Complete Prose Works Part 11

MULLEINS AND MULLEINS

Large, placid mulleins, as summer advances, velvety in texture, of a light greenish-drab color, growing everywhere in the fields--at first earth's big rosettes in their broad-leav'd low cl.u.s.ter-plants, eight, ten, twenty leaves to a plant--plentiful on the fallow twenty-acre lot, at the end of the lane, and especially by the ridge-sides of the fences--then close to the ground, but soon springing up--leaves as broad as my hand, and the lower ones twice as long--so fresh and dewy in the morning--stalks now four or five, even seven or eight feet high. The farmers, I find, think the mullein a mean unworthy weed, but I have grown to a fondness for it. Every object has its lesson, enclosing the suggestion of everything else--and lately I sometimes think all is concentrated for me in these hardy, yellow-flower'd weeds. As I come down the lane early in the morning, I pause before their soft wool-like fleece and stem and broad leaves, glittering with countless diamonds.

Annually for three summers now, they and I have silently return'd together; at such long intervals I stand or sit among them, musing--and woven with the rest, of so many hours and moods of partial rehabilitation--of my sane or sick spirit, here as near at peace as it can be.

DISTANT SOUNDS

The axe of the wood-cutter, the measured thud of a single threshing-flail, the crowing of chanticleer in the barn-yard, (with invariable responses from other barn-yards,) and the lowing of cattle--but most of all, or far or near, the wind--through the high tree-tops, or through low bushes, laving one's face and hands so gently, this balmy-bright noon, the coolest for a long time, (Sept. 2)--I will not call it _sighing_, for to me it is always a firm, sane, cheery expression, through a monotone, giving many varieties, or swift or slow, or dense or delicate. The wind in the patch of pine woods off there--how sibilant. Or at sea, I can imagine it this moment, tossing the waves, with spirits of foam flying far, and the free whistle, and the scent of the salt--and that vast paradox somehow with all its action and restlessness conveying a sense of eternal rest.

_Other adjuncts._--But the sun and the moon here and these times. As never more wonderful by day, the gorgeous...o...b..imperial, so vast, so ardently, lovingly hot--so never a more glorious moon of nights, especially the last three or four. The great planets too--Mars never before so flaming bright, so flashing-large, with slight yellow tinge, (the astronomers say--is it true?--nearer to us than any time the past century)--and well up, lord Jupiter, (a little while since close by the moon)--and in the west, after the sun sinks, voluptuous Venus, now languid and shorn of her beams, as if from some divine excess.

A SUN-BATH-NAKEDNESS

_Sunday, Aug. 27_.--Another day quite free from mark'd prostration and pain. It seems indeed as if peace and nutriment from heaven subtly filter into me as I slowly hobble down these country lanes and across fields, in the good air--as I sit here in solitude with Nature--open, voiceless, mystic, far removed, yet palpable, eloquent Nature. I merge myself in the scene, in the perfect day. Hovering over the clear brook-water, I am sooth'd by its soft gurgle in one place, and the hoa.r.s.er murmurs of its three-foot fall in another. Come, ye disconsolate, in whom any latent eligibility is left--come get the sure virtues of creek-sh.o.r.e, and wood and field. Two months (July and August, '77,) have I absorb'd them, and they begin to make a new man of me.

Every day, seclusion--every day at least two or three hours of freedom, bathing, no talk, no bonds, no dress, no books, no _manners_.

Shall I tell you, reader, to what I attribute my already much-restored health? That I have been almost two years, off and on, without drugs and medicines, and daily in the open air. Last summer I found a particularly secluded little dell off one side by my creek, originally a large dug-out marl-pit, now abandon'd, fill'd, with bushes, trees, gra.s.s, a group of willows, a straggling bank, and a spring of delicious water running right through the middle of it, with two or three little cascades. Here I retreated every hot day, and follow it up this summer.

Here I realize the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I get so close to Nature; never before did she come so close to me. By old habit, I pencill'd down from time to time, almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints and outlines, on the spot. Let me specially record the satisfaction of this current forenoon, so serene and primitive, so conventionally exceptional, natural.

An hour or so after breakfast I wended my way down to the recesses of the aforesaid dell, which I and certain thrushes, cat-birds, &c., had all to ourselves. A light south-west wind was blowing through the tree-tops. It was just the place and time for my Adamic air-bath and flesh-brushing from head to foot. So hanging clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broadbrim straw on head and easy shoes on feet, havn't I had a good time the last two hours! First with the stiff-elastic bristles rasping arms, breast, sides, till they turn'd scarlet--then partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook--taking everything very leisurely, with many rests and pauses--stepping about barefooted every few minutes now and then in some neighboring black ooze, for unctuous mud-bath to my feet--a brief second and third rinsing in the crystal running waters--rubbing with the fragrant towel--slow negligent promenades on the turf up and down in the sun, varied with occasional rests, and further frictions of the bristle-brush--sometimes carrying my portable chair with me from place to place, as my range is quite extensive here, nearly a hundred rods, feeling quite secure from intrusion, (and that indeed I am not at all nervous about, if it accidentally happens.)

