near-by narrowness different in our day from what
it was when Myles and his men trod it with matchlocks ready and
matches lighted, spying out the land. These as yet have not gone so
deep but you may find portions that seem as wild and untrammeled
now as they were then. Indeed they may well be identical. That a
row of sand dunes has moved before the winds a half mile east or
west matters little to the eye. They are sand dunes still, and the
vegetation which grew up on them in one place or was wiped out,
cut off by gnawing sand particles and blown away by the wind, or
buried beyond all hope of resurrection in the over-riding drifts
is the same to-day as it was three centuries ago. On this primal
wildness of the Cape the march of human progress has in some
measure encroached, but it is a long way from obliterating it yet.
I fancy a man, choosing his route, could start at Race Point and
go down the land by beach and by dune, to a point far beyond the
one reached by the second, farthest, land-exploring expedition of
the Pilgrim scouts from this point, without seeing more evidence
of human settlement than the wheel tracks of a road deep in sand
or a glimpse of the towering turrets of the Pilgrim monument which
dominates the landscape for a long distance. Through this same
length of Cape wind, of course, the hard ribbon of a State-built
automobile road and the railway. But it is easy to lose and forget
these.
In fact, you need but to climb sand hills and slide down sand
declivities a very short distance north of the center of
Provincetown itself to be as near lost as the Pilgrim scouts were
and to find those dense thickets of thorny growth which they
complained were like to tear their clothes and their very armor
itself off their backs. No doubt the greenbrier was responsible
for much of this wreckage of Pilgrim habiliments. Most varieties of
this wild smilax, of which we have a dozen or so in this country,
are to be found in more southern latitudes. But we grow here in
eastern Massachusetts commonly the Smilax rotundifolia which climbs
to treetops, is as strong almost as cod line, and is well set
with vigorous thorns. In the moist hollows among the sand dunes
this vine finds good sustenance, puts forth most vigorous growth,
and barricades gullies sometimes with an almost impenetrable
entanglement of its thorny ropes. I have rarely seen a tropical
tangle which is more impenetrable than one of these. It climbs and
twines among beach plums and scrubby wild cherry shrubs, weaving
all together in a dense matting. To Pilgrim warriors fresh from
English fields or Dutch meadows this thorny wild tangle must have
been embarrassing indeed. Even without the greenbrier the rich
growth of blueberries, high and low blackberry, wild rose, bayberry
and sweet-fern may well have sorely tangled and tripped their
unaccustomed feet.
All these are growths of the bottom lands, the hollows among the
sand dunes back of the town. Within some of these are little fresh
ponds in which grow waterlilies and the usual aquatic plants of
such places. Here amid the prevailing wildness are many little
beauty spots which, could the Pilgrims have come to them before the
winter frosts had wrecked the vegetation, might have tempted them
to stay. Passing on down the Cape you soon leave these behind and
get into the higher dunes on the narrowest part where vegetation
has little chance for its life. Here for a mile or two one might
well think himself in Sahara. The sands, blown hither and thither
and piled in fantastic shapes by the winds, are as clean as those
of the beaten sea beach, as free from all suspicion of humus.
Yet if you will cross Sahara in most any direction to the
camel’s-hump hills which are scattered over its border as if
a caravan had become petrified there, you will find the humps
sprouting vegetation, a vegetation that is sparse, perhaps, but to
your astonishment is glossy and luxuriant of leaf. More than one
of these mounds represents a drawn battle between whelming sands,
wind-driven, and a vigorous wild cherry tree. How such a tree finds
its start in these shifting, scouring sands is a puzzle. Yet once
started it is easy to follow with more or less accuracy the course
of the war which lasts years. The winds take the young shoot for
a nucleus and pile their sands all up about it, yet may not quite
cover the very tip, for there the varying draft whirls the topmost
sands away again. The sand really helps. It mulches the young plant
and protects it from the winter cold and the gales, from the summer
heat and the drought. Each year the thus protected plant grows
joyously more straight shoots, to be whelmed again almost to the
tips by the sand, and so the merry war goes on till finally we have
a dune twenty-five or thirty feet high, with the trunk and larger
branches of a wild cherry tree for a core, its smooth, hard-packed
surface wreathed with green leaves and often bearing rich, dark
fruit for the delectation of all who pass.
These brief, hilltop oases do not relieve the desert-like wildness
of this narrowest part of the Cape, however; they merely serve to
accentuate it. From them you see the vasty blue velvet of the ocean
outside the Cape and think it but a brief plunge to it through the
glittering sands. Yet as you go toward it you find that one sand
ridge hides another and that the valleys between hide brackish
meadows in which grow strange plants, fleshy of stem and stubby and
thick of leaf, as if they were degenerate offspring of land plants
that had most unhappily intermarried with sea weed. On the margins
of these witch pools it is a pleasure to find growing good old
sturdy homely dusty-miller. Whatever broomstick-riding hags infest
these weird hollows of windy midnights, here stands that plain
common-sense Puritan to shame their reveries. Cineraria maritima
may not have come in the Mayflower, but some ship from England
brought him and he is a Puritan without doubt. If the witches do
gather in these wild hollows of Cape Cod’s desert I warrant you he
gets after them with a tithing rod and drives them back abashed to
their own chimney corners.
Passing the desert you find the Cape widening again and growing
green with vegetation. Yet something of the witch impress is on
it still. In the distance you see forests of pitch pine which as
you approach show branching trees of seemingly luxuriant growth.
As you stride up to these trees you find them shrinking in stature
while yet keeping their proportions and luxuriance, and finally you
march, a modern Gulliver, through this Liliputian forest that may
not reach higher than your shoulder. Here was a Pilgrim’s progress
for Myles and his men that may well have added an eerie touch to
their expectation of wild men of the woods. Such a forest--and I
have no reason to believe the North Truro forests have changed much
in just three hundred years--might well produce trolls or giants,
as well as Indians. I can fancy the mail-clad explorers glancing at
the glades of these enchanted woods with a bit of superstition in
their apprehensions, saying prayers out of one side of their mouths
and charms against evil spirits out of the other. Nor can one blame
them, thinking what these hills are in dreary November weather,
with snow squalls hiding the sun and the wind complaining among
these loneliest of forest trees.
[Illustration: “That little creek that blocked the way of doughty
Myles Standish and his men, sending them inland on a detour.”
_See page 85_ ]
In late summer it is different. Out of the gray reindeer moss and
poverty weed which are more prevalent than grass on the sands
beneath these trees spire slender scapes of Spiranthes gracilis,
the tiny orchid that someone named ladies’ tresses, not because
the flower looks like them but reminds of them, being wayward
and fragrant and lovingly blown by all winds. Here is goldenrod,
and wee asters are just opening their baby-blue eyes to the
approaching autumn. Wood warblers trill in the absurd forest, and
the rich aroma of its leaves subtends the lighter fragrance of the
blossoming wild flowers. In feathery glades among these Truro trees
one might forget that winter is to come and bring bleakness and
desolation unspeakable to the land with him. But if winter does
not always warn, the sea does. Not so deep in any witch hollow
can you hide, not so far may you wander in enchanted forests, as
to escape its call. The trees murmur continually the song of the
surf, and the crash of its breakers echoes continually in the air
overhead. The wind song in the trees is not menacing, it is
simply a minor melody, full of melancholy, as if it knew sad things
and could but let them tinge its music. But even on quiet days when
the south wind drifts gently in over the bay there sounds from the
air above these mellow glades the growl of white-faced breakers
that are never still on the northern shore. Out of the northeast
they roll over gray-green leagues of cold sea, and as they bite
deep into the sand of the shore behind Peaked Hill Bar, and drag
it and all that is on it down into their maw and hurl it all back
again, beating it on the beach and snatching it and beating it
again, it roars inarticulate threats that make the onlooker draw
back glad of a space of summer-dried sand between him and its
depths. If this threatening undertone lingers in the ear even on a
summer day with the wind warm and fragrant from the south, how must
it have sounded to the Pilgrim explorers in a November northeaster?
And yet, for all the November bleakness to come, for all the
ever-warning growl of the sea, I wonder, had the Pilgrims arrived
at Provincetown in late August, if they would not have stayed.
Nowhere in New England would they have found the late summer
huckleberries sweeter or more plentiful, nowhere the beach plums
rounder or more prolific. Here was to be gathered in handfuls
bayberry wax for their candles, and its aromatic incense floats
over the Provincetown hills to-day as rich and enticing as then.
There is little hope of fertility in the sand banks, to be sure,
yet in the cosy hollows between these the homesteaders of to-day
plant corn and beans, pumpkins and peas, and their gardens seem as
luxuriant and productive as any that one might find in Plymouth
County. The native trees of the place seem dwarfed, as I have said.
But in the town itself are willows and silver-leafed poplars,
planted by later pilgrims, which have reached great size, a willow
in particular in the older part of the town being at least five
feet--I would readily believe it is six--in diameter. There must be
fertility somewhere to grow an immigrant to such girth.
Here too, rioting through the old-time flower gardens and out
of them, dancing and gossiping by the roadside and in the
field, sending rich perfume across lots as a dare to us all, is
Bouncing-Bet. I cannot think of this amorous, buxom beauty as
having been allowed to come with a shipload of serious, praying
Pilgrims or any later expedition of stern-visaged Puritans. I
believe she was a stow-away and when she did reach New England
danced blithely across the gang plank and took up her abode
wherever she saw fit. Thus she does to-day. All over the Cape she
strays, a common roadside weed and a beauty of the gardens at once.
Out of this point where the Pilgrim epic first touches our shores
she comes, with the memory of the visitor, a welcome garnish to the
long sandy trail once trod by Myles Standish and his armor-clad
scouts.
VII
IN OLD CONCORD
_The Unspoiled Haunts of Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau_
One may seek in vain in Concord the reason for Concord. “It is an
odd jealousy,” says Emerson, “but the poet finds himself not near
enough to his object. The pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers
before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere.
This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the
triumph that has passed by, and is now in its glancing splendor and
heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or if you stand in the
field, then in the adjacent wood.”
With this same odd jealousy one may tramp the fields and woods,
the pleasant highways and the village green to-day and not quite
find Concord, for the Concord that one’s mind presaged has passed
on. This is but far-off reflection and echo of the triumph. Fuit
Ilium. Yet here is all that first gave the name to the town, and
more. Here are peaceful rivers meeting in rich meadows from which
spring with the rising ground fruitful fields. Here men dwell in
amity and keep singularly intact the beauty and thrift of a New
England village of a century ago, though even here one can see
wealth taking the place of prosperity and the pretentious ugliness
of the modern attempt at Queen Anne architecture shouldering the
quiet dignity of the old Colonial residences off the street. Here
and there a little of the husk of the Concord of the Revolution
remains, though somewhat sadly hemmed in. A simulacrum of the
Concord Bridge still spans the flood, done in resonant cement, but
here the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. Nor is
his jealousy an odd one, for the rude bridge that arched the flood
led somewhere. This echo of the triumph that has passed by drops
him who would tread in the footsteps of heroes within the narrow
bounds of an iron picket fence beyond which keep-off-the-grass
signs doubly defend the way. In the presence of these the Minute
Man seems superfluous. The British never would have got by this.
Fortunately it is easy to believe that the Minute Man has never
seen the barricade or the signs. In him at least Concord, the
Concord of the Revolution, holding in its calm heart sons born
of the soil and sturdy with its grit, is personified for all men
for all time. To turn one’s back upon the fence as he does and
look across the grassy Musketaquid vigilantly at those swaying
lines of British bayonets is to dwell for a little in the Concord
which, with a streak of yellow flame and a whizzing bullet, first
leapt skyrocket-like into the world’s eye. Many things have made
the beautiful village a Mecca whither journey pilgrims from all
over the world. All come eager to look upon the spot where the
farmers marched deliberately upon the king’s troops and dared
fling back into their faces the red gauntlet of murder. It is not
to be believed that curiosity merely is the spirit which informs
these pilgrims. One can but feel that they come to the bridge in
reverence for the principles involved in the fray, and in looking
upon the very spot hope to learn what went into the making of
the men who so boldly hazarded life and worldly comfort and
prosperity in the defense of these principles.
[Illustration: “Here in a volley was the summing up of the nature
of the heroes that had grown up, quite literally, in the Concord
soil.”
_See page 93_ ]
For, after all, it was the men behind the principles that counted.
Here in a volley was the summing up of the nature of the heroes
that had grown up, quite literally, in the Concord soil. Did they
come of the fertility within it? One must say yes, in part. Down
stream a little, not far below the bridge, I found an old-time
path of their day, now long since disused, along which in the rich
bottom land the meadow thistles grew ten feet tall. Such virility
the Concord soil no doubt gave to the heroes who ceased delving in
it only to grasp their muskets for the fray. The Minute Man holds
to his plow still, the sculptor justly thus carving him. Out of the
good brown earth one can easily know that courage and self-reliance
thrilled through share and beam and handle into the bone of the
man himself. Till the earth is fluid such men do not run. Like it
they stand firm. Yet here is but the bony structure of the man in
the Concord fight. Something more must go in to the making of a
hero. It has been justly said that at the narrow bridge stood men
born in direct descent from heroes of a stubborn stand, a stricken
field, of seven hundred years before, and I dare say it is true.
Planted among the Concord meadows and fertile uplands, grown lusty
upon the richness of her soil, were men of Kent, that sturdiest
county in all England; men whose very forbears had stood with
Harold behind the wattled fence at Hastings, and died there with
Norman arrows in their necks. More than all else in the building of
men blood counts.
Yet, tramping the highways and fields of the old town, dreaming
within her woodlands and by her ponds and streams, it pleases me
to think there is more to it even than this. In Plymouth woods
grows the mayflower, as we love to call it, the trailing arbutus,
filling the spaces with rich scent in late April and early May, and
though it is eagerly sought by thousands and is sold in bunches on
all city streets in spring, yet it is not rooted out but retains
its hold on the soil there. In certain other eastern Massachusetts
towns the trailing arbutus never grew, and though I know of many
attempts to transplant it to these none have succeeded beyond a
slight growth that is hardly lusty or likely long to survive. Yet
among the Maine and New Hampshire hills again the mayflower grows
luxuriantly. So it is with the hepatica and the maidenhair fern.
Some cool northern hillsides are beautiful with these, others with
equal shade, cool springs, moss and gravel have never known these
plants. No. More is necessary than that the blood of men should
fall and take root in fertile soil. There must be fluid, where seed
and fertility meet, some of that ichor which flows in the veins of
the immortals, and it must enter into the growth. Only thus does
Hodge become hero. Without it he holds both hands on the plow and
lets the British pass the bridge and go on. How many nations have
thus been stillborn and buried in the furrow no history can tell us.
Little by little nature gives us the secrets of these things, as
when after a time she taught the Australian planters why clover
would not produce seed there. It grew well in fertile soil when
seed was brought from England; it blossomed and made good fodder
for cattle, but never a seed. Then they imported bumble-bees from
the English meadows with probosces long enough to reach the nectar
in the bottom of the clover blooms and thus be pollen carriers
from plant to plant. Here was the solution of the problem, the
ichor of immortality that the clover needed. So with alfalfa and
most leguminous plants. Scientific investigation has shown that if
seeds of these are to grow well and thrive in new regions distant
from that of their cultivation more is needed than the right soil
and climate. Certain mysterious bacteria are present on the roots
of all plants of this genus, and in some obscure way take from the
soil and give to the plants the elements of vigor and success. Now
the scientific horticulturist steeps his seeds of alfalfa or other
leguminous plants in a culture of these bacteria, and knows that
if his planting is in fertile ground and the sun and rain do their
work well his harvest will be bountiful. Here again is the ichor of
the gods, Vishnu become fluid and incarnating himself in obscure
bacteria for the building of the plant world.
So, I can but fancy, has it been with Concord and her men. The
seed of the Kentish heroes of Harold’s time has grown since in many
soils. In Concord when time was ripe it found fluid there some of
the ichor of the immortals coursing through farming tools to the
making of fire for heroic deeds. The Concord fight did not happen;
it had to be. It was not that every Concord farmer’s barn was full
of munitions of war. Every Concord farmer’s blood was full of
powder. The shot had to be fired there.
For nearly three-quarters of a century this mysterious essence of
greatness that one feels must always be present in places where
great deeds have taken place seems to have flashed no spark to
the outer world. Grass waved on Concord farms and fell before the
scythe, and new generations of farmers grew up to take the places
of those which passed unmarked outside their community. For that
space of time Concord was, very much as Troy was, the scene of
a memorable fight. Then came Emerson to bring back to the place
something of the nobility of spirit and independence of thought
and action that must have come to it with his ancestor the Rev.
Peter Bulkeley. Here was the scholar and the preacher instead
of the farmer, but born of the same old sturdy stock and come
back to set roots in Concord soil. Here he walked daily in the
fields and woods with his veins open to that same ichor of the
gods which had not made patriots and heroes indeed, but had given
them tongues, which seems to have given power of expression to him
who was already poet and seer. Here with him, grown up out of the
same town, was Thoreau. Hither came Alcott to paint the bubbles
of his inchoate dreams in rainbow conversation. Hither too came
Hawthorne, to tramp the woods as did the others and feel as did
they the divine afflatus drumming in their veins and the impulse to
sturdy independence coming up to them out of the Concord soil as it
thrilled up to the Minute Man through his plow handle. It was not
so much that these men had within them the poetic fire, but that it
burned there on the hearth of freedom, independence, and intense
individuality.
