THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

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- • - "• — • irnr

RIVERSIDE ESSAYS

EDITED BY

ADA L. F. SNELL

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE

Ktoereifce

i. f .

THE AMERICAN MIND AND AMERICAN IDEALISM. By
Bliss Perry. 35 cents.

UNIVERSITY SUBJECTS. By John Henry Newman. 35
cents.

STUDIES IN NATURE AND LITERATURE. By John Bur
roughs. 35 cents.

PROMOTING GOOD CITIZENSHIP. By James Bryce. 35
cents

Prices are net, postpaid
Other titles in preparation

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

HifcersrtUe ^literature

STUDIES IN NATURE
AND LITERATURE

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

rf.

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
^Dfte fiitoer^ibe JSre^jS Cambrib0e

COPYRIGHT, 1875, 1889, 1894, 1902, 1903, AND 1908,
BY JOHN BURROUGHS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

R. L. S. 226

U)t Kibergfte JJrtsef

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

PS

PREFACE

MR. BURROUGHS has written of himself in
an "Egotistical Chapter" so revealingly and
withal so concisely that it makes the most fit
ting introduction to this little volume of selections
from the works of our greatest literary naturalist.
The choosing of material from fifteen by no means
slender volumes has been a difficult task; how many
favorites one would like to include, such as "The
Hunt for the Nightingale," "The Apple," "The
Grist of the Gods" — but one must not make a
catalogue in a preface! It is hoped, however, that
the material which has been selected and is here
presented may serve to increase the interest of stu
dents in the writings of Mr. Burroughs, and that it
may encourage them to read and express on their
own account the world which he has made known
to us as a place abounding in miracles.

ADA L. F. SNELL.

672705

CONTENTS

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 1

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 19

BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE 38

BIRD COURTSHIP 45

THE SNOW- WALKERS 66

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 62

THE DIVINE SOIL 69

STYLE AND THE MAN 82

SUGGESTIVENESS . 101

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER1

A FEW years ago the editor of a popular maga
zine inveigled a good many people, myself
among the number, into writing about themselves
and their experiences in life. None of us, I imagine,
needed very much persuading, for as a rule there
is no subject which a man or a woman is more ready
or willing to talk about than himself or herself.
One's ailments are always a favorite subject; next
to that, one's good luck or ill luck in his last under
taking; then one's experiences, one's likes and dis
likes; and lastly, self -analysis and criticism. And
it has been said that a man "is never so sure to
please as when he writes of himself with good faith,
and without affectation." Ay, there 's the rub ; to
write of one's self without affectation ! A false note
of this kind is fatal to the interest and value of the
criticism.

In a certain sense, a man of the literary or artistic
temperament never portrays or writes of anything
but himself ; that is, he gives us things as seen
through the intimate personal medium which he
himself is. All things reflect his hue and quality.

1 From Indoor Studies.

2 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

This is the bane of science, but it is the life of
literature. I have probably unwittingly written
myself in my books more fully and frankly than I
ever can by any direct confession and criticism ; but
the latter may throw some side light at least, and,
on looking over what I wrote for the editor above
referred to, I find that portions of it possess a cer
tain interest and value to myself, and therefore I
trust may not seem entirely amiss to my reader.

If a man is not born into the environment best
suited to him, he, as a rule, casts about him until
he finds such environment. My own surroundings
and connections have been mainly of the unliterary
kind. I was born of and among people who neither
read books nor cared for them, and my closest asso
ciations since have been with those whose minds
have been alien to literature and art. My unlit
erary environment has doubtless been best suited
to me. Probably what little freshness and primal
sweetness my books contain is owing to this circum
stance. Constant intercourse with bookish men
and literary circles I think would have dwarfed or
killed my literary faculty. This perpetual rubbing
of heads together, as in the literary clubs, seems to
result in literary sterility. In my own case, at least,
what I most needed was what I had, — a few books
and plenty of real things. I never had any apti
tude for scholarly attainments; my verbal or artifi
cial memory, so to speak, was poor, but my mind

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 3

always had a certain magnetic or adhesive quality
for things that were proper to it and that belonged
to me.

I early took pleasure in trying to express myself
on paper, probably in my sixteenth or seventeenth
year. In my reading I was attracted by everything
of the essay kind. In the libraries and bookstores
I was on the lookout for books of essays. And I
wanted the essay to start, not in a casual and incon
sequential way, but the first sentence must be a
formal enunciation of a principle. I bought the
whole of Dr. Johnson's works at a second-hand
bookstore in New York, because, on looking into
them, I found his essays appeared to be of solid
essay-stuff from beginning to end. I passed by
Montaigne's Essays at the same time, because they
had a personal and gossipy look. Almost my first
literary attempts were moral reflections, somewhat
in the Johnsonian style. I lived on the "Ram
bler " and the " Idler " all one year, and tried to pro
duce something of my own in similar form. As a
youth I was a philosopher ; as a young man I was
an Emersonian ; as a middle-aged man I am a liter
ary naturalist; but always have I been an essayist.

It was while I was at school, in my nineteenth
year, that I saw my first author ; and I distinctly
remember with what emotion I gazed upon him,
and followed him in the twilight, keeping on the
other side of the street. He was of little account, —

4 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

a man who had failed as a lawyer, and then had
written a history of Poland, which I have never
heard of since that time ; but to me he was the
embodiment of the august spirit of authorship, and
I looked upon him with more reverence and enthu
siasm than I had ever looked before upon any man.
I do not think I could have approached and spoken
to him on any consideration. I cannot at this date
divine why I should have stood in such worshipful
fear and awe of this obscure individual, but I sup
pose it was the instinctive tribute of a timid and
imaginative youth to a power which he was just
beginning vaguely to see, — the power of letters.

It was at about this time that I first saw my own
thoughts in print, — a communication of some kind
to a little country paper published in an adjoining
town. In my twenty-second or twenty-third year,
I began to send rude and crude essays to the maga
zines and to certain New York weekly papers, but
they came back again pretty promptly. I wrote on
such subjects as "Revolutions," "A Man and his
Times," " Genius," " Individuality." At this period
of my life I was much indebted to Whipple, whose
style, as it appears in his earlier essays and in the
thin volume of lectures published by Ticknor, Reed
& Fields about 1853, is, in my judgment, much
better than in his later writings. It was never a
good style, not at all magnetic or penetrating, but
it was clear and direct, and, to my mind at that

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 5

period, stimulating. Higginson had just begun to
publish his polished essays in the "Atlantic," and
I found much help in them also. They were a
little cold, but they had the quality which belongs
to the work of a man who looks upon literature
as a fine art. My mind had already begun to turn
to outdoor themes, and Higginson gave me a good
send-off in this direction. But the master-enchanter
of this period of my life and of many following
years was Emerson. While at school, in my nine
teenth year, in my search for essays I had carried
to my room one volume of his, but I could do
nothing with it. What, indeed, could a Johnso
nian youth make of Emerson ? A year or so later
I again opened one of his books in a Chicago book
store, and was so taken with the first taste of it that
I then and there purchased the three volumes, — the
" Essays " and the " Miscellanies." All that sum
mer I fed upon them and steeped myself in them:
so that when, a year or two afterwards, I wrote an
essay on "Expression" and sent it to the "Atlan
tic," it was so Emersonian that the editor thought
some one was trying to palm off on him an early
essay of Emerson's which he had not seen. Satis
fying himself that Emerson had published no such
paper, he printed it in the November number of
1860. It had not much merit. I remember this
sentence, which may contain some truth aptly put:
*' Dr. Johnson's periods act like a lever of the third

6 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

kind: the power applied always exceeds the weight
raised."

It was mainly to break the spell of Emerson's
influence and to get upon ground of my own that I
took to writing upon outdoor themes. I wrote half
a dozen or more sketches upon all sorts of open-air
subjects, which were published in the New York
" Leader." The woods, the soil, the waters, helped
to draw out the pungent Emersonian flavor and
restore me to my proper atmosphere. But to this
day I am aware that a suggestion of Emerson's
manner often crops out in my writings. His mind
was the firmer, harder substance, and was bound
to leave its mark upon my own. But, in any case,
my debt to him is great. He helped me to better
literary expression, he quickened my perception of
the beautiful, he stimulated and fertilized my reli
gious nature. Unless one is naturally more or less
both of a religious and of a poetic turn, the writings
of such men as Emerson and Carlyle are mainly lost
upon him. Two thirds of the force of these writers,
at least, is directed into these channels. It is the
quality of their genius, rather than the scope and
push of their minds, that endears them to us. They
quicken the conscience and stimulate the character
as well as correct the taste. They are not the spokes
men of science or of the reason, but of the soul.

About this period I fell in with Thoreau's " Wai-
den," but I am not conscious of any great debt to

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 7

Thoreau : I had begun to write upon outdoor themes
before his books fell into my hands, but he undoubt
edly helped confirm me in my own direction. He
was the intellectual child of Emerson, but added
a certain crispness and pungency, as of wild roots
and herbs, to the urbane philosophy of his great
neighbor. But Thoreau had one trait which I
always envied him, namely, his indifference to
human beings. He seems to have been as insensible
to people as he was open and hospitable to nature.
It probably gave him more pleasure to open his
door to a woodchuck than to a man.

Let me confess that I am too conscious of per
sons, — feel them too much, defer to them too
much, and try too hard to adapt myself to them.
Emerson says, " A great man is coming to dine with
me: I do not wish to please him, I wish that he
should wish to please me." I should be sure to
overdo the matter in trying to please the great man :
more than that, his presence would probably take
away my appetite for my dinner.

In speaking of the men who have influenced me,
or to whom I owe the greatest debt, let me finish
the list here. I was not born out of time, but in
good time. The men I seemed to need most were
nearly all my contemporaries; the ideas and influ
ences which address themselves to me the most
directly and forcibly have been abundantly current
in my time. Hence I owe, or seem to owe, more

8 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

to contemporary authors than to the men of the
past. I have lived in the present time, in the pre
sent hour, and have invested myself in the objects
nearest at hand. Besides the writers I have men
tioned, I am conscious of owing a debt to Whitman,
Ruskin, Arnold, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Ten
nyson. To Whitman I owe a certain liberalizing
influence, as well as a lesson in patriotism which
I could have got in the same measure from no
other source. Whitman opens the doors, and opens
them wide. He pours a flood of human sympathy
which sets the whole world afloat. He is a great
humanizing power. There is no other personality
in literature that gives me such a sense of breadth
and magnitude in the purely human and personal
qualities. His poems are dominated by a sense
of a living, breathing man as no other poems are.
This would not recommend them to some read
ers, but it recommends them to such as I, who
value in books perennial human qualities above all
things. To put a great personality in poetry is to
establish a living fountain of power, where the jaded
and exhausted race can refresh and renew itself.

To a man in many ways the opposite of Whit
man, who stands for an entirely different, almost
antagonistic, order of ideas, — to wit, Matthew
Arnold, — I am indebted for a lesson in clear think
ing and clean expression such as I have got from
no other. Arnold's style is probably the most lucid,

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 9

the least embarrassed by anything false or foreign,
of that of any writer living. His page is as clear as
science and as vital and flexible as poetry. Indeed,
he affords a notable instance of the cool, impartial
scientific spirit wedded to, or working through, the
finest poetic delicacy and sensibility.

I have not been deeply touched or moved by
any English poet of this century save Wordsworth.
Nearly all other poetry of nature is tame and insin
cere compared with his. But my poetic sympathies
are probably pretty narrow. I cannot, for instance,
read Robert Browning, except here and there a
short poem. The sheer mechanical effort of read
ing him, of leaping and dodging and turning sharp
corners to overtake his meaning, is too much for
me. It makes my mental bones ache. It is not
that he is so subtile and profound, for he is less in
both these respects than Shakespeare, but that he
is so abrupt and elliptical and plays such fantastic
tricks with syntax. His verse is like a springless
wagon on a rough road. He is full of bounce and
vigor, but it is of the kind that bruises the flesh
and makes one bite his tongue. Swinburne has lilt
and flow enough, certainly, and yet I cannot read
him. He sickens me from the opposite cause : I am
adrift in a sea of melodious words, with never an
idea to cling to. There is to me something grew-
some and uncanny about Swinburne's poetry, like
the clammy and rapidly-growing fungi in nature.

10 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

It is not health, but disease; it is not inspiration,
but a mortal flux. The "Saturday Review," in
noticing my last volume, "Signs and Seasons,"
intimates that I might have found better specimens
of sea-poetry to adorn the chapter called "A Salt
Breeze " in Mr. Swinburne than those I have given,
and quotes the following stanzas from him as
proof: —

"Hardly we saw the high moon hanging,

Heard hardly through the windy night,
Far waters ringing, low reefs clanging,
Under wan skies and waste white light.

"With chafe and change of surges chiming,
The clashing channels rocked and rang
Large music, wave to wild wave timing,
And all the choral waters sang."

Words, words, words ! and all struck with the lep
rosy of alliteration. Such poetry would turn my
blood to water. " Wan skies and waste white light,"
— are there ever any other skies or any other lights
in Swinburne ?

But this last is an ill wind which I fear can blow
no good to any one. I have lived long enough to
know that my own private likes and dislikes do not
always turn out to be the decrees of the Eternal.
Some writers confirm one and brace him where he
stands ; others give him a lift forward. I am not
aware that more than two American writers have

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 11

been of the latter service to me, — Emerson and
Whitman. Such a spirit as Bryant is confirmatory.
I may say the same of Whittier and Longfellow.
I owe to these men solace and encouragement, but
no new territory.

Still, the influences that shape one's life are often
so subtile and remote, and of such small beginning,
that it will not do to be too positive about these
matters. At any rate, self-analysis is a sort of back
handed work, and one is lucky if he comes at all
near the truth.

As such a paper must of necessity be egotistical,
let me not flinch in any part of my task on that
account.

What little merit my style has is the result of
much study and discipline. I have taught myself
always to get down to the quick of my mind at
once, and not fumble about amid the husks at the
surface. Unless one can give the sense of vitality
in his pages, no mere verbal brightness or scholarly
attainments will save him. In the best writing,
every sentence is filled with the writer's living,
breathing quality, just as in the perfected honey
comb every cell is filled with honey. But how
much empty comb there is even in the best books!
I wish to give an account of a bird, or a flower, or
of any open-air scene or incident. My whole effort
is to see the thing just as it was. I ask myself,
" Exactly how did this thing strike my mind ? What

12 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

was prominent ? What was subordinated ? I have
been accused of romancing at times. But it is not
true. I set down the thing exactly as it fell out.
People say, " I do not see what you do when I take
a walk." But for the most part they do, but the
fact as it lies there in nature is crude and raw: it
needs to be brought out, to be passed through the
heart and mind and presented in appropriate words.
This humanizes it and gives it an added charm and
significance. This, I take it, is what is meant by
idealizing and interpreting nature. We do not add
to or falsely color the facts: we disentangle them,
and invest them with the magic of written words.

To give anything like vitality to one's style, one
must divest one's self of any false or accidental
or factitious mood or feeling, and get down to his
real self, and speak as directly and sincerely as he
does about his daily business or affairs, and with as
little affectation. One may write from the outside
of his mind, as it were, write and write, glibly and
learnedly, and make no impression; but when one
speaks from real insight and conviction of his own,
men are always glad to hear him, whether they
agree with him or not. So much writing or speak
ing is like mere machine-work, as if you turned a
crank and the piece or discourse came out. It is
not the man's real mind, his real experience. This
he does not know how to get at ; it has no con
nection with his speaking or writing faculty. How

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 13

rare are real poems, — poems that spring from real
feeling, a real throb of emotion, and not from a
mere surface-itching of the mind for literary expres
sion! The world is full of "rhyming parasites,"
as Milton called them. The great mass of the poetry
of any age is purely artificial, and has no root in
real things. It is a kind of masquerading. The
stock poetic forms are masks behind which the
poetlings hide their real poverty of thought and
feeling. In prose one has no such factitious aids;
here he must stand upon his own merits; he has
not the cloak of Milton or Tennyson, or Spenser,
to hide in.

