CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library re 1220.E95 ‘Wii olin Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022149888 THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS Riverside Edition HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO FRESH FIELDS BY JOHN BURROUGHS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY Che Kivergive press, Cambridge 1895 ay 7 Copyright, 1884, 1895, By JOHN BURROUGHS. All rights reserved. Sey The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. 8. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. CONTENTS PAGE I.. NATURE IN ENGLAND x x r i “ . 1 IJ. Enerish Woops: A Contrast. ‘ ; 35 I. In Cartyue’s Country . . 45 IV. A Hunt ror THE NIGHTINGALE . x 4 F 17 V. EnetisH AND AMERICAN Sonc-Brrps j . 113 VI. Impressions or some EnGiisu Birps . 131 VIL. “In WorpswortnH’s Country . - 147 VIII. A Guance at British Witp FLOWERS . ‘ 159 IX. British Ferriniry . ‘ ‘ “ é 7 - 175 X. A Sunpay in Curyne Row,. . -. . = . 199 XI. Ar Sra. : . 7 . : é i 5 + 267 INDEX ‘ 2 2 a. ane. Ce ‘ s e 277 The frontispiece was etched by Charles H. Woodbury, and the vignette by W. H. W. Bicknell, after a photograph of Mr. Burroughs taken at the age of fifty-three. : FRESH FIELDS I NATURE IN ENGLAND I a Dice first whiff we got of transatlantic nature was the peaty breath of the peasant chimneys of Ireland while we were yet many miles at sea. What a homelike, fireside smell it was! it seemed to make something long forgotten stir within one. One recognizes it as a characteristic Old World odor, it savors so of the soil and of a ripe and mel- low antiquity. I know no other fuel that yields so agreeable a perfume as peat. Unless the Irishman in one has dwindled to a very small fraction, he will be pretty sure to dilate his nostrils and feel some dim awakening of memory on catching the scent of this ancestral fuel. The fat, unctuous peat, — the pith and marrow of ages of vegetable growth, — how typical it is of much that lies there before us in the elder world; of the slow ripenings and accumulations, of extinct life and forms, decayed civilizations, of ten thousand growths and achieve- 2 FRESH FIELDS ments of the hand and soul of man, now reduced to their last modicum of fertilizing mould! With the breath of the chimney there came pres- ently the chimney swallow, and dropped much fa- tigued upon the deck of the steamer, It was a still more welcome and suggestive token, — the bird of Virgil and of Theocritus, acquainted with every cottage roof and chimney in Europe, and with the ruined abbeys and castle walls. Except its lighter- colored breast, it seemed identical with our barn swallow; its little black cap appeared pulled down over its eyes in the same manner, and its glossy steel-blue coat, its forked tail, its infantile feet, and its cheerful twitter were the same. But its habits are different; for in Europe this swallow builds in chimneys, and the bird that answers to our chimney swallow, or swift, builds in crevices in barns and houses. We did not suspect we had taken aboard our pilot in the little swallow, yet so it proved: this light navigator always hails from the port of bright, warm skies; and the next morning we found our- selves sailing between shores basking in full sum- mer sunshine. Those who, after ten days of sor- rowing and fasting in the desert of the ocean, have sailed up the Frith of Clyde, and thence up the Clyde to Glasgow, on the morning of a perfect mid- May day, the sky all sunshine, the earth all ver- dure, know what this experience is; and only those can know it. ; It takes a good many foul days in Scotland to breed one fair one; but when the fair NATURE IN ENGLAND 3 day does come, it is worth the price paid for it. The soul and sentiment of all fair weather is in it; it is the flowering of the meteorological influences, the rose on this thorn of rain and mist. These fair days, I was told, may be quite confidently looked for in May; we were so fortunate as to experience a series of them, and the day we entered port was such a one as you would select from a hundred. The traveler is in a mood to be pleased after clearing the Atlantic gulf; the eye in its exuberance is full of caresses and flattery, and the deck of a steamer is a rare vantage-ground on any occasion of sight-seeing; it affords just the isolation and elevation needed. Yet fully discounting these fa- vorable conditions, the fact remains that Scotch sun- shine is bewitching, and that the scenery of the Clyde is unequaled by any other approach to Eu- rope. It is Europe, abridged and assorted and passed before you in the space of a few hours, — the highlands and lochs and castle-crowned crags on the one hand; and the lowlands, with their parks and farms, their manor halls and matchless verdure, on the other. The eye is conservative, and loves a look of permanence and order, of peace and content- ment; and these Scotch shores, with their stone houses, compact masonry, clean fields, grazing herds, ivied walls, massive foliage, perfect roads, verdant mountains, etc., fill all the conditions. We pause an hour in front of Greenock, and then, on the crest of the tide, make our way slowly upward. The landscape closes around us. We can almost 4 FRESH FIELDS hear the cattle ripping off the lush grass in the fields. One feels as if he could eat grass himself. Tt is pastoral paradise. We can see the daisies and buttercups; and from above a meadow on the right a part of the song of a skylark reaches my ear. In- deed, not a little of the charm and novelty of this part of the voyage was the impression it made as of going afield in an ocean steamer. We had sud- denly passed from a wilderness of waters into a ver- durous, sunlit landscape, where scarcely any water was visible. The Clyde, soon after you leave Greenock, becomes little more than a large, deep canal, inclosed between meadow banks, and from the deck of the great steamer only the most charm- ing rural sights and sounds greet you. You are at sea amid verdant parks and fields of clover and grain. You behold farm occupations — sowing, planting, plowing—as from the middle of the Atlantic. Playful heifers and skipping lambs take the place of the leaping dolphins and the basking swordfish. The ship steers her way amid turnip- fields and broad acres of newly planted potatoes. You are not surprised that she needs piloting, A little tug with a rope at her bow pulls her first this way and then that, while one at her stern nudges her right flank and then her left. Presently we come to the ship-building yards of the Clyde, where rural, pastoral scenes are strangely mingled with those of quite another sort. ‘First a cow and then an iron ship,” as one of the voyagers observed. Here a pasture or a meadow, or a field of wheat or NATURE IN ENGLAND 5 oats, and close beside it, without an inch of waste or neutral ground between, rise the skeletons of innumerable ships, like a forest of slender growths of iron, with the workmen hammering amid it like so many noisy woodpeckers. It is doubtful if such a scene can be witnessed anywhere else in the world, —an enormous mechanical, commercial, and archi- tectural interest, alternating with the quiet and simplicity of inland farms and home occupations. You could leap from the deck of a half-finished ocean steamer into a field of waving wheat or Win- chester beans. These vast shipyards appear to be set down here upon the banks of the Clyde without any interference with the natural surroundings of the place. Of the factories and foundries that put this iron in shape you get no hint; here the ships rise as if they sprouted from the soil, without waste or litter, but with an incessant din. They stand as thickly as a row of cattle in stanchions, almost touching each other, and in all stages of development. Now and then a stall will be vacant, the ship having just been launched, and others will be standing with flags flying and timbers greased or soaped, ready to take to the water at the word. Two such, both large ocean steamers, waited for us to pass. We looked back, saw the last block or wedge knocked away from one of them, and the monster ship saun- tered down to the water and glided out into the current in the most gentle, nonchalant way imagin- able. I wondered at her slow pace, and at the 6 FRESH FIELDS grace and composure with which she took to the water; the problem nicely studied and solved, — just power enough, and not an ounce to spare. The vessels are launched diagonally up or down stream, on account of the narrowness of the chan- nel. But to see such a brood of ships, the largest in the world, hatched upon the banks of such a placid little river, amid such quiet country scenes, is anovel experience. But this is Britain, — a little island, with little lakes, little rivers, quiet, bosky fields, but mighty interests and power that reach round the world. I was conscious that the same scene at home would have been less pleasing. It would not have been so compact and tidy. There would not have been a garden of ships and a garden of turnips side by side; haymakers and shipbuild- ers in adjoining fields; milch-cows and iron steamers seeking the water within sight of each other. We leave wide margins and ragged edges in this coun- try, and both man and nature sprawl about at greater lengths than in the Old World. For the rest I was perhaps least prepared for the utter tranquillity, and shall I say domesticity, of the mountains. At a distance they appear to be covered with a tender green mould that one could brush away with his hand. On nearer approach it is seen to be grass. They look nearly as rural and pastoral as the fields. Goat Fell is steep and stony, but even it does not have a wild and barren look. At home, one thinks of a mountain as either a vast pile of barren, frowning rocks and precipices, or NATURE IN ENGLAND q else a steep acclivity covered with a tangle of primi- tive forest timber. But here, the mountains are high, grassy sheep-walks, smooth, treeless, rounded, and as green as if dipped in a fountain of perpetual spring. I did not wish my Catskills any different; but I wondered what would need to be done to them to make them look like these Scotch high- lands. Cut away their forests, rub down all in- equalities in their surfaces, pulverizing their loose bowlders; turf them over, leaving the rock to show through here and there, —then, with a few large black patches to represent the heather, and the soft- ening and ameliorating effect of a mild, humid cli- mate, they might in time come to bear some resem- blance to these shepherd mountains. Then over all the landscape is that new look, — that mellow, legendary, half-human expression which nature wears in these ancestral lands, an expression famil- iar in pictures and in literature, but which a native of our side of the Atlantic has never before seen in gross, material objects and open-air spaces, — the added charm of the sentiment of time and human history, the ripening and ameliorating influence of long ages of close and loving occupation of the soil, — naturally a deep, fertile soil under a mild, very humid climate. There is an unexpected, an unexplained lure and attraction in the landscape, — a pensive, reminiscent feeling in the air itself. Nature has grown mellow under these humid skies, as in our fiercer climate she grows harsh and severe. One sees at once why 8 FRESH FIELDS this fragrant Old World has so dominated the affec- tions and the imaginations of our artists and poets: it is saturated with human qualities; it is unctuous with the ripeness of ages, the very marrowfat of time. II I had come to Great Britain less to see the noted sights and places than to observe the general face of nature. I wanted to steep myself long and well in that mellow, benign landscape, and put to further tests the impressions I had got of it during a hasty visit one autumn, eleven years before. Hence I was mainly intent on roaming about the country, it mattered little where. Like an attic stored with relics and heirlooms, there is no place in England where you cannot instantly turn from nature to scenes and places of deep historical or legendary or artistic interest. My journal of travel is a brief one, and keeps to a few of the main lines. After spending a couple of days in Glasgow, we went down to Alloway, in Burns’s country, and had our first taste of the beauty and sweetness of rural Britain, and of the privacy and comfort of a little Scotch inn, The weather was exceptionally fair, and the mellow Ayrshire landscape, threaded by the Doon, a per- petual delight. Thence we went north on a short tour through the Highlands, —up Loch Lomond, down Loch Katrine, and through the Trosachs to Callander, and thence to Stirling and Edinburgh. After a few days in the Scotch capital we set out NATURE IN ENGLAND 9 for Carlyle’s country, where we passed five delight- ful days. The next week found us in Words- worth’s land, and the 10th of June in London. After a week here I went down into Surrey and Hants, in quest of the nightingale, for four or five days. ‘Till the middle of July I hovered about London, making frequent excursions into the coun- try, —east, south, north, west, and once across the channel into France, where I had a long walk over the hills about Boulogne. July 15 we began our return journey northward, stopping a few days at Stratford, where I found the Red Horse Inn sadly degenerated from excess of travel. Thence again into the Lake region for a longer stay. From Grasmere we went into north Wales, and did the usual touring and sight-seeing around and over the mountains. The last week of July we were again in Glasgow, from which port we sailed on our home- ward voyage July 29. With a suitable companion, I should probably have made many long pedestrian tours. As it was, I took many short but delightful walks both in England and Scotland, with a half day’s walk in the north of Ireland about Moville. ’T is an admi- rable country to walk in, —the roads are so dry and smooth and of such easy grade, the footpaths so numerous and so bold, and the climate so cool and tonic. One night, with a friend, I walked from Rochester to Maidstone, part of the way in a slow rain and part of the way in the darkness. We had proposed to put up at some one of the little 10 FRESH FIELDS inns on the road, and get a view of the weald of Kent in the morning; but the inns refused us enter- tainment, and we were compelled to do the eight miles at night, stepping off very lively the last four in order to reach Maidstone before the hotels were shut up, which takes place at eleven o’clock. I learned this night how fragrant the English elder is while in bloom, and that distance lends enchant- ment to the smell. When I plucked the flowers, which seemed precisely like our own, the odor was rank and disagreeable; but at the distance of a few yards it floated upon the moist air, a spicy and pleasing perfume. ‘The elder here grows to be a veritable tree; I saw specimens seven or eight inches in diameter and twenty feet high. In the morning we walked back by a different route, tak- ing in Boxley Church, where the pilgrims used to pause on their way to Canterbury, and getting many good views of Kent grain-fields and hop-yards. Sometimes the road wound through the landscape like a footpath, with nothing between it and the rank-srowing crops. An occasional newly-plowed field presented a curious appearance. The soil is upon the chalk formation, and is full of large frag- ments of flint. These work out upon the surface, and, being white and full of articulations and pro- cesses, give ‘to the ground the appearance of being thickly strewn with bones, — with thigh bones greatly foreshortened. Yet these old bones in skill- ful hands make a most effective building material. They appear in all the old churches and ancient NATURE IN ENGLAND 11 buildings in the south of England. Broken squarely off, the flint shows a fine semi-transparent surface that, in combination with coarser material, has a remarkable crystalline effect. One of the most delicious bits of architectural decoration I saw in England was produced, in the front wall of one of the old buildings attached to the cathedral at Can- terbury, by little squares of these flints in brick panel-work. The cool, pellucid, illuminating effect of the flint was just the proper foil to the warm, glowing, livid brick. From Rochester we walked to Gravesend, over Gad’s Hill; the day soft and warm, half sunshine, half shadow; the air full of the songs of skylarks; a rich, fertile landscape all about us; the waving wheat just in bloom, dashed with scarlet poppies; and presently, on the right, the Thames in view dotted with vessels. Seldom any cattle or grazing herds in Kent; the ground is too valuable; it is all given up to wheat, oats, barley, hops, fruit, and vari- ous garden produce. A few days later we walked from Feversham to Canterbury, and from the top of Harbledown hill saw the magnificent cathedral suddenly break upon us as it did upon the footsore and worshipful pil- grims centuries ago. At this point, it is said, they knelt down, which seems quite probable, the view is so imposing. The cathedral stands out from and above the city, as if the latter were the foundation upon which it rested. On this walk we passed several of the famous cherry orchards of Kent, the 12 FRESH FIELDS thriftiest trees and the finest fruit I ever saw. We invaded one of the orchards, and proposed to pur- chase some of the fruit of the men engaged in gath- ering it. But they refused to sell it; had no right to do so, they said; but one of them followed us across the orchard, and said in a confidential way that he would see that we had some cherries. He filled my companion’s hat, and accepted our shilling with alacrity. In getting back into the highway, over the wire fence, I got my clothes well tarred before I was aware of it. The fence proved to be well besmeared with a mixture of tar and grease, — an ingenious device for marking trespassers. We sat in the shade of a tree and ate our fruit and scraped our clothes, while a troop of bicyclists filed by. About the best glimpses I had of Canterbury cathedral — after the first view from Harbledown hill — were obtained while lying upon my back on the grass, under the shadow of its walls, and gazing up at the jackdaws flying about the central tower and going out and in weather-worn openings three hundred feet above me. There seemed to be some wild, pinnacled mountain peak or rocky ledge up there toward the sky, where the fowls of the air had made their nests, secure from molestation. The way the birds make themselves at home about these vast architectural piles is very pleasing. Doves, starlings, jackdaws, swallows, sparrows, take to them as to a wood or to acliff. If there were only something to give a corresponding touch of nature or a throb of life inside! But their interiors NATURE IN ENGLAND 13 are only impressive sepulchres, tombs within a tomb. Your own footfalls seem like the echo of past ages. These cathedrals belong to the pleisto- cene period of man’s religious history, the period of gigantic forms. How vast, how monstrous, how terrible in beauty and power! but in our day as empty and dead as the shells upon the shore. The cold, thin ecclesiasticism that now masquerades in them hardly disturbs the dust in their central aisles, I saw five worshipers at the choral service in Can- terbury, and about the same number of curious spectators. For my part, I could not take my eyes off the remnants of some of the old stained windows up aloft, If I worshiped at all, it was my devout admiration of those superb relics. There could be no doubt about the faith that inspired those. Be- low them were some gorgeous modern memorial windows: stained glass, indeed! loud, garish, thin, painty; while these were like a combination of pre- cious stones and gems, full of depth and richness of tone, and, above all, serious, not courting your attention. My eye was not much taken with them at first, and not till after it had recoiled from the hard, thin glare in my immediate front. From Canterbury I went to Dover, and spent part of a day walking along the cliffs to Folkestone. There is a good footpath that skirts the edge of the cliffs, and it is much frequented. It is character- istic of the compactness and neatness of this little island, that there is not an inch of waste land along this sea margin; the fertile rolling landscape, wav- 14 FRESH FIELDS ing with wheat and barley, and with grass just ready for the scythe, is cut squarely off by the sea; the plow and the reaper come to the very brink of the chalky cliffs. As you sit down on Shake- speare’s Cliff, with your feet dangling in the air at a height of three hundred and fifty feet, you can reach back and pluck the grain heads and the scar- let poppies. Never have I seen such quiet pastoral beauty take such a sudden leap into space. Yet the scene is tame in one sense: there is no hint of the wild and the savage; the rock is soft and fri- able, a kind of chalky bread, which the sea devours readily; the hills are like freshly cut loaves; slice after slice has been eaten away by the hungry ele- ments. Sitting here, I saw no “crows and choughs ” winging ‘‘the midway air,” but a species of hawk, “haggards of the rocks,” were disturbed in the niches beneath me, and flew along from point to point. “The murmuring surge, That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes, Cannot be heard so high.’ I had wondered why Shakespeare had made his seashores pebbly instead of sandy, and now I saw why: they are pebbly, with not a grain of sand to be found. ‘This chalk formation, as I have already said, is full of flint nodules; and as the shore is eaten away by the sea, these rounded masses remain. They soon become worn into smooth pebbles, which beneath the pounding of the surf give out a strange clinking, rattling sound. Across the Channel, on NATURE IN ENGLAND 15 the French side, there is more sand, but it is of the hue of mud and not pleasing to look upon. Of other walks I had in England, I recall with pleasure a Sunday up the Thames toward Windsor: the day perfect, the river alive with row-boats, the shore swarming with pedestrians and picnickers; young athletic London, male and female, rushing forth as hungry for the open air and the water as young mountain herds for salt. I never saw or imagined anything like it. One shore of the Thames, sometimes the right, sometimes the left, it seems, belongs to the public. No private grounds, however lordly, are allowed to monopolize both sides. Another walk was about Winchester and Salis- bury, with more cathedral-viewing. One of the most human things to be seen in the great cathe- drals is the carven image of some old knight or warrior prince resting above his tomb, with his feet upon his faithful dog. I was touched by this remembrance of the dog. In all cases he looked alert and watchful, as if guarding his master while he slept. I noticed that Cromwell’s soldiers were less apt to batter off the nose and ears of the dog than they were those of the knight. At Stratford I did more walking. After a row on the river, we strolled through the low, grassy field in front of the church, redolent of cattle and clover, and sat for an hour on the margin of the stream and enjoyed the pastoral beauty and the sunshine. In the afternoon (it was Sunday) I 16 FRESH FIELDS walked across the fields to Shottery, and then fol- lowed the road as it wound amid the quaint little thatched cottages till it ended at a stile from which a footpath led across broad, sunny fields to a stately highway. To give a more minute account of Eng- lish country scenes and sounds in midsummer, I will here copy some jottings in my note-book, made then and there: — “July 16. In the fields beyond Shottery. Bright and breezy, with appearance of slight show- ers in the distance. Thermometer probably about seventy; a good working temperature. Clover — white, red, and yellow (white predominating) — in the fields all about me. The red very ruddy; the white large. The only noticeable bird voice that of the yellow-hammer, two or three being within ear-shot. The song is much like certain sparrow songs, only inferior: Sip, sip, sip, see-e-e-e ; or, Tf, if, tf you ple-e-ease. Honey-bees on the white clover. Turf very thick and springy, sup- porting two or three kinds of grass resembling red- top and bearded rye-grass. Narrow-leaved plantain, a few buttercups, a small yellow flower unknown to me (probably ladies’ fingers), also a species of dan- delion and prunella. The land thrown into marked swells twenty feet broad. Two Sunday-school girls lying on the grass in the other end of the field. A nunber of young men playing some game, perhaps cards, seated on the ground in an adjoining field. Scarcely any signs of midsummer to me; no ripe- ness or maturity in nature yet. The grass very NATURE IN ENGLAND 17 tender and succulent, the streams full and roily, Yarrow and cinquefoil also in the grass where I sit. The plantain in bloom and fragrant. Along the Avon, the meadow-sweet in full bloom, with a fine cinnamon odor. A wild rose here and there in the hedge-rows. The wild clematis nearly ready to bloom, in appearance almost identical with our own. The wheat and oats full-grown, but not yet turning. The clouds soft and fleecy. Prunella dark purple. A few paces farther on I enter a highway, one of the broadest I have seen, the roadbed hard and smooth as usual, about sixteen feet wide, with grassy margins twelve feet wide, redolent with white and red clover. A rich farming landscape spreads around me, with blue hills in the far west. Cool and fresh like June. Bumblebees here and there, more hairy than at home. A plow in a field by the roadside is so heavy I can barely move it, —at least three times as heavy as an American plow; beam very long, tails four inches square, the mould-board a thick plank. The soil like putty; where it dries, crumbling into small, hard lumps, but sticky and tough when damp, —Shakespeare’s soil, the finest and most versatile wit of the world, the product of a sticky, stubborn clay-bank. Here is a field where every alternate swell is small. The large swells heave up in a very molten-like way — real turfy billows, crested with white clover-blos- soms.” “July 17. On the road to Warwick, two miles from Stratford. Morning bright, with sky full of 18 FRESH FIELDS white, soft, high-piled thunderheads. Plenty of pink blackberry blossoms along the road; herb Robert in bloom, and a kind of Solomon’s-seal as at home, and what appears to be a species of golden- rod with a midsummery smell. The note of the yellow-hammer and the wren here and there. Beech- trees loaded with mast and humming with bumble- bees, probably gathering honey-dew, which seems to be more abundant here than with us. The land- scape like a well-kept park dotted with great trees, which make islands of shade in a sea of grass. Droves of sheep grazing, and herds of cattle re- posing in the succulent fields. Now the just felt breeze brings me the rattle of a mowing-machine, a rare sound here, as most of the grass is cut by hand. The great motionless arms of a windmill rising here and there above the horizon. A gentleman’s turn- out goes by with glittering wheels and spanking team; the footman in livery behind, the gentleman driving. I hear his brake scrape as he puts it on down the gentle descent. Now a lark goes off. Then the mellow horn of a cow or heifer is heard. Then the bleat of sheep. The crows caw hoarsely. Few houses by the roadside, but here and there behind the trees in the distance. I hear the green- finch, stronger and sharper than our goldfinch, but less pleasing. The matured look of some fields of grass alone suggests midsummer. Several species of mint by the roadside, also certain white umbellifer- ous plants. Everywhere that royal weed of Brit- ain, the nettle. Shapely piles of road material and NATURE IN ENGLAND 19 pounded stone at regular distances, every fragment of which will go through a two-inch ring. The roads are mended only in winter, and are kept as smooth and hard as a rock. No swells or ‘ thank- y’-ma’ams’ in them to turn the water; they shed the water like a rounded pavement. On the hill, three miles from Stratford, where a finger-post points you to Hampton Lucy, I turn and see the spire of Shakespeare’s church between the trees. It lies in a broad, gentle valley, and rises above much foliage. ‘T hope and praise God it will keep foine,’ said the old woman at whose little cottage I stopped for ginger-beer, attracted by a sign in the window. ‘One penny, sir, if you please. I made it myself, sir. I do not leave the front door unfastened’ (undoing it to let me out) ‘ when I am down in the garden.’ A weasel runs across the road in front of me, and is scolded by a little bird. The body of a dead hedgehog festering beside the hedge. A species of St. John’s-wort in bloom, teasels, and a small convolvulus. Also a species of plantain with a head large as my finger, purple tinged with white. Road margins wide, grassy, and fragrant with clover. Privet in bloom in the hedges, panicles of small white flowers faintly sweet-scented. ‘ As clean and white as privet when it flowers,’ says Tennyson in ‘ Walking to the Mail.’ The road and avenue between noble trees, beech, ash, elm, and oak. All the fields are bounded by lines of stately trees; the distance is black with them. A large thistle by the roadside, with homeless bumble- 20 FRESH FIELDS bees on the heads as at home, some of them white- faced and stingless. Thistles rare in this country. Weeds of all kinds rare except the nettle. The place to see the Scotch thistle is not in Scotland or England, but in America.” III England is like the margin of a spring-run, near its source, — always green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer. The spring-run to which it owes this character is the Gulf Stream, which brings out of the pit of the southern ocean what the fountain brings out of the bowels of the earth—a uniform temperature, low but constant; a fog in winter, a cloud in summer. The spirit of gentle, fertilizing summer rain perhaps never took such tangible and topographical shape before. Cloud- evolved, cloud-enveloped, cloud-protected, it fills the eye of the American traveler with a vision of greenness such as he has never before dreamed of; a greenness born of perpetual May, tender, untar- nished, ever renewed, and as uniform and all-per- vading as the rain-drops that fall, covering moun- tain, cliff, and vale alike. The softened, rounded, flowing outlines given to our landscape by a deep fall of snow are given to the English by this depth of vegetable mould and this all-prevailing verdure which it supports. Indeed, it is caught upon the shelves and projections of the rocks as if it fell from the clouds, —a kind of green snow, — and it NATURE IN ENGLAND 21 clings to their rough or slanting sides like moist flakes. In the little valleys and chasms it appears to lie deepest. Only the peaks and broken rocky crests of the highest Scotch and Cumberland moun- tains are bare. Adown their treeless sides the moist, fresh greenness fairly drips. Grass, grass, grass, and evermore grass. Is there another coun- try under the sun so becushioned, becarpeted, and becurtained with grass? Even the woods are full of grass, and I have seen them mowing in a forest. Grass grows upon the rocks, upon the walls, on the tops of the old castles, on the roofs of the houses, and in winter the hay-seed sometimes sprouts upon the backs of the sheep. Turf used as capping to a stone fence thrives and blooms as if upon the ground. There seems to be a deposit from the at- mosphere, —a slow but steady accumulation of a black, peaty mould upon all exposed surfaces, — that by and by supports some of the lower or cryp- togamous forms of vegetation. These decay and add to the soil, till thus in time grass and other plants will grow. The walls of the old castles and cathedrals support a variety of plant life. On Rochester Castle I saw two or three species of large wild flowers growing one hundred feet from the ground and tempting the tourist to perilous reach- ings and climbings to get them. The very stones seem to sprout. My companion made a sketch of a striking group of red and white flowers blooming far up on one of the buttresses of Rochester Cathe- dral. The soil will climb to any height. Indeed, 22 FRESH FIELDS there seems to be a kind of finer soil floating in the air. How else can one account for the general smut of the human face and hands in this country, and the impossibility of keeping his own clean? The unwashed hand here quickly leaves its mark on whatever it touches. A prolonged neglect of soap and water, and I think one would be presently covered with a fine green mould, like that upon the boles of the trees in the woods. If the rains were not occasionally heavy enough to clean them off, I have no doubt that the roofs of all buildings in England would in a few years be covered with turf, and that daisies and buttercups would bloom upon them. How quickly all new buildings take on the prevailing look of age and mellowness! One needs to have seen the great architectural piles and monuments of Britain to appreciate Shake- speare’s line, — “That unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish Time.” He must also have seen those Scotch or Cumberland mountains to appreciate the descriptive force of this other line, — “The turfy mountains where live the nibbling sheep.” The turfy mountains are the unswept stones that have held and utilized their ever-increasing capital of dirt. These vast rocky eminences are stuffed and padded with peat; it is the sooty soil of the housetops and of the grimy human hand, deepened and accumulated till it nourishes the finest, sweetest grass. It was this turfy and grassy character of these NATURE IN ENGLAND 23 mountains —I am tempted to say their cushionary character — that no reading or picture viewing of mine had prepared me for. In the cut or on can- vas they appeared like hard and frowning rocks; and here I beheld them as green and succulent as any meadow-bank in April or May, — vast, elevated sheep-walks and rabbit-warrens, treeless, shrubless, generally without loose bowlders, shelving rocks, or sheer precipices; often rounded, feminine, dimpled, or impressing one as if the rock had been thrust up beneath an immense stretch of the finest lawn, and had carried the turf with it heavenward, rending it here and there, but preserving acres of it intact. In Scotland I ascended Ben Venue, not one of the highest or ruggedest of the Scotch mountains, but a fair sample of them, and my foot was seldom off the grass or bog, often sinking into them as into a saturated sponge. Where I expected a dry course, I found a wet one. The thick, springy turf was oozing with water. Instead of being balked by precipices, I was hindered by swamps. Where a tangle of brush or a chaos of bowlders should have detained me, I was picking my way as through a wet meadow-bottom tilted up at an angle of forty- five degrees. My feet became soaked when my shins should have been bruised. Occasionally, a large deposit of peat in some favored place had given way beneath the strain of much water, and left a black chasm a few yards wide and a yard or more deep. Cold spring-runs were abundant, wild flowers few, grass universal. A loping hare started 24 FRESH FIELDS up before me; a pair of ringed ousels took a hasty glance at me from behind a rock; sheep and lambs, the latter white and conspicuous beside their dingy and all but invisible dams, were scattered here and there; the wheat-ear uncovered its white rump as it flitted from rock to rock, and the mountain pipit displayed its larklike tail. No sound of wind in the trees; there were no trees, no seared branches and trunks that so enhance and set off the wildness of our mountain-tops. On the summit the wind whistled around the outcropping rocks and hummed among the heather, but the great mountain did not purr or roar like one covered with forests. I lingered for an hour or more, and gazed upon the stretch of mountain and vale about me. The summit of Ben Lomond, eight or ten miles to the west, rose a few hundred feet above me. On four peaks I could see snow or miniature glaciers. Only four or five houses, mostly humble shepherd dwell- ings, were visible in that wide circuit. The sun shone out at intervals; the driving clouds floated low, their keels scraping the rocks of some of the higher summits. The atmosphere was filled with a curious white film, like water tinged with milk, an effect only produced at home by a fine mist. “A certain tameness in the view, after all,” I recorded in my note-book on the spot, “perhaps because of the trim and grassy character of the mountain; not solemn and impressive; no sense of age or power. The rock crops out everywhere, but it can hardly look you in the face; it is crumbling NATURE IN ENGLAND 25 and insignificant; shows no frowning walls, no tre- mendous cleavage; nothing overhanging and precipi- tous; no wrath and revel of the elder gods.” Even in rugged Scotland nature is scarcely wilder than a mountain sheep, certainly a good way short of the ferity of the moose and caribou. There is everywhere marked repose and moderation in the scenery, a kind of aboriginal Scotch canniness and propriety that gives one a new sensation. On and about Ben Nevis there is barrenness, cragginess, and desolation; but the characteristic feature of wild Scotch scenery is the moor, lifted up into mountains, covering low, broad hills, or stretching away in undulating plains, black, silent, melancholy, it may be, but never savage or especially wild. “The vast and yet not savage solitude,” Carlyle says, referring to these moorlands. The soil is black and peaty, often boggy; the heather short and uniform as prairie grass; a shepherd’s cottage or a sportsman’s “box” stuck here and there amid the hills. The highland cattle are shaggy and pic- turesque, but the moors and mountains are close cropped and uniform. The solitude is not that of a forest full of still forms and dim vistas, but of wide, open, sombre spaces. Nature did not look alien or unfriendly to me; there must be barrenness or some savage threatening feature in the landscape to produce this impression; but the heather and whin are like a permanent shadow, and one longs to see the trees stand up and wave their branches. The torrents leaping down off the mountains are 26 FRESH FIELDS very welcome to both eye and ear. And the lakes —nothing can be prettier than Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine, though one wishes for some of the superfluous rocks of the New World to give their beauty a granite setting. IV It is characteristic of nature in England that most of the stone with which the old bridges, churches, and cathedrals are built is so soft that people carve their initials in it with their jack- knives, as we do in the bark of a tree or in a piece of pine timber. At Stratford a card has been posted upon the outside of the old church, implor- ing visitors to refrain from this barbarous practice. One sees names and dates there more than a century old. Often, in leaning over the parapets of the bridges along the highways, I would find them coy- ered with letters and figures. Tourists have made such havoc chipping off fragments from the old Brig o’ Doon in Burns’s country, that the parapet has had to be repaired. One could cut out the key of the arch with his pocket-knife. And yet these old structures outlast empires. A few miles from Glas- gow I saw the remains of an old Roman bridge, the arch apparently as perfect as when the first Roman chariot passed over it, probably fifteen centuries ago. No wheels but those of time pass over it in these later centuries, and these seem to be driven slowly and gently in this land, with but little wear and tear to the ancient highways. NATURE IN ENGLAND 27 England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay. The old Plutonic gods do not assert themselves; they are buried and turned to dust, and the more modern humanistic divinities bear sway. The land is a green cemetery of extinct rude forces. Where the highway or the railway gashed the hills deeply, I could seldom tell where the soil ended and the rock began, as they gradually assimilated, blended, and became one. And this is the key to nature in England: ’tis granite grown ripe and mellow and issuing in grass and verdure; ’tis aboriginal force and fecundity become docile and equable and mounting toward higher forms, —the harsh, bitter rind of the earth grown sweet and edible. There is such body and substance in the color and presence of things that one thinks the very roots of the grass must go deeper than usual. ‘The crude, the raw, the dis- cordant, where are they? It seems a comparatively short and easy step from nature to the canvas or to the poem in this cozy land. Nothing need be added; the idealization has already taken place. The Old World is deeply covered with a kind of human leaf-mould, while the New is for the most part yet raw, undigested hard-pan. This is why these scenes haunt one like a memory. One seems to have youthful associations with every field and hilltop he looks upon. The complete humanization of nature has taken place. The soil has been mixed with human thought and substance. These fields have been alternately Celt, Roman, British, Nor- 28 FRESH FIELDS man, Saxon; they have moved and walked and talked and loved and suffered; hence one feels kin- dred to them and at home among them. The mother-land, indeed. Every foot of its soil has given birth to a human being and grown tender and conscious with time. England is like a seat by the chimney-corner, and is as redolent of human occupancy and domes- ticity. It has the island coziness and unity, and the island simplicity as opposed to the continental diversity of forms. It is all one neighborhood; a friendly and familiar air is over all. It satisfies to the full one’s utmost craving for the home-like and for the fruits of affectionate occupation of the soil. It does not satisfy one’s craving for the wild, the savage, the aboriginal, what our poet describes as his “Hungering, hungering, hungering for primal energies and Nature’s dauntlessness.’’ But probably in the matter of natural scenes we hunger most for that which we most do feed upon. At any rate, I can conceive that one might be easily contented with what the English landscape affords him. The whole physiognomy of the land bespeaks the action of slow, uniform, conservative agencies. There is an elemental composure and moderation in things that leave their mark everywhere, —a sort of elemental sweetness and docility that are a sur- prise and a charm. One does not forget that the evolution of man probably occurred in this hemi- NATURE IN ENGLAND 29 sphere, and time would seem to have proved that there is something here more favorable to his per- petuity and longevity. The dominant impression of the English land- scape is repose. Never was such a restful land to the eye, especially to the American eye, sated as it is very apt to be with the mingled squalor and splendor of its own landscape, its violent contrasts, and general spirit of unrest. But the completeness and composure of this outdoor nature is like a dream. It is like the. poise of the tide at its full: every hurt of the world is healed, every shore cov- ered, every unsightly spot is hidden. The circle of the horizon is brimming with the green equable flood. (I did not see the fens of Lincolnshire nor the wolds of York.) This look of repose is partly the result of the maturity and ripeness brought about by time and ages of patient and thorough hus- bandry, and partly the result of the gentle, conti- nent spirit of Nature herself. She is contented, she is happily wedded, she is well clothed and fed. Her offspring swarm about her, her paths have fallen in pleasant places. The foliage of the trees, how dense and massive! The turf of the fields, how thick and uniform! The streams and rivers, how placid and full, showing no devastated margins, no widespread sandy wastes and unsightly heaps of drift bowlders! To the returned traveler the foli- age of the trees and groves of New England and New York looks thin and disheveled when compared with the foliage he has just left. This effect is 30 FRESH FIELDS probably owing to our cruder soil and sharper cli- mate, The aspect of our trees in midsummer is as if the hair of their heads stood on end; the woods have a wild, frightened look, or as if they were just recovering from a debauch. In our intense light and heat, the leaves, instead of spreading them- selves full to the sun and crowding out upon the ends of the branches as they do in England, retreat, as it were, hide behind each other, stand edgewise, perpendicular, or at any angle, to avoid the direct rays. In Britain, from the slow, dripping rains and the excessive moisture, the leaves of the trees droop more, and the branches are more pendent. The rays of light are fewer and feebler, and the foliage disposes itself so as to catch them all, and thus presents a fuller and broader surface to the eye of the beholder. The leaves are massed upon the outer ends of the branches, while the interior of the tree is comparatively leafless. The European plane-tree is like a tent. The foliage is all on the outside. The bird voices in it reverberate as in a chamber. “The pillar’d dusk of sounding sycamores,” says Tennyson. At a little distance, it has the mass and solidity of a rock. The same is true of the European maple, and when this tree is grown on our side of the Atlantic it keeps up its Old World habits. I have for several years taken note of a few of them growing in a park near my home. They have less grace and delicacy of outline than our native maple, but present a darker and more NATURE IN ENGLAND 31 solid mass of foliage. The leaves are larger and less feathery, and are crowded to the periphery of the tree. Nearly every summer one of the trees, which is most exposed, gets the leaves on one side badly scorched. When the foliage begins to turn in the fall, the trees appear as if they had been lightly and hastily brushed with gold. The outer edges of the branches become a light yellow, while, a little deeper, the body of the foliage is still green. It is this solid and sculpturesque character of the English foliage that so fills the eye of the artist. The feathery, formless, indefinite, not to say thin, aspect of our leafage is much less easy to paint, and much less pleasing when painted. The same is true of the turf in the fields and upon the hills. The sward with us, even in the oldest meadows, will wear more or less a ragged, uneven aspect. The frost heaves it, the sun parches it; it is thin here and thick there, crabbed in one spot and fine and soft in another. Only by the frequent use of a heavy roller, copious waterings, and top-dressings, can we produce sod that ap- proaches in beauty even that of the elevated sheep ranges in England and Scotland. The greater activity and abundance of the earth- worm, as disclosed by Darwin, probably has much to do with the smoothness and fatness of those fields when contrasted with our own. This little yet mighty engine is much less instrumental in leaven- ing and leveling the soil in New England than in Old. The greater humidity of the mother country, 32 FRESH FIELDS the deep clayey soil, its fattening for ages by human occupancy, the abundance of food, the milder climate, etc., are all favorable to the life and activ- ity of the earthworm. Indeed, according to Dar- win, the gardener that has made England a garden is none other than this little obscure creature. It plows, drains, airs, pulverizes, fertilizes, and levels, It cannot transport rocks and stone, but it can bury them; it cannot remove the ancient walls and pave- ments, but it can undermine them and deposit its rich castings above them. On each acre of land, he says, “in many parts of England, a weight of more than ten tons of dry earth annually passes through their bodies and is brought to the surface.” “When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse,” he further observes, ““we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty de- pends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly leveled by worms.” The small part which worms play in this direc- tion in our landscape is, I am convinced, more than neutralized by our violent or disrupting climate; but England looks like the product of some such gentle, tireless, and beneficent agent. I have re- ferred to that effect in the face of the landscape as if the soil had snowed down; it seems the snow came from the other direction, namely, from below, but was deposited with equal gentleness and uni- formity. The repose and equipoise of nature of which I have spoken appears in the fields of grain no less NATURE IN ENGLAND 33 than in the turf and foliage. One may see vast stretches of wheat, oats, barley, beans, etc., as uni- form as the surface of a lake, every stalk of grain or bean the size and height of every other stalk. This, of course, means good husbandry; it means a mild, even-tempered nature back of it, also, Then the repose of the English landscape is en- hanced, rather than marred, by the part man has played in it. How those old arched bridges rest above the placid streams; how easily they conduct the trim, perfect highways over them! Where the foot finds an easy way, the eye finds the same; where the body finds harmony, the mind finds har- mony. ‘Those ivy-covered walls and ruins, those finished fields, those rounded hedge-rows, those embowered cottages, and that gray, massive archi- tecture, all contribute to the harmony and to the repose of the landscape. Perhaps in no other country are the grazing herds so much at ease. One’s first impression, on seeing British fields in spring or summer, is that the cattle and sheep have all broken into the meadow and have not yet been discovered by the farmer; they have taken their fill, and are now reposing upon the grass or dream- ing under the trees. But you presently perceive that it is all meadow or meadow-like; that there are no wild, weedy, or barren pastures about which the herds toil; but that they are in grass up to their eyes everywhere. Hence their contentment; hence another element of repose in the landscape. The softness and humidity of the English climate 34 FRESH FIELDS act in two ways in promoting that marvelous green- ness of the land, namely, by growth and by decay. As the grass springs quickly, so its matured stalk or dry leaf decays quickly. No field growths are desiccated and preserved as with us; there are no dried stubble and seared leaves remaining over the winter to mar and obscure the verdancy of spring. Every dead thing is quickly converted back to vege- table mould. In the woods, in May, it is difficult to find any of the dry leaves of the previous autumn; in the fields and copses and along the highways, no stalk of weed or grass remains; while our wild, uplying pastures and mountain-tops always present a more or less brown and seared appearance from the dried and bleached stalks of the growth of the previous year, through which the fresh spring- ing grass is scarcely visible. Where rain falls on nearly three hundred days in the year, as in the British islands, the conversion of the mould into grass, and vice versa, takes place very rapidly. Ir ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST CO cannot well overpraise the rural and pas- toral beauty of England — the beauty of her fields, parks, downs, holms. In England you shall see at its full that of which you catch only glimpses in this country, the broad, beaming, hospitable beauty of a perfectly cultivated landscape. Indeed, to see England is to take one’s fill of the orderly, the permanent, the well-kept in the works of man, and of the continent, the beneficent, the uniform, in the works of nature. It is to see the most per- fect bit of garden lawn extended till it covers an empire; it is to see the history of two thousand years written in grass and verdure, and in the lines of the landscape; a continent concentrated into a state, the deserts and waste places left out, every rood of it swarming with life; the pith and marrow of wide tracts compacted into narrow fields and recruited and forwarded by the most vigilant hus- bandry. Those fields look stall-fed, those cattle beam contentment, those rivers have never left their banks; those mountains are the paradise of shepherds; those open forest glades, half sylvan, half pastoral, clean, stately, full of long vistas and 36 FRESH FIELDS cathedral-like aisles, — where else can one find beauty like that? The wild and the savage flee away. ‘The rocks pull the green turf over them like coverlids; the hills are plump with vegetable mould, and when they bend this way or that, their sides are wrinkled and dimpled like the forms of fatted sheep. And fatted they are; not merely by the care of map, but by the elements themselves; the sky rains fertility upon them; there is no wear and tear as with our alternately flooded, parched, and frozen hilltops; the soil accumulates, the mould deepens; the matted turf binds it and yearly adds to it. All this is not simply because man is or has been so potent in the landscape (this is but half the truth), but because the very mood and humor of Nature herself is domestic and human. She seems to have grown up with man and taken on his look and ways. Her spirit is that of the full, placid stream that you may lead through your garden or conduct by your doorstep without other danger than a wet sill or a soaked flower-plot, at rare intervals. It is the opulent nature of the southern seas, brought by the Gulf Stream, and reproduced and perpetuated here under these cool northern skies, the fangs and the poison taken out; full, but no longer feverish; lusty, but no longer lewd. Yet there is a certain beauty of nature to be had in much fuller measure in our own country than in England, —the beauty of the wild, the aboriginal, —the beauty of primitive forests, —the beauty of ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST 37 lichen-covered rocks and ledges. The lichen is one of the lowest and humblest forms of vegetable growth, but think how much it adds to the beauty of all our wild scenery, giving to our mountain walls and drift bowlders the softest and most pleas- ing tints. The rocky escarpments of New York and New England hills are frescoed by Time him- self, painted as with the brush of the eternal ele- ments. But the lichen is much less conspicuous in England, and plays no such part in her natural scenery. The climate is too damp. ‘The rocks in Wales and Northumberland and in Scotland are dark and cold and unattractive. The trees in the woods do not wear the mottled suit of soft gray ours do. The bark of the British beech is smooth and close-fitting, and often tinged with a green mould. The Scotch pine is clad as in a ragged suit of leather. Nature uses mosses instead of lichens. The old walls and housetops are covered with moss —a higher form of vegetation than lichens. Its decay soon accumulates a little soil or vegetable mould, which presently supports flowering plants. Neither are there any rocks in England worth mentioning; no granite bowlders, no fern-decked or moss-covered fragments scattered through the woods, as with us. They have all been used up for build- ing purposes, or for road-making, or else have quite dissolved in the humid climate. I saw rocks in Wales, quite a profusion of them in the pass of Llanberis, but they were tame indeed in comparison with such rock scenery as that say at Lake Mohunk, 38 FRESH FIELDS in the Shawangunk range in New York. There are passes in the Catskills that for the grandeur of wildness and savageness far surpass anything the Welsh mountains have to show. Then for exqui- site and thrilling beauty, probably one of our mot- tled rocky walls with the dicentra blooming from little niches and shelves in April, and the colum- bine thrusting out from seams and crevices clusters of its orange bells in May, with ferns and mosses clinging here and there, and the woodbine tracing a delicate green line across its face, cannot be matched anywhere in the world. Then, in our woods, apart from their treasures of rocks, there is a certain beauty and purity un- known in England, a certain delicacy and sweetness, and charm of unsophisticated nature, that are native to our forests. The pastoral or field life of nature in England is so rank and full, that no woods or forests that I was able to find could hold their own against it fora moment. It flooded them like a tide. The grass grows luxuriantly in the thick woods, and where the grass fails, the coarse bracken takes its place. There was no wood spirit, no wild wood air. Our forests shut their doors against the fields; they shut out the strong light and the heat. Where the land has been long cleared, the woods put out a screen of low branches, or else a brushy growth starts up along their borders that guards and pro- tects their privacy. Lift or part away these branches, and step inside, and you are in another world; new ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST 39 plants, new flowers, new birds, new animals, new insects, new sounds, new odors; in fact, an entirely different atmosphere and presence. Dry leaves cover the ground, delicate ferns and mosses drape the tocks, shy, delicate flowers gleam out here and there, the slender brown wood-frog leaps nimbly away from your feet, the little red newt fills its infantile pipe, or hides under a leaf, the ruffed grouse bursts up before you, the gray squirrel leaps from tree to tree, the wood pewee utters its plain- tive cry, the little warblers lisp and dart amid the branches, and sooner or later the mosquito demands his fee. Our woods suggest new arts, new pleas- ures, a new mode of life. English parks and groves, when the sun shines, suggest a perpetual picnic, or Maying party; but no one, I imagine, thinks of camping out in English woods. The constant rains, the darkened skies, the low tempera- ture, make the interior of a forest as uninviting as an underground passage. I wondered what became of the dry leaves that are such a feature and give out such a pleasing odor in our woods. They are probably raked up and carried away; or, if left upon the ground, are quickly resolved into mould by the damp climate. While in Scotland I explored a large tract of woodland, mainly of Scotch fir, that covers a hill near Ecclefechan, but it was grassy and uninviting. In one of the parks of the Duke of Hamilton, I found a deep wooded gorge through which flowed the river Avon (I saw four rivers of this name in 40 FRESH FIELDS Great Britain), a branch of the Clyde, —a dark, rock-paved stream, the color of brown stout. It was the wildest bit of forest scenery I saw any- where. I almost imagined myself on the head- waters of the Hudson or the Penobscot. The still- ness, the solitude, the wild boiling waters, were impressive; but the woods had no charm; there were no flowers, no birds; the sylvan folk had moved away long ago, and their house was cold and inhospitable. I sat a half-hour in their dark nettle- grown halls by the verge of the creek, to see if they were stirring anywhere, but they were not. I did, indeed, hear part of a wren’s song, and the call of the sandpiper; but that was all. Not one purely wood voice or sound or odor. But looking into the air a few yards below me, there leapt one of those matchless stone bridges, clearing the profound gulf and carrying the road over as securely as if upon the geological strata. It was the bow of art and civilization set against nature’s wildness. In the woods beyond, I came suddenly upon the ruins of an old castle, with great trees growing out of it, and rabbits burrowing beneath it. One learns that it takes more than a collection of trees to make a forest, as we know it in this country. Unless they house that spirit of wildness and purity like a temple, they fail to satisfy. In walking to Sel- borne, I skirted Wolmer Forest, but it had an unin- viting look. The Hanger on the hill above Sel- borne, which remains nearly as it was in White’s time, —a thrifty forest of beeches, —I explored, ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST 41 but found it like the others, without any distinctive woodsy attraction — only so much soil covered with dripping beeches, too dense for a park and too tame for a forest. The soil is a greasy, slippery clay, and down the steepest part of the hill, amid the trees, the boys have a slide that serves them for summer “coastings.” Hardly a leaf, hardly a twig or branch, to be found. In White’s time, the poor people used to pick up the sticks the crows dropped in building their nests, and they probably do so yet. When one comes upon the glades beyond the Hanger, the mingling of groves and grassy common, the eye is fully content. The beech, which is the prevailing tree here, as it is in many other parts of England, is a much finer tree than the American beech. The deep limestone soil seems especially adapted to it. It grows as large as our elm, with much the same manner of branching. The trunk is not patched and mottled with gray, like ours, but is often tinged with a fine deep green mould. The beeches that stand across the road in front of Wordsworth’s house, at Rydal Mount, have boles nearly as green as the surrounding hills. The bark of this tree is smooth and close-fitting, and shows that muscular, athletic character of the tree beneath it which justifies Spenser’s phrase, “the warlike beech.” These beeches develop finely in the open, and make superb shade-trees along the highway. All the great historical forests of England — Shrews- bury Forest, the Forest of Dean, New Forest, etc. — have practically disappeared. Remnants of them 42 FRESH FIELDS remain here and there, but the country they once occupied is now essentially pastoral. It is noteworthy that there is little or no love of woods as such in English poetry; no fond mention of them, and dwelling upon them. The muse of Britain’s rural poetry has none of the wide-eyedness and furtiveness of the sylvan creatures; she is rather a gentle, wholesome, slightly stupid divinity of the fields. Milton sings the praises of “ Arched walks of twilight groves.’’ But his wood is a ‘‘drear wood,” “The nodding horror of whose shady brows Threats the forlorn and wandering passenger.”’ Again: — “Very desolation dwells By grots and caverns shagg’d with horrid shade.” Shakespeare refers to the “ruthless, vast, and hor- rid wood,” —a fit place for robbery, rapine, and murder. Indeed, English poetry is pretty well colored with the memory of the time when the woods were the hiding-places of robbers and out- laws, and were the scenes of all manner of dark deeds. The only thing I recall in Shakespeare that gives a faint whiff of our forest life occurs in “ All’s Well That Ends Well,” where the clown says to Lafeu, “I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always loved a great fire.” That great fire is American; wood is too scarce in Europe. Francis Higginson wrote in 1630: “New England may boast of the element of fire more than all the rest; for all Europe is not able to afford to make so great fires ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST 43 as New England. had heard a nightingale only fifteen minutes fore, “on Polecat Hill, sir, just this side the ‘evil’s Punch-bowl, sir!” I had heard of his ajesty’s punch-bowl before, and of the gibbets zar it where three murderers were executed nearly hundred years ago, but Polecat Hill was a new ame to me. The combination did not seem a kely place for nightingales, but I walked rapidly itherward; I heard several warblers, but not hilomel, and was forced to conclude that probably had crossed the sea to miss my bird by just fifteen inutes. I met many other boys (is there any vantry where boys do not prowl about in small mds of a Sunday?) and advertised the object of y search freely among them, offering a reward iat made their eyes glisten for the bird in song; at nothing ever came of it. In my desperation, even presented a letter I had brought to the vil- A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 89 lage squire, just as, in company with his wife, he was about to leave his door for church. He turned back, and, hearing my quest, volunteered to take me on a long walk through the wet grass and bushes of his fields and copses, where he knew the birds were wont to sing. “Too late,” he said, and so it did appear. He showed me a fine old edition of White’s ‘‘Selborne,” with notes by some editor whose name I have forgotten. This editor had extended White’s date of June 15 to July 1, as the time to which the nightingale continues in song, and I felt like thanking him for it, as it gave me renewed hope. The squire thought there was a chance yet; and in case my man with the spear of grass behind his teeth failed me, he gave me a card to an old naturalist and taxidermist at Godal- ming, a town nine miles above, who, he felt sure, could put me on the right track if anybody could. At eight o’clock, the sun yet some distance above the horizon, I was at the door of the barber in Hazlemere. He led the way along one of those delightful footpaths with which this country is threaded, extending to a neighboring village several miles distant. It left the street at Hazlemere, cut- ting through the houses diagonally, as if the brick walls had made way for it, passed between gardens, through wickets, over stiles, across the highway and railroad, through cultivated fields and a gentleman’s park, and on toward its destination, —a broad, well-kept path, that seemed to have the same inevitable right of way as a brook. I was told that 90 FRESH FIELDS it was repaired and looked after the same as the highway. Indeed, it was a public way, public to pedestrians only, and no man could stop or turn it aside. We followed it along the side of a steep hill, with copses and groves sweeping down into the valley below us. It was as wild and pic- turesque a spot as J had seen in England. The foxglove pierced the lower foliage and wild growths everywhere with its tall spires of purple flowers; the wild honeysuckle, with a ranker and coarser fragrance than our cultivated species, was just open- ing along the hedges. We paused here, and my guide blew his shrill call; he blew it again and again. How it awoke the echoes, and how it awoke all the other songsters! The valley below us and the slope beyond, which before were silent, were soon musical. The chaffinch, the robin, the blackbird, the thrush—the last the loudest and most copious — seemed to vie with each other and with the loud whistler above them. But we lis- tened in vain for the nightingale’s note. Twice my guide struck an attitude and said, impressively, “There! I believe I ’erd ’er.” But we were obliged to give it up. A shower came on, and after it had passed we moved to another part of the landscape and repeated our call, but got no response, and as darkness set in we returned to the village. The situation began to look serious. I knew there was a nightingale somewhere whose brood had been delayed from some cause or other, and who was therefore still in song, but I could not get a A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 91 clew to the spot. I renewed the search late that night, and again the next morning; I inquired of every man and boy I saw. “T met many travelers, Who the road had surely kept; They saw not my fine revelers, — These had crossed them while they slept; Some had heard their fair report, In the country or the court.’” I soon learned to distrust young fellows and their girls who had heard nightingales in the gloaming. I knew one’s ears could not always be depended upon on such occasions, nor his eyes either. Larks are seen in buntings, and a wren’s song entrances like Philomel’s. A young couple of whom [I in- quired in the train, on my way to Godalming, said Yes, they had heard nightingales just a few mo- ments before on their way to the station, and described the spot, so I could find it if I returned that way. They left the train at the same point I did, and walked up the street in advance of me. I had lost sight of them till they beckoned to me from the corner of the street, near the church, where the prospect opens with a view of a near meadow and a stream shaded by pollard willows. “We heard one