[Illustration: “Hither too came Hawthorne, to tramp the woods as
did the others and feel as did they the divine afflatus.”]
With them Concord came again into the eye of the world, and because
they preached as well as wrought, the world’s eye is still upon it.
And, as after the Minute Man and his times passed the little
village slumbered, seeming to wait placidly for the next troubling
of the waters, so now Sleepy Hollow, where these four dreamers
lie, seems to be the real center of the town. The mystic dreams
of Hawthorne, the golden serenity of Emerson, the primal wisdom
of Thoreau, and the roseate fog of Alcott’s transcendentalism all
flow serenely forth over its rim and flood the green hills and
shadowy valleys of the region with peace and sweet content. Here,
almost side by side, rest the four, and such blood of the gods
as flowed in them is piped to all the world by way of what each
wrote. No wonder Concord is a place of pilgrimage and people come
by thousands to these graves as devout Mohammedans go to that of
the prophet. Red oaks set their roots deep in the knoll where these
lie, and white pines tower above them as if forming the first and
most fitting round in their ladder to the stars. Out of the tops
of these pines the harper wind should pluck harmonies beyond those
common to groves.
Hither come the pilgrims that have hastily viewed the Minute Man
and the bridge, puffing in rows up the hillside and standing,
breathless but voluble, before the stone they have sought.
Reverence in their hearts they have without doubt, yet little of
it gets to the surface as they, panting, recite one to another
the legend of the stone and pass on. It is a wonderful piece of
white quartz that marks Emerson’s grave. There is dignity in its
roughness, and something of the pure opacity of Emerson’s thought
seems to dwell in its white crystals, fittingly touched here and
there with a color which might be the matrix of all gems. One
thinks from what he sees of those who pass that Emerson is best
known, Hawthorne most loved, while Thoreau and the Alcotts have
each their own special worshipers. Now and then one sees much
reverence based upon a rather slender knowledge, as when a young
man balancing a year-old baby on his arm said to his wife, “This,
my dear, is the grave of Thorough, David Thorough, the man who
wrote ‘Zounds.’” One can fancy David, who was Henry to most of us,
being willing to be called thorough, yet hesitating to acknowledge
“Zounds,” except perhaps as an exclamation of astonishment. As an
offset for this I might cite the small boy who, having been shown
the stone which marks the grave of Louisa Alcott, gave it shyly a
little loving hug and a pat before he went away. In the highest
group of Concord immortals it is not customary to include the
talented daughter of the transcendentalist, yet of the worshipers
who pass not a few lay their fondest offering on the turf that
covers her.
For a few hours out of the twenty-four, visitors to Sleepy Hollow
come and go. Except for that the hollow indeed sleeps, steeped in
the gentle peace of all nature which seems to well up out of it and
encompass all the region round about in its golden haze. Surely
the lotos grows where the Assabet and the Sudbury join to make the
Concord, that sleeps on so gently that one may hardly know that
it is on its way. The lotos grows there and the land has eaten of
it, for the bustle of the world passes over it but does not change
nor wake it. The very farms of Revolutionary time linger on, and
if they are tilled now as they were then I do not know, but the
cattle graze on the hills in herds as great now as then, and as
broad cornfields toss their golden plumes toward the sky. The
houses where dwelt Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, still stand,
and into the fields round about them few others have crowded. The
fertile soil still yields crops to the husbandman, in whose breast
slumbers mayhap the same sturdy courage which made the Minute Men
and would make others should the need arise. Manufacturing, summer
hotel keeping, these things do not seem to have touched the town
much. I fancy it as lying fallow, waiting the flow of that ichor of
the immortals that shall some day again waken it to great things.
“The Sphinx is drowsy,
Her wings are furled;
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world,
Who’ll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept?
I awaited the seer
While they slumbered and slept.
“The fate of the man-child,
The meaning of man;
Known fruit of the unknown;
Dædalian plan;
Out of sleeping a waking;
Out of waking a sleep;
Life death overtaking;
Deep underneath deep.”
Thus we find Concord to-day an historical and literary Mecca, a
fine example of what has always been best in a New England town,
holding firmly to the old, choosing, one believes, the best in the
new, brooding the past in dreamy persistency, biding its time for
the good that the future is to bring. Some day out of its lush
meadows and the rich mold of its hillsides will flow again into
the veins of men that subtle fluid of flame that makes heroes and
poets. It is for this the fine old town lies fallow, and in this
shall be the justification for its patience.
VIII
“THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET”
_Its Home in an Unspoiled Corner of Pilgrim Land_
It is not often that the scenes of a man’s childhood remain
measurably intact when that childhood occurred something over a
century ago. Yet that is the case with Samuel Woodworth, whose
detached name I fancy not one man in a thousand would recall,
even among well-read people. Yet you have but to mention “The Old
Oaken Bucket” and you get an answering smile of recognition from
the veriest ignoramus. Even if he cannot recall the words he can
whistle the tune.
People given to moralizing are apt to take instances like this for
a topic and wind up with the familiar aphorism, “Such is fame!”
And such it seems to be, rightfully enough I dare say. Here was a
man of journalistic training and literary instincts who must have
figured fairly large in the New York journalistic world of his day.
He wrote novels, plays, operas and a vast amount of miscellaneous
matter. He founded one journal after another, among these the New
York Mirror, yet the world recalls him only by way of the little
song, sweated out of him by the heat of an August day in New York.
Those things that the poets “dash off” at one sitting are usually,
rightfully, the cause of editorial derision. Now and then, it
seems, something is wrung out of a man’s heart at a single twist
that taps the deep springs of immortality.
Governor Bradford, writing of Plymouth Colony, early regretted
that his Pilgrims were little content to stay within easy reach of
Plymouth Rock but remained Pilgrims still, migrating through the
woods and along shore to seek new and better farms. This was but
the further expression of that wanderlust which had brought so many
of the followers of the Pilgrims over seas. The spirit of adventure
manned many a ship that followed the Mayflower to Massachusetts
Bay, and the descendants of these adventurous migrants have since
explored and settled the country to the very tip of Alaska.
One of the first of these early impulses to move on took Pilgrims
to Scituate, and here in 1636 an ancestor of Woodworth dug and
stoned a well, thirty-six feet deep, in that little corner of the
present town now known as Greenbush. The Pilgrim settlers and
farmers marked their trails behind them with stones that stand
as their most lasting physical memorial to this day. One can but
fancy that the glaciers which built the land the Pilgrims were to
occupy, grinding, mixing, sifting soil from a thousand miles of
back country and dropping it in southeastern Massachusetts, moved
on ball-bearings, so numerous are the rounded boulders they dropped
behind them in this fertile mixture. The stronger and richer the
soil the more of these boulders are to be found in it, and the
Pilgrim farmers had a double task in the clearing of their farms.
They must not only fell the trees and remove the stumps, but they
must go deeper and get out the rocks before their plows could
furrow it. How well they set their stubborn wills to the grubbing
of these rocks we know as we look upon their fields, to this day
bound in neat parallelograms of gray granite, each round stone set
upon two others, as the Pilgrims taught their sons to place them,
little disturbed by stormy centuries that have merely served to
garland them with ivy, clematis and woodbine.
Wild things of the woods have come to know and love these old stone
walls. Chipmunks, woodchucks, foxes even, find refuge and make
their homes in the artificial galleries thus enduringly placed,
and the wild flowers of the field snuggle up to them to escape the
farmer’s scythe, paying for their shelter in beauty and fragrance.
Close to the walls, however well shorn the field, the winds of this
first day of October toss yellow curls of goldenrod blooms, while
the asters, children of the year’s late prime, open wide, roguish
blue eyes among them. Particularly do these wayside children love
to ramble along one of the old stone-walled lanes leading from the
pasture to the cow barn, as if they came up with the cows night
after night, and lingered outside only because the barn is closed
on them before they managed to loiter in.
“The cot of my father, the dairy house nigh it,
And e’en the rude bucket that hung in the well”
are gone, but the old barn still stands in its wonted place and
to it come the cattle by the same old lane, the cattle lane that
has been such since that pioneer set the gray stones as a fence on
either side of it nearly three hundred years ago. Up and down this
lane the farm boys of one generation after another have whistled
and dreamed dreams while the cattle went quickly forth to pasture
in the morning or loitered back at milking time, nor hardly has one
stone slipped from another in the passing of the centuries. Yet
they have been there a long time, those stones, the gray lichens
have grown black on their sides and they long ago seem to have
settled together with an air of finality. A newly built stone
wall does not look like this. It is an excrescence, an artificial
boundary. These stone walls are nothing like that. They look as if
the glacier had intended that they should rest there, a part of
the rock-ribbed arrangement of the earth as it left it. So with
all these gray stone walls that bound the farm and the road. They
long ago lost the air of having been put in place by man and have
lapsed into the primeval arrangement of valleys and moraines,
a logical result of first causes. There is a restful, old-home
feeling about the old barn and this old lane, and it is no wonder
the wild flowers that have strolled into it love to remain.
All September it has been golden with the velvety yellow blooms of
the fall dandelion, a milky way of yellow stars that twinkled as
the wee winds slip through the pasture bars and wander down the
lane. Now, with October at hand, they pale a little at the thought
of coming winter, as the stars do at the approach of dawn, and
here and there is one that is shivering into white pappus, ready
to vanish, ghost like, down the wind. But these are but few; most
of them hold their gold bravely toward the sun still and valiantly
deny that there is anything to be afraid of. The grass is as green
and velvety there as in spring, but the other denizens of this lane
know that winter is coming and show it. The cinnamon and royal
ferns that have come up from the meadow in times past and now
snuggle their roots down between the very stones of the foundation
of the wall, know it, for they have paled to a wan, tan brown, as
delicately beautiful as you shall find on any autumn-tinted tree
of the forest. The woodbine is a deep, rich red, and the poison
ivy that helps it garland the old walls has ripened its leaves to
the loveliest apple reds and yellows that can be found. There are
sweeter-natured things than this poison ivy which beautifies old
walls and fences at this time of year, but nothing that gives us
quite such softly delectable tints of ripeness. It seems as if
these ought to tempt us from the cheek of some rarely palatable
fruit rather than the poisonous leaf of this vixenish vine.
“The wide-spreading pond and the mill that stood by it” have long
since done their work and the mill of Woodworth’s day has passed.
Yet the pond remains in all respects as he knew it, the deep
tangled wildwood lining its one shore, the road and a fringe of
houses skirting the other, and below it another mill, long since
fallen into disuse and decay, for the one that Woodworth recalled
was a product of the century before the last one. Over the stones
of the old dam the water trickles down and meets the salt tides
of the sea, and here at a step the boy of more than a century
ago passed from one country of romance to another. Up stream lie
to-day as they did then the rolling billows of land, fertile
fields, wooded hills and the tangle of swamp and thicket that is,
I believe, more luxuriant in those parts of Plymouth County where
the forest comes down to the sea than in any other place. I have
never found, in tropical jungle or the warmer countries of the
temperate zone, such matted areas of richly growing shrub and vine
as you meet in these Plymouth County bottom lands where the fresh
water comes down to meet the salt. Fox grapes luxuriate there and
woodbine and convolvulus climb and twine, but the toughest of the
tangle is due to the greenbrier, to penetrate which one needs to
use a machete as much as ever Cuban did in Camaguay. The greenbrier
is tough and its thorns repellent, yet its glossy smilax leaves
are beautifully decorative and its close-set bunches of deep blue
fruit, now ripe, please the eye if not the palate. Thickets like
these border the pasture paths in this rich bottom land walling
in the wanderer with high tapestried walls of vivid green, richly
patterned with varied leaves and flowers the long summer through.
Somewhere there may be a more beautiful country than such pasture
land. Wandering far I have failed to find it.
When the east wind blows in on this lovely country of pasture,
field and woodland it brings the roar of the sea and the smell of
it. The breakers that smash against the boulder-strewn base of
Third Cliff send the call of the wide spaces of the earth into the
secluded glades, and match the lure of their odors against the
fragrance of the woods. And here between the two lies the level
stretch of the salt marsh, the no-man’s land, the Tom Tiddler’s
ground, which the sea may seize but never quite possess, which the
country may invade but never overrun. The marsh is a little border
world of itself, with its own plants, its own birds, even its
own air. It infuses into the cool rich breath of the sea a tonic
fragrance of its own, and there is a rich harmony in the coloring
of its wide levels that more than matches any beauty that the land
or the sea has to give. Colors drawn from the weeds of the deep sea
caves and the clear depths of cool brine, olives and browns and
greens, keen grays and soft blues, are in the marsh, shaded and
toned to an individuality of their own, as tonic to the eye as its
ozonic odors are to the sense of smell.
Through these comes the full tide twice a day, bringing the salt,
cool tang of its kisses to the feet of the old dam, there to meet
those of the stream brought far from cool springs in the hills and
daily perfumed with the petals of some newly ripened wild flower,
caltha in the spring, wild rose in the summer, clematis now, with
aster and witch hazel still to come. No wonder “the wide-spreading
pond and the mill that stood by it; the bridge and the rock
where the cataract fell,” were strongly fixed on the memory of
one who had in boyhood been familiar with these scenes. The farm
of his ancestors may not have held these by deed, nor the level
wonder of the marsh, and the blue reaches of the sea beyond, but
it held them, nevertheless, and the man that owned the one had
an inalienable right to the other. Nor need the passer in this
unspoiled, half-forgotten corner of Pilgrim land be without them,
though he merely rent a room by the day or come with staff and
scrip for but an afternoon.
[Illustration: “The water from the old well cooled the throat
of his memory and sparkled to the eye of it as he recalled the
dripping bucket.”]
It was about these, too, that “The Old Oaken Bucket” was written,
though the words of the poem do not say so, nor, I fancy, did the
author realize it. The water from the old well cooled the throat
of his memory with these and sparkled with them to the eye of it
as he recalled the dripping bucket. Without the background there
were no picture, however we forget it in the vivid figures in the
foreground. The background of Woodworth’s picture remains much as
he left it when, a boy in his teens, he started for Boston to make
the fortune he was later to find in New York. Of the figures he
painted in the immediate foreground, some remain vivid still, after
the lapse of a century. It is not so with the orchard. The great
trees that still bear good fruit that they toss over into the lane
up by the old barn are vigorous in an old age that might well seem
to go back and include the beginning of the nineteenth century, but
it does not. The trees were planted since the poet’s day. One tree
only of the orchard he knew remains. That stands just within the
wall at the road, a stone’s toss from the well, bearing on its
topmost growth old-fashioned russets. But this tree was top-grafted
some time in the early years of the last century. Before that it
was of a now forgotten variety known to our great-grandfathers as
“high top.” Of late sprouts from below the graft on this old tree
have come to maturity, and the visitor to the place may taste the
same apples, with their sweet and pleasant flavor, that pleased the
palate of the poet a century and more ago.
The old oaken bucket itself has passed and been replaced many a
time since Woodworth’s day; the wooden well-curb and the sweep,
swinging in the upright crotch, have come and gone and come again.
Curb and bucket and sweep are there to-day, similar in form and
appearance no doubt and equally useful for the drawing of water,
as near like those of which the poet wrote as is the water of
to-day like that of his time. Even at the well itself the lapse of
a century has left but one thing permanent. That is the cylinder
of stone that walls it in. Here again, as in the walls surrounding
the ancient fields, the stones that were the ball-bearings of
the glacier serve as the enduring monument of the pioneer. And in
these we have the most lasting one that he could raise to himself.
In the passing of enough centuries the slow heaving of frost and
subsidence of thaw may throw out of alignment the carefully laid
old stone walls. Nature herself in her own good time will throw
down and scatter these tables of stone in which the early settlers
wrote their laws of the fields. New owners will change those laws
and use the stones for the foundations of other enterprises and
thus in time will pass these monuments to the memories of the
earliest occupants. It is not so with the old wells. They may
fall into disuse, be covered over and filled in and forgotten.
But the carefully laid cylinders of stone that enclosed them will
remain out of reach of frost, untouched by man through indefinite
centuries. Thirty, fifty, in some instances sixty and more feet
beneath the surface they lie, and the man of a thousand years hence
will find these memorials of early occupancy intact if he will
but dig in the right place for them. The old well is the first
settler’s most enduring monument. I fancy the poem will outlast
that, not for its singing quality which early caused it to be set
to music that has lived along with the words, though that might
well justify a green old age; not for its beauty of diction or its
purity of thought, but because it voices a sentiment that the whole
of humanity understands and approves. None so proud and none so
mean but he knows the taste of that draught of cool water and the
gratitude it inspires. To lean over the curb of the pioneer’s well
is to see your own face reflected as if with that of all mankind
in a little circle that is the counterpart of the sky overhead.