It is, of course, the young writer who oftenest
fails to speak his real mind, or to speak from any
proper basis of insight and conviction. He is car
ried away by a fancy, a love of novelty, or an affec
tation of originality. The strange things, the novel
things, are seldom true. Look for truth under your
feet. To be original, Carlyle said, is to be sincere.
When one is young, how many discoveries he
makes, — real mare's-eggs, which by and by turn
out to be nothing but field-pumpkins!

Men who, like myself, are deficient in self-asser
tion, or whose personalities are flexible and yield
ing, make a poor show in politics or business, but
in certain other fields these defects have their
advantages. In action, Renan says, one is weak
by his best qualities, — such, I suppose, as tender-

14 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

ness, sympathy, religiousness, — and strong by
his poorer, or at least his less attractive, qualities.
But in letters the reverse is probably true. How
many of us owe our success in this field to qualities
which in a measure disqualified us for an active
career! A late writer upon Carlyle seeks to demon
strate that the "open secret of his life" was his
desire to take a hand in the actual affairs of English
politics; but it is quite certain that the traits and
gifts which made him such a power in literature
— namely, his tremendous imagination and his
burdened prophetic conscience — would have stood
in his way in dealing with the coarse affairs of this
world.

In my own case, what hinders me with the world
helps me with impersonal nature. I do not stand
in my own light. My will, my personality, offer
little resistance : they let the shy, delicate influences
pass. I can surrender myself to nature without
effort, but am more or less restrained and self-con
scious in the presence of my fellows. Bird and
beast take to me, and I to them. I can look in the
eye of an ugly dog and win him, but with an ugly
man I have less success.

I have unmistakably the feminine idiosyncrasy.
Perhaps this is the reason that my best and most
enthusiastic readers appear to be women. In the
genesis of all my books, feeling goes a long way
before intellection. What I feel I can express,

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 15

and only what I feel. If I had run after the birds
only to write about them, I never should have writ
ten anything that any one would have cared to read.
I must write from sympathy and love, or not at
all: I have in no sort of measure the gift of the
ready writer who can turn his pen to all sorts of
themes ; or the dramatic, creative gift of the great
poets, which enables them to get out of themselves
and to present vividly and powerfully things entirely
beyond the circle of their own lives and experiences.
I go to the woods to enjoy myself, and not to report
them ; and if I succeed, the expedition may by
and by bear fruit at my pen. When a writer of
my limited range begins to " make believe," or to
go outside of his experience, he betrays himself at
once. My success, such as it is, has been in put
ting my own personal feelings and attractions into
subjects of universal interest. I have loved Nature
no more than thousands upon thousands of others
have, but my aim has been not to tell that love to
my reader, but to tell it to the trees and the birds
and to let them tell him. I think we all like this
indirect way the best. It will not do in literature
to compliment Nature and make love to her by
open profession and declaration : you must show
your love by your deeds or your spirit, and by the
sincerity of your service to her.

For my part, I never can interview Nature in the
reporter fashion : I must camp and tramp with her

16 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

to get any good, and what I get I absorb through
my emotions rather than consciously gather through
my intellect. Hence the act of composition with
me is a kind of self-exploration to see what hidden
stores my mind holds. If I write upon a favorite
author, for instance, I do not give my reader some
thing which lay clearly defined in my mind when I
began to write : I give him what I find, after closest
scrutiny, in the subconscious regions, — a result as
unknown to me as to him when I began to write.
The same with outdoor subjects. I come gradually
to have a feeling that I want to write upon a given
theme, — rain, for instance, or snow, — but what I
may have to say upon it is as vague as the back
ground of one of Millet's pictures ; my hope is
entirely in the feeling or attraction which draws
my mind that way ; the subject is congenial, it
sticks to me; whenever it recurs to me, it awakens
as it were a warm personal response.

Perhaps this is the experience of all other writers :
their subjects find them, or bring the key to their
hidden stores. Great poets, like Milton, however,
cast about them and deliberately choose a theme:
they are not hampered by their sympathies, nor
are they prisoners of their own personalities, like
writers who depend upon this pack of unconscious
impressions at their back. An experience must
lie in my mind a certain time before I can put it
on paper, — say from three to six months. If

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 17

there is anything in it, it will ripen and mellow
in that time. I rarely take any notes, and I have
a very poor memory, but rely upon the affinity of
my mind for a certain order of truths or observa
tions. What is mine will stick to me, and what is
not will drop off. When I returned from England
after a three months' visit in the summer of 1882,
I was conscious of having brought back with me
a few observations that I might expand into tw6
or three short essays. But when I began to open
my pack, the contents grew so upon my hands
that it reached many times the measure I at first
proposed. Indeed, when I look back over my seven
volumes, I wonder where they have all come from.
I am like a boy who at the close of the day looks
over his string of fish curiously, not one of which
did he know of in the morning, and every one of
which oame to his hand from depths beyond his
ken by luck and skill in fishing. I have often caught
my fish when I least expected to, and as often
my most determined efforts have been entirely
unavailing.

It is a wise injunction, " Know thyself," but
how hard to fulfil ! This unconscious region in
one, this unconscious setting of the currents of his
life in certain directions, — how hard to know
that ! The influences of his family, his race, his
times, his environment, are all deeper than the
plummet of his self-knowledge can reach. Yet

18 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

how we admire the ready man, the man who always
has complete control of his resources, who can speak
the right word instantly! My own wit is always
belated. After the crisis is past, the right word or
the right sentence is pretty sure to appear and mock
me by its tardiness.

There is, no doubt, a great difference in men with
reference to this knowledge and command of their
own resources. Some writers seem to me to be like
those military states wherein every man is num
bered, drilled, and equipped, and ready for instant
service : the whole male population is a standing
army. Then there are men of another type who
have no standing army. They are absorbed in mere
living, and, when the occasion requires, they have
to recruit their ideas slowly from the vague, uncer
tain masses in the background. Hence they never
cut a brilliant figure upon paper, though they may
be capable of doing real heartfelt work.

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD1

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.

WALT WHITMAN.

OCCASIONALLY on the sidewalk, amid the
dapper, swiftly moving, high-heeled boots and
gaiters, I catch a glimpse of the naked human foot.
Nimbly it scuffs along, the toes spread, the sides
flatten, the heel protrudes; it grasps the curbing,
or bends to the form of the uneven surfaces, — a
thing sensuous and alive, that seems to take cogni
zance of whatever it touches or passes. How primi
tive and uncivil it looks in such company, — a real
barbarian in the parlor! We are so unused to the
human anatomy, to simple, unadorned nature, that
it looks a little repulsive; but it is beautiful for all
that. Though it be a black foot and an unwashed
foot, it shall be exalted. It is a thing of life amid
leather, a free spirit amid cramped, a wild bird
amid caged, an athlete amid consumptives. It is
the symbol of my order, the Order of Walkers.
That unhampered, vitally playing piece of anatomy
is the type of the pedestrian, man returned to first

1 From Winter Sunshine.

20 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

principles, in direct contact and intercourse with
the earth and the elements, his faculties unsheathed,
his mind plastic, his body toughened, his heart
light, his soul dilated; while those cramped and
distorted members in the calf and kid are the unfor
tunate wretches doomed to carriages and cushions.

I am not going to advocate the disuse of boots
and shoes, or the abandoning of the improved modes
of travel ; but I am going to brag as lustily as I can
on behalf of the pedestrian, and show how all the
shining angels second and accompany the man who
goes afoot, while all the dark spirits are ever look
ing out for a chance to ride.

When I see the discomforts that able-bodied
American men will put up with rather than go a
mile or half a mile on foot, the abuses they will
tolerate and encourage, crowding the street car on
a little fall in the temperature or the appearance of
an inch or two of snow, packing up to overflowing,
dangling to the straps, treading on each other's
toes, breathing each other's breaths, crushing the
women and children, hanging by tooth and nail to
a square inch of the platform, imperiling their limbs
and killing the horses, — I think the commonest
tramp in the street has good reason to felicitate
himself on his rare privilege of going afoot. Indeed,
a race that neglects or despises this primitive gift,
that fears the touch of the soil, that has no foot
paths, no community of ownership in the land

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 21

which they imply, that warns off the walker as a tres
passer, that knows no way but the highway, the
carriage-way, that forgets the stile, the foot-bridge,
that even ignores the rights of the pedestrian in the
public road, providing no escape for him but in the
ditch or up the bank, is in a fair way to far more
serious degeneracy.

Shakespeare makes the chief qualification of the
walker a merry heart : —

" Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,

And merrily hent the stile-a;
A merry heart goes- all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a. ' '

The human body is a steed that goes freest and
longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all
riders is a cheerful heart. Your sad, or morose, or
embittered, or preoccupied heart settles heavily into
the saddle, and the poor beast, the body, breaks
down the first mile. Indeed, the heaviest thing in
the world is a heavy heart. Next to that, the most
burdensome to the walker is a heart not in perfect
sympathy and accord with the body, — a reluctant
or unwilling heart. The horse and rider must not
only both be willing to go the same way, but the
rider must lead the way and infuse his own light
ness and eagerness into the steed. Herein is no
doubt our trouble, and one reason of the decay of
the noble art in this country. We are unwilling

22 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

walkers. We are not innocent and simple-hearted
enough to enjoy a walk. We have fallen from that
state of grace which capacity to enjoy a walk im
plies. It cannot be said that as a people we are so
positively sad, or morose, or melancholic, as that we
are vacant of that sportiveness and surplusage of
animal spirits that characterized our ancestors, and
that springs from full and harmonious life, — a
sound heart in accord with a sound body. A man
must invest himself near at hand and in common
things, and be content with a steady and moderate
return, if he would know the blessedness of a cheer
ful heart and the sweetness of a walk over the round
earth. This is a lesson the American has yet to
learn, — capability of amusement on a low key. He
expects rapid and extraordinary returns. He would
make the very elemental laws pay usury. He has
nothing to invest in a walk ; it is too slow, too cheap.
We crave the astonishing, the exciting, the far away,
and do not know the highways of the gods when we
see them, — always a sign of the decay of the faith
and simplicity of man.

If I say to my neighbor, " Come with me, I have
great wonders to show you," he pricks up his ears
and comes forthwith; but when I take him on the
hills under the full blaze of the sun, or along the
country road, our footsteps lighted by the moon and
stars, and say to him, " Behold, these are the won
ders, these are the circuits of the gods, this we now

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 23

tread is a morning star," he feels defrauded, and as
if I had played him a trick. And yet nothing less
than dilatation and enthusiasm like this is the badge
of the master walker.

If we are not sad, we are careworn, hurried, dis
contented, mortgaging the present for the promise
of the future. If we take a walk, it is as we take a
prescription, with about the same relish and with
about the same purpose ; and the more the fatigue,
the greater our faith in the virtue of the medicine.

Of those gleesome saunters over the hills in spring,
or those sallies of the body in winter, those excur
sions into space when the foot strikes fire at every
step, when the air tastes like a new and finer mix
ture, when we accumulate force and gladness as we
go along, when the sight of objects by the roadside
and of the fields and woods pleases more than pic
tures or than all the art in the world, — those ten
or twelve mile dashes that are but the wit and efflu
ence of the corporeal powers, — of such diversion
and open road entertainment, I say, most of us
know very little.

I notice with astonishment that at our fashionable
watering-places nobody walks ; that, of all those vast
crowds of health-seekers and lovers of country air,
you can never catch one in the fields or woods, or
guilty of trudging along the country road with dust
on his shoes and sun-tan on his hands and face.
The sole amusement seems to be to eat and dress

24 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

and sit about the hotels and glare at each other.
The men look bored, the women look tired, and all
seem to sigh, "O Lord! what shall we do to be
happy and not be vulgar?" Quite different from
our British cousins across the water, who have
plenty of amusement and hilarity, spending most
of the time at their watering-places in the open air,
strolling, picnicking, boating, climbing, briskly
walking, apparently with little fear of sun-tan or of
compromising their "gentility."

It is indeed astonishing with what ease and hilar
ity the English walk. To an American it seems a
kind of infatuation. When Diekens was in this
country, I imagine the aspirants to the honor of a
walk with him were not numerous. In a pedestrian
tour of England by an American, I read that, " after
breakfast with the Independent minister, he walked
with us for six miles out of town upon our road.
Three little boys and girls, the youngest six years
old, also accompanied us. They were romping and
rambling about all the while, and their morning
walk must have been as much as fifteen miles ; but
they thought nothing of it, and when we parted
were apparently as fresh as when they started, and
very loath to return."

I fear, also, the American is becoming disquali
fied for the manly art of walking by a falling off in
the size of his foot. He cherishes and cultivates
this part of his anatomy, and apparently thinks his

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 25

taste and good breeding are to be inferred from its
diminutive size. A small, trim foot, well booted
or gaitered, is the national vanity. How we stare
at the big feet of foreigners, and wonder what may
be the price of leather in those countries, and where
all the aristocratic blood is, that these plebeian ex
tremities so predominate ! If we were admitted to
the confidences of the shoemaker to Her Majesty or
to His Royal Highness, no doubt we should modify
our views upon this latter point, for a truly large
and royal nature is never stunted in the extremi
ties ; a little foot never yet supported a great char
acter.

It is said that Englishmen, when they first come
to this country, are for some time under the impres
sion that American women all have deformed feet,
they are so coy of them and so studiously careful
to keep them hid. That there is an astonishing dif
ference between the women of the two countries
in this respect, every traveler can testify; and that
there is a difference equally astonishing between
the pedestrian habits and capabilities of the rival
sisters, is also certain.

The English pedestrian, no doubt, has the advan
tage of us in the matter of climate ; for, notwith
standing the traditional gloom and moroseness of
English skies, they have in that country none of
those relaxing, sinking, enervating days, of which
we have so many here, and which seem especially

26 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

trying to the female constitution, — days which
withdraw all support from the back and loins, and
render walking of all things burdensome. Theirs is
a climate of which it has been said that " it invites
men abroad more days in the year and more hours
in the day than that of any other country."

Then their land is threaded with paths which
invite the walker, and which are scarcely less im
portant than the highways. I heard of a surly
nobleman near London who took it into his head
to close a footpath that passed through his estate
near his house, and open another a little farther
off. The pedestrians objected; the matter got into
the courts, and after protracted litigation the aris
tocrat was beaten. The path could not be closed or
moved. The memory of man ran not to the time
when there was not a footpath there, and every
pedestrian should have the right of way there still.

I remember the pleasure I had in the path that
connects Stratford-on-Avon with Shottery, Shake
speare's path when he went courting Anne Hatha
way. By the king's highway the distance is some
farther, so there is a well-worn path along the hedge
rows and through the meadows and turnip patches.
The traveler in it has the privilege of crossing the
railroad track, an unusual privilege in England, and
one denied to the lord in his carriage, who must
either go over or under it. (It is a privilege, is it
not, to be allowed the forbidden, even if it be the

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 27

privilege of being run over by the engine?) In
strolling over the South Downs, too, I was delighted
to find that where the hill was steepest some bene
factor of the order of walkers had made notches in
the sward, so that the foot could bite the better and
firmer; the path became a kind of stairway, which
I have no doubt the plowman respected.