now, just there,” they said, as I came up. They passed on, and I bent my ear eagerly in the direction. Then I walked farther on, following one of those inevitable footpaths to where it cuts diagonally through the cemetery behind the old church, but I heard nothing save a few notes of the thrush. My ear was too critical 92 FRESH FIELDS and exacting. Then I sought out the old naturalist and taxidermist to whom I had a card from the squire. He was a short, stout man, racy both in look and speech, and kindly. He had a fine collec- tion of birds and animals, in which he took great pride. He pointed out the woodlark and the black- cap to me, and told me where he had seen and heard them. He said I was too late for the night- ingale, though I might possibly find one yet in song. But he said she grew hoarse late in the season, and did not sing as a few weeks earlier. He thought our cardinal grosbeak, which he called the Virginia nightingale, as fine a whistler as the nightingale herself. He could not go with me that day, but he would send his boy. Summoning the lad, he gave him minute directions where to take me, —over by Easing, around by Shackerford church, etc., a circuit of four or five miles. Leav- ing the picturesque old town, we took a road over a broad, gentle hill, lined with great trees, — beeches, elms, oaks, —with rich cultivated fields beyond. The air of peaceful and prosperous human occu- pancy which everywhere pervades this land seemed especially pronounced through all this section. The sentiment of parks and lawns, easy, large, basking, indifferent of admiration, self-sufficing, and full, everywhere prevailed. The road was like the most perfect private carriage-way. Homeliness, in its true sense, is a word that applies to nearly all Eng- lish country scenes; homelike, redolent of affection- ate care and toil, saturated with rural and domestic A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 93 contentment; beauty without pride, order without stiffness, age without decay. This people love the country, because it would seem as if the country must first have loved them. In a field I saw for the first time a new species of clover, much grown in parts of England as green fodder for horses. The farmers call it trifolium, probably Trifoliwm incar- natum. The head is two or three inches long, and as red as blood. A field of it under the sunlight presents a most brilliant appearance. As we walked along, I got also my first view of the British blue jay, —a slightly larger bird than ours, with a hoarser voice and much duller plumage. Blue, the tint of the sky, is not so common, and is not found in any such perfection among the British birds as among the American. My boy companion was worthy of observation also. He was a curious specimen, ready and officious, but, as one soon found out, full of duplicity. I questioned him about himself. “TI helps he, sir; sometimes I shows people about, and sometimes I does errands. I gets three a week, sir, and lunch and tea. I lives with my grandmother, but I calls her mother, sir. The master and the rector they gives me a character, says I am a good, honest boy, and that it is well I went to school in my youth. I am ten, sir. Last year I had the measles, sir, and I thought I should die; but I got hold of a bottle of medicine, and it tasted like honey, and I takes the whole of it, and it made me well, sir. I never lies, sir. It is good to tell the truth.” And yet 94 FRESH FIELDS he would slide off into a lie as if the track in that direction was always greased. Indeed, there was a kind of fluent, unctuous, obsequious effrontery in all he said and did. As the day was warm for that climate, he soon grew tired of the chase. At one point we skirted the grounds of a large house, as thickly planted with trees and shrubs as a forest; many birds were singing there, and for a moment my guide made me believe that among them he recognized the notes of the nightingale. Failing in this, he coolly assured me that the swallow that skimmed along the road in front of us was the night- ingale! We presently left the highway and took a footpath. It led along the margin of a large plowed field, shut in by rows of noble trees, the soil of which looked as if it might have been a garden of untold generations. Then the path led through a wicket, and down the side of a wooded hill to a large stream and to the hamlet of Easing. A boy fishing said indifferently that he had heard nightingales there that morning. He had caught a little fish which he said was a gudgeon. “Yes,” said my companion in response to a remark of mine, “they ’s little; but you can eat they if they és little.” Then we went toward Shackerford church. The road, like most roads in the south of England, was a deep trench. The banks on either side rose fifteen feet, covered with ivy, moss, wild flowers, and the roots of trees. England’s best defense against an invading foe is her sunken roads. Whole armies might be ambushed in these trenches, while A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 95 an enemy moving across the open plain would very often find himself plunging headlong into these hidden pitfalls. Indeed, between the subterranean character of the roads in some places and the high- walled or high-hedged character of it in others, the pedestrian about England is shut out from much he would like to see. I used to envy the bicyclists, perched high upon their rolling stilts. But the footpaths escape the barriers, and one need walk nowhere else if he choose. Around Shackerford church are copses, and large pine and fir woods. The place was full of birds. My guide threw a stone at a small bird which he declared was a nightingale; and though the missile did not come within three yards of it, yet he said he had hit it, and pretended to search for it on the ground. He must needs invent an opportunity for lying. I told him here I had no further use for him, and he turned cheerfully back, with my shil- ling in his pocket. I spent the afternoon about the woods and copses near Shackerford. The day was bright and the air balmy. I heard the cuckoo call, and the chaffinch sing, both of which I considered good omens. The little chiffchaff was chiffchaffing in the pine woods. The whitethroat, with his quick, emphatic Chew-che-rick or Che-rick-a-rew, flitted and ducked and hid among the low bushes by the roadside. A girl told me she had heard the nightingale yesterday on her way to Sunday-school, and pointed out the spot. It was in some bushes near a house. I hovered about this place till I 96 FRESH FIELDS was afraid the woman, who saw me from the win- dow, would think I had some designs upon her premises. But I managed to look very indifferent or abstracted when I passed. I am quite sure I heard the chiding, guttural note of the bird I was after. Doubtless her brood had come out that very day. Another girl had heard a nightingale on her way to school that morning, and directed me to the road; still another pointed out to me the white- throat and said that was my bird. This last was a rude shock to my faith in the ornithology of schoolgirls. Finally, I found a laborer breaking stone by the roadside, —a serious, honest-faced man, who said he had heard my bird that morning on his way to work; he heard her every morning, and nearly every night, too. He heard her last night after the shower (just at the hour when my barber and I were trying to awaken her near Hazle- mere), and she sang as finely as ever she did. This was a great lift. I felt that I could trust this man. He said that after his day’s work was done, that is, at five o’clock, if I chose to accompany him on his way home, he would show me where he had heard the bird. This I gladly agreed to; and, remembering that I had had no dinner, I sought out the inn in the village and asked for something to eat. The unwonted request so startled the land- lord that he came out from behind his inclosed bar and confronted me with good-humored curiosity. These back-country English inns, as I several times found to my discomfiture, are only drinking places A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 97 for the accommodation of local customers, mainly of the laboring class. Instead of standing conspic- uously on some street corner, as with us, they usually stand on some byway, or some little paved court away from the main thoroughfare. I could have plenty of beer, said the landlord, but he had not a mouthful of meat in the house. I urged my needs, and finally got some rye-bread and cheese. With this and a glass of home-brewed beer I was fairly well fortified. At the appointed time I met the cottager and went with him on his way home. We walked two miles or more along a charming road, full of wooded nooks and arbor-like vistas. Why do English trees always look so sturdy, and exhibit such massive repose, so unlike, in this latter respect, to the nervous and agitated expres- sion of most of our own foliage? Probably because they have been a long time out of the woods, and have had plenty of room in which to develop indi- vidual traits and peculiarities; then, in a deep fer- tile soil, and a climate that does not hurry or over- tax, they grow slow and last long, and come to have the picturesqueness of age without its infirmi- ties. The oak, the elm, the beech, all have more striking profiles than in our country. Presently my companion pointed out to me a small wood below the road that had a wide fringe of bushes and saplings connecting it with a meadow, amid which stood the tree-embowered house of a city man, where he had heard the nightingale in the morning; and then, farther along, showed me, 98 FRESH FIELDS near his own cottage, where he had heard one the evening before. It was now only six o’clock, and I had two or three hours to wait before I could reasonably expect to hear her. ‘“‘It gets to be into the hevening,” said my new friend, “when she sings the most, you know.” I whiled away the time as best I could. If I had been an artist, I should have brought away a sketch of a picturesque old cottage near by, that bore the date of 1688 on its wall. Iwas obliged to keep moving most of the time to keep warm. Yet the ‘“no-see-’ems,” or midges, annoyed me, in a temperature which at home would have chilled them buzzless and biteless. Finally, I leaped the smooth masonry of the stone wall and ambushed myself amid the tall ferns under a pine-tree, where the nightingale had been heard in the morning. If the keeper had seen me, he would probably have taken me for a poacher. I sat shivering there till nine o’clock, listening to the cooing of the wood-pigeons, watching the motions of a jay that, I suspect, had a nest near by, and taking note of various other birds. The song- thrush and the robins soon made such a musical uproar along the borders of a grove, across an adjoining field, as quite put me out. It might veil and obscure the one voice I wanted to hear. The robin continued to sing quite into the darkness, This bird is related to the nightingale, and looks and acts like it at a little distance; and some of its notes are remarkably piercing and musical. When my patience was about exhausted, I was startled by A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 99 a quick, brilliant call or whistle, a few rods from me, that at once recalled my barber with his blade of grass, and I knew my long-sought bird was inflat- ing her throat. How it woke me up! It had the quality that startles; it pierced the gathering gloom like a rocket. Then it ceased. Suspecting I was too near the singer, I moved away cautiously, and stood in a lane beside the wood, where a loping hare regarded me a few paces away. Then my singer struck up again, but I could see did not let herself out; just tuning her instrument, I thought, and getting ready to transfix the silence and the darkness. A little later, a man and boy came up the lane. I asked them if that was the nightingale singing; they listened, and assured me it was none other. “Now she’s on, sir; now she’s on. Ah! but she don’t stick. In May, sir, they makes the woods all heccho about here. Now she’s on again; that’s her, sir; now she’s off; she won’t stick.” And stick she would not. I could hear a hoarse wheezing and clucking sound beneath her notes, when I listened intently. The man and boy moved away. I stood mutely invoking all the gentle divinities to spur the bird on. Just then a bird like our hermit thrush came quickly over the hedge a few yards below me, swept close past my face, and back into the thicket. I had been caught lis- tening; the offended bird had found me taking notes of her dry and worn-out pipe there behind the hedge, and the concert abruptly ended; not another note; not a whisper. I waited a long time 100 FRESH FIELDS and then moved off; then came back, implored the outraged bird to resume; then rushed off, and slammed the door, or rather the gate, indignantly behind me. I paused by other shrines, but not a sound, The cottager had told me of a little village three miles beyond, where there were three inns, and where I could probably get lodgings for the night. I walked rapidly in that direction; com- mitted myself to a footpath; lost the trail, and brought up at a little cottage in a wide expanse of field or common, and by the good woman, with a babe in her arms, was set right again. I soon struck the highway by the bridge, as I had been told, and a few paces brought me to the first inn. It was ten o’clock, and the lights were just about to be put out, as the law or custom is in country inns. The landlady said she could not give me a bed ; she had only one spare room, and that was not in order, and she should not set about putting it in shape at that hour; and she was short and sharp about it, too. I hastened on to the next one. The landlady said she had no sheets, and the bed was damp and unfit to sleep in. I protested that I thought an inn was an inn, and for the accommo- dation of travelers. But she referred me to the next house. Here were more people, and more the look and air of a public house. But the wife (the man does not show himself on such occasions) said her daughter had just got married and come home, and she had much company and could not keep me. In vain I urged my extremity; there was no room. A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 101 Could I have something to eat, then? This seemed doubtful, and led to consultations in the kitchen; but, finally, some bread and cold meat were pro- duced. The nearest hotel was Godalming, seven miles distant, and I knew all the inns would be shut up before I could get there. So I munched my bread and meat, consoling myself with the thought that perhaps this was just the ill wind that would blow me the good I was in quest of. I saw no alternative but to spend a night under the trees with the nightingales; and I might surprise them at their revels in the small hours of the morning. Just as I was ready to congratulate myself on the richness of my experience, the landlady came in and said there was a young man there going with a “trap” to Godalming, and he had offered to take me in. I feared I should pass for an escaped luna- tic if I declined the offer; so I reluctantly assented, and we were presently whirling through the dark- ness, along a smooth, winding road, toward town. The young man was a drummer; was from Lincoln- shire, and said I spoke like a Lincolnshire man. I could believe it, for I told him he talked more like an American than any native I had met. The hotels in the larger towns close at eleven, and I was set down in front of one just as the clock was striking that hour. I asked to be conducted to a room at once. As I was about getting in bed there was a rap at the door, and a waiter presented me my billon atray. “Gentlemen as have no luggage, etc.,” he explained; and pretend to be looking for 102 FRESH FIELDS nightingales, too! Three-and-sixpence; two shil- lings for the bed and one-and-six for service. I was out at five in the morning, before any one inside was astir. After much trying of bars and doors, I made my exit into a paved court, from which a covered way led into the street. A man opened a window and directed me how to undo the great door, and forth I started, still hoping to catch my bird at her matins. I took the route of the day before. On the edge of the beautiful plowed field, looking down through the trees and bushes into. the gleam of the river twenty rods below, I was arrested by the note I longed to hear. It came up from near the water, and made my ears tingle. I folded up my rubber coat and sat down upon it, saying, Now we will take our fill, But—the bird ceased, and, tarry though I did for an hour, not another note reached me. The prize seemed destined to elude me each time just as I thought it mine. Still, I treasured what little I had heard. It was enough to convince me of the superior quality of the song, and make me more desirous than ever to hear the complete strain. I continued my rambles, and in the early morning once more hung about the Shackerford copses and loitered along the highways. Two schoolboys pointed out a tree to me in which they had heard the nightin- gale, on their way for milk, two hours before. But I could only repeat Emerson’s lines: — “Right good-will my sinews strung, But no speed of mine avails To hunt up their shining trails.” A HUNT TOR THE NIGHTINGALE 103 At nine o’clock I gave over the pursuit and returned to Easing in quest of breakfast. Bringing up in front of the large and comfortable-looking inn, I found the mistress of the house with her daughter engaged in washing windows. Perched upon their step-ladders, they treated my request for breakfast very coldly; in fact, finally refused to listen to it at all. The fires were out, and I could not be served. So I must continue my walk back to Goldalming; and, in doing so, I found that one may walk three miles on indignation quite as easily as upon bread. In the afternoon I returned to my lodgings at Shotter Mill, and made ready for a walk to Sel- borne, twelve miles distant, part of the way to be accomplished that night in the gloaming, and the rest early on the following morning, to give the nightingales a chance to make any reparation they might feel inclined to for the neglect with which they had treated me. There was a footpath over the hill and through Leechmere bottom to Liphook, and to this, with the sun half an hour high, I committed myself. The feature in this hill scenery of Surrey and Sussex that is new to American eyes is given by the furze and heather, broad black or dark-brown patches of which sweep over the high rolling surfaces, like sable mantles. Tennyson’s house stands amid this dusky scenery, a few miles east of Hazlemere. The path led through a large common, partly covered with grass and partly grown up to furze, — another un-American feature. 104 FRESH FIELDS Doubly precious is land in England, and yet so much of it given to parks and pleasure-grounds, and so much of it left unreclaimed in commons! These commons are frequently met with; about Selborne they are miles in extent, and embrace the Hanger and other woods. No one can inclose them, or appropriate them to his own use. The landed pro- prietor of whose estates they form a part cannot; they belong to the people, to the lease-holders. The villagers and others who own houses on leased land pasture their cows upon them, gather the furze, and cut the wood. In some places the com- mons belong to the crown and are crown lands. These large uninclosed spaces often give a free-and- easy air to the landscape that is very welcome. Near the top of the hill I met a little old man nearly hidden beneath a burden of furze. He was backing it home for fuel and other uses. He paused obsequious, and listened to my inquiries. A dwarfish sort of man, whose ugliness was redo- lent of the humblest chimney corner. Bent beneath his bulky burden, and erinning upon me, he was a visible embodiment of the poverty, ignorance, and, I may say, the domesticity of the lowliest peasant home. I felt as if I had encountered a walking superstition, fostered beside a hearth lighted by furze fagots and by branches dropped by the nest- ing rooks and ravens, —a figure half repulsive and half alluring. On the border of Leechmere bottom I sat down above a straggling copse, aflame as usual with the foxglove, and gave eye and ear to the A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 105 scene. While sitting here, I saw and heard for the first time the black-capped warbler. I recognized the note at once by its brightness and strength, and a faint suggestion in it of the nightingale’s. But it was disappointing: I had expected a nearer approach to its great rival. The bird was very shy, but did finally show herself fairly several times, as she did also near Selborne, where I heard the song oft repeated and prolonged. It is a ringing, ani- mated strain, but as a whole seemed to me crude, not smoothly and finely modulated. I could name several of our own birds that surpass it in pure music. Like its congeners, the garden warbler and the whitethroat, it sings with great emphasis and strength, but its song is silvern, not golden. ‘“‘Lit- tle birds with big voices,” one says to himself after having heard most of the British songsters. My path led me an adventurous course through the copses and bottoms and open commons, in the long twilight. At one point I came upon three young men standing together and watching a dog that was working a near field, —one of them probably the squire’s son, and the other two habited like labor- ers. In a little thicket near by there was a bril- liant chorus of bird voices, the robin, the song- thrush, and the blackbird, all vying with each other. To my inquiry, put to test the reliability of the young countrymen’s ears, they replied that one of the birds I heard was the nightingale, and, after a moment’s attention, singled out the robin as the bird in question. This incident so impressed 106 FRESH FIELDS me that I paid little attention to the report of the next man I met, who said he had heard a nightin- gale just around a bend in the road, a few minutes’ walk in advance of me. At ten o’clock I reached Liphook. I expected and half hoped the inn would turn its back upon me again, in which case I pro- posed to make for Wolmer Forest, a few miles dis- tant, but it did not. Before going to bed, I took a short and hasty walk down a promising-looking lane, and again met a couple who had heard night- ingales. “It was a nightingale, was it not, Char- ley?” If all the people of whom I inquired for nightin- gales in England could have been together and compared notes, they probably would not have been long in deciding that there was at least one crazy American abroad. I proposed to be up and off at five o’clock in the morning, which seemed greatly to puzzle mine