Part 14
"My path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. Feeling inclined to muse, and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship in being all night out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise. I descended a steep bank, and got upon the shore of the lake where its ripple came up and expired. The air was calm; every one was at rest; I remained there for hours. Toward morning the moon shed over the earth and waters the ineffable melancholy of her last gleams. Nature seems unspeakably grand, when, plunged, in a long reverie, one hears the rippling of the waters upon a solitary strand, in the calm of a night still enkindled and luminous with the setting moon.
"Sensibility beyond utterance, charm and torment of our vain years; vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere impenetrable; all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom, delicious self-abandonment—everything that a mortal heart can contain of life-weariness and yearning, I felt it all. I experienced it all, in this memorable night. I have made a grave step toward the age of decline. I have swallowed up ten years of life at once. Happy the simple whose heart is always young!"
The moral element is behind this also, and is the source of its value and charm. In literature never nature for her own sake, but for the sake of the soul which is over and above all.
II
One of the most desirable things in life is a fresh impression of an old fact or scene. One's love of nature may be a constant factor, yet it is only now and then that he gets a fresh impression of the charm and meaning of nature; only now and then that the objects without and the mood within so fit together that we have a vivid and original sense of the beauty and significance that surround us. How often do we really see the stars? Probably a great many people never see them at all—that is, never look upon them with any thrill of emotion. If I see them a few times a year, I think myself in luck. If I deliberately go out to see them, I am quite sure to miss them; but occasionally, as one glances up to them in his lonely night walk, the mind opens, or the heaven opens—which is it?—and he has a momentary glimpse of their ineffable splendor and significance. How overwhelming, how awe-inspiring! His thought goes like a lightning flash into that serene abyss, and then the veil is drawn again. One's science, one's understanding, tells him he is a voyager on the celestial deep, that the earth beneath his feet is a star among stars, that we can never be any more in the heavens than we are now, or any more within reach of the celestial laws and forces; but how rare the mood in which we can realize this astounding fact, in which we can get a fresh and vivid impression of it! To have it ever present with one in all its naked grandeur would perhaps be more than we could bear.
The common and the familiar—how soon they cease to impress us! The great service of genius, speaking through art and literature, is to pierce through our callousness and indifference and give us fresh impressions of things as they really are; to present things in new combinations, or from new points of view, so that they shall surprise and delight us like a new revelation. When poetry does this, or when art does it, or when science does it, it recreates the world for us, and for the moment we are again Adam in paradise.
Herein lies one compensation to the lover of nature who is an enforced dweller in the town: the indifference which familiarity breeds is not his. His weekly or monthly sallies into the country yield him a rare delight. To his fresh, eager senses the charm of novelty is over all. Country people look with a kind of pitying amusement upon the delight of their newly arrived city friends; but would we not, after all, give something if we could exchange eyes with them for a little while?
We who write about nature pick out, I suspect, only the rare moments when we have had glimpses of her, and make much of them. Our lives are dull, and our minds crusted over with rubbish like those of other people. Then writing about nature, as about most other subjects, is an expansive process; we are under the law of evolution; we grow the germ into the tree; a little original observation goes a good way. Life is a compendium. The record in our minds and hearts is in shorthand. When we come to write it out, we are surprised at its length and significance. What we feel in a twinkling it takes a long time to tell to another.
When I pass along by a meadow in June, where the bobolinks are singing and the daisies dancing in the wind, and the scent of the clover is in the air, and where the boys and girls are looking for wild strawberries in the grass, I take it all in in a glance, it enters swiftly through all my senses; but if I set about writing an account of my experience for my reader, how long and tedious the process, how I must beat about the bush! And then, if I would have him see and feel it, I must avoid a point-blank description and bring it to him, or him to it, by a kind of indirection, so as to surprise him and give him more than I at first seemed to promise.