When you see an English country church with
drawn, secluded, out of the reach of wheels, stand
ing amid grassy graves and surrounded by noble
trees, approached by paths and shaded lanes, you
appreciate more than ever this beautiful habit of
the people. Only a race that knows how to use its
feet, and holds footpaths sacred, could put such a
charm of privacy and humility into such a structure.
I think I should be tempted to go to church myself
if I saw all my neighbors starting off across the
fields or along paths that led to such charmed spots,
and were sure I should not be jostled or run over by
the rival chariots of the worshipers at the temple
doors. I think that is what ails our religion ; humil
ity and devoutness of heart leave one when he lays
by his walking shoes and walking clothes, and sets
out for church drawn by something.

Indeed, I think it would be tantamount to an
astonishing revival of religion if the people would
all wTalk to church on Sunday and walk home again.
Think how the stones would preach to them by the
wayside ; how their benumbed minds would warm

28 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

up beneath the friction of the gravel ; how their
vain and foolish thoughts, their desponding thoughts,
their besetting demons of one kind and another,
would drop behind them, unable to keep up or to
endure the fresh air! They would walk away from
their ennui, their worldly cares, their uncharitable-
ness, their pride of dress ; for these devils always
want to ride, while the simple virtues are never so
happy as when on foot. Let us walk by all means;
but if we will ride, get an ass.

Then the English claim that they are a more
hearty and robust people than we are. It is certain
they are a plainer people, have plainer tastes, dress
plainer, build plainer, speak plainer, keep closer to
facts, wear broader shoes and coarser clothes, and
place a lower estimate on themselves, — all of which
traits favor pedestrian habits. The English grandee
is not confined to his carriage; but if the American
aristocrat leaves his, he is ruined. Oh the weari
ness, the emptiness, the plotting, the seeking rest
and finding none, that go by in the carriages ! while
your pedestrian is always cheerful, alert, refreshed,
with his heart in his hand and his hand free to all.
He looks down upon nobody; he is on the common
level. His pores are all open, his circulation is ac
tive, his digestion good. His heart is not cold, nor
are his faculties asleep. He is the only real traveler;
he alone tastes the "gay, fresh sentiment of the
road." He is not isolated, but is at one with things,

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 29

with the farms and the industries on either hand.
The vital, universal currents play through him.
He knows the ground is alive; he feels the pulses
of the wind, and reads the mute language of things.
His sympathies are all aroused ; his senses are con
tinually reporting messages to his mind. Wind,
frost, rain, heat, cold, are something to him. He is
not merely a spectator of the panorama of nature,
but a participator in it. He experiences the country
he passes through, — tastes it, feels it, absorbs it;
the traveler in his fine carriage sees it merely. This
gives the fresh charm to that class of books that
may be called " Views Afoot," and to the narratives
of hunters, naturalists, exploring parties, etc. The
walker does not need a large territory. When you
get into a railway car you want a continent, the
man in his carriage requires a township ; but a
walker like Thoreau finds as much and more along
the shores of Walden Pond. The former, as it were,
has merely time to glance at the headings of the
chapters, while the latter need not miss a line, and
Thoreau reads between the lines. Then the walker
has the privilege of the fields, the woods, the hills,
the byways. The apples by the roadside are for him,
and the berries, and the spring of water, and the
friendly shelter; and if the weather is cold, he eats
the frost grapes and the persimmons, or even the
white-meated turnip, snatched from the field he
passed through, with incredible relish.

SO THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

Afoot and in the open road, one has a fair start
in life at last. There is no hindrance now. Let him
put his best foot forward. He is on the broadest
human plane. This is on the level of all the great
laws and heroic deeds. From this platform he is
eligible to any good fortune. He was sighing for
the golden age ; let him walk to it. Every step
brings him nearer. The youth of the world is but
a few days' journey distant. Indeed, I know per
sons who think they have walked back to that fresh
aforetime of a single bright Sunday in autumn or
early spring. Before noon they felt its airs upon
their cheeks, and by nightfall, on the banks of some
quiet stream, or along some path in the wood, or on
some hilltop, aver they have heard the voices and
felt the wonder and the mystery that so enchanted
the early races of men.

I think if I could walk through a country, I
should not only see many things and have adven
tures that I should otherwise miss, but that I should
come into relations with that country at first hand,
and with the men and women in it, in a way that
would afford the deepest satisfaction. Hence I envy
the good fortune of all walkers, and feel like join
ing myself to every tramp that comes along. I am
jealous of the clergyman I read about the other
day, who footed it from Edinburgh to London, as
poor Effie Deans did, carrying her shoes in her hand
most of the way, and over the ground that rugged

Ben Jonson strode, larking it to Scotland, so long
ago. I read with longing of the pedestrian feats of
college youths, so gay and light-hearted, with their
coarse shoes on their feet and their knapsacks on
their backs. It would have been a good draught of
the rugged cup to have walked with Wilson the orni
thologist, deserted by his companions, from Niagara
to Philadelphia through the snows of winter. I
almost wish that I had been born to the career of a
German mechanic, that I might have had that de
licious adventurous year of wandering over my coun
try before I settled down to work. I think how
much richer and firmer-grained life would be to me
if I could journey afoot through Florida and Texas,
or follow the windings of the Platte or the Yellow
stone, or stroll through Oregon, or browse for a sea
son about Canada. In the bright, inspiring days of
autumn I only want the time and the companion to
walk back to the natal spot, the family nest, across
two States and into the mountains of a third.^(What
adventures we would have by the way, what hard
pulls, what prospects from hills, what spectacles
we would behold of night and day, what passages
with dogs, what glances, what peeps into windows,
what characters we should fall in with, and how
seasoned and hardy we should arrive at our desti
nation !

For companion I should want a veteran of the
war! Those marches put something into him I

32 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

like. Even at this distance his mettle is but little
softened. As soon as he gets warmed up, it all
comes back to him. He catches your step and away
you go, a gay, adventurous, half-predatory couple.
How quickly he falls into the old ways of jest and
anecdote and song ! You may have known him for
years without having heard him hum an air, or more
than casually revert to the subject of his experience
during the war. You have even questioned and
cross-questioned him without firing the train you
wished. But get him out on a vacation tramp, and
you can walk it all out of him. By the camp-fire at
night, or swinging along the streams by day, song,
anecdote, adventure, come to the surface, and you
wonder how your companion has kept silent so

long-
It is another proof of how walking brings out the
true character of a man. The devil never yet asked
his victims to take a walk with him. You will not
be long in finding your companion out. All dis
guises will fall away from him. As his pores open
his character is laid bare. His deepest and most
private self will come to the top. It matters little
with whom you ride, so he be not a pickpocket ; for
both of you will, very likely, settle down closer and
firmer in your reserve, shaken down like a measure
of corn by the jolting as the journey proceeds. But
walking is a more vital copartnership; the relation
is a closer and more sympathetic one, and you do

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 33

not feel like walking ten paces with a stranger with
out speaking to him.

Hence the fastidiousness of the professional walker
in choosing or admitting a companion, and hence
the truth of a remark of Emerson, that you will
generally fare better to take your dog than to invite
your neighbor. Your cur-dog is a true pedestrian,
and your neighbor is very likely a small politician.
The dog enters thoroughly into the spirit of the
enterprise ; he is not indifferent or preoccupied ; he
is constantly sniffing adventure, laps at every spring,
looks upon every field and wood as a new world to
be explored, is ever on some fresh trail, knows some
thing important will happen a little farther on, gazes
with the true wonder-seeing eyes, whatever the spot
or whatever the road finds it good to be there, — in
short, is just that happy, delicious, excursive vaga
bond that touches one at so many points, and whose
human prototype in a companion robs miles and
leagues of half their power to fatigue.

Persons who find themselves spent in a short
walk to the market or the post-office, or to do a
little shopping, wonder how it is that their pedes
trian friends can compass so many weary miles and
not fall down from sheer exhaustion; ignorant of
the fact that the walker is a kind of projectile that
drops far or near according to the expansive force
of the motive that set it in motion, and that it is easy
enough to regulate the charge according to the dis-

34 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

tance to be traversed."/. If I am loaded to carry only
one mile and am compelled to walk three, I gen
erally feel more fatigue than if I had walked six
under the proper impetus of preadjusted resolution.
In other words, the will or corporeal mainspring,
whatever it be, is capable of being wound up to
different degrees of tension, so that one may walk
all day nearly as easy as half that time, if he is pre
pared beforehand. He knows his task, and he
measures and distributes his powers accordingly. It
is for this reason that an unknown road is always a
long road. We cannot cast the mental eye along it
and see the end from the beginning. We are fight
ing in the dark, and cannot take the measure of our
foe. Every step must be preordained and provided
for in the mind. Hence also the fact that to van
quish one mile in the woods seems equal to com
passing three in the open country. The furlongs
are ambushed, and we magnify them.

Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only
five miles to the next place when it is really eight
or ten ! We fall short nearly half the distance, and
are compelled to urge and roll the spent ball the
rest of the way. In such a case walking degener
ates from a fine art to a mechanic art ; we walk
merely ; to get over the ground becomes the one
serious and engrossing thought; whereas success in
walking is not to let your right foot know what
your left foot doeth. Your heart must furnish such

music that in keeping time to it your feet will carry
you around the globe without knowing it. The
walker I would describe takes no note of distance;
his walk is a sally, a bonmot, an unspoken jeu
d' 'esprit ; the ground is his butt, his provocation ;
it furnishes him the resistance his body craves ; he
rebounds upon it, he glances off and returns again,
and uses it gayly as his tool.

I do not think I exaggerate the importance or
the charms of pedestrianism, or our need as a people
to cultivate the art. I think it would tend to soften
the national manners, to teach us the meaning of
leisure, to acquaint us with the charms of the open
air, to strengthen and foster the tie between the
race and the land. No one else looks out upon the
world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian;
no one else gives and takes so much from the coun
try he passes through. Next to the laborer in the
fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the
soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation
to nature because he is freer and his mind more at
leisure.

Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no
more than a potted plant in his house or carriage
till he has established communication with the soil
by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it.
Then the tie of association is born; then spring
those invisible fibres and rootlets through which
character comes to smack of the soil, and which

36 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

make a man kindred to the spot of earth he in
habits.

The roads and paths you have walked along in
summer and winter weather, the fields and hills
which you have looked upon in lightness and glad
ness of heart, where fresh thoughts have come into
your mind, or some noble prospect has opened be
fore you, and especially the quiet ways where you
have walked in sweet converse with your friend,
pausing under the trees, drinking at the spring, —
henceforth they are not the same; a new charm is
added ; those thoughts spring there perennial, your
friend walks there forever.

We have produced some good walkers and saun-
terers, and some noted climbers; but as a staple
recreation, as a daily practice, the mass of the peo
ple dislike and despise walking. Thoreau said he
was a good horse, but a poor roadster. I chant the
virtues of the roadster as well. I sing of the sweet
ness of gravel, good sharp quartz-grit. It is the
proper condiment for the sterner seasons, and many
a human gizzard would be cured of half its ills by
a suitable daily allowance of it. I think Thoreau
himself would have profited immensely by it. His
diet was too exclusively vegetable. A man cannot
live on grass alone. If one has been a lotus-eater
all summer, he must turn gravel-eater in the fall
and winter. Those who have tried it know that
gravel possesses an equal though an opposite charm.

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 37

It spurs to action. The foot tastes it and hence
forth rests not. The joy of moving and surmount
ing, of attrition and progression, the thirst for space,
for miles and leagues of distance, for sights and
prospects, to cross mountains and thread rivers,
and defy frost, heat, snow, danger, difficulties, seizes
it; and from that day forth its possessor is enrolled
in the noble army of walkers.

BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE l

NEAR my study there used to stand several old
apple-trees that bore fair crops of apples, but
better crops of birds. Every year these old trees
were the scenes of bird incidents and bird histories
that were a source of much interest and amusement.
Young trees may be the best for apples, but old
trees are sure to bear the most birds. If they are
very decrepit, and full of dead and hollow branches,
they will bear birds in winter as well as summer.
The downy woodpecker wants no better place than
the brittle, dozy trunk of an apple-tree in which
to excavate his winter home. My old apple-trees
are all down but one, and this one is probably an
octogenarian, and I am afraid cannot stand another
winter. Its body is a mere shell not much over one
inch thick, the heart and main interior structure
having turned to black mould long ago. An old
tree, unlike an old person, as long as it lives at all,
always has a young streak, or rather ring, in it. It
wears a girdle of perpetual youth.

My old tree has never yet failed to yield me a
bushel or more of gillyflowers, and it has turned out

1 From Riverby.

BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE 39

at least a dozen broods of the great crested flycatcher,
and robins and bluebirds in proportion. It carries
up one large decayed trunk, which some one sawed
off at the top before my time, and in this a downy
woodpecker is now, January 12, making a home.
Several years ago, a downy woodpecker excavated a
retreat in this branch, which the following season
was appropriated by the bluebirds, and has been
occupied by them nearly every season since. When
the bluebirds first examined the cavity in the
spring, I suppose they did not find the woodpecker
at home, as he is a pretty early riser.

I happened to be passing near the tree when, on
again surveying the premises one afternoon, they
found him in. The male bluebird was very angry,
and I suppose looked upon the innocent downy
as an intruder. He seized on him, and the two fell
to the ground, the speckled woodpecker quite cov
ered by the blue coat of his antagonist. Downy
screamed vigorously, and got away as soon as he
could, but not till the bluebird had tweaked out a
feather or two. He is evidently no fighter, though
one would think that a bird that had an instrument
with which it could drill a hole into a tree could
defend itself against the soft-billed bluebird.

Two seasons the English sparrows ejected the
bluebirds and established themselves in it, but
were in turn ejected by me, their furniture of hens'
feathers and straws pitched out, and the bluebirds

40 BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE

invited to return, which later in the season they
did.

The new cavity which downy is now drilling is
just above the old one and near the top of the stub.
Its wells are usually sunk to a depth of six or eight
inches, but in the present case it cannot be sunk
more than four inches without breaking through
into the old cavity. Downy seems to have considered
the situation, and is proceeding cautiously. As she
passed last night in her new quarters, I am inclined
to think it is about finished, and there must be at
least one inch of wood beneath her. She worked
vigorously the greater part of the day, her yellow
chips strewing the snow beneath. I paused several
times to observe her proceedings. After her chips
accumulate, she stops her drilling and throws them
out. This she does with her beak, shaking them
out very rapidly with a flirt of her head. She did
not disappear from sight each time to load her beak,
but withdrew her head, and appeared to seize the
fragments as if from her feet. If she had had a com
panion, I should have thought he was handing them
up to her from the bottom of the cavity. Maybe
she had them piled up near the doorway.

The woodpeckers, both the hairy and the downy,
usually excavate these winter retreats in the fall.
They pass the nights and the stormy days in them.
So far as I have observed, they do not use them
as nesting-places the following season. Last night

BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE 41

when I rapped on the trunk of the old apple-tree
near sundown, downy put out her head with a sur
prised and inquiring look, and then withdrew it
again as I passed on.

I have spoken of the broods of the great crested
flycatchers that have been reared in the old apple-
tree. This is by no means a common bird, and as
it destroys many noxious insects, I look upon it with
a friendly eye, though it is the most uncouth and
unmusical of the flycatchers. Indeed, among the
other birds of the garden and orchard it seems quite
like a barbarian. It has a harsh, froglike scream,
form and manners to suit, and is clad in a suit of
butternut brown. It seeks a cast-off snakeskin to
weave into its nest, and not finding one, will take
an onion skin, a piece of oiled paper, or large fish
scales. It builds in a cavity in a tree, rears one
brood, and is off early in the season. I never see or
hear it after August 1.