And out of the blue depths shines the gratitude of all mankind for
thirst well quenched. Adam, or whatever the first man was called,
thus gave thanks on his knees for a first draught from some clear
spring and saw the sky reflected as he did so. Even the thoughts
which “Home, Sweet Home” inspires do not go quite so far back to
the beginnings of the race, nor is that song any more likely to
live to remote times than is “The Old Oaken Bucket.”
IX
IN OLD NEWBURYPORT
_The Dignity, Quiet, and Beauty of the One-Time Busy Seaport_
Salt marshes surround Newburyport with their level beauty and
through them you must come to it. Through them, too, the sea comes
to it, stretching long arms lovingly as if to clasp it and bear
it away. Thus fondly but placidly the tides twice a day give the
gentle old city a hug and then go about their business. It is no
wonder that this corner of old Newbury knew it belonged to the
ocean rather than to the land and was set off as a seaport long
ago. In the heyday of their affection the town sent forth its
splendid ships in great numbers to all seas, and the seas in return
sent tribute of all distant climes to Newburyport. For more than
a century shipmasters and sailors born on the long ridge south of
the Merrimac knew Guadeloupe and Surinam, Port au Prince and St.
Martins as well as they knew the streets of their own towns, for
the trade with the West Indies was very large. Ships launched at
Newburyport and manned by her men brought back wine from Madeira,
carpeting, silks and glassware from Bilbao, salt from Cadiz and
from Turk’s Island, linen from Ireland, earthenware from Dunkirk.
They brought back, too, knowledge of the wide spaces of the earth
and distant cities, and it is no wonder the town grew in dignity as
well as wealth, for it had a broad outlook upon the world. In the
year 1810, more than a century ago, twenty-one full-rigged ships,
thirteen brigs and a schooner were built and set sail on maiden
voyages from Newburyport. On the first day of May, ten years later,
forty vessels that had been held in port by contrary winds put to
sea. The thought of such fleets makes the harbor lonely to-day when
the only masts in sight are those of a coal barge or two, waiting
for the surf on the bar to go down and let them out.
It is only a little over half a century since Newburyport saw the
launching of a ship that was famous on all seas, her exploits
woven into sea chanteys and ringing in hoarse chorus round the
capstan in many a distant port while the men bent to the capstan
bars, the pawl clicked, and ponderous anchors strained upward
out of the ooze. That was the clipper-built Liverpool packet
Dreadnaught. She was known as “The Wild Boat of the Atlantic” and
“The Flying Dutchman.” Twice she carried the latest American news
to Europe, slipping in between steamers. Once in 1860 she crossed
the wind-swept western ocean in nine days and thirteen hours,
from Sandy Hook to Queenstown, a pace which many an ocean-going
steamship does not better to-day. She was conspicuous on all seas
for the red cross painted on her foretopsail. “The Port” was proud
indeed of this vessel, and as I stood on the top deck of the gray
old custom house, looking down on the empty harbor on the one hand
and up the ridge at the great square houses of the old sea captains
and ship-builders on the other, I thought the wind crooned a snatch
or two of deep sea chantey in memory of it round the gray stone
cornices at my feet:
“There’s a saucy, wild packet, a packet of fame,
She belongs to New York and the Dreadnaught’s her name.
She’s bound to the eastward where stormy winds blow,
Bound away in the Dreadnaught to the eastward we go.
Oh, the Dreadnaught’s a-howling down the Long Island shore,
Captain Samuels will drive her as he’s oft done before,
With every stitch drawing aloft and alow,
She’s a Liverpool packet; Lord God, see her go!”
Such was the building of Newburyport, and such is the romance of
memory that comes in to her on every wind of the sea to-day, though
the ships have sailed away never to return and even the foundations
of the old ship yards are hard to find. The wealth and dignity of
the old sea-faring days remain. The custom house bravely hoists its
flag each morning and waits in gray silence for the cargoes that
rarely come. Old age comes to it, though, and to climb the worn
stairs to its top is to walk with the men of other years, hearing
their footfalls in the echo of your own and seeing them vanish,
phantoms of gray dust, through dark doorways into the forgotten
past. Piled in the corners as they pass you see the outworn flags
of other years, as if draping huddled heaps of the achievements of
these phantom shipmasters. Perhaps in some dark corner lies another
story like that of the Scarlet Letter.
Along the street on which the custom house faces passed the
sea-faring traffic of the day, and the buildings suggest Wapping
Old Stairs or some such quaint corner of old London near the
Thames. The smell of the sea lingers round all corners, and in
the little shop windows are crowded for sale pictures of ships
and fragments of ship chandlery and curios from ports once a
half-year’s sail away; wares that one fancies have waited a century
for customers. The street itself loves the sea so well that it is
always trying to reach it, swerving toward the water line often
and making detours when blocked, and always sending down little
messenger side streets to bring it news from the very shore, thus
winding its way always eastward till it gets an unobstructed view
of the harbor entrance across Joppa flats and is no doubt content,
strolling there along the very margin with a blear eye turned
seaward for the ships that come no more.
In the debris the centuries have dropped along this once busy
street the quaint and curious mingling of useless utilities and
unvalued treasures, one is reminded of the quaint and curious
characters such surroundings seem to evolve. Among such Dickens
finds an Old Curiosity Shop and its keeper and makes them immortal.
Yet it is not often that the queer character himself goes into
print and leaves his name and pokes his personality into the
dusty corners of literary fame, to be picked out and wondered at
centuries after. Newburyport had one such, the story of whose
amazing eccentricities still lasts, linked with the dignified
reputation of the old seaport. These stories in time may be
forgotten, though they have lasted more than a century, but his
astounding book, “Pickles for the Knowing Ones,” bids fair to
last far longer, as long in fact as libraries collect and hold
absurdities of print as well as literature. It is one of the
ironies of fame that Newburyport, which can rightfully boast of
being the town in which William Lloyd Garrison established his
Free Press and wrote his anti-slavery broadsides, the town where
Whittier’s first poem was published, where Whitefield preached
and John Pierpont wrote the best of his patriotic verse, where
Richard Hildreth began his work as a historian, where many another
author of good repute was born, or lived, or died, where Harriet
Prescott Spofford still lives and adds to her literary fame, should
recall to the minds of many of us only the name of the preposterous
“Lord” Timothy Dexter. After all, perhaps it is style alone which
survives. Dexter’s style was like nothing which ever went before
or has yet come after, in print. It takes an inventive mind to
find any meaning at all in what he wrote, sense being as scarce as
punctuation, of which there was none. Yet the trail of Lord Timothy
Dexter is still eagerly followed through Newburyport annals by
people who forget that John Pierpont ever lived, and we all gloat
over the punctuation marks added in a solid page at the end of his
second edition, to be used as the reader’s fancy dictates.
Lord Dexter lived in the solid, dignified upper portion of the
town. His mind and character belonged in the queer junk in the
little shop windows down near the water front. I can fancy John
Pierpont drawing the clear, denunciatory fire of his verses from
the keen sea winds that blow on the top of the ridge where High
Street is lined with the noble, square, stately old houses of
the one-time magnates of the place. It is not a far cry from the
shacks of Joppa and the clutter shops of the lower regions to
this atmosphere of worth and dignity along the higher levels of
Newburyport. I have an idea that more than one youth who climbed
first to reef topsails later climbed to a master’s berth and an
owner’s financial security, his abode climbing with him from the
jumbled, characterless houses of the lower regions to one of these
mansions in the skies: It may be that there is equal opportunity
now, but it is not so easy to see. Sea-faring and shipbuilding
could not make men, but it did train them to wide outlooks and
large experience in self-control and self-reliance; larger, I
believe, than do the shoe factories and other industries that have
taken their places in this town that the sea once made its own.
Newburyport does not grow in population, but it holds its own with
a peaceful dignity and a quiet beauty that seem to belong to it as
much as do its surrounding marshes. Leisure, peace, and an assured
prosperity seem to mark the one as well as the other, whether ships
come or go. There is little bustle, even at its busiest points,
and you have but to go a little way from these to find as sweet a
country as any part of New England has to offer. Passing up the
river bank where the marsh grasses grow over the rotting stocks
of the old shipyards, you find the hills coming down to meet the
marshes and mingling with them in friendly converse. The town drops
behind you, and gentle hillocks offer kindly asylum on the placid
levels of the river bank, beauty spots full of half-wild life.
[Illustration: The Newburyport home of Joshua Coffin, the early
friend and teacher of Whittier]
Here and there on these is an apple tree that has strolled down
from suburban orchards as if to view the beauty of the river, and
liked the place so well that it stayed, glad to escape the humdrum
of ordered life, sending out wild shoots at will and producing
fruit that has a half-wild vigor of flavor that puts the orchard
apples to shame for their insipidity. They riot in lawless growth,
these runaway trees, and welcome their boon companions, crows and
jays, spreading an autumnal feast for their delectation and
holding the fragments far into the winter that none may go away
from a visit hungry. The pasture cedars, that love the river air,
but may not live on the marsh, have built seaside colonies on
these hillocks and spread a feast of blue cedar berries for all
passing flocks. Here the robins, now gathering for their winter
flight south, flock and feed, holding their ground at the approach
of man, crying “Tut, tut!” to his intrusion. With them are the
cedar wax-wings, also very fond of the cedar berries, the soft
gray-browns of the bird’s plumage blending most pleasantly with
the olive greens of the cedars. There is a dainty, sleek beauty
about this bird that harmonizes wonderfully well with the cedar
trees which it frequents, and the little red sealing-wax tips
on its wing feathers make one think that the flock is bringing
Christmas decorations of holly berries to each tree to deck it for
the holiday season. In wild apple trees the robins seem less than
half-wild and in the cedars the wax-wings more than half-tame. The
two give a friendly spirit to the spot and at once make you feel
that you are welcome. To sit quietly in such a place for five
minutes is to make it your own home, and you go away with regret
and a certain homesickness. Huckleberry bushes, maples, beach plums
and birches stand admiringly round, and wild grasses and pasture
flowers crowd in and add to the cosiness.
Of these wild flowers the seaside goldenrod is most profuse.
Pasture-born like the cedars, it too loves the sea and crowds to
its very edge like the people at Revere and Nantasket, so close
indeed that at high tides the smelt and young herring, swimming in
silver shoals, nibble at the bare toes the plants dabble in the
water. You may know this even if you do not see the nibblers, for
the plants quiver and shake with suppressed laughter at being thus
tickled. The seaside goldenrod is prettier now in the cool winds
and under the pale October sun’s slant rays than it was in the
heyday of August, when it burgeoned with yellow racemes of rather
coarse bloom. Its head-gear is in the full autumn style, and it
bows beneath the weight of ostrich-plume pappus and softens all the
foreground of the view with gray fluff.
From these sea margins where tide and river mingle and meet the
borders of Newburyport one gets glimpses of higher hills up-river,
dark with pines and gorgeous with autumn scarlet and gold, and
among them the picturesque towers and cadenced sweep of the old
chain bridge that takes you across the river to Amesbury. Down
river to the old chain bridge the rough rocks of the New Hampshire
hills, wandering far, come to get a taste of salt, and put their
lips to the water at the island home of Harriet Prescott Spofford,
whose sparkling verse and piquant prose has made the name of
Newburyport known in literary annals for more than half a century.
Hills and sea meet there, and all the beauty of marsh, pasture and
woodland surround the spot. It is no wonder that romance, vivid
life and rich atmosphere inform her work.
[Illustration: “Down river to the old chain bridge the rough rocks
of the New Hampshire hills come to get a taste of salt.”
_See page 129_ ]
The herring gulls which go up and down with the tides no longer
follow the Newburyport sails to sea and escort them back again
to port, pensioners on the bounty which ships always scatter in
their wake. Instead they have reverted to their original, more
noble trade of fishing. Every time the smelt or the young herring
come in to make game of the seaside goldenrod by tickling their
toes they risk their lives. The gulls soar and wheel over the
shallows and tide rips, their wings and bodies set and quiet like
soaring monoplanes, their heads hanging loosely on supple necks
and turning this way and that as they peer with far-sighted eyes
at all beneath the surface. Suddenly the stays of the monoplane
seem to break, the wings crumple, and the bird falls to water as
if shot, going often beneath the surface. In a second he emerges
with lifted bill and you see the silvery flash of some unlucky fish
disappearing down the capacious gullet. Often this is a polite
morsel, but not always. The gull is not over particular in his
mouthfuls, and I have seen one take a herring as long as his own
body, head first, swallowing the fish as far as circumstances would
permit, then sitting placidly on the water with several inches of
shiny tail protruding, waiting, like continuous performance table
d’hôte diners, for the first course to be digested so that there
should be room to swallow the last one. Birds of the sea meet birds
of the land here, and birds of the marsh join them. Over the
river the fish hawk soars as well as the gulls, and the marsh hawk
crosses from one mouse-hunting ground to another. Out of the sky
a Wilson’s snipe fell like a gray aerolite, while I was there, a
lightning-like plunge ended by an alighting as soft as the fall of
a thistledown on the marsh grass. This was proof that the drought
has been long, for the Wilson’s snipe likes the fresh water meadows
best and rarely comes to the salt marsh grass unless his familiar
stabbing ground is too dry to be thrust with comfort. He came like
a visitor from another sphere. In the second of his lighting I
caught a flash of his mottle gray and brown, then he vanished as if
his plunge had after all taken him far into the ground and all you
need expect to find was the hole by which he entered. Yet neither
bird nor hole could I find by diligent search in the marsh grass.
Never a top waved with his progress among the culms, and only by
scent could he have been followed.
On the other side of Newburyport you come to the marshes again,
great level stretches of them, silvered with winding threads of
the sea that seek far through the slender creeks, marshes dotted
at this time of year as far as eye can see with the rounded domes
of many-footed haystacks, a place where the full sky is yours for
the seeing, where all winds blow free, and blowing bring to your
lungs the rich, life-giving scent of the deep sea tides, caught
and concentrated in the tangled grasses and touched with a faint
essence of their own perfume. Beyond again lies Plum Island. Here
the sea beats in savage vigor, and I seem to get in its voice
an echo of the sonorous poems in which John Pierpont denounced
slavery. Pierpont was one of the great writers of his day, and his
work lasts. He may well have got the culture, depth and dignity
of his multitudinous sermons from the atmosphere he found among
the great square houses built by the old-time shipmasters and
shipbuilders on the ridge which is the backbone of the city. In the
laughing beauty of the up-river scenery I can fancy him finding
light-winged fancies such as the couplet he wrote in Miss Octavia’s
album:
“Octavia; what, the eighth! If bounteous heaven
Hath made eight such, where are the other seven?”
Only in the deep sea thunder of the waves on Plum Island beach
could he have heard such notes as echoed in “The Tocsin”:
“Ay--slaves of slaves. What, sleep ye yet,
And dream of freedom while ye sleep?
Ay, dream while slavery’s foot is set
So firmly on your necks, while deep
The chain her quivering flesh endures
Gnaws likes a cancer into yours!”
It is easy to see him striding home from a session with the Plum
Island waves and pausing to see the snow settle on and blot out
the outlines of the peaceful marshes, drawing from the sight his
best-remembered, most-quoted verse:
“A weapon that comes down as still
As snowflakes fall upon the sod,
But executes the freeman’s will
As lightnings do the will of God;
And from its force nor doors nor locks
Can shield you; ’tis the ballot box.”
I do not know if he wrote these lines here or later when he had
become one of Boston’s famous preachers, but I do know that he saw
these things in the years that he lived in the fine old town and
carried the memory of them long with him, just as all of us who
visit the place carry away lasting impressions of its quaintness,
dignity and wholesome quiet, and the beauty of its surrounding
country.
X
PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS
_Adventures of a Spring Day in Pilgrim Land_
The first day on which one might hope for mayflowers came smilingly
to Plymouth in late April. The day before a bitter northeaster had
swept through the town, a gale like the December one in which the
Pilgrim’s shallop first weathered Manomet head and with broken
mast limped in under the lee of Clark’s Island. No promise of May
had been in this wild storm that keened the dead on Burial Hill,
yet this day that followed was to be better than a promise. It was
May itself, come a few days ahead of the calendar, so changeful
is April in Pilgrim land. The gale, ashamed of itself, ceased its
outcry in the darkness of full night and the chill of a white frost
followed on all the land.
In the darkest hour of this night I saw a thin point of light rise
out of the mystery of the sea far to the eastward, the tiny sail
of the shallop of the old moon, blown landward by little winds of
dawn, making port on the shore of “hither Manomet.” In the velvety
blackness of this ultimate hour of night the slender sail curved
sweetly backward toward the sea, and the shallop seemed drawn to
the land by a lodestone, as was the ship of Sinbad the Sailor, and
when it magically climbed the dark headland and sailed away into
the sky above it drew out of the sea behind it the first light
of glorious morning. From Manomet head to the Gurnet the horizon
showed a level sea line of palest garnet that deepened, moment by
moment, till the coming sun arched it with rose and bounded from
it, a flattened globule of ruby fire. I like to think that the
path of gold with which the sun glorified the stippled steel of
the sea was the very one by which the first Mayflower came in from
Provincetown, the sails nobly set and the ship pressing onward to
that memorable anchorage within the protecting white arm of the
sandspit.
I like to think that the sweet curve of the old moon’s slender sail
sways in by Manomet each month in loving remembrance of that other
shallop that so magically won by the roar of the breakers on the
dark point and brought the simple record of faith and courage for
our loving remembrance. But whether these things are so or not I
know that the very first rays of the morning sun pass in level
neglect over the bay and the town to lay a wreath of light on
the brow of Burial Hill and touch with celestial gold the simple
granite shaft that stands over the grave of William Bradford,
historian of Plymouth Colony and writer of the first American book.
Such is the unfailing ceremony of sunrise in Plymouth, and such it
has been since the first Pilgrim was laid to rest on the hill which
lifts its head above the roofs and spires to the free winds of the
world.
Plymouth is fortunate in this hill. It bears the very presence
of its founders above the enterprise and ferment of a modern
town which grows rapidly toward city conditions, a hill which is
set upon a city and cannot be hid. Factories and city blocks and
all the wonders of steam and electrical contrivance which would
have astounded and amazed Bradford and his fellows are common in
Plymouth to-day as they are common to all cities and towns of a
vast country, yet the graves of the simple pioneers rise above
them as the story of their lives transcends in interest that of all
others that have come after them. The book that Bradford wrote, as
the tales that Homer told, will last as long as books are read.
Plymouth may pass, as Troy did, but the story of its heroes will
remain. Bradford’s book, which was our first, may well, at the end
of time, be rated our greatest.
The trailing arbutus is peculiarly the flower of Plymouth. Not
that it grows there alone, indeed within easy reach of the landing
place of the Pilgrims it is not easy now to find it. Once, no
doubt, it blossomed about the feet of the pioneers, sending up
its fragrance to them as they trod sturdily along their first
street and through their new-found fields that first spring after
their arrival. My, but their hearts must have been homesick for
the English May they had left behind! and in memory of the pink
and white of the hawthorn hedges they called this pink and white
flower which peered from the oval-leaved vines trailed about their
feet, mayflower. It surely must have grown on the slopes of Burial
Hill, down toward Town Brook, but now one will look in vain for
it there. I found my first blossom of the year by following the
brook up to its headwaters in Billington Sea. The brook itself is
greatly changed since Bradford’s day. Its waters are now held back
by dams where it winds through the sand hills, and one mill after
another sits by the side of the ponds thus formed. Yet the “sea”
itself must be much the same in itself and its surroundings as it
was in Billington’s time. Nor do I wholly believe the legend which
has it that Billington thought it was a sea in very truth. It is
too obviously a pond to have deceived even this unsophisticated
wanderer. It covers but a little over three hundred acres including
its islands and winding coves.
I think, rather, its name was given in good-natured derision of
Billington and his idea of the importance of his discovery, a form
of quaint humor not unknown in the descendants of the Pilgrims to
this day. Yet the waters of the little winding pond are as clear
as those of the sea which breaks on the rocks of Manomet or the
Gurnet, and the hilly shores, close set with deciduous growth, are
almost as wild as they were then. The robins that greeted the dawn
on Burial Hill sang here at mid-day, blackbirds chorused, and song
sparrows sent forth their tinkling songs from the shrubby growths.
Plymouth woods, here at least, are a monotony of oaks. Yet here and
there in the low places a maple has become a burning bush of ruby
flame, and along the bog edges the willows are in the full glory
of their yellow plumes. The richest massed coloring one can see in
the region to-day, though, is that of the cranberry bogs. Looking
away from the sun the thick-set vines are a level floor of rich
maroon, not a level color but a background showing the brush marks
of a master painter’s hand. Toward the sun this color lightens and
silvers to tiny jewel points where the light glances from glossy
leaf tips. The later spring growth will fleck the bogs with green,
but the maroon background will still be there.
The arbutus does not trail in all spots beneath the oaks, even
in this secluded wilderness. Sometimes one thinks he sees broad
stretches green with its rounded leaves only to find last year’s
checkerberries grinning coral red at him, instead of the soft
pink tints and spicy odor of the Epigæa blooms. Sometimes the
pyrola simulates it and cracks the gloss on its leaves with a wan
wintergreen smile at the success of the deception. But after a
little the eye learns to discriminate in winter greens and to know
the outline of the arbutus leaf and its grouping from that of the
others. Then success in the hunt should come rapidly. After all
Epigæa and Gaultheria are vines closely allied, and it is no wonder
that there is a family resemblance. The checkerberry’s spicy flavor
permeates leaves, stem and fruit. That of the arbutus seems more
volatile and ethereal. It concentrates in the blossom and rises
from that to course the air invisibly, an aromatic fragrance that
the little winds of the woods sometimes carry far to those who love
it, over hill and dale. Given a day of bright sun and slow-moving
soft air and one may easily hunt the Plymouth mayflowers by scent.
Even after the grouped leaves are surely sighted the flowers are
still to be found. The winds of winter have strewn the ground deep
with oak leaves and half buried the vines in them for safety from
the cold. Out from among these the blossoms seem to peer shyly,
like sweet little Pilgrim children, ready to draw back behind
their mother’s aprons if they do not like the appearance of the
coming stranger. Perhaps they do withdraw at discretion, and this
is very likely why some people who come from far to hunt find many
mayflowers, while others get few or none.
Just as the Mayflower in which the Pilgrims sailed to Plymouth
seems to have been but one of many English ships of that name, so
the trailing arbutus is not the only flower to be called mayflower
in New England. The mayflower of the English fields and hedgerows
was pre-eminently the hawthorn, known often just as “the may.”
But there is a species of bitter cress in England with showy
flowers, Cardamine pratensis, which is also called mayflower,
and the name is given to the yellow bloom of the marsh marigold,
Caltha palustris, often known, less lovingly, as “blobs.” The
Caltha is common to both Europe and America, and, though it is
often hereabout known by the nickname of “cowslip” which the early
English settlers seem to have given it, I do not hear it called
mayflower. In localities where the arbutus is not common the name
mayflower is here most commonly given to the pink and white
Anemone nemorosa, the wind flower of the meadow margins and low
woods, and to the rock saxifrage, Saxifraga virginiensis, both of
which are among the earliest blossoms of the month.
None can visit Plymouth without wishing to climb the bold
promontory of “hither Manomet.” The legend has it that Eric the
Red, the Viking who explored the New England shores centuries
before the first Englishman heard of them, made this his burial
hill and that somewhere beneath its forests his bones lie to this
day. I sought long for mayflowers on the seaward slopes and in the
rough gullies of these “highlands of Plymouth.” I did not find them
there.
On the landward slopes, gentler and less wind-swept, down toward
the “sweet waters” that flow from inland to the sea, you may with
patient search find many. But the heights shall reward you, if not
with mayflowers with greater and more lasting joys. The woods of
Manomet were full of butterflies. Splendid specimens of Vanessa
antiopa danced together by twos and threes in every sunny glade,
the gold edging of bright raiment showing beneath their “mourning
cloaks” of rich seal brown. Here in the rich sunshine Launcelot
might well have said:
“Myself beheld three spirits, mad with joy,
Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower.”
Here Grapta interrogationis carried his ever-present question mark
from one dry leaf to another, asking always that unanswerable
“why?” Here Pyrameis huntera, well named the hunter’s butterfly,
flashed red through the woodland, scouting silently and becoming
invisible in ambush as a hunter should. Here a tiny fleck of sky,
the spirit bluebird of the spring which the entomologists have
woefully named Lycæna pseudargiolus, fluttered along the ground as
if a new-born flower tried quivering flight, and brown Hesperiidæ,
“bedouins of the pathless air,” buzzed in vanishing eccentricity.
But it was not for these that I lingered long on the seaward crest.
There below me lay the bay that the exploring Pilgrims entered at
such hazard, that but the day before had been blotted out with a
freezing storm and gray with snow, now smiling in unforgettable
beauty at my feet, bringing irresistibly to mind the one who sang,
“My soul to-day is far away,
Sailing the blue Vesuvian bay.”
At Naples indeed could be no softer, fairer skies than this June
day of late April brought to Plymouth Bay and spread over the
waters that nestled within the curve of that splendid young moon
of white sand that sweeps from Manomet to the tip of the sandspit,
with the Gurnet far to the right and Plymouth’s white houses rising
in the middle distance. It lacked only the cone of Vesuvius smoking
beyond to make the memory complete.
Nor has the Bay of Naples bluer waters than those that danced below
me. Some stray current of the Gulf Stream must have curled about
the tip of Cape Cod and spread its wonder bloom over them. Here
were the same exquisite soft blues, shoaling into tender green,
that I have seen among the Florida keys. Surely it was like a
transformation scene. The day before the torn sea wild with wind
and the dun clouds of a northeast gale hiding the distance with a
mystery of dread, a wind that beat the forest with snow and chilled
to the marrow; and this day the warmth of an Italian spring and the
blue Vesuvian Bay.
The Pilgrims had their seasons of storm and stress, but there came
to them too halcyon days like this when the mayflower bloomed in
all the woodland about them, the mourning cloak butterflies danced
with joy down the sunny glades, and the bay spread its wonderful
blue beneath their feet in the delicious promise of June. Nor is
it any wonder that in spite of hardships and disasters manifold
they yet found heart to write home that it was a “fayere lande and
bountiful.”
But for all the lure of Plymouth woods with their fragrance of
trailing arbutus, from all the grandeur of the wide outlook from
Manomet Heights, the hearts of all who come to Plymouth must lead
them back to the resting place of the fathers on the brow of the
little hill in the midst of the town. There where the grass was not
yet green and the buttercups that will later shine in gold have
put forth but the tiniest beginnings of their fuzzy, three-parted
leaves, I watched the sun sink, big and red in a golden mist, over
a land of whose coming material greatness Bradford and his fellow
Pilgrims could have had no inkling. Seaward the tropic bloom of
the water was all gone, and there as the sun passed I saw the
cool steel of the bay catch the last rays in little dimples of
silver light. Manomet withdrew, blue and mysterious in the haze of
nightfall. Out over the Gurnet, and beyond, the sky caught purples
from the colors in the west, and there, dropping below the horizon
line, east northeast toward England, I saw a sail vanish in the
soft haze as if it might be the first Mayflower, sailing away from
the heavy-hearted Pilgrims, toward England and home. The sun’s last
ray touched it with a fleck of rose as it passed, a rose like that
which tipped the petals of the mayflowers that I held in my hand,
mayflowers that sent up to me in the coolness of the gathering
April night a fragrance as aromatic and beloved as is the memory of
the lives of the Pilgrims that slept all about me on the brow of
Burial Hill. Bradford wrote gravely and simply the chronicles of
these, and no more, yet the fervent faith and sturdy love for fair
play, unquenchable in the hearts of these men, breathes from every
page, a fragrance that shall go forth on the winds of the world for
all time.
XI
OLD SALEM TOWN
_A Scarlet Letter Day in the Witch City_
Over all the hum of business activity that rises from Salem town
sleeps the glamour of old-time memories. Factories drone, traffic
roars or clatters, and the multiple message of modern civilization
goes forth to eye and ear, but among all these sits the ancient
city dreaming long dreams and careless of the children of to-day.
Along Charter Street and down Derby the once stately mansions of
the great merchants of another century droop in senile decay,
knee deep in the dust and debris that immigrant, alien races
scatter, and note it and them no more than they do the rats in the
wainscoting. The thoughts of the old houses are busy still with
ships in the China Sea, battling round the Cape of Good Hope with
the Flying Dutchman, or running down the trades from Senegambia,
Surinam or Ceylon, and their upper window eyes stare unwinkingly
across rotten wharves and out to the island gaps in the horizon of
the bay, watching for the sails that come no more. So the world
thinks of Salem to-day as the city of romantic memories. It may
weave cotton cloth and tan hides and make shoes and carry on a
thousand other inventions of modern business, yet we who dwell away
from it, far or near, will always know it best for its romance of
elder days, the dread delusion of its witch finding, the astounding
deeds of its merchant sailors, and in the end most of all perhaps,
for its man of dreams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who dreamed there the
grim story of “The Scarlet Letter” and made it live for all men for
all time.
More and more, as the years slip by, Hawthorne comes to be the
presiding genius of Salem, and reverent pilgrims in increasing
numbers come to seek the few abiding traces of his life there; and
though they go to Gallows Hill and also view the relics of the old
merchants and their portraits and the pictures of their ships,
they go first to the house where Hawthorne was born, to the other
houses where he lived and worked, and to the sleepy, dignified
old Custom House from whose drab duties grew the strange flower
of weird romance. It may be that out of the Ghettos and Warsaws
which now surround the old Custom House will come again as great
merchants as once dwelt there, or as great a writer of romance as
he who worked on its scarred old wooden desk now preserved with
such care in the Essex Institute, but one may be pardoned for
having his doubts. The world matures rapidly, and the heritage
of primitive environment and primitive opportunity is smoothed
out by the steel roller of modern invention. New ports no longer
wait the seaman adventurer. Steam makes all ports common, and the
knowledge of them common, to all the world. We shall look long for
the successors to Derby and Peabody and their ilk, and we may well
doubt if ships like The Grand Turk, Rajah and Astræa will sail
again from any future Salem.
[Illustration: One angle of “The House of the Seven Gables.”]
[Illustration: A Salem dock of the old sea-faring days]
Never again, the world surely hopes, can come upon a pioneer people
so mysterious a madness as the Salem witchcraft delusion, yet in
it were set the roots of temperament which made Hawthorne what
he was. Its grewsome mystery seems to brood in all he wrote, and
one cannot visit his haunts and the scenes of its terror to-day
without feeling some atmosphere of it still hovering over the
place. Hawthorne’s ancestor sat in judgment over the witches, and
Judge Hathorne, invisible indeed but grimly onlooking, seems to
me to preside over many a tale which he wrote. As relentless fate
mocked the witches while it gripped them and killed them with
trivialities, so it does the characters in Hawthorne’s stories, nor
in the progress of events is there room in the tale, in the one
case or the other, for the saving grace of humor. From Hathorne to
Hawthorne came the somber impress of the days of witch finding.
The spring sun and the spring rain fall alike gently on Gallows
Hill, yet it stands bare and wind-swept to-day as it did when the
witches met their fate there, as it has stood since the glaciers
ground over it, no one knows how many hundred thousand years ago.
The tough rock of which it was built shows everywhere the traces of
the fires which melted and reset it in its present form, its twist
and coloration burnt into it as the story of the deeds wrought on
its summit is seared into the annals of old Salem town. Here and
there on its fantastic ledges one sees zigzag marks struck pale as
if lightning had welted the tormented stone and left the impress
of its sudden anger there. The softening years can do little with
this rock. A curse far older than that of the witch finding has set
its seal upon the height, and though the gentle things of earth
strive patiently to ameliorate the evidence they do little to wipe
out the bleakness of the place. The green of spring grasses climbs
patiently toward the topmost ledges, indeed, and draws with it
the gold of potentilla and the white of wild strawberry blooms.
Dandelions set the round image of the sun in sheltered places, and
little lilac constellations of bluets star the moister spots adown
the slope, but the barren soil is too shallow and the summer turns
all these to a brown garment of sorrowful sackcloth and sprinkles
it with the gray ashes of drought.
A few houses have boldly climbed the hill from the street below,
but none has yet dared the very spot on the bare, red-gray summit
where the irons that once helped support the gibbet rust, still
firmly bedded in their holes in the rock. Over the ledges and down
the hill to the southeast lies a little pond of sweet water that
sparkles in the spring winds, cosily sheltered in the hollow and
surrounded by the vivid green of smooth turf. But even this the
long scorn of summer heat dries to a brown bog where sedges fight
for the life remaining in the stagnant pool in its center. About
this pond the barberry bushes have found a foothold in straggling
clumps to bear little crosses of witch-pin thorns, and steeples
of hard-hack blooms spire solemnly near it in summer. Potentilla
and cudweed dare the slope toward the summit of Gallows Hill when
the rain and sun are kind, and fragaria and violets and bulbous
buttercup trail after, but even in the soft days of May the height
where the witches were hung is desolate and forbidding. Yet it
dominates the outlook upon the town as the story of the witchcraft
delusion dominates the annals of it, as both will for all time.
Yet, for all its bareness, the country about Gallows Hill has its
golden days. These come in late June, when it seems as if the
sun had wrought a miracle among the bleak ledges and along the
treeless slopes. Everywhere then in the seemingly barren pastures
springs up the shrubby, lanceolate-leaved genista, clothing them
in a rolling sea of its golden bloom. For weeks then the hills are
glad with a wonder of papilionaceous yellow blossoms that any other
pastures, however prolific of beauty, find it hard to match. The
same Puritans that cherished the witchcraft delusion brought this
plant with them from England, the dyer’s greenweed, woadwaxen or
whin, and as they passed on into history left it behind them. It
has wandered far in the waste places in New England, but nowhere
does it so clothe the hills and rough slopes with beauty as it does
in the region about Salem. The thought of this, already pushing
up through the sod, is best to take back to the city with one. As
the good in the Puritans was far greater than their grim misdeeds,
so this goes far to hide the bleakness of the ledges, as it seems
striving to. Perhaps some day it will even overgrow and hide the
iron in the summit of the hill where children play to-day, and make
them forget the story of its tragedies which now they are so eager
to tell to the visiting stranger.