host. At first he thought it could not be done, but finally saw his way out of the dilemma, and said he would get up and undo the door for me himself. The morning was cloudy and misty, though the previous night had been of the fairest. There is one thing they do not have in England that we can boast of at home, and that is a good masculine type of weather: it is not even feminine; it is childish and puerile, though I am told that occasionally there is a full-grown storm. But I saw nothing but petu- lant little showers and prolonged juvenile sulks. The clouds have no reserve, no dignity; if there is A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 107 a drop of water in them (and there generally are several drops), out it comes. The prettiest little showers march across the country in summer, scarcely bigger than a street watering-cart; some- times by getting over the fence one can avoid them, but they keep the haymakers in a perpetual flurry. There is no cloud scenery, as with us, no mass and solidity, no height nor depth. The clouds seem low, vague, and vapory, — immature, indefinite, in- consequential, like youth. The walk to Selborne was through mist and light rain. Few bird voices, save the cries of the lapwing and the curlew, were heard. Shortly after leaving Liphook the road takes a straight cut for three or four miles through a level, black, barren, peaty stretch of country, with Wolmer Forest a short distance on the right. Under the low-hanging clouds the scene was a dismal one, —a black earth beneath and a gloomy sky above. For miles the only sign of life was a baker’s cart rattling along the smooth, white road. At the end of this soli- tude I came to cultivated fields, and a little hamlet and an inn. At this inn (for a wonder!) I got some breakfast. The family had not yet had theirs, and I sat with them at the table, and had substantial fare. From this point I followed a footpath a couple of miles through fields and parks. The highways for the most part seemed so narrow and exclusive, or inclusive, such penalties seemed to attach to a view over the high walls and hedges that shut me in, that a footpath was always a wel- 108 FRESH FIELDS come escape to me. I opened the wicket or mounted the stile without much concern as to whether it would further me on my way or not, It was like turning the flank of an enemy. These well-kept fields and lawns, these cozy nooks, these stately and exclusive houses that had taken such pains to shut out the public gaze, —from the foot- path one had them at an advantage, and could pluck out their mystery. On striking the highway again, I met the postmistress, stepping briskly along with the morning mail. Her husband had died, and she had taken his place as mail-carrier. England is so densely populated, the country is so like a great city suburb, that your mail is brought to your door everywhere, the same as in town. I walked a distance with a boy driving a little old white horse with a cart-load of brick. He lived at Hedleigh, six miles distant; he had left there at five o’clock in the morning, and had heard a night- ingale. He was sure; as I pressed him, he de- scribed the place minutely. ‘She was in the large fir-tree by Tom Anthony’s gate, at the south end of the village.” Then, I said, doubtless I shall find one in some of Gilbert White’s haunts; but I did not. I spent two rainy days at Selborne; I passed many chilly and cheerless hours loitering along those wet lanes and dells and dripping hang- ers, wooing both my bird and the spirit of the gen- tle parson, but apparently without getting very near to either. When I think of the place now, I see its hurrying and anxious haymakers in the field A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 109 of mown grass, and hear the ery of a child that sat in the hay back of the old church, and cried by the hour while its mother was busy with her rake not far off. The rain had ceased, the hay had dried off a little, and scores of men, women, and children, but mostly women, had flocked to the fields to rake it up. The hay is got together inch by inch, and every inch is fought for. They first rake it up into narrow swaths, each person taking a strip about a yard wide. If they hold the ground thus gained, when the hay dries an hour or two longer, they take another hitch, and thus on till they get it into the cock or “carry” it from the windrow. It is usually nearly worn out with handling before they get it into the rick. From Selborne I went to Alton, along a road that was one prolonged rifle-pit, but smooth and hard as a rock; thence by train back to London. To leave no ground for self-accusation in future, on the score of not having made a thorough effort to hear my songster, I the next day made a trip north toward Cambridge, leaving the train at Hitchin, a large picturesque old town, and thought myself in just the right place at last. I found a road between the station and the town proper called Nightingale Lane, famous for its songsters. A man who kept a thrifty-looking inn on the corner (where, by the way, I was again refused both bed and board) said they sang night and morning in the trees opposite, He had heard them the night before, but had not noticed them that morning. He often sat at night 110 FRESH FIELDS with his friends, with open windows, listening to the strain. He said he had tried several times to hold his breath as long as the bird did in uttering certain notes, but could not doit. This, I knew, was an exaggeration; but I waited eagerly for night- fall, and, when it came, paced the street like a patrol- man, and paced other streets, and lingered about other likely localities, but caught nothing but neuralgic pains in my shoulder. I had no better success in the morning, and here gave over the pursuit, saying to myself, It matters little, after all; I have seen the country and had some object for a walk, and that is sufficient. Altogether I heard the bird less than five min- utes, and only a few bars of its song, but enough to satisfy me of the surprising quality of the strain. It had the master tone as clearly as Tennyson or any great prima donna or famous orator has it. Indeed, it was just the same. Here is the com- plete artist, of whom all these other birds are but hints and studies. Bright, startling, assured, of great compass and power, it easily dominates all other notes; the harsher chur-r-r-r-rg notes serve as foil to her surpassing brilliancy. Wordsworth, among the poets, has hit off the song nearest: — “Those notes of thine, —they pierce and pierce; Tumultuous harmony and fierce !”’ I could easily understand that this bird might keep people awake at night by singing near their houses, as I was assured it frequently does; there is something in the strain so startling and awaken- A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE 111 ing. Its start is a vivid flash of sound. On the whole, a high-bred, courtly, chivalrous song; a song for ladies to hear leaning from embowered windows on moonlight nights; a song for royal parks and groves, —and easeful but impassioned life. We have no bird-voice so piercing and loud, with such flexibility and compass, such full- throated harmony and long-drawn cadences; though we have songs of more melody, tenderness, and plaintiveness. None but the nightingale could have inspired Keats’s ode, — that longing for self-forget- fulness and for the oblivion of the world, to escape the fret and fever of life. “And with thee fade away into the forest dim.” Vv ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS HE charm of the songs of birds, like that of a nation’s popular airs and hymns, is so little a question of intrinsic musical excellence, and so largely a matter of association and suggestion, or of subjective coloring and reminiscence, that it is per- haps entirely natural for every people to think their own feathered songsters the best. What music would there not be to the homesick American, in Europe, in the simple and plaintive note of our bluebird, or the ditty of our song sparrow, or the honest carol of our robin; and what, to the European traveler in this country, in the burst of the black- cap, or the redbreast, or the whistle of the merlin! The relative merit of bird-songs can hardly be set- tled dogmatically; I suspect there is very little of what we call music, or of what could be noted on the musical scale, in even the best of them; they are parts of nature, and their power is in the degree in which they speak to our experience. When the Duke of Argyll, who is a lover of the birds and a good ornithologist, was in this country, he got the impression that our song-birds were inferior to the British, and he refers to others of 114 FRESH FIELDS his countrymen as of like opinion. No wonder he thought our robin inferior in power to the missel thrush, in variety to the mavis, and in melody to the blackbird! Robin did not and could not sing to his ears the song he sings to ours. Then it is very likely true that his grace did not hear the robin in the most opportune moment and season, or when the contrast of his song with the general silence and desolation of nature is the most striking and impressive. The nightingale needs to be heard at night, the lark at dawn rising to meet the sun; and robin, if you would know the magic of his voice, should be heard in early spring, when, as the sun is setting, he carols steadily for ten or fif- teen minutes from the top of some near tree. There is perhaps no other sound in nature; patches of snow linger here and there; the trees are naked and the earth is cold and dead, and this contented, hopeful, reassuring, and withal musical strain, poured out so freely and deliberately, fills the void with the very breath and presence of the spring. It is a simple strain, well suited to the early season ; there are no intricacies in it, but its honest cheer and directness, with its slight plaintive tinge, like that of the sun gilding the treetops, go straight to the heart. The compass and variety of the robin’s powers are not to be despised either. A German who has great skill in the musical education of birds told me what I was surprised to hear, namely, that our robin surpasses the European blackbird in capa- bilities of voice. ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS 115 The duke does not mention by name all the birds he heard while in this country. He was evi- dently influenced in his opinion of them by the fact that our common sandpiper appeared to be a silent bird, whereas its British cousin, the sandpiper of the lakes and streams of the Scottish Highlands, is very loquacious, and the “male bird-has a continu- ous and most lively song.” Hither the duke must have seen our bird in one of its silent and medita- tive moods, or else, in the wilds of Canada where his grace speaks of having seen it, the sandpiper is a more taciturn bird than it is in the States. True, its call-notes are not incessant, and it is not prop- erly a song-bird any more than the British species is; but it has a very pretty and pleasing note as it flits up and down our summer streams, or runs along on their gray, pebbly, and bowlder-strewn shallows. I often hear its calling and piping at night during its spring migratings. Indeed, we have no silent bird that I am aware of, though our pretty cedar-bird has, perhaps, the least voice of any. A lady writes me that she has heard the hummingbird sing, and says she is not to be put down, even if I were to prove by the anatomy of the bird’s vocal organs that a song was impossible to it. Argyll says that, though he was in the woods and fields of Canada and of the States in the richest moment of the spring, he heard little of that burst of song which in England comes from the blackcap, and the garden warbler, and the whitethroat, and 116 FRESH FIELDS the reed warbler, and the common wren, and (locally) from the nightingale. There is no lack of a burst of song in this country (except in the remote forest solitudes) during the richest moment of the spring, say from the Ist to the 20th of May, and at times till near midsummer; moreover, more bird-voices join in it, as I shall point out, than in Britain; but it is probably more fitful and intermit- tent, more confined to certain hours of the day, and probably proceeds from throats less loud and viva- cious than that with which our distinguished critic was familiar. The ear hears best and easiest what it has heard before. Properly to apprehend and appreciate bird-songs, especially to disentangle them from the confused murmur of nature, requires more or less familiarity with them. If the duke had passed a season with us in some one place in the country, in New York or New England, he would probably have modified his views about the silence of our birds. One season, early in May, I discovered an Eng- lish skylark in full song above a broad, low meadow in the midst of a landscape that possessed features attractive to a great variety of our birds. Every morning for many days I used to go and sit on the brow of a low hill that commanded the field, or else upon a gentle swell in the midst of the meadow itself, and listen to catch the song of the lark. The maze and tangle of bird-voices and bird-cho- ruses through which my ear groped its way search- ing for the new song can be imagined when I say ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS 117 that within hearing there were from fifteen to twenty different kinds of songsters, all more or less in full tune. If their notes and calls could have been materialized and made as palpable to the eye as they were to the ear, I think they would have veiled the landscape and darkened the day. There were big songs and little songs, — songs from the trees, the bushes, the ground, the air, — warbles, trills, chants, musical calls, and squeals, etc. Near by in the foreground were the catbird and the brown thrasher, the former in the bushes, the latter on the top of a hickory. These birds are related to the mockingbird, and may be called performers; their songs are a series of vocal feats, like the exhibition of an acrobat; they throw musical somersaults, and turn and twist and contort themselves in a very edi- fying manner, with now and then a ventriloquial touch. The catbird is the more shrill, supple, and feminine; the thrasher the louder, richer, and more audacious. The mate of the latter had a nest, which I found in a field under the spreading ground- juniper. From several points along the course of a bushy little creek there came a song, or a melody of notes and calls, that also put me out, — the tipsy, hodge-podge strain of the polyglot chat, a strong, olive-backed, yellow - breasted, black - billed bird, with a voice like that of a jay or a crow that had been to school to a robin or an oriole, —a performer sure to arrest your ear and sure to elude your eye. There is no bird so afraid of being seen, or fonder of being heard. 118 FRESH FIELDS The golden voice of the wood thrush that came to me from the border of the woods on my right was no hindrance to the ear, it was so serene, liquid, and, as it were, transparent: the lark’s song has nothing in common with it. Neither were the songs of the many bobolinks in the meadow at all confusing, —a brief tinkle of silver bells in the grass, while I was listening for a sound more like the sharp and continuous hum of silver wheels upon a pebbly beach. Certain notes of the red-shoul- dered starlings in the alders and swamp maples near by, the distant barbaric voice of the great crested flycatcher, the jingle of the kingbird, the shrill, metallic song of the savanna sparrow, and the pier- cing call of the meadowlark, all stood more or less in the way of the strain I was listening for, because every one had a touch of that burr or guttural hum of the lark’s song. The ear had still other notes to contend with, as the strong, bright warble of the tanager, the richer and more melodious strain of the rose-breasted grosbeak, the distant, brief, and emphatic song of the chewink, the child-like con- tented warble of the red-eyed vireo, the animated strain of the goldfinch, the softly ringing notes of the bush sparrow, the rapid, circling, vivacious strain of the purple finch, the gentle lullaby of the song sparrow, the pleasing ‘“wichery,” ‘“‘ wichery ” of the yellow-throat, the clear whistle of the oriole, the loud call of the high-hole, the squeak and chat- ter of swallows, etc. But when the lark did rise in full song, it was easy to hear him athwart all ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS 119 these various sounds, first, because of the sense of altitude his strain had, —its skyward character, — and then because of its loud, aspirated, penetrating, unceasing, jubilant quality. It cut its way to the ear like something exceeding swift, sharp, and copious. It overtook and outran every other sound; it had an undertone like the humming of multitu- dinous wheels and spindles. Now and then some turn would start and set off a new combination of shriller or of graver notes, but all of the same pre- cipitate, out-rushing and down-pouring character ; not, on the whole, a sweet or melodious song, but a strong and blithe one. The duke is abundantly justified in saying that we have no bird in this country, at least east of the Mississippi, that can fill the place of the skylark. Our high, wide, bright skies seem his proper field, too. His song is a pure ecstasy, untouched by any plaintiveness, or pride, or mere hilarity, —a well- spring of morning joy and blitheness set high above the fields and downs. Its effect is well suggested in this stanza of Wordsworth: — “Up with me! up with me into the clouds! For thy song, Lark, is strong; Up with me, up with me into the clouds! Singing, singing, With clouds and sky about thee ringing, Lift me, guide me till I find That spot which seems so to thy mind!” But judging from Gilbert White’s and Barring- ton’s lists, I should say that our bird-choir was a larger one, and embraced more good songsters, than the British. 120 FRESH FIELDS White names twenty-two species of birds that sing in England during the spring and summer, including the swallow in the list. A list of the spring and summer songsters in New York and New England, without naming any that are charac- teristically wood-birds, like the hermit thrush and veery, the two wagtails, the thirty or more war- blers, and the solitary vireo, or including any of the birds that have musical call-notes, and by some are denominated songsters, as the bluebird, the sandpiper, the swallow, the red-shouldered starling, the pewee, the high-hole, and others, would embrace more names, though perhaps no songsters equal to the lark and nightingale, to wit: the robin, the catbird, the Baltimore oriole, the orchard oriole, _the song sparrow, the wood sparrow, the vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, the swamp sparrow, the purple finch, the wood thrush, the scarlet tan- ager, the indigo-bird, the goldfinch, the bobolink, the summer yellowbird, the meadowlark, the house wren, the marsh wren, the brown thrasher, the chewink, the chat, the red-eyed vireo, the white- eyed vireo, the Maryland yellow-throat, and the rose- breasted grosbeak. The British sparrows are for the most part song- less. What a ditty is that of our song sparrow, rising from the garden fence or the roadside so early in March, so prophetic and touching, with endless variations and pretty trilling effects; or the song of the vesper sparrow, full of the repose and the wild sweetness of the fields; or the strain of ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS 121 the little bush sparrow, suddenly projected upon the silence of the fields or of the evening twilight, and delighting the ear as a beautiful scroll delights the eye! The white-crowned, the white-throated, and the Canada sparrows sing transiently spring and fall; and I have heard the fox sparrow in April, when his song haunted my heart like some bright, sad, delicious memory of youth, —the richest and most moving of all sparrow-songs. Our wren-music, too, is superior to anything of the kind in the Old World, because we have a greater variety of wren-songsters. Our house wren is inferior to the British house wren, but our marsh wren has a lively song; while our winter wren, in sprightliness, mellowness, plaintiveness, and execu- tion, is surpassed by but few songsters in the world. The summer haunts of this wren are our high, cool, northern woods, where, for the most part, his music is lost on the primeval solitude. The British flycatcher, according to White, is a silent bird, while our species, as the phosbe-bird, the wood pewee, the kingbird, the little green fly- catcher, and others, all have notes more or less lively and musical. The great crested flycatcher has a harsh voice, but the pathetic and silvery note of the wood pewee more than makes up for it. White says the golden-crowned wren is not a song- bird in Great Britain. The corresponding species here has a pleasing though not remarkable song, which is seldom heard, however, except in its breeding haunts in the north. But its congener, the ruby- 122 FRESH FIELDS crowned kinglet, has a rich, delicious, and prolonged warble, which is noticeable in the Northern States for a week or two in April or May, while the bird pauses to feed on its way to its summer home. There are no vireos in Europe, nor birds that answer to them. With us, they contribute an im- portant element to the music of our groves and woods. There are few birds I should miss more than the red-eyed vireo, with his cheerful musical soliloquy, all day and all summer, in the maples and locusts. It is he, or rather she, that builds the exquisite basket nest on the ends of the low, leafy branches, suspending it between two twigs. The warbling vireo has a stronger, louder strain, more continuous, but not quite so sweet. The soli- tary vireo is heard only in the deep woods, while the white-eyed is still more local or restricted in its range, being found only in wet, bushy places, whence its vehement, varied, and brilliant song is sure to catch the dullest ear. The goldfinches.of the two countries, though differing in plumage, are perhaps pretty evenly matched in song; while our purple finch, or linnet, I am persuaded, ranks far above the English lin- net, or lintie, as the Scotch call it. In compass, in melody, in sprightliness, it is a remarkable songster. Indeed, take the finches as a family, they certainly furnish more good songsters in this country than in Great Britain. They furnish the staple of our bird- melody, including in the family the tanager and the grosbeaks, while in Europe the warblers lead. ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS 123 White names seven finches in his list, and Barring- ton includes eight, none of them very noted song- sters, except the linnet. Our list would include the sparrows above named, and the indigo-bird, the goldfinch, the purple finch, the scarlet tanager, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the blue grosbeak, and the cardinal bird. Of these birds, all except the fox sparrow and the blue grosbeak are familiar summer songsters throughout the Middle and Eastern States. The indigo-bird is a midsummer and an all-summer songster of great brilliancy. So is the tanager. I judge there is no European thrush that, in the pure charm of melody and hymn-like serenity and spirit- uality, equals our wood and hermit thrushes, as there is no bird there that, in simple lingual excel- lence, approaches our bobolink. The European cuckoo makes more music than ours, and their robin redbreast is a better singer than the allied species, to wit, the bluebird, with us. But it is mainly in the larks and warblers that the European birds are richer in songsters than are ours. We have an army of small wood-warblers, —no less than forty species, —but most of them have faint chattering or lisping songs that escape all but the most attentive ear, and then they spend the summer far to the north. Our two wagtails are our most brilliant warblers, if we except the kinglets, which are Northern birds in summer, and the Ken- tucky warbler, which is a Southern bird; but they probably do not match the English blackcap, or whitethroat, or garden warbler, to say nothing of 124 FRESH FIELDS the nightingale, though Audubon thought our large- billed water-thrush, or wagtail, equaled that famous bird. It is certainly a brilliant songster, but most provokingly brief; the ear is arrested by a sudden joyous burst of melody proceeding from the dim aisles along which some wild brook has its way, but just as you say “Listen!” it ceases. I hear and see the bird every season along a rocky stream that flows through a deep chasm amid a wood of hemlock and pine. As I sit at the foot of some cascade, or on the brink of some little dark eddying pool above it, this bird darts by me, up or down the stream, or alights near me, upon a rock or stone at the edge of the water. Its speckled breast, its dark olive-colored back, its teetering, mincing gait, like that of a sandpiper, and its sharp chit, like the click of two pebbles under water, are characteristic features. Then its quick, ringing song, which you are sure presently to hear, suggests something so bright and silvery that it seems almost to light up, for a brief moment, the dim retreat. If this strain were only sustained and prolonged like the nightin- gale’s, there would be good grounds for Audubon’s comparison. Its cousin, the wood wagtail, or golden- crowned thrush of the older ornithologists, and golden-crowned accentor of the later, —a common bird in all our woods, — has a similar strain, which it delivers as it were surreptitiously, and in the most precipitate manner, while on the wing, high above the treetops. It is a kind of wood-lark, prac- ticing and rehearsing on the sly. When the modest ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS 125 songster is ready to come out and give all a chance to hear his full and completed strain, the European wood-lark will need to look to his laurels. These two birds are our best warblers, and yet they are probably seldom heard, except by persons who know and admire them. If the two kinglets could also be included in our common New England summer residents, our warbler music would only pale before the song of Philomela herself. The English red- start evidently surpasses ours as a songster, and we have no bird to match the English wood-lark above referred to, which is said to be but little inferior to the skylark; but, on the other hand, besides the sparrows and vireos, already mentioned, they have no songsters to match our oriole, our orchard star- ling, our catbird, our brown thrasher (second only to the mockingbird), our chewink, our snowbird, our cow-bunting, our bobolink, and our yellow-breasted chat. As regards the swallows of the two countries, the advantage is rather on the side of the American. Our chimney swallow, with his incessant, silvery, rattling chipper, evidently makes more music than the corresponding house swallow of Europe; while our purple martin is not represented in the Old World avifauna at all. And yet it is probably true that a dweller in England hears more bird-music through- out the year than a dweller in this country, and that which, in some respects, is of a superior order. In the first place, there is not so much of it lost “upon the desert air,” upon the wild, unlistening solitudes. The English birds are more domestic 126 FRESH FIELDS and familiar than ours; more directly and intimately associated with man; not, as a class, so withdrawn and lost in the great void of the wild and the unre- claimed. England is like a continent concentrated, —all the waste land, the barren stretches, the wil- dernesses, left out. The birds are brought near together and near to man. Wood-birds here are house and garden birds there. They find good pasturage and protection everywhere. A land of parks, and gardens, and hedge-rows, and game pre- serves, and a climate free from violent extremes, — what a stage for the birds, and for enhancing the effect of their songs! How prolific they are, how abundant! If our songsters were hunted and trapped by bird-fanciers and others, as the lark, and goldfinch, and mavis, etc., are in England, the race would soon become extinct. Then, as a rule, it is probably true that the British birds as a class have more voice than ours have, or certain qualities that make their songs more striking and conspicu- ous, such as greater vivacity and strength. They are less bright in plumage, but more animated in voice. They are not so recently out of the woods, and their strains have not that elusiveness and plaintiveness that ours have. They sing with more confidence and copiousness, and as if they, too, had been touched by civilization. Then they sing more hours in the day, and more days in the year. This is owing to the milder and more equable climate. I heard the skylark singing above the South Downs in October, apparently with ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS 127 full spring fervor and delight. The wren, the robin, and the wood-lark sing throughout the win- ter, and in midsummer there are perhaps more vocal throats than here. The heat and blaze of our midsummer sun silence most of our birds. There are but four songsters that I hear with any regularity after the meridian of summer is past, namely, the indigo-bird, the wood or bush sparrow, the scarlet tanager, and the red-eyed vireo, while White names eight or nine August songsters, though he speak of the yellow-hammer only as persistent. His dictum, that birds sing as long as nidification goes on, is as true here as in England. Hence our wood thrush will continue in song over into August if, as frequently happens, its June nest has been broken up by the crows or squirrels. The British songsters are more vocal at night than ours. White says the grasshopper lark chirps all night in the height of summer. The sedge-bird also sings the greater part of the night. A stone thrown into the bushes where it is roosting, after it has become silent, will set it going again. Other British birds, besides the nightingale, sing more or less at night. In this country the mockingbird is the only regu- lar night-singer we have. Other songsters break out occasionally in the middle of the night, but so briefly that it gives one the impression that they sing in their sleep. Thus I have heard the hair- bird, or chippie, the kingbird, the oven-bird, and the cuckoo fitfully in the dead of the night, like a schoolboy laughing in his dreams. 128 FRESH FIELDS On the other hand, there are certain aspects in which our songsters appear to advantage. That they surpass the European species in sweetness, ten- derness, and melody I have no doubt; and that our mockingbird, in his native haunts in the South, surpasses any bird in the world in fluency, variety, and execution is highly probable. That the total effect of his strain may be less winning and persua- sive than the nocturne of the nightingale is the only question in my mind about the relative merits of the two songsters. Bring our birds together as they are brought together in England, let all our shy wood-birds — like the hermit thrush, the veery, the winter wren, the wood wagtail, the water wag- tail, the many warblers, the several vireos — be- come birds of the groves and orchards, and there would be a burst of song indeed. Bates, the naturalist of the Amazon, speaks of a little thrush he used to hear in his rambles that showed the American quality to which I have referred. ‘It is a much smaller and plainer-colored bird,” he says, “than our [the English] thrush, and its song is not so loud, varied, or so long sustained ; here the tone is of a sweet and plaintive quality, which harmonizes well with the wild and silent woodlands, where alone it is heard in the mornings and evenings of sultry, tropical days.” I append parallel lists of the better-known Ameri- can and English song-birds, marking in each with an asterisk, those that are probably the better song- sters ; followed by a list of other American songsters, ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SONG-BIRDS 129 some of which are not represented in the British avi- fauna: — Old England. New England. * Wood-lark. Meadowlark. Song-thrush. * Wood thrush. *Jenny Wren. House wren. Willow wren. * Winter wren. * Redbreast. Bluebird. * Redstart. Redstart. Hedge-sparrow. * Song sparrow. Yellow-hammer. * Fox sparrow. * Skylark. Bobolink. Swallow. Swallow. * Blackcap. Wood wagtail. Titlark. Titlark (spring and fall). * Blackbird. Robin. Whitethroat. * Maryland yellow-throat. Goldfinch. Goldfinch. Greenfinch. * Wood sparrow. Reed-sparrow. * Vesper sparrow. Linnet. * Purple finch. * Chaffinch. Indigo-bird. * Nightingale. Water wagtail. Missel thrush. * Hermit thrush. Great titmouse. Savanna sparrow. Bullfinch. Chickadee. New England song-birds not included in the above are: — Red-eyed vireo. Orchard oriole. White-eyed vireo. Catbird. Brotherly love vireo. Brown thrasher. Solitary vireo. Chewink. Yellow-throated vireo. Rose-breasted grosbeak. Scarlet tanager. Purple martin. Baltimore oriole. Mockingbird (occasionally). Besides these, a dozen or more species of the Mniotiltide, or wood-warblers, might be named, some of which, like the black-throated green war- bler, the speckled Canada warbler, the hooded war- bler, the mourning ground-warbler, and the yellow warbler, are fine songsters. VI IMPRESSIONS OF SOME ENGLISH BIRDS ree foregoing chapter was written previous to my last visit to England, and when my know- ledge of the British song-birds was mainly from report, and not from personal observation. I had heard the skylark, and briefly the robin, and snatches of a few other bird strains, while in that country in the autumn of 1871; but of the full spring and summer chorus, and the merits of the individual songsters, I knew little except through such writers as White, Broderip, and Barrington. Hence, when I found myself upon British soil once more, and the birds in the height of their May jubilee, I improved my opportunities, and had very soon traced every note home. It is not a long and difficult lesson; there is not a great variety of birds, and they do not hide in woods and remote corners. You find them nearly all wherever your walk leads you. And how they do sing! how loud and pier- cing their notes are! Not a little of the pleasure I felt arose from the fact that the birds sang much as I expected them to, much as they ought to have sung according to my previous views of their merits and qualities, when contrasted with our own song- sters. : 132 FRESH FIELDS I shall not soon forget how my ears were beset that bright May morning, two days after my arrival at Glasgow, when I walked from Ayr to Alloway, a course of three miles in one of the most charming and fertile rural districts in Scotland. It was as warm as mid-June, and the country had the most leafy and luxuriant June aspect. Above a broad stretch of undulating meadow-land on my right the larks were in full song. These I knew; these I welcomed. What a sound up there, as if the sun- shine were vocal! A little farther along, in aclover field, I heard my first corn-crake. ‘“‘Crex, crex, crex,”’ came the harsh note out of the grass, like the rasping sound of some large insect, and I knew the bird at once. But when I came to a beautiful grove or wood, jealously guarded by a wall twelve feet high (some fine house concealed back there, I saw by the entrance), what a throng of strange songs and calls beset my ears! The concert was at its height. The wood fairly rang and reverberated with bird-voices. How loud, how vivacious, almost clamorous, they sounded to me! I paused in delightful bewilderment. Two or three species of birds, as I afterwards found, were probably making all the music I heard, and of these, one species was contributing at least two thirds of it. At Alloway I tarried nearly a week, putting up at a neat little inn “Where Doon rins, wimplin’, clear,’’ and I was not long in analyzing this spirited bird- choir, and tracing each note home to its proper IMPRESSIONS OF SOME ENGLISH BIRDS 133 source. It was, indeed, a burst of song, as the Duke of Argyll had said, but the principal singer his grace does not mention. Indeed, nothing I had read, or could find in the few popular treatises on British ornithology I carried about with me, had given me any inkling of which was the most abundant and vociferous English song-bird, any more than what I had read or heard had given me any idea of which was the most striking and con- spicuous wild flower, or which the most universal weed. Now the most abundant song-bird in Britain is the chaffinch, the most conspicuous wild flower (at least in those parts of the country I saw) is the foxglove, and the most ubiquitous weed is the nettle. Throughout the month of May, and prob- ably during all the spring months, the chaffinch makes two thirds of the music that ordinarily greets the ear as one walks or drives about the country. In both England and Scotland, in my walks up to the time of my departure, the last of July, I seemed to see three chaffinches to one of any other species of bird. It is a permanent resident in this island, and in winter appears in immense flocks. The male is ‘the prettiest of British song-birds, with its soft blue-gray back, barred wings, and pink breast and sides. The Scotch call it shilfa. At Alloway there was a shilfa for every tree, and its hurried and incessant notes met and intersected each other from all directions every moment of the day, like wave- lets on a summer pool. So many birds, and each one so persistent and vociferous, accounts for their 134 FRESH FIELDS part in the choir. ‘The song is as loud as that of our orchard starling, and is even more animated. It begins with a rapid, wren-like trill, which quickly becomes a sharp jingle, then slides into a warble, and ends with an abrupt flourish. I have never heard a song that began so liltingly end with such a quick, abrupt emphasis. The last note often sounds like ‘‘whittier,” uttered with great sharp- ness; but one that used to sing in an apple-tree over my head, day after day there by the Doon, finished its strain each time with the sharp ejacula- tion, “Sister, right here.” Afterwards, whenever I met a shilfa, I could hear in its concluding note this pointed and almost impatient exclamation of “Sister, right here.” The song, on the whole, is a pleasing one, and very characteristic; so rapid, incessant, and loud. The bird seemed to be held in much less esteem in Britain than on the Conti- nent, where it is much sought after as a caged bird. In Germany, in the forest of Thuringia, the bird is in such quest that scarcely can one be heard. A common workman has been known to give his cow for a favorite songster. The chaffinch has far less melody and charm of song than some of our finches, notably our purple finch; but it is so abundant and so persistent in song that in quantity of music it far excels any singer we have. Next to the chaffinch in the volume of its song, and perhaps in some localities surpassing it, is the song-thrush. I did not find this bird upon the Doon, and but rarely in other places in Scotland, IMPRESSIONS OF SOME ENGLISH BIRDS 135 but in the south of England it leads the choir. Its voice can be heard above all others. But one would never suspect it to be a thrush. It has none of the flute-like melody and serene, devotional quality of our thrush strains. It is a shrill whis- tling polyglot. Its song is much after the manner of that of our brown thrasher, made up of vocal attitudes and poses. It is easy to translate its strain into various words or short ejaculatory sentences. It sings till the darkness begins to deepen, and I could fancy what the young couple walking in the gloaming would hear from the trees overhead. “Kiss her, kiss her; do it, do it; be quick, be quick; stick her to it, stick her to it; that was neat, that was neat; that will do,” with many other calls not so explicit, and that might sometimes be construed as approving nods or winks. Sometimes it has a staccato whistle. Its performance is always animated, loud, and clear, but never, to my ear, melodious, as the poets so often have it. Even Burns says, — “The mavis mild and mellow.” Drayton hits it when he says, — “The throstle with shrill sharps,” etc. Ben Jonson’s “lusty throstle” is still better. It is a song of great strength and unbounded good cheer; it proceeds from a sound heart and a merry throat. There is no touch of plaintiveness or melancholy in it; it is as expressive of health and good digestion as the crowing of the cock in the morning. When Iwas hunting for the nightingale, the thrush fre- 136 FRESH FIELDS quently made such a din just at dusk as to be a great annoyance. At Kew, where I passed a few weeks, its shrill pipe usually woke me in the morning. A thrush of a much mellower strain is the black- bird, which is our robin cut in ebony. His golden bill gives a golden touch to his song. It was the most leisurely strain I heard. Amid the loud, vivacious, workaday chorus, it had an easeful, dolce for niente effect. I place the song before that of our robin, where it belongs in quality, but it falls short in some other respects. It constantly seemed to me as if the bird was a learner and had not yet mastered his art. The tone is fine, but the execu- tion is labored; the musician does not handle his instrument with deftness and confidence. It seems as if the bird were trying to whistle some simple air, and never quite succeeding. Parts of the song are languid and feeble, and the whole strain is wanting in the decision and easy fulfillment of our robin’s song. ‘The bird is noisy and tuneful in the twilight like his American congener. Such British writers on birds and bird life as I have been able to consult do not, it seems to me, properly discriminate and appreciate the qualities and merits of their own songsters. The most melo- dious strain I heard, and the only one that exhib- ited to the full the best qualities of the American songsters, proceeded from a bird quite unknown to fame, in the British Islands at least. I refer to the willow warbler, or willow wren, as it is also IMPRESSIONS OF SOME ENGLISH BIRDS 137 called, —a little brown bird, that builds a dome- shaped nest upon the ground and lines it with feathers. White says it has a “sweet, plaintive note,” which is but half the truth. It has along, . tender, delicious warble, not wanting in strength and volume, but eminently pure and sweet, — the song of the chaffinch refined and idealized. The famous blackcap, which I heard in the south of England and again in France, falls far short of it in these respécts, and only surpasses it in strength and brilliancy. The song is, perhaps, in the minor key, feminine and not masculine, but it touches the heart. “That strain again; it had a dying fall.” The song of the willow warbler has a dying fall; no other bird-song is so touching in this respect. It mounts up round and full, then runs down the scale, and expires upon the air in a gentle murmur. I heard the bird everywhere; next to the chaffinch, its voice greeted my ear oftenest; yet many country people of whom I inquired did not know the bird, or confounded it with some other. It is too fine a song for the ordinary English ear; there is not noise enough in it. The whitethroat is much more famous; it has a louder, coarser voice; it sings with great emphasis and assurance, and is a much better John Bull than the little willow warbler. I could well understand, after being in England a few days, why, to English travelers, our songsters seem inferior to their own. ‘They are much less loud and vociferous, less abundant and familiar; 138 FRESH FIELDS one needs to woo them more; they are less recently out of the wilderness; their songs have the delicacy and wildness of most woodsy forms, and are as plain- tive as the whistle of the wind. They are not so happy a race as the English songsters, as if life had more trials for them, as doubtless it has in their enforced migrations and in the severer climate with which they have to contend. When one hears the European cuckoo he regrets that he has ever heard a cuckoo clock. The clock has stolen the bird’s thunder; and when you hear the rightful owner, the note has a second-hand, artificial sound. It is only another cuckoo clock off there on the hill or in the grove. Yet itisa cheerful call, with none of the solitary and monkish character of our cuckoo’s note; and, as it comes early in spring, I can see how much it must mean to native ears. I found that the only British song-bird I had done injustice to in my previous estimate was the wren. It is far superior to our house wren. It approaches very nearly our winter wren, if it does not equal it. Without hearing the two birds to- gether, it would be impossible to decide which was the better songster. Its strain has the same gush- ing, lyrical character, and the shape, color, and manner of the two birds are nearly identical. It is very common, sings everywhere, and therefore contributes much more to the general entertainment than does our bird. Barrington marks the wren far too low in his table of the comparative merit IMPRESSIONS OF SOME ENGLISH BIRDS 139 of British song-birds; he denies it mellowness and plaintiveness, and makes it high only in sprightli- ness, a fact that discredits his whole table. He makes the thrush and blackbird equal in the two qualities first named, which is equally wide of the mark, The English robin is a better songster than I expected to find him. The poets and writers have not done him justice. He is of the