The Writings of John Burroughs Part 11

"The ousel-c.o.c.k, so black of hue, With orange-tawny bill, The throstle with his note so true, The wren with little quill.

"The finch, the sparrow, and the lark, The plain-song cuckoo gray, Whose note full many a man doth mark.

And dares not answer nay."

In "Much Ado about Nothing" we get a glimpse of the lapwing:--

"For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs Close by the ground, to hear our conference."

The lapwing is a kind of plover, and is very swift of foot. When trying to avoid being seen they run rapidly with depressed heads, or "close by the ground," as the poet puts it. In the same scene, HERO says of URSULA:--

"I know her spirits are as coy and wild As haggards of the rock."

The haggard falcon is a species of hawk found in North Wales and in Scotland. It breeds on high shelving cliffs and precipitous rocks.

Had Shakespeare been an "amateur poacher" in his youth? He had a poacher's knowledge of the wild creatures. He knew how fresh the snake appears after it has cast its skin; how the hedgehog makes himself up into a ball and leaves his "p.r.i.c.kles" in whatever touches him; how the b.u.t.terfly comes from the grub; how the fox carries the goose; where the squirrel hides his store; where the martlet builds its nest, etc.

"Now is the woodc.o.c.k near the gin,"

says FABIAN, in "Twelfth Night," and

"Stalk on, stalk on; the fowl sits,"

says CLAUDIO to LEONATO, in "Much Ado."

"Instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmozet,"

says CALIBAN, in The Tempest." Sings the fool in "Lear:"--

"The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long That it had it head bit off by it young."

The hedge-sparrow is one of the favorite birds upon which the European cuckoo imposes the rearing of its young. If Shakespeare had made the house sparrow, or the blackbird, or the bunting, or any of the granivorous, hard-billed birds, the foster-parent of the cuckoo, his natural history would have been at fault.

Shakespeare knew the flowers, too, and knew their times and seasons:--

"When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, Do paint the meadows with delight."

They have, in England, the cuckoo-flower, which comes in April and is lilac in color, and the cuckoo-pint, which is much like our "Jack in the pulpit;" but the poet does not refer to either of these (if he did, we would catch him tripping), but to b.u.t.tercups, which are called by rural folk in Britain "cuckoo-buds."

In England the daffodil blooms in February and March; the swallow comes in April usually; hence the truth of Shakespeare's lines:--

"Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty."

The only flaw I notice in Shakespeare's natural history is in his treatment of the honey-bee, but this was a flaw in the knowledge of the times as well. The history of this insect was not rightly read till long after Shakespeare wrote. He pictures a colony of bees as a kingdom, with

"A king and officers of sorts"

(see "Henry V."), whereas a colony of bees is an absolute democracy; the rulers and governors and "officers of sorts" are the workers, the ma.s.ses, the common people. A strict regard to fact also would spoil those fairy tapers in "Midsummer Night's Dream,"--

"The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And, for night-tapers, crop their waxen thighs, And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,"--

since it is not wax that bees bear upon their thighs, but pollen, the dust of the flowers, with which bees make their bread. Wax is made from honey.

The science or the meaning is also a little obscure in this phrase, which occurs in one of the plays:--

"One heat another heat expels,"--

as one nail drives out another, or as one love cures another.

In a pa.s.sage in "The Tempest" he speaks of the ivy as if it were parasitical, like the mistletoe:--

"Now, he was The ivy which had hid my princely trunk, And sucked my verdure out on't."

I believe it is not a fact that the ivy sucks the juice out of the trees it climbs upon, though it may much interfere with their growth. Its aerial rootlets are for support alone, as is the case with all climbers that are not twiners. But this may perhaps be regarded as only a poetic license on the part of Shakespeare; the human ivy he was picturing no doubt fed upon the tree that supported it, whether the real ivy does or not.

It is also probably untrue that

"The poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies,"

though it has suited the purpose of other poets besides Shakespeare to say so. The higher and more complex the organization, the more acute the pleasure and the pain. A toad has been known to live for days with the upper part of its head cut away by a scythe, and a beetle will survive for hours upon the fisherman's hook. It perhaps causes a gra.s.shopper less pain to detach one of its legs than it does a man to remove a single hair from his beard. Nerves alone feel pain, and the nervous system of a beetle is a very rudimentary affair.