Salem’s golden days began a century or more after the witchcraft
delusion had burnt to ashes in the fury of its own fire. Certainly
the descendants of the men who feared the devil and his emissaries
feared little else. He might be formidable dancing at night with
withered crones on the weird hills of Salem pastures, but they
laughed in his face when he came on the high seas with shotted
guns and foreign sailors outnumbering their own guns and crews
two to one. They beat the devil and they outgeneraled him, those
Salem sailors of the seventeen hundreds, whether he came in
English privateer or French man-o’-war or a score of feluccas or
piratical junks, and they brought great treasures home to Salem
town. They explored uncharted seas, visited ports unheard of before
and carried the name and fame of their home town the world over.
The world has made a great hero of Paul Jones, but there were
half-a-dozen young sea captains out of Salem in Revolutionary times
who did all that he did, and more, yet did it so unostentatiously
and so much as a part of the day’s work that the records of it
are hard to trace and for the most part have been lost. During the
Revolution Salem sent out 158 armed vessels carrying more than 2000
guns. They took 445 prizes, losing in return fifty-one of their own
fleet. Jonathan Harraden, for instance, sailed from Salem in the
privateer General Pickering, 180 tons, carrying fourteen 6-pounders
and a crew of less than fifty men. Thus manned and equipped they
captured a British privateer of twenty-two guns. Harraden put a
part of his crew on the captured vessel and the two sailed on. Off
the coast of Spain they sighted a vessel bearing down upon them,
and the captive British captain laughed as he told Harraden that
this was the British frigate Achilles of forty-two guns.
“Well, I shall not run from her,” said Harraden, stoutly; and
he did not. The big frigate soon recaptured the prize with its
short crew, but the little Pickering laid up alongside of her at
nightfall when the battle ceased for want of light. Harraden went
to bed and got a good night’s sleep. In the morning the battle
began again so near the coast that a hundred thousand Spaniards
made the hills black with spectators. The disparity in size of
the two vessels was such that an eyewitness said it was like a
ship’s long boat attacking a man-o’-war. But the little boat won
the battle, and not only the big frigate but the recaptured prize
struck to the indomitable Salem captain and his fearless Salem
crew. The battle was no sooner over than the sea was black with the
boats of admiring Spaniards who came out in great numbers and later
took Captain Harraden ashore and carried him about the city on
their shoulders. Report does not state whether the captain enjoyed
the ride, but at least he must have been proud of the admiration
which called it forth. Sailing again after the battle with the
Achilles, Harraden met three British ships of the size of his and
captured the three of them, one after another. In all during the
Revolution this one Salem captain took from the British more than a
thousand guns and sent home great wealth in prizes taken from the
far stronger sailor nation with which his country, one might almost
have said his town, was at war.
Joseph Peabody was another Salem sailor whose fame was to outlast
the Revolution and grow greater in the succeeding days of
hard-won peace. In those following days of peaceful, or at least
semi-peaceful trading adventure, Peabody owned, first and last,
83 ships which he freighted himself. In his time he shipped 7000
seamen and promoted 45 men from cabin boys to captains. In Salem
ships these cabin-boy captains, often striplings of nineteen or
twenty, sailed the seven seas, opened new ports to commerce,
conquering the prejudice of potentates, matched their wits and
wisdom against those of skilled merchants of the Orient and brought
back princely profit to the ship owners of Salem and in part to
themselves, for often captain and crew alike shared in the profits
they helped to make. In those days the Chinese called the Yankees
“the new people,” for they first heard of them when Salem ships
visited their ports, and the list of new lands first visited by
American ships from Salem is a long one.
It was in November, 1785, that the Grand Turk, belonging to Elias
Derby and commanded by Ebenezer West, cleared for Canton, China,
the first American ship to seek this round-the-world port.
Seventeen months after she returned, the result of her voyage, for
one thing, being a cargo that brought her owners twice more capital
than she had carried out. The Salem merchants often sold not only
the cargo but the ship itself in these far distant ports, and
later the Grand Turk was thus disposed of in India, Derby building
another and a larger vessel of the same name. In 1794 Salem owned
160 vessels of a tonnage totaling 16,788 tons. In 1805 this number
had increased to 54 ships, 18 barques, 72 brigs and 86 schooners,
of which 48 were employed in trade around the Cape of Good Hope.
In 1806 there were 73 ships, 11 barques and 48 brigs, all engaged
in this foreign trade, which gave such splendid opportunity for
adventure and such princely returns. Cargoes have been brought into
Salem port that realized 800 per cent on the capital invested,
and from 1800 to 1807 inclusive 1542 vessels in the foreign trade
arrived, paying an annual average duty of $755,157.90, and this at
the 10 or 12 per cent ad valorem which was the reasonable rate of
those days.
In the story of this Salem shipping from 1775 to 1875 is an Odyssey
that some latter-day Homer may yet make ring down the future ages.
The captains and crews of these ships needed all the courage and
wisdom of Ulysses, nor had sea-worn Odysseus so wide wanderings or
so strange adventures as they.
In Hawthorne’s time this age of Homeric adventure had indeed passed
from the port, yet Salem ships still sailed the seas, for in 1847,
when he was dreaming of Hester Prynne, her preacher lover and her
weird and satanic husband, as he bent over that old desk in the
custom-house, 78 vessels cleared from Salem for foreign ports. So
true it is that one’s eyes see only what they are fitted to see.
All about the dreamer were the records of these mighty adventures
told for the most part indeed in invoices and clearance papers,
but also, one must believe, echoing in the traditions which his
snug-harbored mariner confrères must have known, yet no story came
from his pen that shows he felt the call of the sea to those keen,
daring sea rovers on whose trail he camped. This was no loss to us,
doubtless. We would not swap the “Scarlet Letter” for any tale
that Stevenson told. Yet think what fancies would have taken shape
in Stevenson’s brain out of the dusty ghosts that still linger in
the nooks of the old custom-house!
More things than these are hidden away in Salem. The homing
instinct of the old sailors brought back from the seas of all the
earth thousands of strange relics which are still to be seen in the
magnificent Peabody Academy of Science and in the Essex Institute,
institutions free to all the world of which the city is justly
proud. Yet the home-keeping instinct of those who remained behind
was as strong, and the Salem homes of the days of the merchant
princes still remain, in some cases much as they were a century and
more ago. Now and then, within the uproar of a busy street one gets
a glimpse over a high board fence of gardens of quaint beauty, the
gravel walks bordered with prim box, the sward of a century green
and smooth, and the hardy perennials that the old-time home-keepers
loved and tended growing and blossoming there still, as beautiful
and deep-rooted as were the lives of the Salem mothers that sent
their sons forth to adventure on the seven seas while they waited
and wove love and longing into the beds of garden bloom. The modern
city has crowded these for long, yet the atmosphere of their brave
beauty remains still and belongs with the square, patrician dignity
of the houses.
In one of these gardens I glimpsed an oriole, flashing his tropic
colors along the branches of a magnolia, now just in its wonder of
white bloom. It was as if white patience of mother love had waited
him there, a gay young wanderer from Surinam, where, very likely,
he had spent the winter on an annual voyage. Gay and restless he
was, and his mellow voice prattled no doubt of all the strange
sights he had seen and the adventures he had met, while the fair
tree enfolded him in her arms and worshiped him with the tender
home perfume of mother love. It made me wonder a little, too,
why Hawthorne missed the orioles in the Salem gardens which he
must have seen each spring, and only birds of such somber colors
flitted through the flowers of his fancy. But after all it was
only one more proof that out of the inner eye come the colors of
our thoughts, and that the inherited shadows of the witch-finding
days must have dwelt deep in the soul of the Salem-born,
Puritan-descended dreamer of weird and somber romances.
XII
VERMONT MAPLE SUGAR
_Sap-Boiling Time in the Green Mountain State_
At ten o’clock the sap began to tinkle all through the grove. In
nearly eight hundred buckets it fell, drop by drop, and the sugar
season had begun. It was late March, but from the snow to the sky
the day had all the warmth and glow of June. The sun had been up
since before six. By seven it was shining bright into the Southern
Vermont valley which the Deerfield River has carved out of the
everlasting hills that roll and rise till the cone of Haystack tips
them, nearly four thousand feet above the sea level. Yet till ten
o’clock the maples sulked.
More sap is boiled in this beautiful bowl-shaped valley of which
Wilmington is the metropolis than in any other part of the State.
Vermont makes four-fifths of the maple sugar that is made in New
England, nearly half of what is made in the United States, and
here if anywhere you may see the art practised in its perfection.
There may be better sugar makers than C. S. Grimes, who has been
at it for sixty years, but if so I do not know them. He began with
the old-time black iron kettle, boiled in the open over a green
wood fire. He has seen the business grow in the sugar house to the
use of scientifically accurate evaporating pans where sap flows in
a steady stream into one end and comes out syrup of a law-required
density of eleven pounds to the gallon at the other, the whole
working automatically; and in that time he has learned something of
the whims of the maples themselves, though not all of them.
Much of the lore of the great gray trees he told me as we sat
together on the broad doorstone of the little white farmhouse,
steeping in the sun and looking down upon the peaceful valley and
across to Haystack, hazed in the blue smoke of spring. Everything
was ready. The spiles were driven and the white, pent-roofed pails
hung. The wood-house end of the sugar house was full to the top
of four-foot sticks ready for the boiling. Even the pan was full
of sap, for there had been a slight run a week before. But the
cold had shut down and the trees had quit. The morning before the
thermometer had stood at zero and the sap in the pan was ice. So,
no doubt, it was in the trees, and would be until the warmth had
reached the heart of them. I learned more in the grove as the
patient old horse drew the sled through a foot or two of old snow,
and we gathered the crystal-clear sap from the buckets and poured
it into the barrel, plodding from tree to tree. More still I got in
the sugar house while the veteran fed the roaring fire and skimmed
the scum from the boiling liquid as it flowed, an inch deep or so,
along the winding channels, back and forth, sap at one end, syrup
at the other.
The white men learned from the Indians the art of making maple
sugar. In the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,”
published in 1684, we find the following: “The savages of Canada
in the time that the sap rises in the maple make an incision in
the tree by which it runs out. After they have evaporated eight
pounds of the liquor there remains one pound as sweet and as much
sugar as that which is got out of the canes. The savages here have
practised this art longer than any now living among them remember.”
The white man has since brought the practice to a science. The art
remains the same. How far back into the dim ages of the past it
goes no man may tell.
The sugar maple reaches maturity at about a hundred years. Then
in the forest the trees are seventy to eighty feet tall and have
a diameter of two to four feet. Trees grown from seed produce
the sweetest sap, second growth not being so good. The seedling
under favorable conditions may reach a diameter of sixteen inches
in fifteen years, though such growth is exceptional. It is not
profitable to tap them before the age of twenty. After that they
may be drawn from yearly, a tap to a tree at first. On the largest
trees two or more buckets may be hung, never one above the other,
as the sap flows up or down, never sidewise. The sweetest and
best sap comes from the outermost ring of growth, the wood of the
previous year. It is sweetest at the height of the run. It flows
better by day than by night; the brighter, lighter and sunnier the
day the faster it flows, the trees resting more or less at night.
As the sun declines, so does the flow, even when the temperature
remains the same. On warm nights, however, there is likely to be
some flow. Daytime sap is sweetest, and the nearer the occurrence
of a freeze or a snowstorm the sweeter the sap. Light seems to be
a powerful agent in the mystery, but a certain balance of heat
and cold is more powerful still. Freezing nights with alternating
warm days bring the ideal conditions, frozen roots and warm twigs
setting the alchemy at work.
Yet with all this and much more general knowledge to draw from each
grove is a study. The maples are strongly individualistic, and
every tree is a law unto itself. Some have a much higher percentage
of sugar to the same amount of sap than others. Indeed, it is
confidently predicted by experts that a race of superior trees
could be easily developed by taking seed from those of highest
sugar percentage, just as superior fruit trees are thus bred. The
profit to the sugar-maker from this is obvious. The future may see
it done. As conditions exist the average yield of sugar per tree
is from two to three pounds, though in favorable seasons this is
increased in some groves to five or six pounds. On the other hand
there are records of large trees which have yielded as much as
forty pounds of sugar in a season, and many have been known to give
twenty pounds. Sometimes a certain tree on a farm gets to be known
as “the sweet tree,” because of the large amount of sugar it yields
yearly.
The sky held a faint violet haze which deepened to royal purple
in all distances, a violet which seemed to materialize into
innumerable bluebirds which caroled coaxingly as they flew toward
the grove. Over on the edge of it song sparrows sang invitingly,
but the sugar makers did not move from the cosy doorstep until
nearly noon. Then we went toward the grove somewhat warily, as a
man tends his traps in the wilderness, rather hoping for luck but
doubtful. The sap moves when it gets ready, and no man can surely
say when. But a look into a bucket or two told us that the time
was at hand for quick action. From every tree a clear, colorless
liquid was oozing with rapid drip into the buckets, some of which
were a third full already. It looked like water, this new-born sap,
as clear as that from the finest spring, yet to my eye it seemed
to have a certain radiance, not a sparkle like an effervescent
liquid, but something purer and more effulgent, as if the nascent
life in it touched something in you by nerves dormant to ordinary
sensations. The sugar cane gives up its juice only to force. It
must be crushed and pressed. But here is a sweetness which the
tree almost bursts to deliver, which will not only drip from every
wound, but will force its way with overmastering prodigality. If
instead of putting a hollow oaken tap into the three-eighths inch
auger hole bored through the bark you drive in a solid plug, the
sap will push through the very pores of the oak wood. No wonder
when it reaches the twig tips the buds are driven into action and
the blossoms burst with astonishing vigor that nothing can delay.
There is little sweetness of taste to this wine of the wood gods,
but a cool, delectable refreshment that is born of the free winds
and mountain air. It tempts you to drink deep and often, and I
suspect that Vermonters do and have since the State was first
settled. No State has given to the nation more sturdy, dependable,
keenly vitalized, strong-souled men and women than this, from
the days of Ethan Allen down, and it may be that deep draughts
from the potent purity distilled by the rough-barked, rock-rooted
maples has more to do with it than we know. Maple syrup ought to be
recommended to the schools. I believe it would increase scholarship
and promote ethics.
The gray grove was like a temple of white stillness as we went
from tree to tree. The only sound was the crunch of soft snow and
the splash of sap within the barrel, a cool sound like that of sea
waves curling on the rocks. A pair of white-breasted nuthatches ran
deftly among the branches and seemed to respect the hush of the
place, calling to one another in tiny tones that only emphasized
the quiet. Here was the gray column of a beech, its smooth trunk
looking as if carved out of mottled marble. There stood a yellow
birch with a fringe of flaxen curls. But for the most part the
growth was of maples alone and with little underbrush, so that
we looked between the trees down to the valley below and up its
further side till the gaze touched the sky on the distant blue
summit of Haystack. It was easy to note with what feathers and fur
the earth keeps herself warm in the fierce cold of Vermont winters.
In the distance the black growth of evergreen spruce and hemlock
would hardly let the roughest gale pass within. Where these do
not stand interwoven the misty mingling of the twigs of deciduous
trees made a cloak that was softly beautiful to the eye yet hardly
less penetrable, and over all the cleared spaces and under all
other protection was the white ermine of the snow. The March sun
and the thawing rains of approaching spring had settled this snow
ermine closer to the ground, indeed, but had only compacted it more
firmly. A foot or more of it was everywhere and you could plunge to
the shoulders in the drifts.
[Illustration: “The only sound was the crunch of soft snow and the
splash of sap within the barrel.”
_See page 171_ ]
Soon the gathering barrel was full and the horse plodded back to
the sugar house, where from the hillside the sap ran into the
sapholder, a twenty-one barrel cask propped up within, thence to
go by gravity through a tube to the pan. Here the elder Grimes
was busy, feeding the roaring fire with four-foot sticks, skimming
the scum from the boiling sap and drawing the syrup into gallon
cans at the other end. Sugar making is no job for a lazy man, even
though the pan regulates the flow of the sap automatically, nor is
it nowadays to be conducted without some capital. The plant is a
small one, yet here, counting house, tools, tanks, pan, buckets,
etc., was an investment which easily figured up a thousand dollars.
The clear liquid from the trees ran in a steady stream, and the
boiling sap bubbled and frothed in one end and collected in palest
amber shallows in the other. Now that the run is started from eight
to thirty barrels of sap a day will come to the sugar house, taxing
the powers of the sugar maker to the uttermost to keep ahead of the
flow. It does not do for the sap to wait. The best syrup is made
from it when first collected and it will spoil if the delay before
boiling is too long. Often the fires roar and the sap boils for the
greater part of the twenty-four hours. It may be one or even three
o’clock in the morning during a good run before the man at the pan
can let his fire go out and snatch a few hours’ sleep. If the
night has been warm gathering may begin again soon after sunrise
and again he must be at his fires.
