Oldport Days
T >>
Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> Oldport Days
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 | 11 |
12
When I think of the self-devotion which the human heart can
contain--of those saintly souls that are in love with sorrow, and
that yearn to shelter all weakness and all grief--it inspires an
unspeakable confidence that there must also be an instinct of
parentage beyond this human race, a heart of hearts, cor cordium.
As we all crave something to protect, so we long to feel
ourselves protected. We are all infants before the Infinite; and
as I turned from that cottage window to the resplendent sky, it
was easy to fancy that mute embrace, that shadowy symbol of
affection, expanding from the narrow lattice till it touched the
stars, gathering every created soul into the armsof Immortal
Love.
FOOTPATHS.
All round the shores of the island where I dwell there runs a
winding path. It is probably as old as the settlement of the
country, and has been kept open with pertinacious fidelity by the
fishermen whose right of way it represents. In some places, as
between Fort Adams and Castle Hill, it exists in its primitive
form, an irregular track above rough cliffs, whence you look down
upon the entrance to the harbor and watch the white-sailed
schooners that glide beneath. Elsewhere the high-road has usurped
its place, and you have the privilege of the path without its
charm. Along our eastern cliffs it runs for some miles in the
rear of beautiful estates, whose owners have seized on it, and
graded it, and gravelled it, and made stiles for it, and done for
it everything that landscape-gardening could do, while leaving it
a footpath still. You walk there with croquet and roses on the
one side, and with floating loons and wild ducks on the other. In
remoter places the path grows wilder, and has ramifications
striking boldly across the peninsula through rough moorland and
among great ledges of rock, where you may ramble for hours, out
of sight of all but some sportsman with his gun, or some
truant-boy with dripping water-lilies. There is always a charm to
me in the inexplicable windings of these wayward tracks; yet I
like the path best where it is nearest the ocean. There, while
looking upon blue sea and snowy sails and floating gulls, you may
yet hear on the landward side the melodious and plaintive drawl
of the meadow-lark, most patient of summer visitors, and, indeed,
lingering on this island almost the whole year round.
But who cares whither a footpath leads? The charm is in the path
itself, its promise of something that the high-road cannot yield.
Away from habitations, you know that the fisherman, the
geologist, the botanist may have been there, or that the cows
have been driven home and that somewhere there are bars and a
milk-pail. Even in the midst of houses, the path suggests
school-children with their luncheon-baskets, or workmen seeking
eagerly the noonday interval or the twilight rest. A footpath
cannot be quite spoiled, so long as it remains such; you can make
a road a mere avenue for fast horses or showy women, but this
humbler track keeps its simplicity, and if a queen comes walking
through it, she comes but as a village maid. On Sunday, when it
is not etiquette for our fashionables to drive, but only to walk
along the cliffs, they seem to wear a more innocent and wholesome
aspect in that novel position; I have seen a fine lady pause
under such circumstances and pick a wild-flower; she knew how to
do it. A footpath has its own character, while that of the
high-road is imposed upon it by those who dwell beside it or pass
over it; indeed, roads become picturesque only when they are
called lanes and make believe that they are but paths.
The very irregularity of a footpath makes half its charm. So much
of loitering and indolence and impulse have gone to its
formation, that all which is stiff and military has been left
out. I observed that the very dikes of the Southern rice
plantations did not succeed in being rectilinear, though the
general effect was that of Tennyson's "flowery squares." Even the
country road, which is but an enlarged footpath, is never quite
straight, as Thoreau long since observed, noting it with his
surveyor's eye. I read in his unpublished diary: "The law that
plants the rushes in waving lines along the edge of a pond, and
that curves the pond shore itself, incessantly beats against the
straight fences and highways of men, and makes them conform to
the line of beauty at last." It is this unintentional adaptation
that makes a footpath so indestructible. Instead of striking
across the natural lines, it conforms to them, nestles into the
hollow, skirts the precipice, avoids the morass. An unconscious
landscape-gardener, it seeks the most convenient course, never
doubting that grace will follow. Mitchell, at his "Edgewood"
farm, wishing to decide on the most picturesque avenue to his
front door, ordered a heavy load of stone to be hauled across the
field, and bade the driver seek the easiest grades, at whatever
cost of curvature. The avenue followed the path so made.