To a countryman like myself the presence of natural objects, the open face of the country, sheds a cheering and soothing influence at all times; but it is only at rare intervals that he experiences the thrill of a fresh impression. I find that a kind of preoccupation, as the farmer with his work, the angler with his rod, the sportsman with his gun, the walker with his friend, the lounger with his book, affords conditions that are not to be neglected. So much will steal in at the corners of your eyes; the unpremeditated glance, when the mind is passive and receptive, often stirs the soul. Upon whom does the brook make such an impression as upon the angler? How he comes to know its character! how he studies its every phase! how he feels it through that rod and line as if they were a part of himself! I pity the person who does not get at least one or two fresh impressions of the charm and sweetness of nature in the spring. Later in the season it gets to be more of an old story; but in March, when the season is early, and in April, when the season is late, there occasionally come days which awaken a new joy in the heart. Every recurring spring one experiences this fresh delight. There is nothing very tangible yet in awakening nature, but there is something in the air, some sentiment in the sunshine and in the look of things, a prophecy of life and renewal, that sends a thrill through the frame. The first sparrow's song, the first robin's call, the first bluebird's warble, the first phœbe's note—who can hear it without emotion? Or the first flock of migrating geese or ducks—how much they bring north with them! When the red-shouldered starlings begin to gurgle in the elms or golden willows along the marshes and watercourses, you will feel spring then; and if you look closely upon the ground beneath them, you will find that sturdy advanced guard of our floral army, the skunk cabbage, thrusting his spear-point up through the ooze, and spring will again quicken your pulse.
One seems to get nearer to nature in the early spring days: all screens are removed, the earth everywhere speaks directly to you; she is not hidden by verdure and foliage; there is a peculiar delight in walking over the brown turf of the fields that one cannot feel later on. How welcome the smell of it, warmed by the sun; the first breath of the reviving earth. How welcome the full, sparkling watercourses, too, everywhere drawing the eye; by and by they will be veiled by the verdure and shrunken by the heat. When March is kind, for how much her slightest favors count! The other evening, as I stood on the slope of a hill in the twilight, I heard a whistling of approaching wings, and presently a woodcock flying low passed near me. I could see his form and his long curved wings dimly against the horizon; his whistling slowly vanished in the gathering night, but his passage made something stir and respond within me. March was on the wing, she was abroad in the soft still twilight searching out the moist, springy places where the worms first come to the surface and where the grass first starts; and her course was up the valley from the south. A day or two later I sat on a hillside in the woods late in the day, amid the pines and hemlocks, and heard the soft, elusive spring call of the little owl—a curious musical undertone hardly separable from the silence; a bell, muffled in feathers, tolling in the twilight of the woods and discernible only to the most alert ear. But it was the voice of spring, the voice of the same impulse that sent the woodcock winging his way through the dusk, that was just beginning to make the pussy-willows swell and the grass to freshen in the spring runs.
Occasionally, of a bright, warm, still day in March, such as we have had the present season, the little flying spider is abroad. It is the most delicate of all March tokens, but very suggestive. Its long, waving threads of gossamer, invisible except when the sunlight falls upon them at a particular angle, stream out here and there upon the air, a filament of life, reaching and reaching as if to catch and detain the most subtle of the skyey influences.
Nature is always new in the spring, and lucky are we if it finds us new also.
XIII
A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS
How beautiful is fertility! A landscape of fruitful and well-cultivated fields; an unbroken expanse of grass; a thick, uniform growth of grain—how each of these fills and satisfies the eye! And it is not because we are essentially utilitarian and see the rich loaf and the fat beef as the outcome of it all, but because we read in it an expression of the beneficence and good-will of the earth. We love to see harmony between man and nature; we love peace and not war; we love the adequate, the complete. A perfect issue of grass or grain is a satisfaction to look upon, because it is a success. These things have the beauty of an end exactly fulfilled, the beauty of perfect fitness and proportion. The barren in nature is ugly and repels us, unless it be on such a scale and convey such a suggestion of power as to awaken the emotion of the sublime. What can be less inviting than a neglected and exhausted Virginia farm, the thin red soil showing here and there through the ragged and scanty turf? and what, on the other hand, can please the eye of a countryman more than the unbroken verdancy and fertility of a Kentucky blue-grass farm? I find I am very apt to take a farmer's view of a country. That long line of toiling and thrifty yeomen back of me seems to have bequeathed something to my blood that makes me respond very quickly to a fertile and well-kept landscape, and that, on the other hand, makes me equally discontented in a poor, shabby one. All the way from Washington till I struck the heart of Kentucky, the farmer in me was unhappy; he saw hardly a rood of land that he would like to call his own. But that remnant of the wild man of the woods, which most of us still carry, saw much that delighted him, especially down the New River, where the rocks and the waters, and the steep forest-clad mountains were as wild and as savage as anything he had known in his early Darwinian ages. But when we emerged upon the banks of the Great Kanawha, the man of the woods lost his interest and the man of the fields saw little that was comforting.