A pair have built in a large, hollow limb in my
old apple-tree for many years. Whether it is the
same pair or not, I do not know. Probably it is, or
else some of their descendants. I looked into the
cavity one day while the mother bird was upon the
nest, but before she had laid any eggs. A sudden
explosive sound came up out of the dark depths of
the limb, much like that made by an alarmed cat.
It made me jerk my head back, when out came the
bird and hurried off. For several days I saw no

42 BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE

more of the pair, and feared they had deserted the
spot. But they had not; they were only more sly
than usual. I soon discovered an egg in the nest,
and then another and another.

One day, as I stood near by, a male bluebird came
along with his mate, prospecting for a spot for a
second nest. He alighted at the entrance of this
hole and peeped in. Instantly the flycatcher was
upon him. The blue was enveloped by the butter
nut brown. The two fell to the ground, where the
bluebird got away, and in a moment more came
back and looked in the hole again, as much as
to say, " I will look into that hole now at all haz
ards." The barbarian made a dash for him again,
but he was now on his guard and avoided her.

Not long after, the bluebirds decided to occupy
the old cavity of the downy woodpecker from which
I had earlier in the season expelled the English
sparrows. After they had established themselves
here, a kind of border war broke out between the
male bluebird and the flycatchers, and was kept up
for weeks. The bluebird is very jealous and very
bold. He will not even tolerate a house wren in
the vicinity of his nest. Every bird that builds in
a cavity he looks upon as his natural rival and en
emy. The flycatchers did not seek any quarrel with
him as long as he kept to his own domicile, but he
could not tolerate them in the same tree. It was a
pretty sight to see this little blue-coat charging the

BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE 43

butternut through the trees. The beak of the latter
would click like a gunlock, and its harsh, savage
voice was full of anger, but the bluebird never
flinched, and was always ready to renew the fight.

The English sparrow will sometimes worst the
bluebird by getting possession of the box or cavity
ahead of him. Once inside, the sparrow can hold
the fort, and the bluebird will soon give up the
siege; but in a fair field and no favor, the native
bird will quickly rout the foreigner.

Speaking of birds that build in cavities reminds
me of a curious trait the high-hole has developed in
my vicinity, one which I have never noticed or heard
of elsewhere. It drills into buildings and steeples
and telegraph poles, and in some instances makes
itself a serious nuisance. One season the large imi
tation Greek columns of an unoccupied old-fash
ioned summer residence near me were badly marred
by them. The bird bored into one column, and find
ing the cavity — a foot or more across — not just
what it was looking for, cut into another one, and
into still another. Then he bored into the ice-house
on the premises, and in the sawdust filling between
the outer and inner sheathing found a place to his
liking. One bird seemed like a monomaniac, and
drilled holes up and down and right and left, as if
possessed of an evil spirit. It is quite probable that
if a high-hole or other woodpecker should go crazy,
it would take to just this sort of thing, drilling into

44 BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE

seasoned timber till it used its strength up. The
one I refer to would cut through a dry hemlock
board in a very short time, making the slivers fly.
The sound was like that of a carpenter's hammer.
It may have been that he was an unmated bird, a
bachelor, whose suit had not prospered that season,
and who was giving vent to his outraged instincts in
drilling these mock nesting-places.

BIRD COURTSHIP1

rTlHERE is something about the matchmaking of
JL birds that is not easily penetrated. The jeal
ousies and rivalries of the males and of the females
are easily understood, — they are quite human ; but
those sudden rushes of several males, some of them
already mated, after one female, with squeals and
screams and a great clatter of wings, — what does it
mean ? There is nothing human about that, unless it
be illustrative of a trait that has at times cropped out
in the earlier races, and which is still seen among
the Eskimos, where the male carries off the female
by force. But in these sudden sallies among the
birds, the female, so far as I have observed, is never
carried off. One may see half a dozen English spar
rows engaged in what at first glance appears to be a
general melee in the gutter or on the sidewalk ; but
if you look more closely, you will see a single female
in the midst of the mass, beating off the males, who,
with plumage puffed out and screaming and chatter
ing, are all making a set at her. She strikes right
and left, and seems to be equally displeased with
them all. But her anger may be all put on, and she
may be giving the wink all the time to her favorite.

1 From Riverby.

46 BIRD COURTSHIP

The Eskimo maiden is said by Doctor Nansen to
resist stoutly being carried off even by the man she
is desperately in love with.

In the latter half of April, we pass through what
I call the " robin racket," — trains of three or four
birds rushing pell-mell over the lawn and fetch
ing up in a tree or bush, or occasionally upon the
ground, all piping and screaming at the top of their
voices, but whether in mirth or anger it is hard to
tell. The nucleus of the train is a female. One can
not see that the males in pursuit of her are rivals;
it seems rather as if they had united to hustle her
out of the place. But somehow the matches are no
doubt made and sealed during these mad rushes.
Maybe the female shouts out to her suitors, " Who
touches me first wins," and away she scurries like
an arrow. The males shout out, "Agreed!" and
away they go in pursuit, each trying to outdo the
other. The game is a brief one. Before one can get
the clew to it, the party has dispersed.

Earlier in the season the pretty sparring of the
males is the chief feature. You may see two robins
apparently taking a walk or a run together over the
sward or along the road; only first one bird runs,
and then the other. They keep a few feet apart,
stand very erect, and the course of each describes the
segment of an arc about the other, thus : —

BIRD COURTSHIP 47

How courtly and deferential their manners toward
each other are! often they pipe a shrill, fine strain,
audible only a few yards away. Then, in a twink
ling, one makes a spring and they are beak to beak,
and claw to claw, as they rise up a few feet into
the air. But usually no blow is delivered; not a
feather is ruffled ; each, I suppose, finds the guard of
the other perfect. Then they settle down upon the
ground again, and go through with the same run
ning challenge as before. How their breasts glow in
the strong April sunlight ; how perk and military the
bearing of each! Often they will run about each
other in this way for many rods. After a week or so
the males seem to have fought all their duels, when
the rush and racket I have already described begin.

The bluebird wins his mate by the ardor of his
attentions and the sincerity of his compliments, and
by finding a house ready built which cannot be sur
passed. The male bluebird is usually here several
days before the female, and he sounds forth his note
as loudly and eloquently as he can till she appears.
On her appearance he flies at once to the box or tree
cavity upon which he has had his eye, and, as he
looks into it, calls and warbles in his most persuasive
tones. The female at such times is always shy and
backward, and the contrast in the manners of the
two birds is as striking as the contrast in their colors.
The male is brilliant and ardent; the female is dim
and retiring, not to say indifferent. She may take a

48 BIRD COURTSHIP

hasty peep into the hole in the box or tree and then
fly away, uttering a lonesome, homesick note. Only
by a wooing of many days is she to be fully won.

The past April I was witness one Sunday morning
to the jealousies that may rage in these little brown
breasts. A pair of bluebirds had apparently mated
and decided to occupy a woodpecker's lodge in the
limb of an old apple-tree near my study. But that
morning another male appeared on the scene, and
.was bent on cutting the first male out, and carry
ing off his bride. I happened to be near by when
the two birds came into collision. They fell to the
grass, and kept their grip upon each other for half
a minute. Then they separated, and the first up flew
to the hole and called fondly to the female. This
was too much for the other male, and they clinched
again and fell to the ground as before. There they
lay upon the grass, blue and brown intermingled.
But not a feather was tweaked out, or even disturbed,
that I could see. They simply held each other down.
Then they separated again, and again rushed upon
each other. The battle raged for about fifteen min
utes, when one of the males — which one, of course,
I could not tell — withdrew and flew to a box under
the eaves of the study, and exerted all the eloquence
he possessed to induce the female to come to him
there. How he warbled and called, and lifted his
wings and flew to the entrance to the box and called
again! The female was evidently strongly attracted;

BIRD COURTSHIP 49

she would respond and fly about halfway to an
apple-tree, and look toward him. The other male,
in the mean time, did his best to persuade her to
cast her lot with him. He followed her to the tree
toward his rival, and then flew back to the nest and
spread his plumage and called and warbled, oh, so
confidently, so fondly, so reassuringly ! When the fe
male would return and peep into the hole in the tree,
what fine, joyous notes he would utter! then he
would look in and twinkle his wings, and say some
thing his rival could not hear. This vocal and pan
tomimic contest went on for a long time. The fe
male was evidently greatly shaken in her allegiance
to the male in the old apple-tree. In less than an
hour another female responded to the male who had
sought the eaves of the study, and flew with him
to the box. Whether this was their first meeting
or not I do not know, but it was clear enough that
the heart of the male was fixed upon the bride of
his rival. He would devote himself a moment to the
new-comer, and then turn toward the old apple-tree
and call and lift his wings ; then, apparently admon
ished by the bird near him, he would turn again to
her and induce her to look into the box, and would
warble fondly; then up on a higher branch again,
with his attention directed toward his first love, be
tween whom and himself salutations seemed con
stantly passing. This little play went on for some
time, when the two females came into collision, and

50 BIRD COURTSHIP

fell to the ground tweaking each other spitefully.
Then the four birds drifted away from me down into
the vineyard, where the males closed with each other
again and fell to the plowed ground and lay there
a surprisingly long time, nearly two minutes, as we
calculated. Their wings were outspread, and their
forms were indistinguishable. They tugged at each
other most doggedly; one or the other brown breast
was generally turned up, partly overlaid by a blue
coat. They were determined to make a finish bf
it this time, but which got the better of the fight
I could not tell. But it was the last battle ; they
finally separated, neither, apparently, any the worse
for the encounter. The females fought two more
rounds, the males looking on and warbling approv
ingly when they separated, and the two pairs drifted
away in different directions. The next day they
were about the box and tree again, and seemed to
have definitely settled matters. Who won and who
lost I do not know, but two pairs of bluebirds have
since been very busy and very happy about the two
nesting-places. One of the males I recognize as a
bird that appeared early in March ; I recognize him
from one peculiar note in the midst of his warble,
a note that suggests a whistle.

The matchmaking of the high-holes, which often
comes under my observation, is in marked contrast
to that of the robins and the bluebirds. There does
not appear to be any anger or any blows. The male

BIRD COURTSHIP 51

or two males will alight on a limb in front of the
female, and go through with a series of bowings
and scrapings that are truly comical. He spreads
his tail, he puffs out his breast, he throws back his
head, and then bends his body to the right and to
the left, uttering all the while a curious musical hic
cough. The female confronts him unmoved, but
whether her attitude is critical or defensive, I can
not tell. Presently she flies away, followed by her
suitor or suitors, and the little comedy is enacted on
another stump or tree. Among all the woodpeckers
the drum plays an important part in the match
making. The male takes up his stand on a dry,
resonant limb, or on the ridgeboard of a building,
and beats the loudest call he is capable of. The
downy woodpecker usually has a particular branch
to which he resorts for advertising his matrimonial
wants. A favorite drum of the high-holes about me
is a hollow wooden tube, a section of a pump, which
stands as a bird-box upon my summer-house. It is
a good instrument; its tone is sharp and clear. A
high-hole alights upon it, and sends forth a rattle
that can be heard a long way off. Then he lifts up
his head and utters that long April call, Wick, wick,
wick, wick. Then he drums again. If the female
does not find him, it is not because he does not make
noise enough. But his sounds are all welcome to
the ear. They are simple and primitive, and voice
well a certain sentiment of the April days. As I

52 BIRD COURTSHIP

write these lines I hear through the half -open door
his call come up from a distant field. Then I hear
the steady hammering of one that has been for three
days trying to penetrate the weather boarding of
the big icehouse by the river, and to reach the saw
dust filling for a nesting-place.

Among our familiar birds the matchmaking of
none other is quite so pretty as that of the goldfinch.
The goldfinches stay with us in loose flocks and
clad in a dull-olive suit throughout the winter. In
May the males begin to put on their bright summer
plumage. This is the result of a kind of super
ficial moulting. Their feathers are not shed, but
their dusky covering or overalls are cast off. When
the process is only partly completed, the bird has a
smutty, unpresentable appearance. But we seldom
see them at such times. They seem to retire from
society. When the change is complete, and the males
have got the.ir bright uniforms of yellow and black,
the courting begins. All the goldfinches of a neigh
borhood collect together and hold a sort of musical
festival. To the number of many dozens they may
be seen in some large tree, all singing and calling
in the most joyous and vivacious manner. The
males sing, and the females chirp and call. Whether
there is actual competition on a trial of musical abil
ities of the males before the females or not, I do
not know. The best of feeling seems to pervade the
company; there is no sign of quarreling or fight-

BIRD COURTSHIP 53

ing ; " all goes merry as a marriage bell," and the
matches seem actually to be made during these musi
cal picnics. Before May is passed the birds are seen
in couples, and in June housekeeping usually be
gins. This I call the ideal of love-making among
birds, and is in striking contrast to the squabbles
and jealousies of most of our songsters.

I have known the goldfinches to keep up this
musical and love-making festival through three con
secutive days of a cold northeast rainstorm. Be
draggled, but ardent and happy, the birds were not
to be dispersed by wind or weather.

All the woodpeckers, so far as I have observed,
drum up their mates ; the male advertises his wants
by hammering upon a dry, resonant limb, when in
due time the female approaches and is duly courted
and won. The drumming of the ruffed grouse is
for the same purpose; the female hears, concludes
to take a walk that way, approaches timidly, is seen
and admired, and the match is made. That the
male accepts the first female that offers herself is
probable. Among all the birds the choice, the se
lection, seems to belong to the female. The males
court promiscuously; the females choose discreetly.
The grouse, unlike the woodpecker, always carries
his drum with him, which is his own proud breast;
yet, if undisturbed, he selects some particular log
or rock in the woods from which to sound forth his
willingness to wed. What determines the choice of

54 BIRD COURTSHIP

the female it would be hard to say. Among song
birds, it is probably the best songster, or the one
whose voice suits her taste best. Among birds
of bright plumage, it is probably the gayest dress;
among the drummers, she is doubtless drawn by
some quality of the sound. Our ears and eyes are too
coarse to note any differences in these things, but
doubtless the birds themselves note differences.

Birds show many more human traits than do quad
rupeds. That they actually fall in love admits of
no doubt; that there is a period of courtship, during
which the male uses all the arts he is capable of to
win his mate, is equally certain; that there are jeal
ousies and rivalries, and- that the peace of families is
often rudely disturbed by outside males or females
is a common observation. The females, when they
come to blows, fight much more spitefully and reck
lessly than do the males. One species of bird has
been known to care for the young of another species
which had been made orphans. The male turkey
will sometimes cover the eggs of his mate and hatch
and rear the brood alone. Altogether, birds often
present some marked resemblances in their actions
to men, when love is the motive.

Mrs. Martin, in her "Home Life on an Ostrich
Farm," relates this curious incident: —

" One undutiful hen — having apparently im
bibed advanced notions — absolutely refused to sit
at all, and the poor husband, determined not to be

BIRD COURTSHIP 55

disappointed of his little family, did all the work
himself, sitting bravely and patiently day and night,
though nearly dead with exhaustion, till the chicks
were hatched out. The next time this pair of birds
had a nest, the cock's mind was firmly made up that
he would stand no more nonsense. He fought the
hen [kicked her], giving her so severe a thrashing
that she was all but killed, and this Petruchio-like
treatment had the desired effect, for the wife never
again rebelled, but sat submissively."

In the case of another pair of ostriches of which
Mrs. Martin tells, the female was accidentally killed,
when the male mourned her loss for over two years,
and would not look at another female. He wan
dered up and down, up and down, the length of his
camp, utterly disconsolate. At last he mated again
with a most magnificent hen, who ruled him tyran
nically; he became the most hen-pecked, or rather
hen-kicked, of husbands.