When a footpath falls thus unobtrusively into its place, all
natural forces seem to sympathize with it, and help it to fulfil
its destiny. Once make a well-defined track through a wood, and
presently the overflowing brooks seek it for a channel, the
obstructed winds draw through it, the fox and woodchuck travel by
it, the catbird and robin build near it, the bee and swallow make
a high-road of its convenient thoroughfare. In winter the first
snows mark it with a white line; as you wander through you hear
the blue-jay's cry, and see the hurrying flight of the sparrow;
the graceful outlines of the leafless bushes are revealed, and
the clinging bird's-nests, "leaves that do not fall," give happy
memories of summer homes. Thus Nature meets man half-way. The
paths of the wild forest and of the rural neighborhood are not at
all the same thing; indeed, a "spotted trail," marked only by the
woodman's axe-marks on the trees, is not a footpath. Thoreau, who
is sometimes foolishly accused of having sought to be a mere
savage, understood this distinction well. "A man changes by his
presence," he says in his unpublished diary, "the very nature of
the trees. The poet's is not a logger's path, but a
woodman's,--the logger and pioneer have preceded him, and
banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it,
and built hearths and humanized nature for him. For a permanent
residence, there can be no comparison between this and the
wilderness. Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodsmen
and rustics; that is, a selvaggia and its inhabitants salvages."
What Thoreau loved, like all men of healthy minds, was the
occasional experience of untamed wildness. "I love to see
occasionally," he adds, "a man from whom the usnea (lichen) hangs
as gracefully as from a spruce."
Footpaths bring us nearer both to nature and to man. No
high-road, not even a lane, conducts to the deeper recesses of
the wood, where you hear the wood-thrush. There are a thousand
concealed fitnesses in nature, rhymed correspondences of bird and
blossom, for which you must seek through hidden paths; as when
you come upon some black brook so palisaded with cardinal-flowers
as to seem "a stream of sunsets"; or trace its shadowy course
till it spreads into some forest-pool, above which that rare and
patrician insect, the Agrion dragon-fly, flits and hovers
perpetually, as if the darkness and the cool had taken wings. The
dark brown pellucid water sleeps between banks of softest moss;
white stars of twin-flowers creep close to the brink, delicate
sprays of dewberry trail over it, and the emerald tips of
drooping leaves forever tantalize the still surface. Above these
the slender, dark-blue insect waves his dusky wings, like a
liberated ripple of the brook, and takes the few stray sunbeams
on his lustrous form. Whence came the correspondence between this
beautiful shy creature and the moist, dark nooks, shot through
with stray and transitory sunlight, where it dwells? The analogy
is as unmistakable as that between the scorching heats of summer
and the shrill cry of the cicada. They suggest questions that no
savant can answer, mysteries that wait, like Goethe's secret of
morphology, till a sufficient poet can be born. And we,
meanwhile, stand helpless in their presence, as one waits beside
the telegraphic wire, while it hums and vibrates, charged with
all fascinating secrets, above the heads of a wondering world.
It is by the presence of pathways on the earth that we know it to
be the habitation of man; in the barest desert, they open to us a
common humanity. It is the absence of these that renders us so
lonely on the ocean, and makes us glad to watch even the track of
our own vessel. But on the mountain-top, how eagerly we trace out
the"road that brings places together," as Schiller says. It is
the first thing we look for; till we have found it, each
scattered village has an isolated and churlish look, but the
glimpse of a furlong of road puts them all in friendly relations.
The narrower the path, the more domestic and familiar it seems.
The railroad may represent the capitalist or the government; the
high-road indicates what the surveyor or the county commissioners
thought best; but the footpath shows what the people needed. Its
associations are with beauty and humble life,--the boy with his
dog, the little girl with her fagots, the pedler with his pack;
cheery companions they are or ought to be.
"Jog on, jog on the footpath way,
And merrily hent the stile-a:
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad one tires in a mile-a."
The footpath takes you across the farms and behind the houses;
you are admitted to the family secrets and form a personal
acquaintance. Even if you take the wrong path, it only leads you
"across-lots" to some man ploughing, or some old woman picking
berries,--perhaps a very spicy acquaintance, whom the road would
never have brought to light. If you are led astray in the woods,
that only teaches you to observe landmarks more closely, or to
leave straws and stakes for tokens, like a gypsy's patteran, to
show the ways already traversed. There is a healthy vigor in the
mind of the boy who would like of all things to be lost in the
woods, to build a fire out of doors,and sleep under a tree or in
a haystack. Civilization is tiresome and enfeebling, unless we
occasionally give it the relish of a little outlawry, and
approach, in imagination at least, the zest of a gypsy life. The
records of pedestrian journeys, the Wanderjahre and memoirs of
good-for-noth-ings, and all the delightful German forest
literature,--these belong to the footpath side of our nature. The
passage I best remember in all Bayard Taylor's travels is the
ecstasy of his Thuringian forester, who said: "I recall the time
when just a sunny morning made me so happy that I did not know
what to do with myself. One day in spring, as I went through the
woods and saw the shadows of the young leaves upon the moss, and
smelt the buds of the firs and larches, and thought to myself,
'All thy life is to be spent in the splendid forest,'I actually
threw myself down and rolled in the grass like a dog, over and
over, crazy with joy."