It is at the sugar house that the business of making maple sugar
has lost much of the romance of old days. The big black kettle in
the little shed or the open woods with its sugaring-off frolics
by the boys and girls is a thing of the past. In its place you
have a small factory equipment running overtime, with much of the
regularity of factory drudgery, while the short season lasts. Yet
it is a godsend to the farmer. His winter’s work in the woods is
done. His farm work has not yet begun, and the sugar brings in
many hundred dollars in ready cash, readier cash than he gets
on any other farm product. Good syrup brings from $1 to $1.25 a
gallon, and on a recent year it was estimated the returns from
maple sugar averaged over $3 each for every man, woman and child
in the State. That of course is gross returns, not profits. These
vary so greatly in individual cases and in various years that it
is impossible to get at the net result. Some Vermont farmers do
not think that sugar pays, and many have even gone to the extent
of cutting off their groves for wood, preferring the cash from the
trees once for all. This, of course, is killing the goose, for it
greatly depreciates the value of the farm. Indeed it is an axiom
in the Green Mountain State that a farm without a sugar orchard is
an unmarketable commodity. For all that it is safe to say that for
one reason or another not half the available trees in the State are
tapped yearly.
Even about Wilmington this is true. I should say that there not one
grove in three is being worked this year. To begin with, there is
the investment in “sugar tools,” no light expense for the man of
small capital. Good sugar workers are not so common as they once
were, and require good wages when they are to be obtained at all.
It is customary to pay a man fifty dollars a month and his board,
and his wages run whether the sap does or not. A start may be made
and then adverse weather or the idiosyncrasies of the trees may
keep the gang waiting a week, or even three. Even the men hired by
the day get two dollars to two and a half. In some years the snow
is not deep and the run of sap steady and prolonged. Then the
farmer makes money. During other years the snow may be so deep that
it is necessary to shovel out the roadways in the grove and go from
tree to tree on snow shoes. Last year, owing to peculiar weather
conditions, there was but a light run of sap, and it was soon over,
lasting hardly three weeks. In consequence the crop was light. Yet
maple sugar is distinctly a luxury for which the demand is greater
than the present supply, and is likely to steadily increase. It is
probable that the planting of large areas to especially productive
trees on which the most scientific business methods were used
would result in large profits. The trouble is that the season of
production is short and all trees must be worked at the same time.
Moreover, it takes twenty years for a seedling maple to grow to
producing size, and the average investor does not care to wait that
long for the first of his returns. In any case, it is a matter for
the capitalist rather than the farmer, who does not usually look so
far ahead for returns on his money.
Along with the improvements in the sugar house have come many in
the methods of getting the sap from the trees. The pioneer method
was to “box” them. This meant cutting a receptacle in the tree
itself large enough to hold a pint or so of the liquid which ran
into it. Boxing, year after year, was destructive to the trees
which, nevertheless, survived a vast amount of it. It is probable
that boxing has not been carried on in the Vermont groves for more
than fifty years, yet there are trees standing to-day which show
marks of the old-time method. On what was known once as the Kathan
farm, just west of the Connecticut River in Dummerston, still stand
a few trees of what is believed to be the first grove in the State
from which white men made maple sugar in any quantity. Thirty-three
of these veterans were there in 1874, but now only nine remain.
They are gigantic trees, free of limbs to a great height and one at
least sixteen feet in circumference. At the base can be seen the
knotted, uneven growth covering the scars of nearly seventy years
of “boxing.” After the boxing method came the tapping iron, almost
as hard on the trees. A slanting kerf, an inch deep and four inches
long, was first made. Then the iron with a half-circle cutting
edge was driven in deep at the bottom of this to make a place for
the spout of hard wood, grooved with a gouge and finished with
draw-shave and pocket-knife. Troughs of white maple or basswood,
split in halves, dug out with the axe and smoothed with the gouge,
were used to catch the sap, which was gathered in hand-made pails
hung from a “sap-yoke” which rested on the bearer’s shoulders and
took the weight.
The boiling was in the big black iron kettle which the elder Grimes
remembers so well. It was hung by chains from a pole set up on two
crotched sticks. Beneath it were two big green logs between which
the fire was kept. Sugar houses were unknown and dry wood was rare,
yet with care a respectably clean sugar was made.
[Illustration: “But here is a sweetness that the tree almost bursts
to deliver.”]
A piece of wood taken from one of these trees in 1873 is still
preserved in Vermont. It is twenty inches by four, yet it shows
five boxing places, two deep in the wood and three that the later
growth of the tree had not been able to cover. Sugar was made from
these trees in 1764, and they were tapped each year by some member
of the Kathan family until 1862. One of the largest of these
trees was cut in 1858, and the number of concentric rings of growth
showed that nearly a hundred years had then passed since the tree
was first boxed for sap. In 1894 another was cut, having a box mark
only three inches beneath the surface of the wood, showing that in
this tree at least someone had gone back to the ancient method not
more than half a generation before the date of cutting the tree.
Probably scattered trees of the groves of a century and a half ago
still stand in other portions of the State, carrying deep in their
heart wood the scars of the old-time sugar making.
The Vermont laws against the adulterating of maple sap products are
now quite strict, and it is probable that original packages from
the State are reasonably sure to be what they are sold for. The
syrup weighing eleven pounds to the gallon is practically at the
point of saturation, a gallon weighing even an ounce more than this
showing a deposit of crystallized sugar. It was formerly considered
that the intermixture of cane syrup could not be detected, but
modern methods of chemical analysis show it, the ash from dried
and burned maple sugar being greater than that from dried and
burned cane sugar in that it, having not been recrystallized, still
contains other chemical constituents of the sap. These no doubt
contain the ingredients which go to make up the delectable flavor,
and those not yet isolated elements which help make the Vermonters
the big-hearted, big-souled people that they are. Yet the rich
golden brown color which most maple sugar has is not a quality of
the sugar itself, but due to impurities, harmless but unnecessary.
They come from tiny flecks of bark which fall into the sap or from
careless boiling. Before the sap gets to the can in the Grimes
sugar house it has been strained seven times. The iron kettle sugar
of the old days was sometimes almost black. Care in the handling
will give a syrup that is almost as colorless as water and a sugar
that is nearly white. Hence color in the final product by no means
indicates purity, though it may in no sense indicate adulteration.
The best syrup is a clear, viscous, pale straw-colored liquor, and
the sugar itself need not be much if any darker.
To an outsider the whole trip into the upper valley of the
Deerfield River is a delight. At Hoosac Tunnel the big train gets
tired of the long climb and plunges into the very heart of the
mountain. But the little narrow-gauge road takes up the ascent
most determinedly. The boy’s-size engine snorts and chu-chus up
astounding grades, winding into defiles where the mountains close
in on each side and almost squeeze the track into the river. At
some stations the stop is on such a slant that the engine puffs
and grinds for minutes before any progress at all is noticed.
The town comes down to see the struggle, and the small boys call
the conductor and engineer by their first names and rail at
their railroading. “Hey, Bill,” says one. “What’s your coffee
mill grinding to-day?” Then, as the imperceptible first motion
accelerates to a snail pace, they stroll along with the engine and
continue their chaff till the hills shut down and cut them off. Yet
after all, when you consider the grades, the curves and the stops,
the whole trip is made at a good pace, the twenty-four miles being
covered in about an hour and a half. Coming down is coasting, and
the speed is limited only by the requirements of safety. Vermont
whole-heartedness runs through the train chaff, however, and
the favorite salutation is “neighbor.” To take the trip is like
attending a lodge meeting, and long before the final stop you feel
a friendly interest in everybody present. If you don’t know most
of the others by their first names it is because you have not kept
your ears open. At this season at least you learn how strong a
hold the good old business of sugar making still has on the hearts
of the people of the Green Mountain State, and the gossip of the
groves and farms is yours without the asking. The free, wholesome
air of the mountains is in it all, and as you breathe more and more
of it you feel that the good old-time New Englander does not need
to come back. He is there, up under the purple shadow of Haystack,
talking maple sugar and drawing its essence of vitality from the
white wood of mighty trees that clothe mountain slopes with the
kindly peace of their stately groves.
XIII
NATURE’S MEMORIAL DAY
_How Earth and Sky Observe this National Holiday_
Up to the brow of Cemetery Hill
The serried battle ranks still press to-day.
The saxifrages in Confederate gray
Charge to the robin’s bugle, piping shrill.
In Union blue the sturdy violets still
Shoulder to shoulder in the battle sway
And, rank on rank, the rising onslaught stay,
While cheers of song-birds through the woodland thrill.
And yet peace reigns, and both the gray and blue
Mingled in garlands on the field will lie
Marking a soldier’s grave, or blue or gray,
Shoulder to shoulder waiting, who shall say?
We only know they wait beneath the sky
While garlands deck them, wet with tears of dew.
In my town the little “God’s Acre” in which the pioneers snuggled
to sleep under the protecting shadow of their first rough church
has grown over hill and dale to a score of acres. The church long
since moved out of its own yard, as if to give the pioneers room,
yet lingers gently within a stone’s throw, as a mother waits
within sound of her children. Where once the rough oak timbers
stood squarely upon their field-stone foundations century-old
graves stretch restfully side by side, and gray lichens cling
so close to the blue slate of headstones that the twain become
one, and the very names of the sleepers beneath are hidden and
forgotten. Shoulder to shoulder these old stones stand and lean
friendlily one on another, as brothers to whom the kindly elder
years have brought surcease of all differences. The early settlers
were bold in their beliefs and battled sturdily for them while it
was time to fight. The ancient records and traditions will tell you
of stern warfare waged between man and man and clan and clan. Then,
the battles well fought, they laid themselves down side by side in
a forgiving neighborliness that is the most lasting inscription on
the plain stones that mark their rest. Peace is most secure between
those who have fought best, and the Memorial Day spirit is no mere
growth of our later years. It was born in the scheme of all good,
just as battles were.
Nature voices for us only kindly memories. Whatever the chisel
may have graven on these rude slate stones, the kindly sun and
rain and the slow sobbing of the earth’s bosom under frost and
thaw have taught them “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” till they voice
it in phrases which none who pass may fail to read. The lichens
have written it and the actions of the slate speak louder than the
words of the inscriptions. We in our Memorial Day offerings tell
for a brief hour only what the good gray earth has been saying
the year through, and we say it best, as she does, in flowers and
tears. Nature’s Memorial Days began with the first grave and have
continued ever since. Ours, which began with our mourning for dead
heroes of the Civil War, has extended since to those of all wars
and moves yearly nearer to Nature’s all-forgiving, all-loving
teaching. Our lesson will be complete when we understand that all
who have lived are heroes and that toward all who are dead we
should bear constant loving remembrance. The sun and the rain lead
the gentler things of earth to this all through the old cemetery
where, since the pioneers of the town, have come the heroes of the
Revolution, of 1812, the Civil War, and of countless un-uniformed
battles of daily life before and since.
All the morning of Memorial Day children, and often their elders,
glean from field and wood, from garden and greenhouse, flowers
for the decking of graves, and later the thinning ranks of Grand
Army men march to martial music and place upon the graves of
dead comrades the flag for which they fought and garlands of
remembrance. For these the mowing fields give gladly the white and
gold of their buttercups and daisies, the hillsides the blue of
their violets, the woodlands the feathery white and glossy green
of the smilacina. It always seems as if these blossomed their best
for the occasion. But beyond all other flowers in profusion and
beauty for the ceremony is the lilac. This shrub, I am convinced,
knows that its best service to man is in garlands for Memorial Day,
and rarely does it fail in the service. There come years in which
the spring is cold and backward and blossoming shrubs are weeks
behind their accustomed time of bloom, but the lilacs press bravely
forward, hopeful even at the very last moment, and manage to put
forth flowers by the thirtieth of May. On other years, like this,
all things are three weeks or more ahead of season, yet the lilacs
hold steadfastly on, and when their need is felt there they are to
be gathered in armfuls from willing bushes that go cheerfully at
work again to repair the wrecked stems and provide buds for the
garnering of another year. The lilac should be the flower of poets
and heroes, and as we are all that, however humble our heroism or
however shyly hidden our poetry, it is fitting that it should be
commonest for the decorations of Memorial Day.
For the lilac, for all its buxom profusion and its ability to take
care of itself in neglected fields and woods where the garden in
which it was once delicately nurtured is grown up to grass, the
house to which it belonged is crumbled to ruin, and wild woodland
things crowd and choke it, is of royal lineage. In the garden of
what prince of prehistoric days it first bloomed I cannot say,
but it was beloved of Babylonian kings and mingled its perfume
with that of the roses in Persepolis when Persia was a seat of
learning and refinement, while western Europe was yet to emerge
from savagery and America was not even a dream. There Jamshid,
founder of the then mighty city, Rustam the hero who defended it
all his life from barbarian invaders, Sadi the poet in his rose
garden, Omar with his “jug of wine and thou” watching the stars
and writing his fond, cynical, keen verses, and even Genghis Khan
and Tamerlane, barbarian conquerors out of the mysterious farther
east, must have sat beneath its shade from time to time as the
centuries dreamed on and dreamed their own dreams of conquest, of
love or of service, under the spell of its fond, pervading perfume.
Dreams these should be, of love, if you will, of constancy, and
of hope and yearning toward high ideals, for all these breathe
from the true heart of the lilac to-day, nor has the passing of
three centuries changed the subtle essences of the flower or
their meaning one whit. How far these have gone to the changing
of the hearts of men in that time one may not say, but surely the
fragrance sighs through the Gulistan and the Rubaiyat and the
culture and refinement that the Persia of those days has sent down
the years to us in their records was greater than that of any
other nation of the time. From this mother land of the lilac spread
westward the belief in one God. There the learned men taught to
princes and nobles a due reverence for parents and aged persons, a
paternal affection for the whole human species and a compassionate
tenderness even for the brute creation. There before the sovereign
in state might appear the humblest peasant for justice, and the
youth of the land were taught fortitude, clemency, justice,
prudence, to ride a horse, use the bow and speak the truth. With
the odor of these things that of the lilac filled the air there
through centuries of springs. What more fitting flower could we
lay upon the graves of our heroes, whether of the Civil War or the
Revolution, whether wearing the blue or the gray, or the homespun
of the battle of everyday workshop, farm or home? There is more of
symbolism in its giving than we heed. With the loving remembrance
of friends of to-day goes a greeting from heroes of an age long
gone but not forgotten.
There is no remembrance of civilization, no aura of human nobility
about the smilacina, which in my regard comes next as a flower
for Memorial Day. Hardly the violet could be more modest. Its
tiny spike of white bloom is borne only a few inches high on a
two-leaved stalk, the leaves in shape and gloss reminding one
of the florist’s smilax, whence probably the name. Yet its very
simplicity makes it peculiarly a flower for garlands. The leaves,
growing on the stalk itself, make just the right amount of green,
and a nosegay or a wreath of smilacina alone has a dainty beauty
that few flowers could thus give. The misty white blooms on the
glossy green seem like shattered tears of gentle spirits of the
woods bringing their tribute of sorrow to the fallen heroes.
Nor are the blooms of this plant which the school children have
gathered and which the veterans have placed on the graves the only
ones that are there. All along one side of this cemetery the woods
themselves press their sheltering beauty, and in them the earth
is garlanded with smilacina blooms. Passing from Memorial Day
observances to these I often think that the forest itself decorates
in honor of its own whose resting places would be otherwise
unmarked. It may be for the people of an elder race all other
traces of whom are lost that the tiny, lovely flowers group their
white and green, or for the humbler creatures of the wood who would
otherwise lack tokens of mourning, but the smilacina certainly
decorates the mounds in all woodlands with mystic tracings which
have their own meaning. But it does more than this. In modest
beauty it slips shyly out from the sheltering friendliness of
the pines and stands with bowed head on many a dewy Memorial Day
morning by such mounds as it may reach, in all gentle friendliness.
Shyer yet are the saxifrages which sometimes stand near by. These
I have seen, clad as if in Confederate gray, by a mound which
veterans had marked with a Union flag and along which tiny blue
violets nestled lovingly. So, surely, they stand in mute respect
and nestle as lovingly by many another spot where the remembered
one fought as bravely beneath another flag. Long ago the good brown
earth taught the blue and the gray to thus fraternize, and though
we forgot it for a time the lesson came soon back to us with
renewed force. The saxifrages and the smilacina have not ventured
far out of the all-sheltering wood, but the Confederate gray is
borne all over the score of memorial acres by the wild immortelles,
everlasting, as the children call them, and no caretaker’s rake or
lawnmower can keep these down, or clip the violets so close that
their blue fails to nestle lovingly where heroes lie. All over the
place from spring until autumn these two set their garlands side by
side, as do those who mourn on the one Memorial Day of the year.
Thus constant are the sun and rain and the tiny herbs of the brown
earth.
As the boldest soldiers in the fray held oftenest the foremost
ramparts and felt themselves fortunate in their position, so I
think it must be with those veterans who rest nearest the brow of
the hill, where it seems as if they could look forth over miles of
beautiful forests to the blue hills which are other ramparts on
the horizon. Here of an early morning of this misty May they might
well think they saw gray troopers form and advance in battalions
that sweep down from the hills to eastward and charge over the
treetops of the vale below. Through the distance they can hear the
bugle calls of thrushes, and with trained ears thus know in what
formation the advance will be made and when. Well may they feel
the old-time thrill of desperate conflict as the advance sweeps up
their hill and the misty gray legions swarm over it until the fight
must need be hand to hand. Yet rarely does a day pass without final
victory for the blue. The misty legions fall back and vanish before
the flashing cavalry of the sun and the blue battalions of the
clear sky swarm forth and drive the enemy in full retreat before
them. Thus to them again out of the shades may come Gettysburg, or
Antietam, or Port Hudson.