THE SNOW-WALKERS1

THE track of the red squirrel may be known by
its smaller size. He is more common and less
dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty
larceny about the barns and grain-fields. He is most
abundant in old barkpeelings, and low, dilapidated
hemlocks, from which he makes excursions to the
fields and orchards, spinning along the tops of the
fences, which afford not only convenient lines of
communication, but a safe retreat if danger threat
ens. He loves to linger about the orchard; and,
sitting upright on the topmost stone in the wall, or
on the tallest stake in the fence, chipping up an
apple for the seeds, his tail conforming to the curve
of his back, his paws shifting and turning the apple,
he is a pretty sight, and his bright, pert appearance
atones for all the mischief he does. At home, in
the woods, he is the most frolicsome and loquacious.
The appearance of anything unusual, if, after con
templating it a moment, he concludes it not dan
gerous, excites his unbounded mirth and ridicule,
and he snickers and chatters, hardly able to contain
himself; now darting up the trunk of a tree and
squealing in derision, then hopping into position on

1 An excerpt from a chapter in Winter Sunshine.

THE SNOW-WALKERS 57

a limb and dancing to the music of his own cackle,
and all for your special benefit.

There is something very human in this apparent
mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to
be a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-con
scious pride and exultation in the laugher. "What
a ridiculous thing you are, to be sure!" he seems to
say; "how clumsy and awkward, and what a poor
show for a tail! Look at me, look at me!" — and
he capers about in his best style. Again, he would
seem to tease you and provoke your attention; then
suddenly assumes a tone of good-natured, childlike
defiance and derision. That pretty little imp, the
chipmunk, will sit on the stone above his den and
defy you, as plainly as if he said so, to catch him
before he can get into his hole if you can. You
hurl a stone at him, and "No you did n't!" comes
up from the depth of his retreat.

In February another track appears upon the
snow, slender and delicate, about a third larger than
that of the gray squirrel, indicating no haste or
speed, but, on the contrary, denoting the most im
perturbable ease and leisure, the footprints so close
together that the trail appears like a chain of curi
ously carved links. Sir Mephitis mephitica, or,
in plain English, the skunk, has awakened from his
six weeks' nap, and come out into society again.
He is a nocturnal traveler, very bold and impudent,
coming quite up to the barn and outbuildings, and

58 THE SNOW-WALKERS

sometimes taking up his quarters for the season un
der the haymow. There is no such word as hurry
in his dictionary, as you may see by his path upon
the snow. He has a very sneaking, insinuating
way, and goes creeping about the fields and woods,
never once in a perceptible degree altering his gait,
and, if a fence crosses his course, steers for a break
or opening to avoid climbing. He is too indolent
even to dig his own hole, but appropriates that of
a woodchuck, or hunts out a crevice in the rocks,
from which he extends his rambling in all direc
tions, preferring damp, thawy weather. He has
very little discretion or cunning, and holds a trap
in utter contempt, stepping into it as soon as beside
it, relying implicitly for defense against all forms of
danger upon the unsavory punishment he is capable
of inflicting. He is quite indifferent to both man
and beast, and will not hurry himself to get out of
the way of either. Walking through the summer
fields at twilight, I have come near stepping upon
him, and was much the more disturbed of the two.
When attacked in the open fields he confounds the
plans of his enemies by the unheard-of tactics of
exposing his rear rather than his front. "Come if
you dare," he says, and his attitude makes even
the farm-dog pause. After a few encounters of
this kind, and if you entertain the usual hostility
towards him, your mode of attack will speedily re
solve itself into moving about him in a circle, the

THE SNOW-WALKERS 59

radius of which will be the exact distance at which
you can hurl a stone with accuracy and effect.

He has a secret to keep and knows it, and is
careful not to betray himself until he can do so with
the most telling effect. I have known him to pre
serve his serenity even when caught in a steel trap,
and look the very picture of injured innocence,
manoeuvring carefully and deliberately to extricate
his foot from the grasp of the naughty jaws. Do
not by any means take pity on him, and lend a
helping hand!

How pretty his face and head! How fine and
delicate his teeth, like a weasel's or cat's! When
about a third grown, he looks so well that one cov
ets him for a pet. He is quite precocious, however,
and capable, even at this tender age, of making a
very strong appeal to your sense of smell.

No animal is more cleanly in its habits than he.
He is not an awkward boy who cuts his own face
with his whip; and neither his flesh nor his fur
hints the weapon with which he is armed. The
most silent creature known to me, he makes no
sound, so far as I have observed, save a diffuse,
impatient noise, like that produced by beating your
hand with a whisk-broom, when the farm-dog has
discovered his retreat in the stone fence. He
renders himself obnoxious to the farmer by his par
tiality for hens' eggs and young poultry. He is a
confirmed epicure, and at plundering hen-roosts an

60 THE SNOW-WALKERS

expert. Not the full-grown fowls are his victims,
but the youngest and most tender. At night Mother
Hen receives under her maternal wings a dozen
newly hatched chickens, and with much pride and
satisfaction feels them all safely tucked away in her
feathers. In the morning she is walking about dis
consolately, attended by only two or three of all
that pretty brood. What has happened? Where
are they gone? That pickpocket, Sir Mephitis,
could solve the mystery. Quietly has he approached,
under coyer of darkness, and one by one relieved
her of her precious charge. Look closely and you
will see their little yellow legs and beaks, or part
of a mangled form, lying about on the ground. Or,
before the hen has hatched, he may find her out,
and, by the same sleight of hand, remove every egg,
leaving only the empty blood-stained shells to wit
ness against him. The birds, especially the ground-
builders, suffer in like manner from his plundering
propensities.

The secretion upon which he relies for defense,
and which is the chief source of his unpopularity,
while it affords good reasons against cultivating him
as a pet, and mars his attractiveness as game, is by
no means the greatest indignity that can be offered
to a nose. It is a rank, living smell, and has none
of the sickening qualities of disease or putrefaction.
Indeed, I think a good smeller will enjoy its most
refined intensity. It approaches the sublime, and

THE SNOW-WALKERS 61

makes the nose tingle. It is tonic and bracing, and,
I can readily believe, has rare medicinal qualities.
I do not recommend its use as eyewater, though an
old farmer assures me it has undoubted virtues when
thus applied. Hearing, one night, a disturbance
among his hens, he rushed suddenly out to catch
the thief, when Sir Mephitis, taken by surprise, and
no doubt much annoyed at being interrupted, dis
charged the vials of his wrath full in the farmer's
face, and with such admirable effect that, for a few
moments, he was completely blinded, and powerless
to revenge himself upon the rogue, who embraced
the opportunity to make good his escape; but he
declared that afterwards his eyes felt as if purged
by fire, and his sight was much clearer.

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS1

ONE sometimes seems to discover a familiar wild
flower anew by coming upon it in some pecu
liar and striking situation. Our columbine is at all
times and in all places one of the most exquisitely
beautiful of flowers ; yet one spring day, when I saw
it growing out of a small seam on the face of a great
lichen-covered wall of rock, where no soil or mould
was visible, — a jet of foliage and color shooting
out of a black line on the face of a perpendicular
mountain wall and rising up like a tiny fountain,
its drops turning to flame-colored jewels that hung
and danced in the air against the gray rocky sur
face, — its beauty became something magical and
audacious. On little narrow shelves in the rocky
wall the corydalis was blooming, and among the
loose bowlders at its base the blood-root shone con
spicuous, suggesting snow rather than anything more
sanguine.

Certain flowers one makes special expeditions for
every season. They are limited in their ranges,
and must generally be sought for in particular
haunts. How many excursions to the woods does
the delicious trailing arbutus give rise to! How

1 An excerpt from a chapter in Riverby.

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 63

can one let the spring go by without gathering it
himself when it hides in the moss ! There are arbu
tus days in one's calendar, days when the trail
ing flower fairly calls him to the woods. With me,
they come the latter part of April. The grass is
greening here and there on the moist slopes and by
the spring runs; the first furrow has been struck
by the farmer; the liver-leaf is in the height of its
beauty, and the bright constellations of the blood-
root shine out here and there; one has had his first
taste and his second taste of the spring and of the
woods, and his tongue is sharpened rather than
cloyed. Now he will take the most delicious and
satisfying draught of all, the very essence and soul
of the early season, of the tender brooding days,
with all their prophecies and awakenings, in the
handful of trailing arbutus which he gathers in his
walk. At the mere thought of it, one sees the sun
light flooding the woods, smells the warm earthy
odors which the heat liberates from beneath the dry
leaves, hears the mellow bass of the first bumble-
Dee,

" Rover of the underwoods,"

or the finer chord of the adventurous honey-bee
seeking store for his empty comb. The arriving
swallows twitter above the woods; the first che-
wink rustles the dry leaves; the north ward -bound
thrushes, the hermit and the gray-cheeked, flit here

64 AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS

and there before you. The robin, the sparrow, and
the bluebird are building their first nests, and the
first shad are making their way slowly up the Hud
son. Indeed, the season is fairly under way when
the trailing arbutus comes. Now look out for
troops of boys and girls going to the woods to gather
it! and let them look out that in their greed they
do not exterminate it. Within reach of our large
towns, the choicer spring wild flowers are hunted
mercilessly. Every fresh party from town raids
them as if bent upon their destruction. One day,
about ten miles from one of our Hudson River
cities, there got into the train six young women
loaded down with vast sheaves and bundles of
trailing arbutus. Each one of them had enough for
forty. They had apparently made a clean sweep of
the woods. It was a pretty sight, — the pink and
white of the girls and the pink and white of the
flowers! and the car, too, was suddenly filled with
perfume, — the breath of spring loaded the air; but
I thought it a pity to ravish the woods in that way.
The next party was probably equally greedy, and,
because a handful was desirable, thought an armful
proportionately so; till, by and by, the flower will
be driven from those woods.

Another flower that one makes special excursions
for is the pond-lily. The pond-lily is a star, and
easily takes the first place among lilies ; and the ex
peditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 65

she rocks upon the dark secluded waters of some
pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the
floral expeditions of summer. It is the expedition
about which more things gather than almost any
other: you want your boat, you want your lunch,
you want your friend or friends with you. You
are going to put in the greater part of the day; you
are going to picnic in the woods, and indulge in a
"green thought in a green shade." When my friend
and I go for pond-lilies, we have to traverse a dis
tance of three miles with our boat in a wagon. The
road is what is called a "back road," and leads
through woods most of the way. Black Pond,
where the lilies grow, lies about one hundred feet
higher than the Hudson, from which it is separated
by a range of rather bold wooded heights, one of
which might well be called Mount Hymettus, for I
have found a great deal of wild honey in the forest
that covers it. The stream which flows out of
the pond takes a northward course for two or three
miles, till it finds an opening through the rocky
hills, when it makes rapidly for the Hudson. Its
career all the way from the lake is a series of alter
nating pools and cascades. Now a long, deep, level
stretch, where the perch and the bass and the pick
erel lurk, and where the willow-herb and the royal
osmunda fern line the shores; then a sudden leap
of eight, ten, or fifteen feet down rocks to another
level stretch, where the water again loiters and suns

itself; and so on through its adventurous course till
the hills are cleared and the river is in sight. Our
road leads us along this stream, across its rude
bridges, through dark hemlock and pine woods,
under gray, rocky walls, now past a black pool, then
within sight or hearing of a foaming rapid or fall,
till we strike the outlet of the long level that leads
to the lake. In this we launch our boat and paddle
slowly upward over its dark surface, now pushing
our way through half-submerged treetops, then
ducking under the trunk of an overturned tree which
bridges the stream and makes a convenient way for
the squirrels and wood-mice, or else forcing the boat
over it when it is sunk a few inches below the sur
face. We are traversing what was once a continu
ation of the lake; the forest floor is as level as the
water and but a few inches above it, even in sum
mer; it sweeps back a half mile or more, densely
covered with black ash, red maple, and other de
ciduous trees, to the foot of the rocky hills which
shut us in. What glimpses we get, as we steal
along, into the heart of the rank, dense, silent
woods ! I carry in my eye yet the vision I had, on
one occasion, of a solitary meadow lily hanging like
a fairy bell there at the end of a chance opening,
where a ray of sunlight fell full upon it, and brought
out its brilliant orange against the dark green
background. It appeared to be the only bit of bright
color in all the woods. Then the song of a single

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 67

hermit thrush immediately after did even more
for the ear than the lily did for the eye. Presently
the swamp sparrow, one of the rarest of the spar
rows, was seen and heard; and that nest there in a
small bough a few feet over the water proves to be
hers, — in appearance a ground-bird's nest in a
bough, with the same four speckled eggs. As we
come in sight of the lilies, where they cover the
water at the outlet of the lake, a brisk gust of wind,
as if it had been waiting to surprise us, sweeps
down and causes every leaf to leap from the water
and show its pink under side. Was it a fluttering of
hundreds of wings, or the clapping of a multitude
of hands? But there rocked the lilies with their
golden hearts open to the sun, and their tender
white petals as fresh as crystals of snow. What a
queenly flower, indeed, the type of unsullied purity
and sweetness! Its root, like a black, corrugated,
ugly reptile, clinging to the slime, but its flower in
purity and whiteness like a star. There is some
thing very pretty in the closed bud making its way
up through the water to meet the sun; and there is
something touching in the flower closing itself up
again after its brief career, and slowly burying itself
beneath the dark wave. One almost fancies a sad,
regretful look in it as the stem draws it downward
to mature its seed on the sunless bottom. The pond-
lily is a flower of the morning; it closes a little after
noon; but after you have plucked it and carried it

68 AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS

home, it still feels the call of the morning sun, and
will open to him, if you give it a good chance. Coil
their stems up in the grass on the lawn, where the
sun's rays can reach them, and sprinkle them copi
ously. By the time you are ready for your morning
walk, there they sit upon the moist grass, almost as
charmingly as upon the wave.

Our more choice wild flowers, the rarer and finer
spirits among them, please us by their individual
beauty and charm; others, more coarse and com
mon, delight us by mass and profusion; we regard
not the one, but the many, as did Wordsworth his
golden daffodils : —

" Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance."

Of such is the marsh marigold, giving a golden
lining to many a dark, marshy place in the leafless
April woods, or marking a little watercourse through
a greening meadow with a broad line of new gold.
One glances up from his walk, and his eye falls upon
something like fixed and heaped-up sunshine there
beneath the alders, or yonder in the freshening
field.

THE DIVINE SOIL1 •

ONE thing we may affirm about the universe —
it is logical ; the conclusion always follows from
the premises.

The lesson which life repeats and constantly
enforces is "look under foot." You are always
nearer the divine and the true sources of your
power than you think. The lure of the distant and
the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is
where you are. Do not despise your own place and
hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is
the centre of the world. Stand in your own door-
yard and you have eight thousand miles of solid
ground beneath you, and all the sidereal splendors
overhead. The morning and the evening stars are
no more in the heavens and no more obedient to
the celestial impulses than the lonely and time-
scarred world we inhabit. How the planet thrills
and responds to the heavenly forces and occurrences
we little know, but we get an inkling of it when we
see the magnetic needle instantly affected by solar
disturbances.

Look under foot. Gold and diamonds and all

1 An excerpt from a chapter in Leaf and Tendril.

70 THE DIVINE SOIL

precious stones come out of the ground; they do
not drop upon us from the stars, and our highest
thoughts are in some way a transformation or a
transmutation of the food we eat. The mean is the
divine if we make it so. The child surely learns
that its father and mother are the Santa Glaus that
brought the gifts, though the discovery may bring
pain ; and the man learns to see providence in the
great universal forces of nature, in the winds and
the rain, in the soil underfoot and in the cloud over
head. What these forces in their orderly rounds
do not bring him, he does not expect. The farmer
hangs up his stocking in the way of empty bins and
barns, and he knows well who or what must fill
them. The Santa Glaus of the merchant, the manu
facturer, the inventor, is the forces and conditions all
about us in every-day operation. When the light
ning strikes your building or the trees on your lawn,
you are at least reminded that you do not live in
a corner outside of Jove's dominions, you are in
the circuit of the great forces. If you are eligible
to bad fortune where you stand, you are equally
eligible to good fortune there. The young man
who went West did well, but the young man who had
the Western spirit and stayed at home did equally
well. To evoke a spark of fire out of a flint with a
bit of steel is the same thing as evoking beautiful
thoughts from homely facts. How hard it is for us
to see the heroic in an act of our neighbor!