It is the charm of pedestrian journeys that they convert the
grandest avenues to footpaths. Through them alone we gain
intimate knowledge of the people, and of nature, and indeed of
ourselves. It is easy to hurry too fast for our best reflections,
which, as the old monk said of perfection, must be sought not by
flying, but by walking, "Perfectionis via non pervolanda sed
perambulanda." The thoughts that the railway affords us are dusty
thoughts; we ask the news, read the journals, question our
neighbor, and wish to know what is going on because we are a part
of it. It is only in the footpath that our minds, like our
bodies, move slowly, and we traverse thought, like space, with a
patient thoroughness. Rousseau said that he had never experienced
so much, lived so truly, and been so wholly himself, as during
his travels on foot.
What can Hawthorne mean by saying in his English diary that "an
American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about
Christian and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the
grounds of Giant Despair, from there being no stiles and by-paths
in our country"? So much of the charm of American pedestrianism
lies in the by-paths! For instance, the whole interior of Cape
Ann, beyond Gloucester, is a continuous woodland, with granite
ledges everywhere cropping out, around which the high-road winds,
following the curving and indented line of the sea, and dotted
here and there with fishing hamlets. This whole interior is
traversed by a network of footpaths, rarely passable for a wagon,
and not always for a horse, but enabling the pedestrian to go
from any one of these villages to any other, in a line almost
direct, and always under an agreeable shade. By the longest of
these hidden ways, one may go from Pigeon Cove to Gloucester, ten
miles, without seeing a public road. In the little inn at the
former village there used to hang an old map of this whole forest
region, giving a chart of some of these paths, which were said to
date back to the first settlement of the country. One of them,
for instance, was called on the map "Old Road from Sandy Bay to
Squam Meeting-house through the Woods"; but the road is now
scarcely even a bridle-path, and the most faithful worshipper
could not seek Squam Meeting-house in the family chaise. Those
woods have been lately devastated; but when I first knew that
region, it was as good as any German forest.
Often we stepped almost from the edge of the sea into some gap in
the woods; there seemed hardly more than a rabbit-track, yet
presently we met some wayfarer who had crossed the Cape by it. A
piny dell gave some vista of the broad sea we were leaving, and
an opening in the woods displayed another blue sea-line before;
the encountering breezes interchanged odor of berry-bush and
scent of brine; penetrating farther among oaks and chestnuts, we
came upon some little cottage, quaint and sheltered as any
Spenser drew; it was built on no high-road, and turned its
vine-clad gable away from even the footpath.
Then the ground rose and we were surprised by a breeze from a new
quarter; perhaps we climbed trees to look for landmarks, and saw
only, still farther in the woods, some great cliff of granite or
the derrick of an unseen quarry. Three miles inland, as I
remember, we found the hearthstones of a vanished settlement;
then we passed a swamp with cardinal-flowers; then a cathedral of
noble pines, topped with crow's-nests. If we had not gone astray
by this time, we presently emerged on Dogtown Common, an elevated
table-land, over-spread with great boulders as with houses, and
encircled with a girdle of green woods and an outer girdle of
blue sea. I know of nothing more wild than that gray waste of
boulders; it is a natural Salisbury Plain, of which icebergs and
ocean-currents were the Druidic builders; in that multitude of
couchant monsters there seems a sense of suspended life; you feel
as if they must speak and answer to each other in the silent
nights, but by day only the wandering sea-birds seek them, on
their way across the Cape, and the sweet-bay and green fern embed
them in a softer and deeper setting as the years go by. This is
the "height of ground" of that wild footpath; but as you recede
farther from the outer ocean and approach Gloucester, you come
among still wilder ledges, unsafe without a guide, and you find
in one place a cluster of deserted houses, too difficult of
access to remove even their materials, so that they are left to
moulder alone. I used to wander in those woods, summer after
summer, till I had made my own chart of their devious tracks, and
now when I close my eyes in this Oldport midsummer, the soft
Italian air takes on something of a Scandinavian vigor; for the
incessant roll of carriages I hear the tinkle of the quarryman's
hammer and the veery's song; and I long for those perfumed and
breezy pastures, and for those promontories of granite where the
fresh water is nectar and the salt sea has a regal blue.
I recall another footpath near Worcester, Massachusetts; it leads
up from the low meadows into the wildest region of all that
vicinity, Tatesset Hill. Leaving behind you the open pastures
where the cattle lie beneath the chestnut-trees or drink from the
shallow brook, you pass among the birches and maples, where the
woodsman's shanty stands in the clearing, and the
raspberry-fields are merry with children's voices. The familiar
birds and butterflies linger below with them, and in the upper
and more sacred depths the wood-thrush chants his litany and the
brown mountain butterflies hover among the scented vines. Higher
yet rises the "Rattlesnake Ledge," spreading over one side of the
summit a black avalanche of broken rock, now overgrown with
reindeer-moss and filled with tufts of the smaller wild geranium.
Just below this ledge,--amid a dark, dense track of second-growth
forest, masked here and there with grape-vines, studded with rare
orchises, and pierced by a brook that vanishes suddenly where the
ground sinks away and lets the blue distance in,--there is a
little monument to which the footpath leads, and which always
seemed to me as wild a memorial of forgotten superstition as the
traveller can find amid the forests of Japan.
It was erected by a man called Solomon Pearson (not to give his
name too closely), a quiet, thoughtful farmer, long-bearded,
low-voiced, and with that aspect of refinement which an ideal
life brings forth even in quite uninstructed men. At the height
of the "Second Advent" excitement this man resolved to build for
himself upon these remote rocks a house which should escape the
wrath to come, and should endure even amid a burning and
transformed earth. Thinking, as he had once said to me, that, "if
the First Dispensation had been strong enough to endure, there
would have been no need of a Second," he resolved to build for
his part something which should possess permanence at least. And
there still remains on that high hillside the small beginning
that he made.
There are four low stone walls, three feet thick, built solidly
together without cement, and without the trace of tools. The
end-walls are nine feet high (the sides being lower) and are
firmly united by a strong iron ridge-pole, perhaps fifteen feet
long, which is imbedded at each end in the stone. Other masses of
iron lie around unused, in sheets, bars, and coils, brought with
slow labor by the builder from far below. The whole building was
designed to be made of stone and iron. It is now covered with
creeping vines and the debris of the hillside; but though its
construction had been long discontinued when I saw it, the
interior was still kept scrupulously clean through the care of
this modern Solomon, who often visited his shrine.
An arch in the terminal wall admits the visitor to the small
roofless temple, and he sees before him, imbedded in the centre
of the floor, a large smooth block of white marble, where the
deed of this spot of land was to be recorded, in the hope to
preserve it even after the globe should have been burned and
renewed. But not a stroke of this inscription was ever cut, and
now the young chestnut boughs droop into the uncovered interior,
and shy forest-birds sing fearlessly among them, having learned
that this house belongs to God, not man. As if to reassure them,
and perhaps in allusion to his own vegetarian habits, the
architect has spread some rough plaster at the head of the
apartment and marked on it in bold characters, "Thou shalt not
kill." Two slabs outside, a little way from the walls, bear these
inscriptions, "Peace on Earth," "Good-Will to Men." When I
visited it, the path was rough and so obstructed with bushes that
it was hard to comprehend how it had afforded passage for these
various materials; it seemed more as if some strange
architectural boulder had drifted from some Runic period and been
stranded there. It was as apt a confessional as any of
Wordsworth's nooks among the Trossachs; and when one thinks how
many men are wearing out their souls in trying to conform to the
traditional mythologies of others, it seems nobler in this man to
have reared upon that lonely hill the unfinished memorial of his
own.