As I walk'd slowly over the gra.s.s, the sun shone out enough to show the shadow moving with me. Somehow I seem'd to get ident.i.ty with each and every thing around me, in its condition. Nature was naked, and I was also. It was too lazy, soothing, and joyous-equable to speculate about. Yet I might have thought somehow in this vein: Perhaps the inner never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, &c., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body, which I will not have blinded or bandaged any more than the eyes.

Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature!--ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your tear, your respectability, that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating extasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is--nor what faith or art or health really is. (Probably the whole curriculum of first-cla.s.s philosophy, beauty, heroism, form, ill.u.s.trated by the old h.e.l.lenic race--the highest height and deepest depth known to civilization in those departments--came from their natural and religious idea of Nakedness.)

Many such hours, from time to time, the last two summers--I attribute my partial rehabilitation largely to them. Some good people may think it a feeble or half-crack'd way of spending one's time and thinking. May-be it is.

THE OAKS AND I

_Sept. 5, '77._--I write this, 11 A.M., shelter'd under a dense oak by the bank, where I have taken refuge from a sudden rain. I came down here, (we had sulky drizzles all the morning, but an hour ago a lull,) for the before-mention'd daily and simple exercise I am fond of--to pull on that young hickory sapling out there--to sway and yield to its tough-limber upright stem--haply to get into my old sinews some of its elastic fibre and clear sap. I stand on the turf and take these health-pulls moderately and at intervals for nearly an hour, inhaling great draughts of fresh air. Wandering by the creek, I have three or four naturally favorable spots where I rest--besides a chair I lug with me and use for more deliberate occasions. At other spots convenient I have selected, besides the hickory just named, strong and limber boughs of beech or holly, in easy-reaching distance, for my natural gymnasia, for arms, chest, trunk-muscles. I can soon feel the sap and sinew rising through me, like mercury to heat. I hold on boughs or slender trees caressingly there in the sun and shade, wrestle with their innocent stalwartness--and _know_ the virtue thereof pa.s.ses from them into me.

(Or may-be we interchange--may-be the trees are more aware of it all than I ever thought.)

But now pleasantly imprison'd here under the big oak--the rain dripping, and the sky cover'd with leaden clouds--nothing but the pond on one side, and the other a spread of gra.s.s, spotted with the milky blossoms of the wild carrot--the sound of an axe wielded at some distant wood-pile--yet in this dull scene, (as most folks would call it,) why am I so (almost) happy here and alone? Why would any intrusion, even from people I like, spoil the charm? But am I alone? Doubtless there comes a time--perhaps it has come to me--when one feels through his whole being, and p.r.o.nouncedly the emotional part, that ident.i.ty between himself subjectively and Nature objectively which Sch.e.l.ling and Fichte are so fond of pressing. How it is I know not, but I often realize a presence here--in clear moods I am certain of it, and neither chemistry nor reasoning nor esthetics will give the least explanation. All the past two summers it has been strengthening and nourishing my sick body and soul, as never before. Thanks, invisible physician, for thy silent delicious medicine, thy day and night, thy waters and thy airs, the banks, the gra.s.s, the trees, and e'en the weeds!

A QUINTETTE

While I have been kept by the rain under the shelter of my great oak, (perfectly dry and comfortable, to the rattle of the drops all around,) I have pencill'd off the mood of the hour in a little quintette, which I will give you:

At vacancy with Nature, Acceptive and at ease, Distilling the present hour, Whatever, wherever it is, And over the past, oblivion.

Can you get hold of it, reader dear? and how do you like it anyhow?

THE FIRST FROST--MEMS

Where I was stopping I saw the first palpable frost, on my sunrise walk, October 6; all over the yet-green spread a light blue-gray veil, giving a new show to the entire landscape. I had but little time to notice it, for the sun rose cloudless and mellow-warm, and as I returned along the lane it had turn'd to glittering patches of wet. As I walk I notice the bursting pods of wild-cotton, (Indian hemp they call it here,) with flossy-silky contents, and dark red-brown seeds--a startled rabbit--I pull a handful of the balsamic life-ever-lasting and stuff it down in my trowsers-pocket for scent.

THREE YOUNG MEN'S DEATHS

_December 20_.--Somehow I got thinking to-day of young men's deaths--not at all sadly or sentimentally, but gravely, realistically, perhaps a little artistically. Let me give the following three cases from budgets of personal memoranda, which I have been turning over, alone in my room, and resuming and dwelling on, this rainy afternoon. Who is there to whom the theme does not come home? Then I don't know how it may be to others, but to me not only is there nothing gloomy or depressing in such cases--on the contrary, as reminiscences, I find them soothing, bracing, tonic.