THE DIVINE SOIL 71

What a burden science took upon itself when it
sought to explain the origin of man! Religion or
theology takes a short cut and makes quick work
of it by regarding man as the result of the special
creative act of a supernatural Being. But science
takes a long and tedious and hazardous way
around through the lowest primordial forms of life.
It seeks to trace his germ through the abyss of
geologic time, where all is dim and mysterious,
through countless cycles of waiting and prepara
tion, where the slow, patient gods of evolution
cherished it and passed it on, through the fetid
carbon, through the birth and decay of continents,
through countless interchanges and readjustments
of sea and land, through the clash and warring of
the cosmic forces, through good and evil report,
through the fish and the reptile, through the ape
and the orang, up to man — from the slime at the
bottom of the primordial ocean up to Jesus of Naz
areth. Surely one may say with Whitman, —

"Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me."

It took about one hundred thousand feet of sed
imentary rock, laid down through hundreds of
millions of years in the bottom of the old seas, all
probably the leavings of minute forms of life, to
make a foundation upon which man could appear.

72 THE DIVINE SOIL

His origin as revealed by science fills and appalls
the imagination: as revealed by theology it simply
baffles and dumfounds one. Science deepens the
mystery while yet it gives the reason and the imagi
nation something to go upon; it takes us beyond
soundings, but not beyond the assurance that cause
and effect are still continuous there beneath us. I
like to think that man has traveled that long, ad
venturous road, that the whole creation has pulled
f- together to produce him. It is a road, of course,
| * U"*' "' . beset with pain and anguish, beset with ugly and
fall- 'repellent forms, beset with riot and slaughter; it
(£'*•*' leads through jungle and morass, through floods
cataclysms, through the hells of the Meso-

!£ 'x

zoic and the Cenozoic periods, but it leads ever
upward and onward.

The manward impulse in creation has doubtless
been checked many times, but never lost ; all forms
conspired to further it, and it seemed to have taken
the push and the aspiration out of each order as
it passed on, dooming it henceforth to a round of
life without change or hope of progress, leaving
the fish to continue fish, the reptiles to continue
reptiles, the apes to continue apes ; it took all the
heart and soul of each to feed and continue the
central impulse that was to eventuate in man.

I fail to see why our religious brethren cannot find
in this history or revelation as much room for crea
tive energy, as large a factor of the mysterious and

THE DIVINE SOIL 73

superhuman, as in the myth of Genesis. True it is
that it fixes our attention upon this world and upon
forces with which we are more or less familiar, but
it implies an element or a power before which we
stand helpless and dumb. What fathered this man-
impulse, what launched this evolutionary process,
what or who stamped upon the first protoplasm
the aspiration to be man, and never let that aspira
tion sleep through all the tremendous changes of
those incalculable geologic ages ? What or who first
planted the seed of the great biological tree, and
determined all its branchings and the fruit it should
bear? If you must have a God, either apart from
or imminent in creation, it seems to me that there
is as much need of one here as in the Mosaic cos- j
mology. The final mystery cannot be cleared up.
We can only drive it to cover. How the universe
came to be what it is, and how man came to be
man, who can tell us?

That somewhere in my line of descent was an
ancestor that lived in trees and had powerful arms
and weaker legs, that his line began in a creature
that lived on the ground, and his in one that lived
in the mud, or in the sea, and his, or its, sprang
from a germ at the bottom of the sea, but deepens
the mystery of the being that is now here and can
look back and speculate over the course he has
probably come; it only directs attention to ugly
facts, to material things, to the every-day process

74 THE DIVINE SOIL

of evolution, instead of to the far away, the un«
known, or the supernatural.

How the organic came to bud and grow from the
inorganic, who knows? Yet it must have done so.
We seem compelled to think of an ascending series
from nebular matter up to the spirituality of man,
each stage in the series resting upon or growing
out of the one beneath it. Creation or develop
ment must be continuous. There are and can be
no breaks. The inorganic is already endowed with
chemical and molecular life. The whole universe
is alive, and vibrates with impulses too fine for
our dull senses; but in chemical affinity, in crys
tallization, in the persistence of force, in electri
city, we catch glimpses of a kind of vitality that
is preliminary to all other. I never see fire burn,
or water flow, or the frost-mark on the pane,
that I am not reminded of something as myste
rious as life. How alive the flame seems, how
alive the water, how marvelous the arborescent etch
ings of the frost! Is there a principle of fire?
Is there a principle of crystallization? Just as
much as there is a principle of life. The mind,
in each case, seems to require something to lay
hold of as a cause. Why these wonderful star
forms of the snowflake? Why these exact geo
metric forms of quartz crystals ? The gulf between
disorganized matter and the crystal seems to me
as great as that between the organic and the inor-

THE DIVINE SOIL 75

ganic. If we did not every day witness the passage,
we could not believe it. The gulf between the crys
tal and the cell we have not seen cleared, and
man has not yet been able to bridge it, and may
never be, but it has been bridged, and I dare say
without any more miracle than hourly goes on
around us. The production of water from two
invisible gases is a miracle to me. When water ap
peared (what made it appear ?) and the first cloud
floated across the blue sky, life was not far off, if
it was not already there. Some morning in spring
when the sun shone across the old Azoic hills, at
some point where the land and sea met, life began
— the first speck of protoplasm appeared. Call it
the result of the throb or push of the creative
energy that pervades all things, and whose action
is continuous and not intermittent, since we are
compelled to presuppose such energy to account
for anything, even our own efforts to account for
things. An ever active vital force pervades the
universe, and is felt and seen in all things, from
atomic attraction and repulsion up to wheeling suns
and systems. The very processes of thought seem
to require such premises to go upon. There is a
reason for the universe as we find it, else man's rea
son is a delusion, and delusion itself is a meaning
less term. The uncaused is unthinkable; thought
can find neither beginning nor ending to the uni
verse because it cannot find the primal cause. Can

76 THE DIVINE SOIL

we think of a stick with only one end? We
have to if we compass time in thought, or space,
either.

So far as science can find out, sentience is a pro
perty of matter which is evolved under certain
conditions, and though science itself has not yet
been able to reproduce these conditions, it still
believes in the possibility. If life was not poten
tial in the inorganic world, how is it possible to
account for it ? It is not a graft, it is more like a
begetting. Nature does not work by prefixes and
suffixes, but by unfolding and ever unfolding, or
developing out of latent innate powers and possi
bilities; — an inward necessity always working,
but never an external maker. It is no help to fancy
that life may have been brought to the earth by
a falling meteorite from some other sphere. How
did life originate upon that other sphere ? It must
have started here as surely as fire started here. We
feign that Prometheus stole the first fire from
heaven, but it sleeps here all about us, and can be
evoked any time and anywhere. It sleeps in all
forms of force. A falling avalanche of rocks turns
to flame; the meteor in the air becomes a torch;

THE DIVINE SOIL 77

the thunderbolt is a huge spark. So life, no doubt,
slept in the inorganic, and was started by the
reverse of friction, namely, by brooding.

When the earth becomes lifeless again, as it surely
must in time, then the cycle will be repeated, a col
lision will develop new energy and new worlds,
and out of this newness will again come life.

It is highly probable that a million years elapsed
between the time when the ancestor of man began
to assume the human form and the dawn of history.
Try to think of that time and of the struggle of
this creature upward; of the pain, the suffering,
the low bestial life, the warrings, the defeats, the
slow, infinitely slow gains, of his deadly enemies in
other animals, of the repeated changes of climate
of the northern hemisphere from subtropical to
subarctic — the land at one time for thousands of
years buried beneath an ice sheet a mile or more
thick, followed by a cycle of years of almost trop
ical warmth even in Greenland — and all of this
before man had yet got off of " all fours," and stood
upright and began to make rude tools and rude
shelters from the storms. The Tertiary period, early
in which the first rude ancestor of man seems to
have appeared, is less than one week of the great
geologic year of the earth's history — a week of
about five days. These days the geologists have
named Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, and
Pleistocene, each one of these days covering, no

78 THE DIVINE SOIL

doubt, a million years or more. The ancestor of man
probably took on something like the human form on
the third, or Miocene, day. The other and earlier
fifty or more weeks of the great geologic year gradu
ally saw the development of the simpler forms of life,
till we reach the earliest mammals and reptiles in the
Permian, about the forty-eighth or forty-ninth week
of the great year. The laying down of the coal mea
sures, Huxley thinks, must have taken six millions
of years. Well, the Lord allowed himself enough
time. Evidently he was in no hurry to see man cut
ting his fantastic tricks here upon the surface of the
planet. A hundred million years, more or less, what
of it ? Did the globe have to ripen all those cycles
upon cycles, like the apple upon the tree ? bask in
the sidereal currents, work and ferment in the sea
of the hypothetical ether before the gross matter
could evolve the higher forms of life ? Probably
every unicellular organism that lived and died in
the old seas helped prepare the way for man,
contributed something to the fund of vital energy
of the globe upon which man was finally to draw.

How life has had to adjust itself to the great
cosmic changes! The delays must have been in
calculable. The periodic refrigeration of the north
ern hemisphere, which brought on the ice age
several times during each one of the Eocene and
Miocene days, must have delayed the development
of life as we know it, enormously.

THE DIVINE SOIL 79

From nebula to nebula — these are the hours
struck by the clock of eternity : from the dissipation
of the solar systems into nebular gas by their falling
together to their condensation again into suns and
worlds by the action of physical laws — thousands
of millions of years in each hour, and the hours
infinite in number. This is a hint of eternity. How
many times, then, there must have been a world
like this evolved in the course of this running down
and winding up of the great clock, with beings like
these we now behold ! how many such worlds and
such beings there must now be in the universe, and
have always been ! Can you think of the number ?
Not till you can think of infinity. The duration of
life upon the globe, to say nothing of man's little
span, is hardly a tick of this clock of eternity, and
the repetition of the birth and dissipations of sys
tems is well symbolized by the endless striking or
ticking of a clock.

Then sooner or later comes the thought, What
is it all for ? and from the great abysm comes back
the echo, " What for ? " Is it our human limitations,
the discipline of this earthly life, when we have to
count the cost and ask what it is for, that makes
us put the question to the Infinite? When the
cosmic show is over, what is the gain ? When our
universe is again a blank, who or what will have

80 THE DIVINE SOIL

reaped the benefit ? Will the moral order which has
been so slowly and painfully evolved, and which so
many souls have struggled to live up to, still go on ?
Where ? with whom ? I seem to see dimly that you
cannot bring the Infinite to book, that you cannot
ask, " What for ? " of the All, — of that which has
neither beginning nor end, neither centre nor cir
cumference, neither fulfillment nor design, which
knows neither failure nor success, neither loss nor
gain, and which is complete in and of itself.

We are tied to the sphere, its laws shape our
minds, we cannot get away from it and see it in
perspective; away from it there is no direction; at
either pole on its surface there is the contradiction
of the sky being always overhead. We are tied to
the Infinite in the same way. We are part of it, but
may not measure it. Our boldest thought comes
back like a projectile fired into the heavens —
the curve of the infinite sphere holds us. I know
I am trying to say the unsayable. I would fain
indicate how human and hopeless is our question,
" What for ? " when asked of the totality of things.
There is no totality of things. To say that there is,
does not express it. To say there is not, does not
express it. To say that the universe was created,
does not express the mystery; to say that it was
not created, but always existed, does not express
it any nearer. To say that the heavens are over
head is only half the truth ; they are underfoot also.

THE DIVINE SOIL 81

Down is toward the centre of the earth, but go on
through and come out at the surface on the other
side, and which way is down then ?

The Unspeakable will not be spoken.

In the light of science we must see that life and
progress and evolution and the moral order must
go on and on somewhere, that the birth of systems
and the evolution of planets must and does con
tinue, and always has continued; that if one sun
fades, another blazes out ; that as there must have
been an infinite number (how can there be an in
finite number? where is the end of the endless?)
of worlds in the past, so there will be an infinite
number in the future; that if the moral order and
the mathematical order and the intellectual order
disappear from one planet, they will appear in due
time on another.

All that which in our limited view of nature we
call waste and delay — how can such terms apply
to the Infinite? Can we ever speak truly of the
Infinite in terms of the finite ? To be sure, we have
no other terms, and can never have. Then let us
be silent and — reverent

STYLE AND THE MAN1

difference between a precious stone and a
JL common stone is not an essential difference —
not a difference of substance, but of arrangement of
the particles — the crystallization. In substance
charcoal and the diamond are one, but in form and
effect how widely they differ. The pearl contains
nothing that is not found in the coarsest oyster shell.
Two men have the same thoughts ; they use about
the same words in expressing them; yet with one
the product is real literature, with the other it is a
platitude.

The difference is all in the presentation; a finer
and more compendious process has gone on in the
one case than in the other. The elements are better
fused and welded together; they are in some way
heightened and intensified. Is not here a clue to
what we mean by style ? Style transforms common
quartz into an Egyptian pebble. We are apt to think
of style as something external, that can be put on,
something in and of itself. But it is not; it is in the

1 An excerpt from a chapter in Literary Values,

I

STYLE AND THE MAN 83

inmost texture of the substance. Choice words,
faultless rhetoric, polished periods, are only the acci
dents of style. Indeed, perfect workmanship is one
thing ; style, as the great writers have it, is quite
another. It • may, and often does, go with faulty
workmanship. It is the use of words in a fresh and
vital way, so as to give us a vivid sense of a new
spiritual force and personality. In the best work the
style is found and hidden in the matter.

If a writer does not bring a new thought, he must
at least bring a new quality, — he must give a fresh,
new flavor to the old thoughts. Style or quality will
keep a man's work alive whose thought is essentially
commonplace, as is the case with Addison ; and Ar
nold justly observes of the poet Gray that his gift
of style doubles his force and " raises him to a rank
beyond what his natural richness and power seem to
warrant."

There is the correct, conventional, respectable and
scholarly use of language of the mass of writers, and
there is the fresh, stimulating, quickening use of
it of the man of genius. How apt and racy and tell
ing is often the language of unlettered persons ; the
born writer carries this same gift into a higher
sphere. There is a passage in one of Emerson's
early letters, written when he was but twenty-four,
and given by Mr. Cabot in his Memoir, which shows
how clearly at that age Emerson discerned the secret
of good writing and good preaching.

84 STYLE AND THE MAN

" I preach half of every Sunday. When I attended
church on the other half of a Sunday, and the image
in the pulpit was all of clay, and not of tunable
metal, I said to myself that if men would avoid that
general language and general manner in which they
strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only
what is uppermost in their own minds, after their
own individual manner, every man would be inter
esting. . . . But whatever properties a man of nar
row intellect feels to be peculiar he studiously hides ;
he is ashamed or afraid of himself, and all his com
munications to men are unskillful plagiarisms from
the common stock of thought and knowledge, and
he is of course flat and tiresome."

The great mass of the writing and sermonizing of
any age is of the kind here indicated ; it is the result
of the machinery of culture and of books and the
schools put into successful operation. But now and
then a man appears whose writing is vital ; his page
may be homely, but it is alive ; it is full of personal
magnetism. The writer does not merely give us
what he thinks or knows ; he gives us himself. There
is nothing secondary or artificial between himself
and his reader. It is books of this kind that man
kind does not willingly let die. Some minds are like
an open fire, — how direct and instant our com
munication with them; how they interest us; there
are no screens or disguises ; we see and feel the vital
play of their thought ; we are face to face with their

STYLE AND THE MAN 85

spirits. Indeed all good literature, whether poetry
or prose, is the open fire; there is directness, reality,
charm; we get something at first-hand that warms
and stimulates.