I like best, though, to think of them here as resting in camp with
no thought of battles past or to come, the mists that rise meaning
no more than the smoke of comrades’ campfires, the bird bugle calls
only those of the day’s routine. From a hundred treetops they may
hear the robins sound the reveille. From their hilltop these bugle
notes should wake even the soundest sleepers. No other bird is so
well fitted for this call. There is a sprightly persistence in the
robin’s song of a morning, a recurrence of rollicking refrain
which reminds one strongly of the awakening notes of the bugle as
they ring through the camp when the last of the night watches is
ended and the new day calls all to be up and stirring. The robins
are peculiarly the buglers of the reveille. No bird sings earlier,
and when the full chorus is in swing there is little chance for any
other bird to be heard. No wonder the sun gets up betimes.
The day calls, the assembly, the retreat, the mess call and a score
of others are left to other birds than the robins. The thrush may
pipe them. Grosbeak, tanager or warbler may trill the familiar
melodies for all these, and a host of others sing at any hour of
the day in tree or shrub or in the pine woods that stand in a
phalanx, like a company under arms, pressing close up to the brow
of the hill. Sometimes I hear these in the sweet, flowing warble
of the purple finch which is not rare hereabouts, but more often
in the notes of the warbling vireos which frequent the tops of
the shade trees. These are all-day buglers, piping clear for all
occasions in firm, rich, continuous notes of whose meaning there
can be no doubt, once you have learned the calls. Nearing these
and seeing the white marble of the newer comers stretch far beyond
the slate headstones, over hill and dale, it is not difficult to
believe these indeed the tents of an army corps and to think I
hear in response to the bugle the marching tread of feet that have
been resting long. The tramp of the boys in blue on Memorial Day,
as they march and countermarch, passing from station to station,
the ringing call of the bugle that sang across Southern fields all
through Grant’s campaign could not seem much more real.
When the busy day is ended it is the wood thrush that sings taps.
The dropping sun reflected from polished white marble lights
campfires from tent to tent, fires that shall burn low to glowworm
embers presently, their smoke curling up in night mists from the
dewy ground. It is then that the friendly forest seems to crowd
closer as if to surround the camp with a host of faithful guards.
Then out of its violet dusk rings the call of the wood thrush, a
call full of gentle mystery, of faith and longing, at once so sad
and so sweetly hopeful that it seems to voice all human sorrow
for mortality and all human, wistful belief in immortality. “Come
to me,” it pipes in tintinnabulating richness out of the deepening
dusk. “Good night; good night; all’s well; good night.” No sweeter
music than taps ever rang from bugle or from throat of wood thrush
when deepening twilight falls upon this white-tented corner of
fame’s eternal camping ground. The buttercups that stray lovingly
among the graves of the pioneers give up their gold to the sky that
sends its tears to dew their round eyes. All day the good gray
earth and the brave blue sky have held memorial service, and as the
last note of taps rings from the throat of the thrush deep in the
sheltering wood the night takes up the service with wet eyes.
XIV
BIRDS OF CHOCORUA
_Some May Songsters of the Frank Bolles Hinterland_
To all who love the lore of woodland life the country up around
Chocorua lake and mountain must always be haunted by the gentle
spirit of Frank Bolles, whose books, all too few, breathe the very
essence of its perennial charm. To nature lovers who come year
after year to the place these books are a litany, and all the bird
songs are echoes of the notes he loved. Nor need there be an hour
of the twenty-four in this region, in May, in which the birds
do not sing. No night is too dark for the wistful plaint of the
whip-poor-wills, wandering voices that seem born of the loneliness
of the bare places in the hills before man was. To the wakeful ear
their sorrow hardly seems soothing, yet when drowsiness comes from
long days in the mountain air the whip-poor-will’s plaint is a
primal, preadamite lullaby that as surely sings to sleep as does
the cadenced sorrow of the wind in the pines or the minor murmur of
a mountain brook, intermittently tossed over the hill by the night
breeze. Often at nightfall the “clackety clack, cow, cow, cow” of
the yellow-billed cuckoo sounds through the Chocorua woods, as if a
lanternless watchman were making his rounds and sounding the hour
with his rattle. Often, too, some songbird will rouse from sleep
as if he heard the cuckoo watchman, going his rounds, pipe him a
sleepy bar or two of his day song, notes strangely vivid in the
perfumed darkness, then drowse again with the melody half finished.
But of all these the whip-poor-wills are most persistent and
loudest. They greet the dusk with antiphonal chant, and when they
finally follow the shadows to rest in the darkest wood the choir of
day takes their silence for its matin bell.
[Illustration: “The farmhouse where Bolles lived and loved the
woods and all that therein lived with him.”
_See page 197_ ]
Something of Bolles’s purity of diction and sweet content in the
gentle joy of life in the fields and woods, the sapphire cadences
of distant mountain peaks and the chrysoprase tremolo of young
leaves, seems to have come from the song of the white-throated
sparrow that sings all day about Chocorua. “Peabody bird” we call
the white-throat, from long custom, but to me his notes, clear,
sweet and infinitely refreshing, seem to chant in accelerating
diminuendo, “hap-pi-ness, hap-pi-ness, happiness,” till I lose the
quivering cadences in an infinity of distance where sight and sound
blend in the passing of dear dreams. The white-throated sparrow
comes to the hills with the pink buds of the trailing arbutus,
whose blooms are nowhere else so white and fair, and something
of their fragrance seems always to come from his song. In little
nooks where the early spring sunlight wells in pools of golden
warmth the perfumes of the arbutus blooms and of the white-throat’s
song come first, and they linger long into the summer where cool
Northern hillsides hold the spring in their shadows. Sometimes
the autumn, too, gives us a rare reblooming of the arbutus, and
the white-throat sings his song of pure contentment well into the
mellow haze of late September.
Now that May is in the mountains one may see the warblers budding
from the twigs with the leaves, nor shall he at first know which
dappling of living light has burgeoned from the wood or which
flashed in from the sky above, so harmonious are the contrasts of
rich color. Often it seems to be the leaves that sing, so well does
the tiny songster fit upon his perch. All about the lake in beech
and birch the young buds lisp and the half-open leaves trill with
the tiny music of the parulas. As you pass from ridge to lowland
and on to ridge again they lead you along the hillsides and on to
the cool depths of remoter ranges where the ancient hemlocks still
grow, their gray beards of usnea moss hanging sedately in the
shadows among their dark trunks. The parulas feed and sing in the
light of deciduous trees, but they nest in this moss in the shadows
of the black growth. Here comes true the fairy tale of the birds
that built their nests in beards, for as I rest in the cloistered
seclusion of the hemlocks two parulas come and press aside the gray
lace draperies of pendent moss and enter in. There is the beginning
of the nest, this tiny cavern which they wedge with their bodies
from the matted moss. The lower ends of this are to be turned up
and interwoven, making the bottom more secure, and pendent there
in her swinging cradle, safe from the eyes of owl or jay above,
from four-footed prowlers below, the mother bird will brood her
rufous-wreathed white eggs.
Many another warbler will lead the May visitor to Chocorua
through these lakeside woodlands which Bolles loved. Some toll
him cheerfully from one low thicket to another, where he may see
the bird and the wood violet in the same glance or pluck painted
and purple trilliums and not lose sight of his quest. Of these is
the black-masked Maryland yellow-throat, whose song of “witchery,
witchery, witchery,” always speaks for itself alone. No bird seems
necessary for the production of this. It buds from the air as young
leaves do from the twigs, impelled by a magic power within itself,
nor, when you finally find the bird, demurely winding his masked
way through the low growth, does the voice by any chance proceed
from his throat. All warblers are ventriloquists, but I always
think the Maryland yellow-throat of the Chocorua thickets the most
demure magician of them all. Perhaps the black mask has something
to do with it, lending to the eye the same thought which the
puzzled ear conveys. The yellow-throats are building now, weaving
their grass nests in tussocks of swamp grass down by the water’s
edge, hiding them not so uniquely indeed as the parulas, but almost
as well. The spikes of swamp grass grow tall about each nest, and
its deep cup if seen at all from the outside is to the eye but a
tangle of the last year’s grasses, matted down under this year’s
growth. If I find these nests it is only by looking directly down
into the heart of each tussock until I reach the right one. Yet
this is not particularly difficult. It means only a little patience
in inspection, after the probable neighborhood has been defined by
the presence of the birds themselves. The yellow-throats are shy
about their nests. If you inspect them too often they will leave
them and begin all over again in a new locality. But, away from
the nest, they are an easy bird to see much of. A man in their
neighborhood is an object of insatiable curiosity to them, and you
do not need to discover them if they are near. Instead they will
come, creeping and peering through the bushes, to inspect you if
you will but sit quietly in the region in which that “witchery”
song is born out of the circumambient air.
Into the upper end of Chocorua Lake flows a brook of transparent
water, fed by melting snows, out of “the heart of the mountain.”
Along this the song of the water thrush leads the wanderer from
one limpid pool to another, a song that has in it some of the
liquid prattle of the stream but more of a dominant, aggressive
note that carries far. There is a touch of sunlight in the color
of the water thrush’s breast, sunlight flecked with little brown
shadow markings that are like the uniform brown of his back, and
if it were not that he sticks so closely to the water he might
suggest the oven-bird to the careless glance. There is something
of the song sparrow and the oven-bird at once in his song. It
is as if the two birds had mated to produce him and the singing
masters of both families had had the youngsters to singing school.
Up this clear-water brook the oven-birds call you by way of the
height of land, the water thrushes from pool to pool, while the sun
drops behind Paugus in mid afternoon, and the blue shadows of the
Sandwich range add to the cool gloom which wells upward from the
deep gorge which is the heart of the mountains.
On the way, as the water thrushes and Maryland yellow-throats
sing from the thickets near the water, so the oven-bird sends
his aggressive staccato from the middle distances of the higher
trees. I never knew an oven-bird to sing from either a treetop or
a low thicket. Always he sits on a limb well up the trunk yet well
beneath the shade also, and sends forth that aggressive, eager
call for knowledge. “Teach us, teach us, teach us,” he cries to
the wood gods, nor is he ever satisfied with his schooling, but
applies persistently for more. The oven-bird is the very voice of
the spirit of modern learning, crying always, in the wilderness of
knowledge attained, for more knowledge. The wood gods have taught
him much. Invisibility for himself he has almost learned. He sits
like a knot on a speckled brown limb, and his speckled brown breast
is so much like it that he may sing long there within a little
distance of your eye before you see him. Invisibility for his nest
he and his demure brown wife have learned completely. You may sit
on it to rest among the brown leaves in the wood and not know it is
there; unless the frightened escape of the brown mother birds gives
you a hint, and even then it is invisible, so completely is it
hidden in the debris dropped by the previous autumn. Of dead weed
stalks, grasses and brown leaves it is not only built but roofed,
and with an entrance on one side that to the uninitiated might be
an entrance to the nest of a field mouse, indeed, but never that
to a bird’s nest. It is not for greater knowledge of nest hiding
that the oven-bird need pray to the wood gods, nor may we know what
further wisdom he seeks, but all summer long he asks for it in no
uncertain tones.
Out of the very treetops while the oven-bird shouts his prayer
below comes the voice of the red-eyed vireo, uttering moral
platitudes from dawn till dusk. It is no wonder that some birds go
wrong with this monotonous preacher steadily droning out, “Don’t
do this; don’t do that,” to them all day long. The bluejays, who
have robber baron blood stirring always under their gaudy military
coats, jeer at this prating of platitudes and descend upon the
vireo’s hanging nest and eat the eggs from it, I always think, with
more gusto than in their other freebooting, and small blame to
them. The red-eyed vireo leads an exemplary life, no doubt, living
properly on small insects and keeping up perpetual prayer-meeting,
but his self-righteous twaddle must be intensely irritating to all
but impeccably good birds that have to listen to it. In gladsome
relief from this was the demeanor of the Canadian warblers, also
flitting daintily in the treetops. I know the authorities say
that the Canadian warbler frequents low thickets, but there is no
mistaking the bird with his breast and throat of clear yellow and
his necklace of jet beads, and this May the leafy topmost twigs of
the deciduous trees in the Chocorua region held many such. They
sang their liquid warble which has in it more than a suggestion of
the song-sparrow notes of the water-thrush song, and they dashed
out into the free air for insects which they captured, flycatcher
fashion, and then dashed back again. The Canadian warblers are
migrating, feeding and singing as they go on to their nesting sites
farther north, and this year their favorite food must have been
hanging high, for they were up there after it.
With the Canadians was the first wave of the tide of blackpolls
which sweeps over the mountains, also bound north, in late May.
More restless were these, constantly flitting and seeking food
among the leaves, now in deciduous growth, again in the evergreens,
ever moving on and ever singing their high-pitched, hissing whistle
which is not so very different from the song of the black and white
creeper, though a little more deliberate in movement and having a
more staccato quality. So far as coloration goes one might mistake
the male blackpoll for the black and white creeper were not the
movements of the birds so distinctly different and the song as wiry
but as soothingly crepitant as that of the cicada.
Night falls early in the deep heart of Chocorua, and full and
clear the wood thrushes were yodeling of peace, one to another in
the shadows, as I turned to descend. In the worn fields of the
ancient clearing about the farmhouse where Bolles lived and loved
the woods and all that therein lived with him, the song sparrows
were trilling evening songs and the swifts twittering and circling
nearer and nearer the big chimney which is their summer home. The
bird cherry trees were white angels of bloom, and from all the land
far and near the incense of opening blossoms made the air sweet and
rose toward the high, mysterious altar of Chocorua’s peak as if in
adoration of the rose glow of its sunset tints. Chocorua Lake was
a mirror in which the glory of the summit, the blue dusk of the
lower ranges and its own shores were reflected in perfect beauty.
It was a sounding-board as well, across whose level came to the ear
innumerable bird songs, singing carols of praise to the passing of
day. Out of the blue depths of the sky the cool of night dropped
like a blessing from heaven and seemed to soften and liquefy all
melodies into purer, more mellow music. Wood thrushes and hermits
sang in the shadows hymns of praise to the most high peak of the
mountain, a pantheistic worship that was old ages before any spires
other than those of the spruces had pointed the way to heaven.
[Illustration: Nightfall on Chocorua Lake]
From the hillocks of the pasture to the topmost boughs of the
forest all bird life joined in the worship, making the welkin
ring with praise of the pure joy of life, a chorus that quivered
into silence only with the passing of the rose of mystery from the
very tip of the high horn of Chocorua. Nor did the silence last
long. Before the last wood thrush had finished his “Good night;
all’s well; God is good,” other songs of praise and the joy of life
were echoing from swamp and wood and lake margin. Where the birds
had ceased a myriad other voices took up new refrains. The dreamy
trill of the tree frogs sounds from the perfumed dusk, a lullaby of
the world primeval that sang the first man to sleep in some safe
refuge in the deep woods. From the distant marsh the mingled voices
of innumerable hylas ring a chorus of fairy sleighbells that rises
and falls as the wind of evening drifts by. Nowhere in the world, I
believe, can one hear such hyla choruses as he gets in May evenings
from marshy pools among the New Hampshire hills. Coming from a
distance the hypnotic insistence of the sound has a soothing,
sleepy quality that lulls to rest. To seek its source and stand by
the very border of the pool is to find it a frightful uproar that
shrills in the ears and rings through the head till the deafened
hearer is driven to the upland again.
On the lake margin in the failing light it came to me as a sleepy
drone of tiny bells, as if goblin sleighing parties were coursing
gayly in the night on the white May snow of petals beneath the bird
cherry trees. It and the dreamy trilling of the tree frogs were
but a background for the voices of night birds that sounded now
that those of the day birds had passed. High in air floated the
nasal “peent, peent,” of whirling nighthawks. Out of the velvet
dusk across the glimmering water I heard a bittern working his
old-fashioned pump, wheezily. “Cahugunkagunk, cahugunkagunk,” he
burbled, the weirdest bird voice of any that comes from marsh or
mountain, yet in the peacefulness of the place sounding neither
lonely nor uncouth. I fancy him, too, with his long beak pointed
to the heights, worshiping the mountain peak in his own tongue.
Whip-poor-wills mourned gently one to another across the water as a
token that the night had really come and the last glow faded from
the lone summit now so immeasurably withdrawn into the sky among
the stars.
A yellow-billed cuckoo called from the thicket, then, indignant
at receiving no answer, sprung his rattle and waited. Roused
out of his first slumber a white-throat gave a faint “tseep” of
surprise, then trembled into music for a moment and went to sleep
again. “Hap--pi--ness, hap-pi-ness, happiness,” he sang, the notes
slipping away into infinite distance and blending with the perfect
quiet of the night and the sky. It was the very spirit of the place
speaking and reminding me again of the gentle writer who sang so
clearly of the peace and beauty of the Chocorua woods and who now
sleeps, after singing.
INDEX
A
Achilles, 156, 157
Adam, 117
Alcott, 99, 100, 102
-- Louisa, 101
Alder, white, 68
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 30
Allen, Ethan, 171
Amesbury, 129
Anemone nemorosa, 143
Angle-wing, 56
Antietam, 193
Apple, Baldwin, 6
-- russet, 115
-- wild, 127
Appledore, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 56, 59
Arbutus, trailing, 94, 138, 140, 141, 142, 146, 199
Arcady, 37
Argynnis, 67
-- cybele, 39
Asclepias cornuti, 37
-- tuberosa, 38
Assabet, 101
Asters, 37, 49, 86, 107, 113
Astræa, 150
Atlantis, 45
Azalea, 9
B
Babylonian kings, 187
Bayberry, 9, 25, 46, 52, 81, 88
Bee, bumble, 25, 41
-- honey, 57
Beech, 21, 177, 200
“Bemis Place, the,” 35
Bilbao, 119
Billington, 139
-- sea, 139
Birch, 27, 69, 128, 200
-- black, 2
-- white, 21
-- yellow, 27, 171
Birds
Bittern, 210
Blackbird, 32, 36, 140
Blackpoll, 207
Bluebird, 169
“Bob white,” 13
Cedar wax-wing, 127
Chewink, 23
Creeper, black and white, 207
Crow, 126
Cuckoo, yellow-billed, 198, 211
Duck, 63
Finch, purple, 194
Flycatcher, great-crested, 14
-- olive-sided, 55
Grosbeak, 194
Gull, 56
-- herring, 129, 130
Hawk, fish, 131
-- night, 210
Heron, great blue, 57
-- little green, 71
Jay, 126, 200
-- blue, 205
Kingbird, 56
Kingfisher, 70, 71
Maryland yellow-throat, 52, 201, 202, 204
Mourning Dove, 13
Nuthatch, white-breasted, 171
Oven-bird, 203, 204, 205
Owl, 200
“Peabody bird,” 199
Quail, 13
Robin, 2, 3, 55, 127, 139, 193, 194
Sandpipers, 56, 70
Skylark, 2
Snipe, Wilson’s, 131
Sparrow, song, 52, 55, 140, 169, 203, 206
-- white-throated, 199, 211
Swallow, 7
-- barn, 5, 6, 53
-- tree, 53, 54
Tanager, 194
Thrush, 193, 194
-- hermit, 208
-- water, 203
-- wood, 195, 196, 208
Vireo, 21
-- red-eyed, 205, 206
-- warbling, 194
Warblers, 194, 199
-- Canadian, 206, 207
-- parula, 200, 202
-- wood, 86
Whip-poor-will, 197, 210
Black Mount, 2, 3, 4, 13
Blackberries, 47, 81
“Blobs,” 142
Blueberries, 4, 81
-- low-bush blacks, 4
-- pale blue, 4
Blue flag, 22, 47
Blue Hill, 32, 33
Bluets, 152
Bolles, Frank, 197, 200, 207, 208
Boston Light, 76
Bouncing-Bet, 89
Bradford, William, 75, 76, 105, 137, 138, 139, 146, 147
Bulkeley, Rev. Peter, 77
Burial Hill, 105, 137, 138, 139, 147
Buttercup, 146, 186
-- bulbous, 153
Butterflies,
Angle-wing, 56
Argynnis, 67
-- cybele, 39
Baltimore, 41
Cabbage, 56
Colias, 27
Colias philodice, 40
Fritillary, great spangled, 39
Grapta interrogationis, 144
Hesperiidæ, 144
Hunters, 56, 144
Lycæna pseudargiolus, 144
Monarch, 39, 56
Mourning cloak, 143, 146
Papilio turnus, 38
Pyrameis huntera, 144
Sulphur, 40
Vanessa antiopa, 143
C
Cabbage butterfly, 56
Cadiz, 119
Caltha palustris, 142
Camaguay, 111
Cape Cod, 75, 145
Cape of Good Hope, 148
Caraway, 43
Cardamine pratensis, 142
Carrageen, 54
Cedar, 11, 127, 128
Cedar berries, 127
Cedar, red, 9, 25, 37
Cedar wax-wing, 127
Ceylon, 63, 148
Charter Street, 148
Checkerberries, 140, 141
Chelone glabra, 41
Cherry-bird, 208, 210
Cherry, wild, 46, 50, 81, 83
Chestnut, 68
“Cheviot Hills, The,” 33
Chewink, 23
Chicory, 1
China Sea, 148
Chipmunks, 107
Chocorua, 3, 201, 206, 207, 208, 209
Chocorua, Lake, 197, 203, 208
-- mountain, 197, 208
-- woods, 198, 211
Chokeberry, 50
Cicada, 207
Cineraria maritima, 84
Cinquefoil, 51
Civil war, 185, 186, 189
Clark’s Island, 135
Clematis, 47, 48, 107, 113
Clethra, 62, 66
Clover, white, 58
Colias, 27
-- philodice, 40
Concord, 63, 65, 71, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98, 99
-- Bridge, 91
Confederate, 191
Convolvulus, 111
Coreopsis, 44
Corydon, 37
Country brook, 26, 27, 28
Cowslip, 142
Crabs, 55
Cranberry, 51
Cranberry bog, 12, 140
Cranes-bill, 47
Creeper, black and white, 207
Cress, bitter, 142
Crow, 126
Cruciferæ, 56
Cuckoo, yellow-billed, 198, 211
Custom House, 150
D
Daisy, 186
-- ox-eye, 23
Dandelions, 51, 152
Dandelions, fall, 109
Deerfield River, 164, 181
Derby, Elias, 150, 158, 159
Derby Street, 148
Dexter, “Lord” Timothy, 124
Dickens, 123
Dreadnaught, 120
Duck, 63
Dummerston, 177
Dunkirk, 119
Dusty-miller, 84
E
Elder, 46, 50
Emerson, 90, 97, 99, 100, 102
Eos, 61
Epigæa, 140, 141
Eric the Red, 143
Essex Institute, 150, 161
Eve, 52
Everlasting, 192
F
Ferns
Cinnamon, 22, 109
Hay-scented, 22
Interrupted, 22
Lady, 22
Maidenhair, 95
Royal, 22, 109
Finch, purple, 194
Firefly, 31
Florida Keys, 145
Flycatcher, great-crested, 14
-- olive-sided, 55
“Flying Dutchman, The,” 120, 148
Forget-me-not, 22
Fox, 107
Fragaria, 153
Free Press, 123
Fritillary, great-spangled, 39
Frog, tree, 209
G
Gallows Hill, 149, 151, 153
Garrison, William Lloyd, 123
Gaultheria, 141
Genista, 154
Geraniums, red, 44, 58, 59
Gerardia, 68
-- flava, 41
-- golden, 40, 41
-- tenuifolia, 67
Gettysburg, 193
Ghettos, 150
Goldenrod, 27, 49, 86, 107
-- seaside, 128, 130
Gosnold, 76
Grand Army, 186
Grand Turk, The, 150, 158, 159
Granite, 49
Grant, 195
Grape, fox, 111
Grapta, interrogationis, 144
Gratiola aurea, 70
Greenbrier, 8, 81, 111
Greenbush, 106
Green Harbor, 2, 3, 7, 10, 12
Grimes, C. S., 165, 173, 178
Grosbeak, 194
Guadeloupe, 119
Gulf Stream, 64
Gulistan, 188
Gull, 56
-- herring, 129, 130
Gurnet, 136, 145, 147
H
Habenaria fimbriata, 36
-- psycodes, 35, 38
Hard-hack, 153
Harold, 94
Harraden, Jonathan, 156, 157
Hastings, 94
Hathorn, Judge, 150
Hawk, fish, 131
Hawk, night, 210
Hawthorn, 142
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 98, 102, 149, 150, 151, 160, 162
Haystack mountain, 164, 165, 172, 182
Hedge-hyssop, 68, 70
Hemlock, 16, 21, 172, 201
Hepatica, 95
Heron, great blue, 57
-- little green, 71
Herring, 128, 130
Hesperiidæ, 144
Hildreth, Richard, 124
Holly berries, 127
Hollyhock, 19
“Home Sweet Home,” 117
Homer, 138
Hoosac Tunnel, 181
Huckleberry, 4, 50, 88, 128
-- low-bush, black, 46
Hunter’s butterfly, 56, 144
Hyla, 52, 209
I
Immortelles, 192
Indians, 32, 85
Indian pipe, 42
Ireland, 119
Isles of Shoals, 44, 49
Ivy, 107
-- poison, 110
J
Jamshid, 188
Jay, 126, 200
-- blue, 205
Jewel Weed, 22
Job’s Hill, 23, 24
Jones, Paul, 155
Joppa, 125
-- flats, 122
Juniper, 25, 69
K
Kathan farm, 177
Kelp, 55, 57
Kenoza lake, 24
Khan, Genghis, 188
Kingbird, 56
Kingfisher, 69, 70, 71
L
Ladies’ Tresses, 86
Launcelot, 144
“Legend of Ara-Cœli,” 34
Lichen, 9, 108, 184, 185
-- reindeer, 10
Lilac, 17, 29, 186, 187, 188, 189
Liliputian, 85
Lily, pond, 32, 42
-- water, 82
Lincoln, 63
Liverpool packet, 120
London pride, 19
Long Point, 75, 76, 77
Lotos, 101
Love-in-a-mist, 44
Lycæna pseudargiolus, 144
M
Madeira, 119
Magnolia, 162
Maidenhair fern, 95
Manomet, 136, 143, 145, 147
-- head, 135
-- heights, 146
Maple, 21, 68, 128, 140, 164, 165, 171
-- sap, 179
-- sugar, 164, 171, 180, 182
Marigold, 44
-- marsh, 142
Marjoram, 19
Marshfield, 1, 3, 6, 14
Maryland yellow-throat, 52, 201, 202, 204
Massachusetts bay, 105
Mayflower, the, 10, 76, 94, 95, 105, 135, 136, 142, 147
Mayflower, 139, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147
Meadow Sweet, 67
Memorial Day, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 191, 192, 195
Merrimac, 15, 20, 27
Miantowonah, 32, 42
Mica, 49
Milkweed, 37, 39, 40, 41
Mint, wild, 20
Minute Man, 91, 92, 93, 99
Mirror, New York, 105
Mogg Megone, 16
Monarch butterfly, 39, 56
Monotropa uniflora, 42
Morning glory, 49
Mourning cloak butterfly, 143, 146
Mourning dove, 13
Mussels, 54
N
Naples, 145
Naples, bay of, 145
Newbury, 118
Newburyport, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125, 129
Nuthatch, white-breasted, 171
O
Oak, 68, 140
Oak, red, 21, 99
-- white, 21
Octavia, Miss, 132
Odysseus, 160
Odyssey, 160
Old Curiosity Shop, 123
“Old Oaken Bucket, The,” 104, 114, 117
Omar, 188
Orchid, 38
-- larger, fringed, 36
-- small purple-fringed, 36
Oriole, 162
Oven-bird, 203, 204, 205
Owl, 200
P
Papilio turnus, 38
Parsnip, wild, 49
Parula, 200, 202
Paugus, 203
Peabody, 150
Peabody Academy of Science, 161
“Peabody Bird,” 199
Peabody, Joseph, 158
Peaked Hill Bar, 87
Peregrine, 3
Persepolis, 187
Persia, 187, 188
“Pickles for the Knowing Ones,” 123
Pierpont, John, 123, 124, 132
Pilgrim, 37, 75, 77, 82, 87, 89, 105, 137, 142, 144, 146, 147
-- cemetery, 3, 6, 12
-- children, 1, 141
-- descendants, 3
-- mothers, 78
-- scouts, 80
-- shrines, 78
-- warriors, 81
Pine, 16, 21, 68, 129, 191
-- pitch, 85
Pink, 44
-- clove, 34
Pipsissewa, 42
Plantain, 51
Plum, beach, 81, 88, 128
Plum Island, 132, 133
Plymouth, 2, 94, 135, 138, 142, 143
-- bay, 10, 145
-- colony, 105, 137
Plymouth rock, 105
Ponkapoag, 31, 33, 34, 35
-- brook, 35
-- pond, 31, 32, 42
Poplar, silver-leafed, 88
Poppies, 19, 44, 58
-- shirley, 49
Port au Prince, 119
Port Hudson, 193
Potentilla, 152, 153
Provincetown, 76, 77, 80, 87, 136
“Prynne, Hester,” 160
Puritan, 89, 154
Pyrameis huntera, 144
Pyrola, 42, 140
Q
Quail, 13
Quartz, 49
Queenstown, 120
R
Race Point, 75, 76, 78, 80
Rajah (ship), 150
Raspberry, 46
Revolution, the, 186, 189
Robin, 2, 3, 55, 127, 139, 193, 194
Rock weed, 53, 54, 57
Rose, damask, 34
-- wild, 9, 11, 24, 25, 26, 50, 58, 81, 113, 187
Royal Society, philosophical transactions of, 166
Rubaiyat, 188
Rudbeckias, 23
Rush, bog, 51
S
Sadi, 188
Sagittaria, 36
Sahara, 82
Salem, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 166
Sandpipers, 56, 70
Sandwich Range, 204
Sandy Hook, 120
Sassafras, 9, 69
Saxifraga virginiensis, 143
Saxifrage, 43, 191, 192
Scarlet Letter, 122, 149, 161
Senegambia, 148
Shadbush, 46, 50
Sinbad the Sailor, 136
Skylark, 2
Sleepy Hollow, 99
Smelt, 128, 130
Smilacina, 186, 189, 190, 192
Smilax, 111, 190
-- rotundifolia, 81
-- wild, 81
Smith, Capt. John, 33, 76
Snake, green, 52
Snipe, Wilson’s, 141
Sparrow, song, 52, 55, 140, 169, 203, 206
-- white-throated, 199, 211
Spiranthes, gracilis, 86
Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 124, 129
Spruce, 172
Standish, Myles, 78, 85, 89
Steeplebush, 24, 25
Stevenson, 161
St. John’s-wort, 47, 58
St. Martins, 119
Strawberry, 4
-- wild, 152
Sudbury, 101
Sumac, 9, 27, 50, 58
-- staghorn, 8, 26, 46
Surinam, 119, 148
Swallow, 7
-- barn, 5, 6, 53
-- tree, 53, 54
Sweet-fern, 25, 81
Sweet william, 19
T
Tambourine bird, 23
Tamerlane, 188
Tanager, 194
Thaxter, Celia, 49
-- --, garden of, 44, 58
-- --, grave of, 58
Third Cliff, 112
Thistle, 25
Thoreau, 60, 65, 66, 67, 69, 73, 74, 98, 99, 100
Thoroughwort, 67, 68
Thrush, 193, 194
-- water, 203
-- wood, 195, 196, 208
Toad-flax, 47
“Tocsin, the,” 133
Town Brook, 138
Trillium, painted, 201
-- purple, 201
Troy, 97, 138
Truro, 86
-- North, 77, 78, 79, 85
Turtle-head, 41
U
Ulysses, 160
Usnea moss, 200
V
Vanessa antiopa, 143
Violet, 153, 186, 190, 192
-- wood, 201
Vireo, 21
-- red-eyed, 205, 206
-- warbling, 191
Virginia creeper, 47
Vishnu, 96
W
Walden, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71
Wapping Old Stairs, 122
Warbler, 194
-- Canadian, 206
-- wood, 86
Warsaw, 150
Water plantain, 37
Water striders, 21
Webster, Daniel, 2, 3, 6, 12
-- farm, 3
-- path, 10
-- place, 4
-- well house, 7
West, Ebenezer, 158
Whin, 154
Whip-poor-will, 197, 210
White Mountains, 45
White, Peregrine, 1, 3, 6, 12
-- --, mother of, 10
Whitefield, 123
Whittier, 17, 20, 23, 24, 28, 123
Whittier birthplace, 18
-- fireplace, 15
Whittier’s mother, 16
“Wild boat of the Atlantic, the,” 120
Willow, 88, 140
Wilmington, 164, 175
Wind flower, 143
Winslow, 12
Witch Hazel, 113
Woad-waxen, 154
Woodbine, 107, 110, 111
Woodchuck, 12, 107
Woodworth, Samuel, 104, 106, 110, 114, 115
Y
Yarrow, 25, 47, 48, 49
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Pg ix: ‘The Birds of Chocorua’ replaced by ‘Birds of Chocorua’.
Pg 118: ‘In the heydey’ replaced by ‘In the heyday’.
Pg 213: ‘Azalia,’ replaced by ‘Azalea,’.
Pg 213: ‘Beech, 21, 177, 280’ replaced by ‘Beech, 21, 177, 200’.
Pg 213: ‘Bilboa,’ replaced by ‘Bilbao,’.
Pg 214: ‘Cardamine praetensis,’ replaced by ‘Cardamine pratensis,’.
Pg 216: ‘Gualaloupe,’ replaced by ‘Guadeloupe,’.
Pg 217: ‘Odyssy,’ replaced by ‘Odyssey,’.
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