When we cross the line into Kentucky, I said, we shall see a change. But no, we did not. The farmer still groaned in spirit; no thrifty farms, no substantial homes, no neat villages, no good roads anywhere, but squalor and sterility on every hand. Nearly all the afternoon we rode through a country like the poorer parts of New England, unredeemed by anything like New England thrift. It was a country of coal, a very new country, geologically speaking, and the top-soil did not seem to have had time to become deepened and enriched by vegetable mould. Near sundown, as I glanced out of the window, I thought I began to see a change. Presently I was very sure I did. It began to appear in the more grassy character of the woods. Then I caught sight of peculiarly soft and uniform grassy patches here and there in the open. Then in a few moments more the train had shot us fairly into the edge of the blue-grass region, and the farmer in me began to be on the alert. We had passed in a twinkling from a portion of the earth's surface which is new, which is of yesterday, to a portion which is of the oldest, from the carboniferous to the lower silurian. Here, upon this lower silurian, the earth that saw and nourished the great monsters and dragons was growing the delicate blue-grass. It had taken all these millions upon millions of years to prepare the way for this little plant to grow to perfection. I thought I had never seen fields and low hills look so soft in the twilight; they seemed clad in greenish gray fur. As we neared Mount Sterling, how fat and smooth the land looked; what long, even, gently flowing lines against the fading western sky, broken here and there by herds of slowly grazing or else reposing and ruminating cattle! What peace and plenty it suggested! From a land raw and crude and bitter like unripe fruit, we had suddenly been transported into the midst of one ripe and mellow with the fullness of time. It was sweet to look upon. I was seized with a strong desire to go forth and taste it by a stroll through it in the twilight.
In the course of the ten days that followed, the last ten days of May, I had an opportunity to taste it pretty well, and my mind has had a grassy flavor ever since. I had an opportunity to see this restless and fitful American nature of ours in a more equable and beneficent mood than I had ever before seen it in; all its savageness and acridness gone, no thought now but submission to the hand and wants of man. I afterward saw the prairies of Illinois, and the vast level stretches of farming country of northern Ohio and Indiana, but these lands were nowhere quite so human, quite so beautiful, or quite so productive as the blue-grass region. One likes to see the earth's surface lifted up and undulating a little, as if it heaved and swelled with emotion; it suggests more life, and at the same time that the sense of repose is greater. There is no repose in a prairie; it is stagnation, it is a _dead_ level. Those immense stretches of flat land pain the eye, as if all life and expression had gone from the face of the earth. There is just unevenness enough in the blue-grass region to give mobility and variety to the landscape. From almost any given point one commands broad and extensive views—of immense fields of wheat or barley, or corn or hemp, or grass or clover, or of woodland pastures.
With Professor Proctor I drove a hundred miles or more about the country in a buggy. First from Frankfort to Versailles, the capital of Woodford County; then to Lexington, where we passed a couple of days with Major McDowell at Ashland, the old Henry Clay place; then to Georgetown in Scott County; thence back to Frankfort again. The following week I passed three days on the great stock farm of Colonel Alexander, where I saw more and finer blooded stock in the way of horses, cattle, and sheep than I had ever seen before. From thence we went south to Colonel Shelby's, where we passed a couple of days on the extreme edge of the blue-grass circle in Boyle County. