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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.