In literature proper our interest, I think, is always
in the writer himself, — his quality, his personality,
his point of view. We may fancy that we care only
for the subject-matter; but the born writer makes
any subject interesting to us by his treatment of it
or by the personal element he infuses into it. When
our concern is primarily with the subject-matter,
with the fact or the argument, or with the informa
tion conveyed, then we are not dealing with literature
in the strict sense. It is not so much what the writer
tells us that makes literature, as the way he tells
it; or rather, it is the degree in which he imparts to
it some rare personal quality or charm that is the gift
of his own spirit, something which cannot be de
tached from the work itself, and which is as inherent
as the sheen of a bird's plumage, as the texture of
a flower's petal. There is this analogy in nature.
The hive bee does not get honey from the flowers;
honey is a product of the bee. What she gets from
the flowers is mainly sweet water or nectar; this she
puts through a process of her own, and to it adds a
minute drop of her own secretion, formic acid. It
is her special personal contribution that converts the
nectar into honey.

In the work of the literary artist, common facts

86 STYLE AND THE MAN

and experiences are changed and heightened in the
same way. Sainte-Beuve, speaking of certain parts
of Rousseau's " Confessions," says, " Such pages
were, in French literature, the discovery of a new
world, a world of sunshine and of freshness, which
men had near them without having perceived it."
They had not perceived it because they had not had
Rousseau's mind to mirror it for them. The sunshine
and the freshness were a gift of his spirit. The new
world was the old world in a new light. What
charmed them was a quality personal to Rousseau.
Nature they had always had, but not the Rousseau
sensibility to nature. The same may be said of more
recent writers upon outdoor themes. Readers fancy
that in the works of Thoreau or of Jeff cries some new
charm or quality of nature is disclosed, that some
thing hidden in field or wood is brought to light.
They do not see that what they are in love with is
the mind or spirit of the writer himself. Thoreau
does not interpret nature, but nature interprets him.
The new thing disclosed in bird and flower is simply
a new sensibility to these objects in the beholder.
In morals and ethics the same thing is true. Let
an essayist like Dr. Johnson or Arthur Helps state a
principle or an idea and it has a certain value; let
an essayist like Ruskin or Emerson or Carlyle state
the same principle and it has an entirely different
value, makes an entirely different impression, — the
qualities of mind and character of these writers are

STYLE AND THE MAN 87

so different. The reader's relation with them is
much more intimate and personal.

It is quality of mind which makes the writings
of Burke rank above those of Gladstone, Ruskin's
criticism above that of Hamerton, Froude's histories
above Freeman's, Kenan's " Life of Jesus " above
that of Strauss; which makes the pages of Goethe,
Coleridge, Lamb, literature in a sense that the works
of many able minds are not. These men impart
something personal and distinctive to the language
they use. They make the words their own. The
literary quality is not something put on. It is not
of the hand, it is of the mind ; it is not of the mind,
but of the soul; it is of whatever is most vital and
characteristic in the writer. It is confined to no
particular manner and to no particular matter. It
may be the gift of writers of widely different man
ners — of Carlyle as well as of Arnold ; and in men
of similar manners, one may have it and the other
may not. It is as subtle as the tone of the voice or
the glance of the eye. Quality is the one thing in
life that cannot be analyzed, and it is the one thing
in art that cannot be imitated. A man's manner
may be copied, but his style, his charm, his real
value, can only be parodied. In the conscious or
unconscious imitations of the major poets by the
minor, we get only a suggestion of the manner of
the former; their essential quality cannot be repro
duced.

88 STYLE AND THE MAN

English literature is full of imitations of the Greek
poets, but that which the Greek poets did not and
could not borrow they cannot lend; their quality
stays with them. The charm of spoken discourse
is largely in the personal quality of the speaker —
something intangible to print. When we see the
thing in print, we wonder how it could so have
charmed or moved us. To convey this charm, this
aroma of the man, to the written discourse is the
triumph of style. A recent French critic says of
Madame de Stael that she had no style; she wrote
just as she thought, but without being able to impart
to her writing the living quality of her speech. It
is not importance of subject-matter that makes a
work great, but importance of the subjectivity of
the writer, — a great mind, a great soul, a great per
sonality. A work that bears the imprint of these,
that is charged with the life and power of these,
which it gives forth again under pressure, is alone
entitled to high rank.

All pure literature is the revelation of a man. In
a work of true literary art the subject-matter has
been so interpenetrated and vitalized by the spirit
or personality of the writer, has become so thor
oughly identified with it, that the two are one and
inseparable, and the style is the man. Works in
which this blending and identification, through emo
tion or imagination, of the author with his subject
has not taken place, or has taken place imperfectly,

STYLE AND THE MAN 89

do not belong to pure literature. They may serve a
useful purpose; but all useful purposes, in the strict
sense, are foreign to those of art, which means for
eign to the spirit that would live in the whole, that
would live in the years and not in the days, in time
and not in the hour. The true literary artist gives
you of the substance of his mind; not merely his
thought or his philosophy, but something more inti
mate and personal than that. It is not a tangible
object passed from his hand to yours; it is much
more like a transfusion of blood from his veins to
yours. Montaigne gives us Montaigne, — the most
delightfully garrulous man in literature. " These are
fancies of my own," he says, "by which I do not
pretend to discover things, but to lay open myself."
"Cut these sentences," says Emerson, "and they
bleed." Matthew Arnold denied that Emerson was
a great writer; but we cannot account for the charm
and influence of his works, it seems to me, on any
other theory than that he has at least this mark of
the great writer : he gives his reader of his own sub
stance, he saturates his page with the high and rare
quality of his own spirit. Everything he published
has a distinct literary value, as distinguished from
its moral or religious value. The same may be said
of Arnold himself: else we should not care much
for him. It is a particular and interesting type of
man that speaks and breathes in every sentence;
his style is vital in his matter, and is no more sepa-

90 STYLE AND THE MAN

rable from it than the style of silver or of gold is
separable from those metals.

In such a writer as Lecky on the other hand, or
as Mill or Spencer, one does not get this same subtle
individual flavor; the work is more external, more
the product of certain special faculties, as the rea
son, the memory, the understanding; and the per
sonality of the author is not so intimately involved.
But in the writer with the creative touch, whether
he be poet, novelist, historian, critic, essayist, the
chief factor in the product is always his own per
sonality.

Style, then, in the sense in which I am here using
the term, implies that vital, intimate, personal rela
tion of the man to his language by which he makes
the words his own, fills them with his own quality,
and gives the reader that lively sense of being in
direct communication with a living, breathing, men
tal and spiritual force. The writer who appears to
wield his language as an instrument or a tool, some
thing exterior to himself, who makes you conscious
of his vocabulary, or whose words are the garments
and not the tissue of his thought, has not style in
this sense. "Style," says Schopenhauer, "is the
physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to char
acter than the face." This definition is as good as
any, and better than most, because it implies that
identification of words with thoughts, of the man
with his subject, which is the secret of a living style.

STYLE AND THE MAN 91

Hence the man who imitates another wears a mask,
as does the man who writes in a language to which
he was not born.

It has been said that novel-writing is a much
finer art in our day than it was in the time of Scott,
or of Dickens and Thackeray, — finer, I think, be
cause it is in the hands of finer-strung, more dain
tily equipped men ; but would one dare to say it is
a greater art ? One may admit all that is charged
about Scott's want of style, his diff useness and cum-
brousness, and his tedious descriptions, and still
justly claim for him the highest literary honors. He
was a great nature, as Goethe said, and we come into
vital contact with that great nature in his romances.
He was not deficient in the larger art that knows
how to make a bygone age live again to the imagina
tion. He himself seems to have deprecated his " big
bow-wow" style in comparison with the exquisite
touches of Jane Austen. But no fineness of work
manship, no deftness of handling, can make up for
the want of a large, rich, copious human endowment.
I think we need to remember this when we compare
unfavorably such men as Dickens and Thackeray
with the cleverer artists of our own day. Scott makes
up to us for his deficiencies in the matter of style
by the surpassing human interest of his characters
and incidents, their relations to the major currents

92 STYLE AND THE MAN

of human life. His scenes fill the stage of history,
his personages seem adequate to great events, and
the whole story has a certain historic grandeur and
impressiveness. There is no mistaking a great force,
a great body, in literature any more than there is in
the physical world; in Scott we have come upon a
great river, a great lake, a great mountain, and we
are more impressed by it than by the lesser bodies,
though they have many more graces and pretti-
nesses.

Frederic Harrison, in a recent address on style, is
cautious in recommending the young writer to take
thought of his style. Let him rather take thought
of what he has to say; in turning his ideal values
into the coin of current speech he will have an ex
ercise in style. If he has no ideal values, then is lit
erature barred to him. Let -him cultivate his sen
sibilities ; make himself, if possible, more quickly
responsive to life and nature about him ; let him try
to see more clearly and feel more keenly, and con
nect his vocabulary with his most radical and spon
taneous self. Style can never come from the outside,
— from consciously seeking it by imitating the
manner of favorite authors. It comes, if at all, like
the bloom upon fruit, or the glow of health upon
the cheek, from an inner essential harmony and
felicity.

In a well-known passage Macaulay tells what
happened to Miss Burney when she began to think

STYLE AND THE MAN 93

about her style, and fell to imitating Dr. Johnson;
how she lost the "charming vivacity" and "per
fectly natural unconsciousness of manner" of her
youthful writings, and became modish and affected.
She threw away her own style, which was a " toler
ably good one," and which might "have been im
proved into a very good one," and adopted " a style
in which she could attain excellence only by achiev
ing an almost miraculous victory over nature and
over habit. She could cease to be Fanny Burney;
it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson."

It is giving too much thought to style in the more
external and verbal aspects of it, which I am here
considering, that leads to the confounding of style
with diction, and that gives rise to the " stylist."
The stylist shows you what can be done with mere
words. He is the foliage plant of the literary flower
garden. An English college professor has recently
exploited him in a highly wrought essay on Style.
Says our professor, " The business of letters is two
fold, to find words for meaning and to find meaning
for words." It strikes me that the last half of this
proposition is not true of the serious writer, of the
man who has something to say, but is true only of
what is called the stylist, the man who has been so
often described as one having nothing to say, which
he says extremely well. The stylist's main effort
is a verbal one, to find meaning for words ; he does
not wrestle with ideas, but with terms and phrases;

94 STYLE AND THE MAN

his thoughts are word-begotten and are often as un
substantial as spectres and shadows.

The stylist cultivates words as the florist culti
vates flowers, and a new adjective or a new colloca
tion of terms is to him what a new chrysanthemum
or a new pansy is to his brother of the forcing house.
He is more an European product than an American.
London and Paris abound in men who cultivate the
art of expression for its own sake, who study how to
combine words so as to tickle the verbal sense with
out much reference to the value of the idea expressed.
Club and university life, excessive library culture —
a sort of indoor or hothouse literary atmosphere
— foster this sort of thing.

French literature can probably show more stylists
than English, but the later school of British writers
is not far behind in the matter of studied expression.
Professor Raleigh, from whose work on style I
quoted above, often writes forcibly and suggestively;
but one cannot help but feel, on finishing his little
volume, that it is more the work of a stylist than of a
thinker. This is the opening sentence: "Style, the
Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate
the art that handles, with ever fresh vitality and
war}7 alacrity, the fluid elements of speech." Does
not one faintly scent the stylist at the start ? Later
on he says : " In proportion as a phrase is memor
able, the words that compose it become mutually
adhesive, losing for a time something of their in-

STYLE AND THE MAN 95

dividual scope, — bringing with them, if they be
torn away too quickly, some cumbrous fragments
of their recent association." Does not the stylist
stand fully confessed here? That he may avoid
these " cumbrous fragments " that will stick to words
when you suddenly pull them up by the roots, "a
sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts,
if he be fortunate, a- triumph from the accident of
his encumbrance." The lust of expression, the con
juring with mere words, is evident. " He is a poor
stylist," says our professor, "who cannot beg half a
dozen questions in a single epithet, or state the con
clusion he would fain avoid in terms that startle the
senses into clamorous revolt."

What it is in one that starts into " clamorous re
volt" at such verbal gymnastics as are shown in
the following sentences I shall not try to define, but
it seems to me it is something real and legitimate.
"A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of
archaism in the common turn of speech that you em
ploy, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob
that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a
select audience of ticket holders with closed doors.
A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct
physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance
authorizes readily enough in its metaphorical sense,
and at a touch you have blown the roof off the draw
ing-room of the villa and have set its obscure inhab
itants wriggling in the unaccustomed sunshine."

96 STYLE AND THE MAN

Amiel says of Renan that science was his material
rather than his object; his object was style. Yet
Renan was not a stylist in the sense in which I am
using the word. His main effort was never a ver
bal one, never an effort to find meaning for words;
he was intent upon his subject; his style was vital
in his thought, and never took on airs on its own
account. You cannot in him separate the artist from
the thinker, nor give either the precedence. All
writers with whom literature is an art aim at style
in the sense that they aim to present their subject in
the most effective form, — with clearness, freshness,
force. They become stylists when their thoughts
wait upon their words, or when their thoughts are
word-begotten. Such writers as Gibbon, De Quin-
cey, Macaulay, have studied and elaborate styles,
but in each the matter is paramount and the mind
finds something solid to rest upon.

"The chief of the incommodities imposed upon
the writer," says Professor Raleigh, is "the neces
sity at all times and at all costs to mean something,"
or to find meaning for words. This no doubt is a
hard task. The trouble begins when one has the
words first. To invoke ideas with words is a much
more difficult experience than the reverse process.
But probably all true writers have something to say
before they have the desire to say it, and in propor
tion as the thought is vital and real is its expression
easy.

STYLE AND THE MAN 97

When I meet the stylist, with his straining for ver
bal effects, I love to recall this passage from Whit
man. " The great poet," he says, " swears to his art,
I will not be meddlesome. I will not have in my
writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang
in the way between me and the rest, like curtains. I
will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest
curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is.
Let who may, exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe ; I
will have purpose, as health or heat or snow has, and
be as regardless of observation. What I experience
or portray shall go from my composition without a
shred of my composition. You shall stand by my
side and look in the mirror with me."

This is the same as saying that the great success
in writing is to get language out of the way and to
put your mind directly to the reader's, so that there
be no veil of words between you. If the reader is
preoccupied with your words, if they court his at
tention or cloud his vision, to that extent is the
communication imperfect. In some of Swinburne's
poems there is often such a din and echo of rhyme
and alliteration that it is almost impossible to hear
what the man is really saying.

To darken counsel with words is a common oc
currence. Words are like lenses, — they must be
arranged in just such a way, or they hinder rather
than help the vision. When the adjustment is as it
should be, the lens itself is invisible; and language in

98 STYLE AND THE MAN

the hands of the master is as transparent. Some of
the more recent British poets affect the archaic, the
quaint, the eccentric, in language, so that one's at
tention is almost entirely occupied with their words.
Reading them is like trying to look through a pair
of spectacles too old or too young for you, or with
lenses of different focus.