royal line of the nightingale, and inherits some of the qualities of that famous bird. His favorite hour for singing is the gloaming, and I used to hear him the last of all. His song is peculiar, jerky, and spasmodic, but abounds in the purest and most piercing tones to be heard, — piercing from their smoothness, in- tensity, and fullness of articulation; rapid and crowded at one moment, as if some barrier had sud- denly given way, then as suddenly pausing, and scintillating at intervals, bright, tapering shafts of sound, It stops and hesitates, and blurts out its notes like a stammerer; but when they do come they are marvelously clear and pure. I have heard green hickory branches thrown into a fierce blaze jet out the same fine, intense, musical sounds on the escape of the imprisoned vapors in the hard wood as characterize the robin’s song. One misses along English fields and highways the tender music furnished at home by our spar- rows, and in the woods and groves the plaintive cries of our pewees and the cheerful soliloquy of our red-eyed vireo. The English sparrows and 140 FRESH FIELDS buntings are harsh-voiced, and their songs, when they have songs, are crude. The yellow-hammer comes nearest to our typical sparrow, it is very common, and is a persistent songster, but the song is slight, like that of our savanna sparrow — scarcely more than the chirping of a grasshopper. In form and color it is much like our vesper sparrow, except that the head of the male has a light yellow tinge. The greenfinch or green linnet is an abundant bird everywhere, but its song is less pleasing than that of several of our finches. The goldfinch is very rare, mainly, perhaps, because it is so persistently trapped by bird-fanciers; its song is a series of twitters and chirps, less musical to my ear than that of our goldfinch, especially when a flock of the latter are congregated in a tree and inflating their throats in rivalry. Their golden - crowned kinglet has a fine thread-like song, far less than that of our kinglet, less even than that of our black and white creeper. The nuthatch has not the soft, clear call of ours, and the various woodpeckers fig- ure much less; there is less wood to peck, and they seem a more shy and silent race. I saw but one in all my walks, and that was near Wolmer Forest. I looked in vain for the wood-lark; the country people confound it with the pipit. The blackcap warbler I found to be a rare and much overpraised bird. The nightingale is very restricted in its range, and is nearly silent by the middle of June. I made a desperate attempt to find it in full song after the seventeenth of the month, as I have IMPRESSIONS OF SOME ENGLISH BIRDS 141 described in a previous chapter, but failed. And the garden warbler is by no means found in every garden; probably I did not hear it more than twice. The common sandpiper, I should say, was more loquacious and musical than ours. JI heard it on the Highland lakes, when its happy notes did indeed almost run into a song, so continuous and bright and joyful were they. One of the first birds I saw, and one of the most puzzling, was the lapwing or pewit. I observed it from the car window, on my way down to Ayr, a large, broad-winged, awkward sort of bird, like a cross between a hawk and an owl, swooping and gamboling in the air as the train darted past. It is very abundant in Scotland, especially on the moors and near the coast. In the Highlands I saw them from the top of the stage-coach, running about the fields with their young. The most graceful and pleasing of birds upon the ground, about the size of the pigeon, now running nimbly along, now pausing to regard you intently, crested, ringed, white-bellied, glossy green-backed, with every move- ment like visible music. But the moment it launches into the air its beauty is gone; the wings look round and clumsy, like a mittened hand, the tail very short, the head and neck drawn back, with nothing in the form or movement that suggests the plover kind. It gambols and disports itself like a great bat, which its outlines suggest. On the moors I also saw the curlew, and shall never forget its wild, musical call. 142 FRESH FIELDS Nearly all the British bird-voices have more of a burr in them than ours have. Can it be that, like the people, they speak more from the throat? It is especially noticeable in the crow tribe, — in the rook, the jay, the jackdaw. The rook has a hoarse, thick caw, —not so clearly and roundly uttered as that of our crow. The swift has a wheezy, catarrhal squeak, in marked contrast to the cheery chipper of our swift. In Europe the chim- ney swallow builds in barns, and the barn swallow builds in chimneys. The barn swallow, as we would call it, —chimney swallow, as it is called there, —is much the same in voice, color, form, flight, etc., as our bird, while the swift is much larger than our chimney swallow and has a forked tail. The martlet, answering to our cliff swallow, is not so strong and ruddy looking a bird as our species, but it builds much the same, and has a similar note. It is more plentiful than our swal- low. I was soon struck with the fact that in the main the British song-birds lead up to and culminate in two species, namely, in the lark and the nightin- gale. In these two birds all that is characteristic in the other songsters is gathered up and carried to perfection. They crown the series. Nearly all the finches and pipits seem like rude studies and sketches of the skylark, and nearly all the warblers and thrushes point to the nightingale; their powers have fully blossomed in her. There is nothing in the lark’s song, in the quality or in the manner of it, that is not sketched or suggested in some voice IMPRESSIONS OF SOME ENGLISH BIRDS 143 lower in the choir, and the tone and compass of the warblers mount in regular gradation from the clink- ing note of the chiffchaff up to the nightingale. Several of the warblers sing at night, and several of the constituents of the lark sing on the wing. On the lark’s side, the birds are remarkable for gladness and ecstacy, and are more creatures of the light and of the open spaces; on the side of the nightingale there is more pure melody, and more a love for the twilight and the privacy of arboreal life. Both the famous songsters are representative as to color, exhibiting the prevailing gray and dark tints. A large number of birds, I noticed, had the two white quills in the tail characteristic of the lark. I found that I had overestimated the bird-music to be heard in England in midsummer. It appeared to be much less than our own. ‘The last two or three weeks of July were very silent: the only bird I was sure of hearing in my walks was the yellow- hammer; while, on returning home early in August, the birds made such music about my house that they woke me up in the morning. The song spar- row and bush sparrow were noticeable till in Sep- tember, and the red-eyed vireo and warbling vireo were heard daily till in October. On the whole, I may add that I did not any- where in England hear so fine a burst of bird-song as I have heard at home, and I listened long for it and attentively. Not so fine in quality, though perhaps greater in quantity. It sometimes happens that several species of our best songsters pass the 144 FRESH FIELDS season in the same locality, some favorite spot in the woods, or at the head of a sheltered valley, that possesses attraction for many kinds. I found such a place one summer by a small mountain lake, in the southern Catskills, just over the farm borders, in the edge of the primitive forest. The lake was surrounded by an amphitheatre of wooded steeps, except a short space on one side where there was an old abandoned clearing, grown up to saplings and brush. Birds love to be near water, and I think they like a good auditorium, love an open space like that of a small lake in the woods, where their voices can have room and their songs reverberate. Certain it is they liked this place, and early in the morning especially, say from half past three to half past four, there was such a burst of melody as I had never before heard. The most prominent voices were those of the wood thrush, veery thrush, rose-breasted grosbeak, winter wren, and one of the vireos, and occasionally at evening that of the her- mit, though far off in the dusky background, — birds all notable for their pure melody, except that of the vireo, which was cheery, rather than melodious. A singular song that of this particular vireo, — “ Cheery, cheery, cheery drunk! Cheery drunk!” —all day long in the trees above our tent. The wood thrush was the most abundant, and the purity and eloquence of its strain, or of their mingled strains, heard in the cool dewy morning from across that translucent sheet of water, was indeed memo- rable. Its liquid and serene melody was in such IMPRESSIONS OF SOME ENGLISH BIRDS 145 perfect keeping with the scene. The eye and the ear both reported the same beauty and harmony. Then the clear, rich fife of the grosbeak from the tops of the tallest trees, the simple flute-like note of the veery, and the sweetly ringing, wildly lyrical outburst of the winter wren, sometimes from the roof of our butternut-colored tent —all joining with it —formed one of the most noteworthy bits of a bird symphony it has ever been my good luck to hear. Often at sundown, too, while we sat idly in our boat, watching the trout break the glassy surface here and there, the same soothing melody would be poured out all around us, and kept up till darkness filled the woods. The last note would be that of the wood thrush, calling out “quit,” “quit.” Across there in a particular point, I used at night to hear another thrush, the olive-backed, the song a slight variation of the veery’s. I did hear in England in the twilight the robin, blackbird, and song-thrush unite their voices, producing a loud, pleasing chorus; add the nightingale and you have great volume and power, but still the pure melody of my songsters by the lake is probably not reached. VII IN WORDSWORTH’S COUNTRY N°? other English poet had touched me quite so closely as Wordsworth. All cultivated men delight in Shakespeare; he is the universal genius; but Wordsworth’s poetry has more the character of a message, and a message special and personal, to a comparatively small circle of readers. He stands for a particular phase of human thought and expe- rience, and his service to certain minds is like an initiation into a new order of truths. Note what a revelation he was to the logical mind of John Stuart Mill. His limitations make him all the more private and precious, like the seclusion of one of his mountain dales. He is not and can never be the world’s poet, but more especially the poet of those who love solitude and solitary communion with nature. Shakespeare’s attitude toward nature is for the most part like that of a gay, careless rev- eler, who leaves his companions for a moment to pluck a flower or gather a shell here and there, as they stroll “By paved fountain, or by rushy brook, Or on the beachéd margent of the sea.” He is, of course, preéminent in all purely poetic 148 FRESH FIELDS achievements, but his poems can never minister to the spirit in the way Wordsworth’s do. One can hardly appreciate the extent to which the latter poet has absorbed and reproduced the spirit of the Westmoreland scenery until he has visited that region. JI paused there a few days in early June, on my way south, and again on my return late in July. I walked up from Windermere to Grasmere, where, on the second visit, I took up my abode at the historic Swan Inn, where Scott used to go surreptitiously to get his mug of beer when he was stopping with Wordsworth. The call of the cuckoo came to me from over Rydal Water as I passed along. I plucked my first foxglove by the roadside; paused and listened to the voice of the mountain torrent; heard “The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; ”’ caught many a glimpse of green, unpeopled hills, urn-shaped dells, treeless heights, rocky promonto- ries, secluded valleys, and clear, swift - running streams. The scenery was sombre; there were but two colors, green and brown, verging on black; wherever the rock cropped out of the green turf on the mountain-sides, or in the vale, it showed a dark face. But the tenderness and freshness of the green tints were something to remember, —the hue of the first springing April grass, massed and wide- spread in midsummer. Then there was a quiet splendor, almost gran- deur, about Grasmere vale, such as I had not seen elsewhere, —a kind of monumental beauty and dig- IN WORDSWORTH’S COUNTRY 149 nity that agreed well with one’s conception of the loftier strains of its poet. It is not too much domi- nated by the mountains, though shut in on all sides by them; that stately level floor of the valley keeps them back and defines them, and they rise from its outer margin like rugged, green-tufted, and green- draped walls. It is doubtless this feature, as De Quincey says, this floor-like character of the valley, that makes the scenery of Grasmere more impressive than the scenery in North Wales, where the physiognomy of the mountains is essentially the same, but where the valleys are more bowl-shaped. Amid so much that is steep and rugged and broken, the eye de- lights in the repose and equilibrium of horizontal lines, —a bit of table-land, the surface of the lake, or the level of the valley bottom. The principal valleys of our own Catskill region all have this stately floor, so characteristic of Wordsworth’s country. It was a pleasure which I daily indulged in to stand on the bridge by Grasmere Church, with that full, limpid stream before me, pausing and deepening under the stone embankment near where the dust of the poet lies, and let the eye sweep across the plain to the foot of the near mountains, or dwell upon their encircling summits above the tops of the trees and the roofs of the village. The water-ouzel loved to linger there, too, and would sit in contemplative mood on the stones around which the water loitered and murmured, its clear white breast alone defining it from the object upon which 150 FRESH FIELDS it rested. Then it would trip along the margin of the pool, or flit a few feet over its surface, and suddenly, as if it had burst like a bubble, vanish before my eyes; there would be a little splash of the water beneath where I saw it, as if the drop of which it was composed had reunited with the sur- face there. Then, in a moment or two, it would emerge from the water and take up its stand as dry and unruffled as ever. It was always amusing to see this plump little bird, so unlike a water-fowl in shape and manner, disappear in the stream. It did not seem to dive, but simply dropped into the water, as if its wings had suddenly failed it. Some- times it fairly tumbled in from its perch. It was gone from sight in a twinkling, and, while you were wondering how it could accomplish the feat of walking on the bottom of the stream under there, it reappeared as unconcerned as possible. It is a song-bird, a thrush, and gives a feature to these mountain streams and waterfalls which ours, except on the Pacific coast, entirely lack. The stream that winds through Grasmere vale, and flows against the embankment of the churchyard, as the Avon at Stratford, is of great beauty, — clean, bright, full, trouty, with just a tinge of gypsy blood in its veins, which it gets from the black tarns on the moun- tains, and which adds to its richness of color. I saw an angler take a few trout from it, in a meadow near the village. After a heavy rain the stream was not roily, but slightly darker in hue; these fields and mountains are so turf-bound that no par- ticle of soil is carried away by the water. IN WORDSWORTH’S COUNTRY 151 Falls and cascades are a great feature all through this country, as they are a marked feature in Words- worth’s poetry. One’s ear is everywhere haunted by the sound of falling water; and, when the ear cannot hear them, the eye can see the streaks or patches of white foam down the green declivities. There are no trees above the valley bottom to ob- struct the view, and no hum of woods to mufile the sounds of distant streams. When I was at Gras- mere there was much rain, and this stanza of the poet came to mind: — “Loud is the Vale! The voice is up With which she speaks when storms are gone, A mighty unison of streams! Of all her voices, one!”’ The words “ vale ” and “dell” come to have a new meaning after one has visited Wordsworth’s coun- try, just as the words “cottage” and “shepherd ” also have so much more significance there and in Scotland than at home. “Dear child of Nature, let them rail! — There is a nest jn a green dale, A harbor and a hold, Where thou, a wife and friend, shalt see Thy own delightful days, and be A light to young and old.” Every humble dwelling looks like a nest; that in which the poet himself lived had a cozy, nest-like look; and every vale is green, —a cradle amid rocky heights, padded and carpeted with the thickest turf. Wordsworth is described as the poet of nature. He is more the poet of man, deeply wrought upon 152 FRESH FIELDS by a certain phase of nature, — the nature of those sombre, quiet, green, far-reaching mountain soli- tudes. There is a shepherd quality about him; he loves the flocks, the heights, the tarn, the tender herbage, the sheltered dell, the fold, with a kind of poetized shepherd instinct. Lambs and sheep and their haunts, and those who tend them, recur perpetually in his poems. How well his verse harmonizes with those high, green, and gray soli- tudes, where the silence is broken only by the bleat of lambs or sheep, or just stirred by the voice of distant waterfalls! Simple, elemental yet pro- foundly tender and human, he had “The primal sympathy Which, having been, must ever be.’” He brooded upon nature, but it was nature mirrored in his own heart. In his poem of “The Brothers ” he says of his hero, who had gone to sea: — “He had been rear’d Among the mountains, and he in his heart Was half a shepherd on the stormy seas. Oft in the piping shrouds had Leonard heard The tones of waterfalls, and inland sounds Of caves and trees;”’ and, leaning over the vessel’s side and gazing into the “broad green wave and sparkling foam,” he “Saw mountains, — saw the forms of sheep that grazed On verdant hills.”’ This was what his own heart told him; every expe- rience or sentiment called those beloved images to his own mind. One afternoon, when the sun seemed likely to IN WORDSWORTH’S COUNTRY 153 get the better of the soft rain-clouds, I set out to climb to the top of Helvellyn. I followed the highway a mile or more beyond the Swan Inn, and then I committed myself to a footpath that turns up the mountain-side to the right, and crosses into Grisedale and so to Ulleswater. Two schoolgirls whom I overtook put me on the right track. The voice of a foaming mountain torrent was in my ears a long distance, and now and then the path crossed it. Fairfield Mountain was on my right hand, Helm Crag and Dunmail Raise on my left. Gras- mere plain soon lay far below. ‘The haymakers, encouraged by a gleam of sunshine, were hastily raking together the rain-blackened hay. From my outlook they appeared to be slowly and laboriously rolling up a great sheet of dark brown paper, un- covering beneath it one of the most fresh and vivid green. The mown grass is so long in curing in this country (frequently two weeks) that the new blades spring beneath it, and a second crop is well under way before the old is “carried.” The long mountain slopes up which I was making my way were as verdant as the plain below me. Large coarse ferns or bracken, with an under-lining of fine grass, covered the ground on the lower portions. On the higher, grass alone prevailed. On the top of the divide, looking down into the valley of Ulleswater, I came upon one of those black tarns, or mountain lakelets, which are such a feature in this strange scenery. The word “tarn” has no mean- ing with us, though our young poets sometimes use 154 FRESH FIELDS it as they do this Yorkshire word “wold;” one they get from Wordsworth, the other from Tennyson. But when you have seen one of those still, inky pools at the head of a silent, lonely Westmoreland dale, you will not be apt to misapply the word in future. Suddenly the serene shepherd mountain opens this black, gleaming eye at your feet, and it is all the more weird for having no eyebrow of rocks, or fringe of rush or bush. The steep, encir- cling slopes drop down and hem it about with the most green and uniform turf. If its rim had been modeled by human hands, it could not have been more regular or gentle in outline. Beneath its emerald coat the soil is black and peaty, which accounts for the hue of the water and the dark line that encircles it. “ All round this pool both flocks and herds might drink On its firm margin, even as from a well, Or some stone basin, which the herdsman’s hand Had shaped for their refreshment.”’ The path led across the outlet of the tarn, and then divided, one branch going down into the head of Grisedale, and the other mounting up the steep flank of Helvellyn. Far up the green acclivity I met a man and two young women making their way slowly down. They had come from Glenridding on Ulleswater, and were going to Grasmere. The women looked cold, and said I would find it wintry on the summit. Helvellyn has a broad flank and a long back, and comes to a head very slowly and gently. You IN WORDSWORTH’S COUNTRY 155 reach a wire fence well up on the top that divides some sheep ranges, pass through a gate, and have a mile yet to the highest ground in front of you; but you could traverse it in a buggy, it is so smooth and grassy. The grass fails just before the summit is reached, and the ground is covered with small fragments of the decomposed rock. The view is impressive, and such as one likes to sit down to and drink in slowly, —a “Grand terraqueous spectacle, From centre to circumference, unveil’d.’ The wind was moderate and not cold. Toward Ulleswater the mountain drops down abruptly many hundred feet, but its vast western slope appeared one smooth, unbroken surface of grass. The fol- lowing jottings in my notebook, on the spot, pre- serve some of the features of the scene: ‘All the northern landscape lies in the sunlight as far as Carlisle, “A tumultuous waste of huge hilltops;”’ not quite so severe and rugged as the Scotch moun- tains, but the view more pleasing and more exten- sive than the one I got from Ben Venue. The black tarns at my feet, — Keppel Cove Tarn one of them, according to my map, —how curious they look! I can just discern the figure of a man mov- ing by the marge of one of them. Away beyond Ulleswater is a vast sweep of country flecked here and there by slowly moving cloud shadows. To the northeast, in places, the backs and sides of the mountains have a green, pastoral voluptuousness, so 156 FRESH FIELDS smooth and full are they with thick turf. At other points the rock has fretted through the verdant carpet. St. Sunday’s Crag to the west, across Grisedale, is a steep acclivity covered with small, loose stones, as if they had been dumped over the top, and were slowly sliding down; but nowhere do I see great bowlders strewn about. Patches of black peat are here and there. The little rills, near and far, are white as milk, so swiftly do they run. On the more precipitous sides the grass and moss are lodged, and hold like snow, and are as tender in hue as the first April blades. A multitude of lakes are in view, and Morecambe Bay to the south. There are sheep everywhere, loosely scattered, with their lambs; occasionally I hear them bleat. No other sound is heard but the chirp of the mountain pipit. I see the wheat-ear flitting here and there. One mountain now lies in full sunshine, as fat as a seal, wrinkled and dimpled where it turns to the west, like a fat animal when it bends to lick itself. What a spectacle is now before me! —all the near mountains in shadow, and the distant in strong sunlight; I shall not see the like of that again. On some of the mountains the green vest- ments are in tatters and rags, so to speak, and barely cling to them. No heather in view. To- ward Windermere the high peaks and crests are much more jagged and rocky. The air is filled with the same white, motionless vapor as in Scotland. When the sun breaks through, — IN WORDSWORTH’S COUNTRY 157 “Slant watery lights, from parting clouds, apace Travel along the precipice’s base, Cheering its naked waste of scatter’d stone.” Amid these scenes one comes face to face with nature, “ With the pristine earth, The planet in its nakedness,’’ as he cannot in a wooded country. The primal, abysmal energies, grown tender and meditative, as it were, thoughtful of the shepherd and his flocks, and voiceful only in the leaping torrents, look out upon one near at hand and pass a mute recognition. Wordsworth perpetually refers to these hills and dales as lonely or lonesome; but his heart was still more lonely. The outward solitude was congenial to the isolation and profound privacy of his own soul. “Lonesome,” he says of one of these moun- tain dales, but “Not melancholy, — no, for it is green And bright and fertile, furnished in itself With the few needful things that life requires. In rugged arms how soft it seems to lie, How tenderly protected.” It is this tender and sheltering character of the mountains of the Lake district that is one main source of their charm. So rugged and lofty, and yet so mellow and delicate! No shaggy, weedy growths or tangles anywhere; nothing wilder than the bracken, which at a distance looks as solid as the grass. The turf is as fine and thick as that of a lawn. The dainty-nosed lambs could not crave a tenderer bite than it affords. The wool of the 158 FRESH FIELDS dams could hardly be softer to the foot. The last of July the grass was still short and thick, as if it never shot up a stalk and produced seed, but always remained a fine, close mat. Nothing was more unlike what I was used to at home than this uni- versal tendency (the same is true in Scotland and in Wales) to grass, and, on the lower slopes, to bracken, as if these were the only two plants in nature. Many of these eminences in the north of England, too lofty for hills and too smooth for mountains, are called fells. The railway between Carlisle and Preston winds between them, as Hough- ill Fells, Tebay Fells, Shap Fells, etc. They are, even in midsummer, of such a vivid and uniform green that it seems as if they must have been painted. Nothing blurs or mars the hue; no stalk of weed or stem of dry grass. The scene, in single- ness and purity of tint, rivals the blue of the sky. Nature does not seem to ripen and grow sere as autumn approaches, but wears the tints of May in October. VIII A GLANCE AT BRITISH WILD FLOWERS toe first flower I plucked in Britain was the daisy, in one of the parks in Glasgow. The sward had recently been mown, but the daisies dotted it as thickly as stars. It is a flower almost as common as the grass; find a square foot of green- sward anywhere, and you are pretty sure to find a daisy, probably several of them. Bairnwort — child’s flower — it is called in some parts, and its expression is truly infantile. It is the favorite of all the poets, and when one comes to see it he does not think it has been a bit overpraised. Some flowers please us by their intrinsic beauty of color and form; others by their expression of certain human qualities: the daisy has a modest, lowly, un- obtrusive look that is very taking. A little white ring, its margin unevenly touched with crimson, it looks up at one like the eye of a child. “Thou unassuming Commonplace Of Nature, with that homely face, And yet with something of a grace, Which Love makes for thee!” Not a little of its charm to an American is the “unexpected contrast it presents with the rank, coarse 160 FRESH FIELDS yx-eye daisy so common in this country, and more or less abundant in Britain, too. The Scotch call shis latter “dog daisy.” I thought it even coarser, and taller there than with us. Though the com- monest of weeds, the “wee, modest, crimson-tippit flower” sticks close at home; it seems to have none of the wandering, devil-may-care, vagabond propensities of so many other weeds. I believe it has never yet appeared upon our shores in a wild state, though Wordsworth addressed it thus: — “Thou wander’st this wild world about Unchecked by pride or scrupulous doubt.’’ The daisy is prettier in the bud than in the flower, as it then shows more crimson. It shuts up on the approach of foul weather; hence Tenny- son says the daisy closes “Her crimson fringes to the shower.’ At Alloway, whither I flitted from Glasgow, I first put my hand into the British nettle, and, I may add, took it out again as quickly as if I had put it into the fire. I little suspected that rank dark-green weed there amid the grass under the old apple-trees, where the blue speedwell and cocks- combs grew, to be a nettle. But I soon learned that the one plant you can count on everywhere in England and Scotland is the nettle. It is the royal weed of Britain. It stands guard along every road- bank and hedge-row in the island. Put your hand to the ground after dark in any fence corner, or under any hedge, or on the border of any field, and the chances are ten to one you will A GLANCE AT BRITISH WILD FLOWERS 161 take it back again with surprising alacrity. And such a villainous fang as the plant has! it is like the sting of bees. Your hand burns and smarts for hours afterward. My little boy and I were eagerly gathering wild flowers on the banks of the Doon, when I heard him scream, a few yards from me. I had that moment jerked my stinging hand out of the grass as if I had put it into a hornet’s nest, and I knew what the youngster had found. We held our burning fingers in the water, which only aggra- vated the poison. It is a dark green, rankly grow- ing plant, from one to two feet high, that asks no leave of anybody. It is the police that protects every flower in the hedge. To “pluck the flower of safety from the nettle danger” is a figure of speech that has especial force in this island. The species of our own nettle with which I am best acquainted, the large-leaved Canada nettle, grows in the woods, is shy and delicate, is cropped by cattle, and its sting is mild. But apparently no cow’s tongue can stand the British nettle, though, when cured as hay, it is said to make good fodder. Even the pigs cannot eat it till it is boiled. In starvation times it is extensively used as a pot-herb, and, when dried, its fibre is said to be nearly equal to that of flax. Rough handling, I am told, dis- arms it, but I could not summon up courage to try the experiment. Ophelia made her garlands “Of crow-flowers, daisies, nettles, and long purples.’ But the nettle here referred to was probably the stingless dead-nettle. 162 FRESH FIELDS A Scotch farmer, with whom I became acquainted, took me on a Sunday afternoon stroll through his fields. I went to his kirk in the forenoon; in the afternoon he and his son went to mine, and liked the sermon as well as I did. These banks and braes of Doon, of a bright day in May, are eloquent enough for anybody. Our path led along the river course for some distance. The globe-flower, like a large buttercup with the petals partly closed, nodded here and there. On a broad, sloping, semi- circular bank, where a level expanse of rich fields dropped down to a springy, rushy bottom near the river’s edge, and which the Scotch call a brae, we reclined upon the grass and listened to the birds, all but the lark new to me, and discussed the flow- ers growing about. In a wet place the “gilly- flower” was growing, suggesting our dentaria, or crinkle-root. This is said to be “the lady’s smock all silver-white” of Shakespeare, but these were not white, rather a pale lilac. Near by, upon the ground, was the nest of the meadow pipit, a species of titlark, which my friend would have me believe was the wood-lark, —a bird I was on the lookout for. The nest contained six brown-speckled eggs, —a large number, I thought. But I found that this is the country in which to see birds’-nests crowded with eggs, as well as human habitations thronged with children. A white umbelliferous plant, very much like wild carrot, dotted the turf here and there. This, my companion said, was pig-nut, or ground-chestnut, and that there was a A GLANCE AT BRITISH WILD FLOWERS 163 sweet, edible tuber at the root of it, and, to make his words good, dug up one with his fingers, recall- ing Caliban’s words in the “Tempest”: — “ And I, with my long nails, will dig thee pig-nuts.”” The plant grows freely about England, but does not seem to be troublesome as a weed. In a wooded slope beyond the brae, I plucked my first woodruff, a little cluster of pure white flowers, much like that of our saxifrage, with a delicate perfume. Its stalk has a whorl of leaves like the galium. As the plant dries its perfume increases, and a handful of it will scent a room. The wild hyacinths, or bluebells, had begun to fade, but a few could yet be gathered here and there in the woods and in the edges of the fields. This is one of the plants of which nature is very prodi- gal in Britain. In places it makes the underwoods as blue as the sky, and its rank perfume loads the air. Tennyson speaks of “sheets of hyacinths.” We have no wood flower in the Eastern States that grows in such profusion. Our flowers, like our birds and wild creatures, are more shy and retiring than the British, They keep more to the woods, and are not sowed so broadcast. Herb Robert is exclusively a wood plant with us, but in England it strays quite out into the open fields and by the roadside. Indeed, in England I found no so-called wood flower that could not be met with more or less in the fields and along the hedges. The main reason, perhaps, is that the need of shelter is never so great there, 164 FRESH FIELDS neither winter nor summer, as it is here, and the supply of moisture is more uniform and abundant. In dampness, coolness, and shadiness, the whole climate is woodsy, while the atmosphere of the woods themselves is almost subterranean in its dank- ness and chilliness. The plants come out for sun and warmth, and every seed they scatter in this moist and fruitful soil takes. How many exclusive wood flowers we have, most of our choicest kinds being of sylvan birth, — flowers that seem to vanish before the mere breath of culti- vated fields, as wild as the partridge and the beaver, like the yellow violet, the arbutus, the medeola, the dicentra, the claytonia, the trilliums, many of the orchids, uvularia, dalibarda, and others. In England, probably, all these plants, if they grew there, would come out into the fields and opens. The wild strawberry, however, reverses this rule; it is more a wood plant in England than with us. Excepting the rarer variety (Fragaria vesca), our strawberry thrives best in cultivated fields, and Shakespeare’s reference to this fruit would not be apt, — “The strawberry grows underneath the nettle; And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best, Neighbor’d by fruit of baser quality.” The British strawberry is found exclusively, I be- lieve, in woods and copses, and the ripened fruit is smaller or lighter colored than our own. Nature in this island is less versatile than with us, but more constant and uniform, less variety and A GLANCE AT BRITISH WILD FLOWERS 165 contrast in her works, and less capriciousness and reservation also, She is chary of new species, but multiplies the old ones endlessly. JI did not ob- serve so many varieties of wild flowers as at home, but a great profusion of specimens; her lap is fuller, but the kinds are fewer. Where you find one of a kind, you will find ten thousand. Wordsworth saw “golden daffodils,” “ Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way,’’ and one sees nearly all the common wild flowers in the same profusion. The buttercup, the dandelion, the ox-eye daisy, and other field flowers that have come to us from Europe, are samples of how lav- ishly Nature bestows her floral gifts upon the Old World. In July the scarlet poppies are thickly sprinkled over nearly every wheat and oat field in the kingdom. The green waving grain seems to have been spattered with blood. Other flowers were alike universal. Not a plant but seems to have sown itself from one end of the island to the other. Never before did I see so much white clover. From the first to the last of July, the fields in Scotland and England were white with it. Every square inch of ground had its clover blossom. Such a harvest as there was for the honey-bee, un- less the nectar was too much diluted with water in this rainy climate, which was probably the case. In traveling south from Scotland, the foxglove traveled as fast as I did, and I found it just as abundant in the southern counties as in the north- 166 FRESH FIELDS ern. ‘This is the most beautiful and conspicuous of all the wild flowers I saw, —a spire of large purple bells rising above the ferns and copses and along the hedges everywhere. Among the copses of Sur- rey and Hants, I saw it five feet high, and amid the rocks of North Wales still higher. We have no conspicuous wild flower that compares with it. It is so showy and abundant that the traveler on the express train cannot miss it; while the pedes- trian finds it lining his way like rows of torches. The bloom creeps up the stalk gradually as the season advances, taking from a month to six weeks to go from the bottom to the top, making at all times a most pleasing gradation of color, and show- ing the plant each day with new flowers and a fresh, new look. It never looks shabby and spent, from first to last. The lower buds open the first week in June, and slowly the purple wave creeps upward; bell after bell swings to the bee and moth, till the end of July, when you see the stalk waving in the wind with two or three flowers at the top, as perfect and vivid as those that opened first. I wonder the poets have not mentioned it oftener. Tennyson speaks of “the foxglove spire.” I note this allusion in Keats: — “Where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell,” and this from Coleridge: — “The fox-glove tall Sheds its loose purple bells or in the gust, Or when it bends beneath the upspringing lark, Or mountain finch alighting.’’ A GLANCE AT BRITISH WILD FLOWERS 167 Coleridge perhaps knew that the lark did not perch upon the stalk of the foxglove, or upon any other stalk or branch, being entirely a ground bird and not a percher, but he would seem to imply that it did, in these lines. A London correspondent calls my attention to these lines from Wordsworth, — “Bees that soar High as the highest peak of Furness Fells, Yet murmur by the hour in foxglove bells ;”’ and adds: ‘Less poetical, but as graphic, was a Devonshire woman’s comparison of a dull preacher to a‘ Drummle drane in a pop;’ Anglicé, A drone in a foxglove, — called a pop from children amusing themselves with popping its bells.” The prettiest of all humble roadside flowers I saw was the little blue speedwell. I was seldom out of sight of it anywhere in my walks till near the end of June; while its little bands and assem- blages of deep blue flowers in the grass by the road- side, turning a host of infantile faces up to the sun, often made me pause and admire. It is prettier than the violet, and larger and deeper colored than our houstonia. It is a small and delicate edition of our hepatica, done in indigo blue and wonted to the grass in the fields and by the waysides. “The little speedwell’s darling blue,”’ sings Tennyson, I saw it blooming, with the daisy and the buttercup, upon the grave of Carlyle. The tender human and poetic element of this stern rocky nature was well expressed by it. 168 FRESH FIELDS In the Lake district I saw meadows purple with a species of wild geranium, probably Geranium pratense. It answered well to our wild geranium, which in May sometimes covers wettish meadows in the same manner, except that this English species was of a dark blue purple. ‘Prunella, I noticed, was of a much deeper purple there than at home. The purple orchids also were stronger colored, but less graceful and pleasing, than our own. One species which I noticed in June, with habits similar to our purple fringed-orchis, perhaps the pyramidal orchis, had quite a coarse, plebeian look. Probably the most striking blue and purple wild flowers we have are of European origin, as succory, blue-weed or bugloss, vervain, purple loosestrife, and harebell. These colors, except with the fall asters and gentians, seem rather unstable in our flora. It has been observed by the Norwegian botanist Schiibeler that plants and trees in the higher lati- tudes have larger leaves and larger flowers than farther south, and that many flowers which are white in the south become violet in the far north. This agrees with my own observation. The feebler light necessitates more leaf surface, and the fewer insects necessitate larger and more showy flowers to attract them and secure cross-fertilization. Black- berry blossoms, so white with us, are a decided pink in England. The same is true of the water- plantain. Our houstonia and hepatica would proba- bly become a deep blue in that country. The marine climate probably has something to do also A GLANCE AT BRITISH WILD FLOWERS 169 with this high color of the British flowers, as I have noticed that on our New England coast the same flowers are deeper tinted than they are in the interior. A flower which greets all ramblers to moist fields and tranquil watercourses in midsummer is the meadow-sweet, called also queen of the meadows. It belongs to the Spirea tribe, where our hardhack, nine-bark, meadow-sweet, queen of the prairie, and others belong, but surpasses all our species in being sweet-scented, —a suggestion of almonds and cin- namon. I saw much of it about Stratford, and in rowing on the Avon plucked its large clusters of fine, creamy white flowers from my boat. Arnold is felicitous in describing it as the “blond meadow- sweet.” They cultivate a species of clover in England that gives a striking effect to a field when in bloom, Trifolium incarnatum, the long heads as red as blood. It is grown mostly for green fodder. I saw not one spear of timothy grass in all my ram- bles. Though this is a grass of European origin, yet it seems to be quite unknown among English and Scotch farmers. The horse bean, or Winches- ter bean, sown broadcast, is a new feature, while its perfume, suggesting that of apple orchards, is the most agreeable to be met with. I was delighted with the furze, or whin, as the Scotch call it, with its multitude of rich yellow, pea-like blossoms exhaling a perfume that reminded me of mingled cocoanut and peaches. It is a 170 FRESH FIELDS prickly, disagreeable shrub to the touch, like our ground juniper. It seems to mark everywhere the line of cultivation; where the furze begins the plow stops. It covers heaths and commons, and, with the heather, gives that dark hue to the Scotch and English uplands. The heather I did not see in all its glory. It was just coming into bloom when I left, the last of July; but the glimpses I had of it in North Wales, and again in northern Ireland, were most pleasing. It gave a purple border or fringe to the dark rocks (the rocks are never so lightly tinted in this island as ours are) that was very rich and striking. The heather vies with the grass in its extent and uniformity. Until midsum- mer it covers the moors and uplands as with a dark brown coat. When it blooms, this coat becomes a royal robe. The flower yields honey to the bee, and the plant shelter to the birds and game, and is used by the cottagers for thatching, and for twisting into ropes, and for various other purposes. Several troublesome weeds I noticed in England that have not yet made their appearance in this country. Coltsfoot invests the plowed lands there, sending up its broad fuzzy leaves as soon as the grain is up, and covering large areas. It is found in this country, but, so far as I have observed, only in out-of-the-way places. Sheep sorrel has come to us from over seas, and reddens many a poor worn-out field; but the larger species of sorrel, Rumex acetosa, so common in English fields, and shooting up a stem two feet A GLANCE AT BRITISH WILD FLOWERS 171 high, was quite new to me. Nearly all the related species, the various docks, are naturalized upon our shores. On the whole the place to see European weeds is in America. They run riot here. They are like boys out of school, leaping all bounds. They have the freedom of the whole broad land, and are allowed to take possession in a way that would astonish a British farmer. The Scotch thistle is much rarer in Scotland than in New York or Massachusetts. I saw only one mullein by the roadside, and that was in Wales, though it flourishes here and there throughout the island. The London correspondent, already quoted, says of the mullein: “One will come up in solitary glory, but, though it bears hun- dreds of flowers, many years will elapse before another is seen in the same neighborhood. We used to say, ‘There is a mullein coming up in such a place,’ much as if we had seen a comet; and its flannel-like leaves and the growth of its spike were duly watched and reported on day by day.” I did not catch a glimpse of blue-weed, Bouncing Bet, elecampane, live-for-ever, bladder campion, and oth- ers, of which I see acres at home, though all these weeds do grow there. They hunt the weeds mer- cilessly; they have no room for them. You see men and boys, women and girls, in the meadows and pastures cutting them out.