In "Coriola.n.u.s" there is a comparison which implies that a man can tread upon his own shadow,--a difficult feat in northern countries at all times except midday; Shakespeare is particular to mention the time of day:--

"Such a nature, Tickled with good success, disdains the shadow Which he treads on at noon."

VI

FOOTPATHS

AN intelligent English woman, spending a few years in this country with her family, says that one of her serious disappointments is that she finds it utterly impossible to enjoy nature here as she can at home--so much nature as we have and yet no way of getting at it; no paths, or byways, or stiles, or foot-bridges, no provision for the pedestrian outside of the public road. One would think the people had no feet and legs in this country, or else did not know how to use them. Last summer she spent the season near a small rural village in the valley of the Connecticut, but it seemed as if she had not been in the country: she could not come at the landscape; she could not reach a wood or a hill or a pretty nook anywhere without being a trespa.s.ser, or getting entangled in swamps or in fields of gra.s.s and grain, or having her course blocked by a high and difficult fence; no private ways, no gra.s.sy lanes; n.o.body walking in the fields or woods, n.o.body walking anywhere for pleasure, but everybody in carriages or wagons.

She was staying a mile from the village, and every day used to walk down to the post-office for her mail; but instead of a short and pleasant cut across the fields, as there would have been in England, she was obliged to take the highway and face the dust and the mud and the staring people in their carriages.

She complained, also, of the absence of bird voices,--so silent the fields and groves and orchards were, compared with what she had been used to at home. The most noticeable midsummer sound everywhere was the shrill, bra.s.sy crescendo of the locust.

All this is unquestionably true. There is far less bird music here than in England, except possibly in May and June, though, if the first impressions of the Duke of Argyle are to be trusted, there is much less even then. The duke says: "Although I was in the woods and fields of Canada and of the States in the richest moments of the spring, I heard little of that burst of song which in England comes from the blackcap, and the garden warbler, and the whitethroat, and the reed warbler, and the common wren, and (locally) from the nightingale." Our birds are more withdrawn than the English, and their notes more plaintive and intermittent.

Yet there are a few days here early in May, when the house wren, the oriole, the orchard starling, the kingbird, the bobolink, and the wood thrush first arrive, that are so full of music, especially in the morning, that one is loath to believe there is anything fuller or finer even in England. As walkers, and lovers of rural scenes and pastimes, we do not approach our British cousins. It is a seven days' wonder to see anybody walking in this country except on a wager or in a public hall or skating-rink, as an exhibition and trial of endurance.

Countrymen do not walk except from necessity, and country women walk far less than their city sisters. When city people come to the country they do not walk, because that would be conceding too much to the country; beside, they would soil their shoes, and would lose the awe and respect which their imposing turn-outs inspire.

Then they find the country dull; it is like water or milk after champagne; they miss the accustomed stimulus, both mind and body relax, and walking is too great an effort.

There are several obvious reasons why the English should be better or more habitual walkers than we are. Taken the year round, their climate is much more favorable to exercise in the open air. Their roads are better, harder, and smoother, and there is a place for the man and a place for the horse. Their country houses and churches and villages are not strung upon the highway as ours are, but are nestled here and there with reference to other things than convenience in "getting out." Hence the gra.s.sy lanes and paths through the fields.

Distances are not so great in that country; the population occupies less s.p.a.ce. Again, the land has been, longer occupied and is more thoroughly subdued; it is easier to get about the fields; life has flowed in the same channels for centuries. The English landscape is like a park, and is so thoroughly rural and mellow and bosky that the temptation to walk amid its scenes is ever present to one. In comparison, nature here is rude, raw, and forbidding; has not that maternal and beneficent look, is less mindful of man, runs to briers and weeds or to naked sterility.

Then as a people the English are a private, domestic, homely folk: they dislike publicity, dislike the highway, dislike noise, and love to feel the gra.s.s under their feet. They have a genius for lanes and footpaths; one might almost say they invented them. The charm of them is in their books; their rural poetry is modeled upon them. How much of Wordsworth's poetry is the poetry of pedestrianism! A footpath is sacred in England; the king himself cannot close one; the courts recognize them as something quite as important and inviolable as the highway.

A footpath is of slow growth, and it is a wild, shy thing that is easily scared away. The plow must respect it, and the fence or hedge make way for it. It requires a settled state of things, unchanging habits among the people, and long tenure of the land; the rill of life that finds its way there must have a perennial source, and flow there tomorrow and the next day and the next century.