But has not style a value in and of itself ? As in
the case of light, its value is in the revelation it
makes. Its value is to conceal itself, to lose itself in
the matter. If humility, or self-denial, or any of the
virtues becomes conscious of itself and claims credit
for its own sake, does it not that moment fall from
grace ? What incomparable style in the passage I
have quoted from Whitman when we come to think
of it, but how it effaces itself and is of no account
for the sake of the idea it serves! The more a
writer's style humbles itself, the more it is exalted.
There is nothing true in religion that is not equally
true in art. Give yourself entirely. All selfish and
v secondary ends are of the devil. Our Calvinistic
grandfathers, who fancied themselves willing to be
damned for the glory of God, illustrate the devotion
of the true artist to his ideal. " Consider the lilies
of the field, . . . they toil not, neither do they
spin." The style of the born poet or artist takes
as little thought of itself, and is the spontaneous
expression of the same indwelling grace and neces
sity.

.) lr-S> §?•:-
• '- * C'

STYLE AND THE

There are as many styles as there are moods and
tempers in men. Words may be used so as to give
us a sense of vigor, a sense of freshness, a sense of
the choice and scholarly, or of the dainty and exclu
sive, or of the polished and elaborate, or of heat or
cold, or of any other quality known to life. Every
work of genius has its own physiognomy — sad,
cheerful, frowning, yearning, determined, medita
tive. This book has the face of a saint; that of a
scholar or a seer. Here is the feminine, there the
masculine face. One has the clerical face, one the
judicial. Each appeals to us according to our tem
peraments and mental predilections. Who shall say
which style is the best? What can be better than
the style of Huxley for his purpose, — sentences
level and straight like a hurled lance; or than Emer
son's for his purpose, — electric sparks, the sudden,
unexpected epithet or tense, audacious phrase, that
gives the mind a wholesome shock; or than Gibbon's
for his purpose, — a style like solid masonry, every
sentence cut four square, and his work, as Carlyle
said to Emerson, a splendid bridge, connecting the
ancient world with the modern; or than De Quin-
cey's for his purpose, — a discursive, roundabout
style, herding his thoughts as a collie dog herds
sheep ; or than Arnold's for his academic spirit, — a
style like cut glass; or than Whitman's for his con
tinental spirit, — the processional, panoramic style

100 STYLE AND THE MAN

that gives the sense of mass and multitude? Certain
things we may demand of every man's style, — that
it shall do its work, that it shall touch the quick. To
be colorless like Arnold is good, and to have color
like Ruskin is good; to be lofty and austere like the
old Latin and Greek authors is good, and to be play
ful and discursive like Dr. Holmes is good; to be
condensed and epigrammatic like Bacon pleases,
and to be flowing and copious like Macaulay pleases.
Within certain limits the manner that is native to
the man, the style that is a part of himself, is what
wears best. What we do not want in any style is
hardness, glitter, tumidity, superfetation, unreality.
In treating of nature or outdoor themes, let the
style have limpidness, sweetness, freshness; in criti
cism let it have dignity, lucidity, penetration; in
history let it have mass, sweep, comprehension; in
all things let it have vitality, sincerity, and genuine
ness.

SUGGESTIVENESS 1

riHHERE is a quality that adheres to one man's
JL writing or speaking, and not to another's, that
we call suggestiveness, — something that warms and
stimulates the mind of the reader or hearer, quite
apart from the amount of truth or information di
rectly conveyed.

It is a precious literary quality, not easy of defini
tion or description. It involves quality of mind,
mental and moral atmosphere, points of view, and
maybe, racial elements. Not every page or every
book carries latent meaning; rarely does any sen
tence of a writer float deeper than it shows.

Thus, of the great writers of English literature,
Dr. Johnson is, to me, the least suggestive, while
Bacon is one of the most suggestive. Hawthorne is
undoubtedly the most suggestive of our romancers;
he has the most atmosphere and the widest and most
alluring horizon. Emerson is the most suggestive of
our essayists, because he has the deepest ethical and
prophetic background. His page is full of moral
electricity, so to speak, which begets a state of elec
tric excitement in his reader's mind. Whitman is the

1 From Literary Values.

102 SUGGESTIVENESS

most suggestive of our poets ; he elaborates the least
and gives us in profusion the buds and germs of
poetry. A musical composer once said to me that
Whitman stimulated him more than Tennyson, be
cause he left more for him to do, — he abounded in
hints and possibilities that the musician's mind
eagerly seized.

This quality is not related to ambiguity of phrase
or to cryptic language or to vagueness and obscurity.
It goes, or may go, with perfect lucidity, as in Mat
thew Arnold at his best, while it is rarely present in
the pages of Herbert Spencer. Spencer has great
clearness and compass, but there is nothing resonant
in his style, — nothing that stimulates the imagina
tion. He is a great workman, but the metal he works
in is not of the kind called precious.

The late roundabout and enigmatical style of
Henry James is far less fruitful in his readers' minds
than his earlier and more direct one, or than the
limpid style of his compeer, Mr. Howells. The
indirect and elliptical method may undoubtedly be
so used a^ to stimulate the mind ; at the same time
there may be a kind of inconclusiveness and beating
around the bush that is barren and wearisome. Upon
the page of the great novelist there fall, more or less
distinct, all the colors of the spectrum of human
life; but Mr. James in his later works seems intent
only upon the invisible rays of the spectrum, and his
readers grope in the darkness accordingly.

SUGGESTIVENESS 103

In the world of experience and observation the
suggestiveness of things is enhanced by veils, con
cealments, half lights, flowing lines. The twilight
is more suggestive than the glare of noonday, a roll
ing field than a lawn, a winding road than a straight
one. In literature perspective, indirection, under
statement, side glimpses, have equal value; a vocab
ulary that is warm from the experience of the writer,
sentences that start a multitude of images, that
abound in the concrete and the specific, that shun
vague generalities, — with these goes the power of
suggestiveness.

Beginnings, outlines, summaries, are suggestive,
while the elaborated, the highly wrought, the per
fected afford us a different kind of pleasure. The
art that fills and satisfies us has one excellence, and
the art that stimulates and makes us ahungry has
another. All beginnings in nature afford us a pe
culiar pleasure. The early spring with its hints and
dim prophecies, the first earth odors, the first robin
or song sparrow, the first furrow, the first tender
skies, the first rainbow, the first wild flower, the
dropping bud scales, the awakening voices in the
marshes, — all these things touch and move us in
a way that later developments in the season do not.
What meaning, too, in the sunrise and the sunset,
in the night with its stars, the sea with its tides and
currents, the morning with its dews, autumn with
its bounty, winter with its snows, the desert with its

104 SUGGESTIVENESS

sands, — in everything in the germ and in the bud,
• — in parasites, suckers, blights, in floods, tempests,
droughts! The winged seeds carry thoughts, the
falling leaves make us pause, the clinging burrs have
a tongue, the pollen dust, not less than meteoric dust,
conveys a hint of the method of nature.

Some things and events in our daily experience are
more typical, and therefore more suggestive, than
others. Thus the sower striding across the ploughed
field is a walking allegory, or parable. Indeed the
whole life of the husbandman, — his first-hand rela
tion to things, his ploughing, his planting, his fer
tilizing, his draining, his pruning, his grafting, his
uprootings, his harvestings, his separating of the
wheat from the chaff, and the tares from the wheat,
his fencing his field with the stones and boulders
that hindered his plough or cumbered his sward, his
making the wilderness blossom as the rose, — all
these things are pleasant to contemplate because in
them there is a story within a story, we translate
the facts into higher truths.

In like manner, the shepherd with his flocks, the
seaman with his compass and rudder, the potter with
his clay, the weaver with his warp and woof, the
sculptor with his marble, the painter with his can
vas and pigments, the builder with his plans and
scaffoldings, the chemist with his solvents and pre-
cipitants, the surgeon with his scalpel and antisep
tics, the lawyer with his briefs, the preacher with

SUGGESTIVENESS 105

his text, the fisherman with his nets, — all are more
or less symbolical and appeal to the imagination.

In both prose and poetry, there is the suggestive-
ness of language used in a vivid, imaginative way,
and the suggestiveness of words redolent of human
association, words of deep import, as friend, home,
love, marriage.

To me Shakespeare's sonnets are the most sugges
tive sonnets in the language, because they so abound
in words, images, allusions drawn from real life;
they are the product of a mind vividly acted upon
by near-by things, that uses language steeped in the
common experience of mankind. The poet drew his
material not from the strange and the remote, but,
as it were, from the gardens and thoroughfares of
life. Does not that poetry or prose work touch us
the most nearly that deals with that with which we
are most familiar? One thing that separates the
minor poet from the major is that the thoughts and
words of the minor poet are more of the nature of
asides, or of the exceptional ; he does not take in the
common and universal ; we are not familiar with the
points of view that so agitate him; and he has not
the power to make them real to us. I read poems
every day that provoke the thought, "Well, that is
all news to me. I do not know that heaven or that
earth, those men or those women," — all is so shad
owy, fantastic, and unreal. But when you enter the
world of the great poets you find yourself upon solid

106 SUGGESTIVENESS

ground; the sky and the earth, and the things in
them and upon them, are what you have always
known, and not for a moment are you called upon to
breathe in a vacuum, or to reverse your upright posi
tion to see the landscape. Dante even makes hell
as tangible and real as the objects of our senses, if
not more so.

Then there is the suggestiveness or kindling power
of pregnant, compact sentences, — type thoughts,
compendious phrases, — vital distinctions or gen
eralizations, such as we find scattered through litera
ture, as when De Quincey says of the Roman that
he was great in the presence of man, never in the
presence of nature; or his distinction between the
literature of power and the literature of knowledge,
or similar illuminating distinctions in the prose of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Goethe,
Lessing. Arnold's dictum that poetry is a criticism
of life, is suggestive, because it sets you thinking to
verify or to disprove it. John Stuart Mill was not
what one would call a suggestive writer, yet the fol
lowing sentence, which Mr. Augustine Birrell has
lately made use of, makes a decided ripple in one's
mind: "I have learnt from experience that many
false opinions may be exchanged for true ones with
out in the least altering the habits of mind of which
false opinions are the result." In a new home writer
whose first books are but a year or two old, I find
deeply suggestive sentences on nearly every page.

'SUGGESTIVENESS 107

Here are two or three of them: "In your inmost
soul you are as well suited to the whole cosmical
order and every part of it as to your own body. You
belong here. Did you suppose that you belonged to
some other world than this, or that you belonged
nowhere at all, just a waif on the bosom of the eter
nities ? . . . Conceivably He might have flung you
into a world that was unrelated to you, and might
have left you to be acclimated at your own risk;
but you happen to know that this is not the case.
You have lived here always; this is the ancestral
demesne; for ages and ages you have looked out of
these same windows upon the celestial landscape
and the star-deeps. You are at home." " How per
verse and pathetic the desires of the animals! But
they all get what they ask for, — long necks and
trunks, flapping ears and branching horns and cor
rugated hides, anything, if only they will believe in
life and try." 1

The intuitional and affirmative writers, to which
class our new author belongs, and the most notable
example of which, in this country, was Emerson,
are, as a rule, more suggestive than the clearly de
monstrating and logical writers. A challenge to the
soul seems to mean more than an appeal to the
reason; an audacious affirmation often irradiates
the mind in a way that a logical sequence of thought
does not. Science rarely suggests more than it says;
1 The Religion of Democracy. By Charles Ferguson.

108 SUGGESTIVENESS

but in the hands of an imaginative man like Maeter
linck a certain order of facts in natural history
becomes fraught with deepest meaning, as may
be witnessed in his wonderful "Life of the Bee,"
— one of the most enchanting and poetic contribu
tions to natural history ever made. Darwin's work
upon the earthworm, and upon the cross fertiliza
tion of flowers, in the same way seems to convey
more truth to the reader than is warranted by the
subject.

The writer who can touch the imagination has
the key, at least one key, to suggestiveness. This
power often goes with a certain vagueness and in-
definiteness, as in the oft-quoted lines from one of
Shakespeare's sonnets : —

" the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come ; "

a very suggestive, but not a clearly intelligible pas
sage.

Truth at the centre, straightly put, excites the
mind in one way, and truth at the surface, or at the
periphery of the circle, indirectly put, excites it in
another way and for other reasons; just as a light
in a dark place, which illuminates, appeals to the
eye in a different way from the light of day falling
through vapors or colored glass, wherein objects
become softened and illusory.

A common word may be so used as to have an

SUGGESTIVENESS 109

unexpected richness of meaning, as when Coleridge
speaks of those books that "find" us; or Shake
speare of the " marriage of true minds," or Whitman
of the autumn apple hanging "indolent-ripe" on
the tree. Probably that language is the most sug
gestive that is the most concrete, that is drawn most
largely from the experience of life, that savors of
real things. The Saxon English of Walton or Bar
row is more suggestive than the latinized English of
Johnson or Gibbon.

Indeed, the quality I am speaking of is quite
exceptional in the eighteenth-century writers. It is
much more abundant in the writers of the seven
teenth century. It goes much more with the vernacu
lar style, the homely style, than with the polished
academic style.

With the stream of English literature of the nine
teenth century has mingled a current of German
thought and mysticism, and this has greatly height
ened its power of suggestiveness both in poetry and
in prose. It is not in Byron or Scott or Campbell
or Moore or Macaulay or Irving, but it is in Words
worth and Coleridge and Landor and Carlyle and
Ruskin and Blake and Tennyson and Browning and
Emerson and Whitman, — a depth and richness of
spiritual and emotional background that the wits of
Pope's and Johnson's times knew not of. It seems
as if the subconscious self played a much greater
part in the literature of the nineteenth century than

110 SUGGESTIVENESS

of the eighteenth, probably because this term has
been recently added to our psychology.

As a rule it may be said that the more a writer
condenses, the more suggestive his work will be.
There is a sort of mechanical equivalent between
the force expended in compacting a sentence and the
force or stimulus it imparts again to the reader's
mind. A diffuse writer is rarely or never a sug
gestive one. Poetry is, or should be, more sugges
tive than prose, because it is the result of a more
compendious and sublimating process. The mind
of the poet is more tense, he uses language under
greater pressure of emotion than the prose writer,
whose medium of expression gives his mind more
play-room. The poet often succeeds in focusing
his meaning or emotion in a single epithet, and
he alone gives us the resounding, unforgettable
line. There are pregnant sentences in all the great
prose writers ; there are immortal lines only in the
poets.

Whitman said the word he would himself use as
most truly descriptive of his "Leaves of Grass"
was the word suggestiveness. "I round and finish
little, if anything; and could not consistently with
my scheme. The reader will always have his or her
part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek
less to state or display my theme or thought, and
more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of
the theme or thought — there to pursue your own

SUGGESTIVENESS 111

flight." These sentences themselves are suggestive,
because they bring before the mind a variety of
definite actions, as finishing a thing, displaying a
thing, doing your part, pursuing your own flight,
and yet the idea conveyed has a certain subtlety and
elusiveness. The suggestiveness of his work as a
whole probably lies in its blending of realism and
mysticism, and in the art of it running parallel to or
in some way tallying with the laws and processes of
nature. It stimulates thought and criticism as few
modern works do.

Of course the suggestiveness of any work — poem,
picture, novel, essay — depends largely upon what
we bring to it; whether we bring a kindred spirit
or an alien one, a full mind or an empty one, an alert
sense or a dull one. If you have been there, so to
speak, if you have passed through the experience
described, if you have known the people portrayed,
if you have thought, or tried to think, the thoughts
the author exploits, the work will have a deeper
meaning to you than to one who is a stranger to
these things. The best books make us acquainted
with our own, — they help us to find ourselves. No
book calls forth the same responses from two differ
ent types of mind. The wind does not awaken
aeolian-harp tones from cornstalks. No man is a
hero to his valet. It is the deep hollows and passes
of the mountains that give back your voice in pro
longed reverberations. The tides are in the sea, not

112 SUGGESTIVENESS

in the lakes and ponds. Words of deep import do
not mean much to a child. The world of books is
under the same law as these things. What any
given work yields us depends largely upon what we
bring to it.

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