ERASTUS HASKELL.--[I just transcribe verbatim from a letter written by myself in one of the army hospitals, 16 years ago, during the secession war.] _Washington, July 28, 1863._--Dear M.,--I am writing this in the hospital, sitting by the side of a soldier, I do not expect to last many hours. His fate has been a hard one--he seems to be only about 19 or 20--Erastus Haskell, company K, 141st N. Y.--has been out about a year, and sick or half-sick more than half that time--has been down on the peninsula--was detail'd to go in the band as fifer-boy. While sick, the surgeon told him to keep up with the rest--(probably work'd and march'd too long.) He is a shy, and seems to me a very sensible boy--has fine manners--never complains--was sick down on the peninsula in an old storehouse--typhoid fever. The first week this July was brought up here--journey very bad, no accommodations, no nourishment, nothing but hard jolting, and exposure enough to make a well man sick; (these fearful journeys do the job for many)--arrived here July 11th--a silent dark-skinn'd Spanish-looking youth, with large very dark blue eyes, peculiar looking. Doctor F. here made light of his sickness--said he would recover soon, etc.; but I thought very different, and told F.

so repeatedly; (I came near quarreling with him about it from the first)--but he laugh'd, and would not listen to me. About four days ago, I told Doctor he would in my opinion lose the boy without doubt--but F.

again laugh'd at me. The next day he changed his opinion--brought the head surgeon of the post--he said the boy would probably die, but they would make a hard fight for him.

The last two days he has been lying panting for breath--a pitiful sight. I have been with him some every day or night since he arrived. He suffers a great deal with the heat--says little or nothing--is flighty the last three days, at times--knows me always, however--calls me "Walter"--(sometimes calls the name over and over and over again, musingly, abstractedly, to himself.) His father lives at Breesport, Chemung county, N. Y., is a mechanic with large family--is a steady, religious man; his mother too is living. I have written to them, and shall write again to-day--Erastus has not receiv'd a word from home for months.

As I sit here writing to you, M., I wish you could see the whole scene.

This young man lies within reach of me, flat on his back, his hands clasp'd across his breast, his thick black hair cut close; he is dozing, breathing hard, every breath a spasm--it looks so cruel. He is a n.o.ble youngster,--I consider him past all hope. Often there is no one with him for a long while. I am here as much as possible.

WILLIAM ALCOTT, fireman. _Camden, Nov., 1874_.--Last Monday afternoon his widow, mother, relatives, mates of the fire department, and his other friends, (I was one, only lately it is true, but our love grew fast and close, the days and nights of those eight weeks by the chair of rapid decline, and the bed of death,) gather'd to the funeral of this young man, who had grown up, and was well-known here. With nothing special, perhaps, to record, I would give a word or two to his memory.

He seem'd to me not an inappropriate specimen in character and elements, of that bulk of the average good American race that ebbs and flows perennially beneath this sc.u.m of eructations on the surface. Always very quiet in manner, neat in person and dress, good temper'd--punctual and industrious at his work, till he could work no longer--he just lived his steady, square, un.o.btrusive life, in its own humble sphere, doubtless unconscious of itself. (Though I think there were currents of emotion and intellect undevelop'd beneath, far deeper than his acquaintances ever suspected--or than he himself ever did.) He was no talker. His troubles, when he had any, he kept to himself. As there was nothing querulous about him in life, he made no complaints during his last sickness. He was one of those persons that while his a.s.sociates never thought of attributing any particular talent or grace to him, yet all insensibly, really, liked Billy Alcott.

I, too, loved him. At last, after being with him quite a good deal--after hours and days of panting for breath, much of the time unconscious, (for though the consumption that had been lurking in his system, once thoroughly started, made rapid progress, there was still great vitality in him, and indeed for four or five days he lay dying, before the close,) late on Wednesday night, Nov. 4th, where we surrounded his bed in silence, there came a lull--a longer drawn breath, a pause, a faint sigh--another--a weaker breath, another sigh--a pause again and just a tremble--and the face of the poor wasted young man (he was just 26,) fell gently over, in death, on my hand, on the pillow.

CHARLES CASWELL.--[I extract the following, verbatim, from a letter to me dated September 29, from my friend John Burroughs, at Esopus-on-Hudson, New York State.] S. was away when your picture came, attending his sick brother, Charles--who has since died--an event that has sadden'd me much. Charlie was younger than S., and a most attractive young fellow. He work'd at my father's and had done so for two years.

He was about the best specimen of a young country farm-hand I ever knew.