I recall another path which leads from the Lower Saranac Lake,
near "Martin's," to what the guides call, or used to call, "The
Philosopher's Camp" at Amperzand. On this oddly named lake, in
the Adirondack region, a tract of land was bought by Professor
Agassiz and his friends, who made there a summer camping-ground,
and with one comrade I once sought the spot. I remember with what
joy we left the boat,-- o delightful at first, so fatiguing at
last; for I cannot, with Mr. Murray, call it a merit in the
Adirondacks that you never have to walk,--and stepped away into
the free forest. We passed tangled swamps, so dense with upturned
trees and trailing mosses that they seemed to give no opening for
any living thing to pass, unless it might be the soft and silent
owl that turned its head almost to dislocation in watching us,
ere it flitted vaguely away. Farther on, the deep, cool forest
was luxurious with plumy ferns; we trod on moss-covered roots,
finding the emerald steps so soft we scarcely knew that we were
ascending; every breath was aromatic; there seemed infinite
healing in every fragrant drop that fell upon our necks from the
cedar boughs. We had what I think the pleasantest guide for a
daylight tramp,--one who has never before passed over that
particular route, and can only pilot you on general principles
till he gladly, at last, allows you to pilot him. When we once
got the lead we took him jubilantly on, and beginning to look for
"The Philosopher's Camp," found ourselves confronted by a large
cedar-tree on the margin of a wooded lake. This was plainly the
end of the path. Was the camp then afloat? Our escort was in that
state of hopeless ignorance of which only lost guides are
capable. We scanned the green horizon and the level water,
without glimpse of human abode. It seemed an enchanted lake, and
we looked about the tree-trunk for some fairy horn, that we might
blow it. That failing, we tried three rifle-shots, and out from
the shadow of an island, on the instant, there glided a boat,
which bore no lady of the lake, but a red-shirted woodsman. The
artist whom we sought was on that very island, it seemed,
sketching patiently while his guides were driving the deer.
This artist was he whose "Procession of the Pines" had identified
his fame with that delightful forest region. He it was who had
laid out with artistic taste "The Philosopher's Camp," and who
was that season still awaiting philosophers as well as deer. He
had been there for a month, alone with the guides, and declared
that Nature was pressing upon him to an extent that almost drove
him wild. His eyes had a certain remote and questioning look that
belongs to imaginative men who dwell alone. It seemed an
impertinence to ask him to come out of his dream and offer us
dinner; but his instincts of hospitality failed not, and the
red-shirted guide was sent to the camp, which was, it seemed, on
the other side of the lake, to prepare our meal, while we bathed.
I am thus particular in speaking of the dinner, not only because
such is the custom of travellers, but also because it was the
occasion of an interlude which I shall never forget. As we were
undressing for our bath upon the lonely island, where the soft,
pale water almost lapped our feet, and the deep, wooded hills
made a great amphitheatre for the lake, our host bethought
himself of something neglected in his instructions.
"Ben!" vociferated he to the guide, now rapidly receding. Ben
paused on his oars.
"Remember to bo-o-oil the venison, Ben!" shouted the pensive
artist, while all the slumbering echoes arose to applaud this
culinary confidence.
"And, Ben!" he added, imploringly, "don't forget the dumplings!"
Upon this, the loons, all down the lake, who had hitherto been
silent, took up the strain with vehemence, hurling their wild
laughter at the presumptuous mortal who thus dared to invade
their solitudes with details as trivial as Mr. Pickwick's
tomato-sauce. They repeated it over and over to each other, till
ten square miles of loons must have heard the news, and all
laughed together; never was there such an audience; they could
not get over it, and two hours after, when we had rowed over to
the camp and dinner had been served, this irreverent and
invisible chorus kept bursting out, at all points of the compass,
with scattered chuckles of delight over this extraordinary bill
of fare. Justice compels me to add that the dumplings were made
of Indian-meal, upon a recipe devised by our artist; the guests
preferred the venison, but the host showed a fidelity to his
invention that proved him to be indeed a dweller in an ideal
world.
Another path that comes back to memory is the bare trail that we
followed over the prairies of Nebraska, in 1856, when the
Missouri River was held by roving bands from the Slave States,
and Freedom had to seek an overland route into Kansas. All day
and all night we rode between distant prairie-fires, pillars of
evening light and of morning cloud, while sometimes the low grass
would burn to the very edge of the trail, so that we had to hold
our breath as we galloped through. Parties of armed Missourians
were sometimes seen over the prairie swells, so that we had to
mount guard at nightfall; Free-State emigrants, fleeing from
persecution, continually met us; and we sometimes saw parties of
wandering Sioux, or passed their great irregular huts and houses
of worship. I remember one desolate prairie summit on which an
Indian boy sat motionless on horseback; his bare red legs clung
closely to the white sides of his horse; a gorgeous sunset was
unrolled behind him, and he might have seemed the last of his
race, just departing for the hunting-grounds of the blest. More
often the horizon showed no human outline, and the sun set
cloudless, and elongated into pear-shaped outlines, as behind
ocean-waves. But I remember best the excitement that filled our
breasts when we approached spots where the contest for a free
soil had already been sealed with blood. In those days, as one
went to Pennsylvania to study coal formations, or to Lake
Superior for copper, so one went to Kansas for men. "Every
footpath on this planet," said a rare thinker, "may lead to the
door of a hero," and that trail into Kansas ended rightly at the
tent-door of John Brown.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 | 11 |
12