You would have loved him. He was like one of your poems. With his great strength, his blond hair, his cheerfulness and contentment, his universal good will, and his silent manly ways, he was a youth hard to match. He was murder'd by an old doctor. He had typhoid fever, and the old fool bled him twice. He lived to wear out the fever, but had not strength to rally. He was out of his head nearly all the time. In the morning, as he died in the afternoon, S. was standing over him, when Charlie put up his arms around S.'s neck, and pull'd his face down and kiss'd him. S. said he knew then the end was near. (S. stuck to him day and night to the last.) When I was home in August, Charlie was cradling on the hill, and it was a picture to see him walk through the grain. All work seem'd play to him. He had no vices, any more than Nature has, and was belov'd by all who knew him.

I have written thus to you about him, for such young men belong to you; he was of your kind. I wish you could have known him. He had the sweetness of a child, and the strength and courage and readiness of a young Viking. His mother and father are poor; they have a rough, hard farm. His mother works in the field with her husband when the work presses. She has had twelve children.

FEBRUARY DAYS

_February 7, 1878_.--Glistening sun today, with slight haze, warm enough, and yet tart, as I sit here in the open air, down in my country retreat, under an old cedar. For two hours I have been idly wandering around the woods and pond, lugging my chair, picking out choice spots to sit awhile--then up and slowly on again. All is peace here. Of course, none of the summer noises or vitality; to-day hardly even the winter ones. I amuse myself by exercising my voice in recitations, and in ringing the changes on all the vocal and alphabetical sounds. Not even an echo; only the cawing of a solitary crow, flying at some distance.

The pond is one bright, flat spread, without a ripple--a vast Claude Lorraine gla.s.s, in which I study the sky, the light, the leafless trees, and an occasional crow, with flapping wings, flying overhead. The brown fields have a few white patches of snow left.

_Feb. 9_.--After an hour's ramble, now retreating, resting, sitting close by the pond, in a warm nook, writing this, shelter'd from the breeze, just before noon. The _emotional_ aspects and influences of Nature! I, too, like the rest, feel these modern tendencies (from all the prevailing intellections, literature and poems,) to turn everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction, death. Yet how clear it is to me that those are not the born results, influences of Nature at all, but of one's own distorted, sick or silly soul. Here, amid this wild, free scene, how healthy, how joyous, how clean and vigorous and sweet!

_Mid-afternoon_.--One of my nooks is south of the barn, and here I am sitting now, on a log, still basking in the sun, shielded from the wind.

Near me are the cattle, feeding on corn-stalks. Occasionally a cow or the young bull (how handsome and bold he is!) scratches and munches the far end of the log on which I sit. The fresh milky odor is quite perceptible, also the perfume of hay from the barn. The perpetual rustle of dry corn-stalks, the low sough of the wind round the barn gables, the grunting of pigs, the distant whistle of a locomotive, and occasional crowing of chanticleers, are the sounds.

_Feb. 19._--Cold and sharp last night--clear and not much wind--the full moon shining, and a fine spread of constellations and little and big stars--Sirius very bright, rising early, preceded by many-orb'd Orion, glittering, vast, sworded, and chasing with his dog. The earth hard frozen, and a stiff glare of ice over the pond. Attracted by the calm splendor of the night, I attempted a short walk, but was driven back by the cold. Too severe for me also at 9 o'clock, when I came out this morning, so I turn'd back again. But now, near noon, I have walk'd down the lane, basking all the way in the sun (this farm has a pleasant southerly exposure,) and here I am, seated under the lee of a bank, close by the water. There are bluebirds already flying about, and I hear much chirping and twittering and two or three real songs, sustain'd quite awhile, in the mid-day brilliance and warmth. (There! that is a true carol, coming out boldly and repeatedly, as if the singer meant it.) Then as the noon strengthens, the reedy trill of the robin--to my ear the most cheering of bird-notes. At intervals, like bars and breaks (out of the low murmur that in any scene, however quiet, is never entirely absent to a delicate ear,) the occasional crunch and cracking of the ice-glare congeal'd over the creek, as it gives way to the sunbeams--sometimes with low sigh--sometimes with indignant, obstinate tug and snort.

(Robert Burns says in one of his letters: "There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more--I do not know if I should call it pleasure--but something which exalts me--something which enraptures me--than to walk in the shelter' d side of a wood in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season of devotion." Some of his most characteristic poems were composed in such scenes and seasons.)

A MEADOW LARK

_March 16_.--Fine, clear, dazzling morning, the sun an hour high, the air just tart enough. What a stamp in advance my whole day receives from the song of that meadow lark perch'd on a fence-stake twenty rods distant! Two or three liquid-simple notes, repeated at intervals, full of careless happiness and hope. With its peculiar shimmering slow progress and rapid-noiseless action of the wings, it flies on a way, lights on another stake, and so on to another, shimmering and singing many minutes.

SUNDOWN LIGHTS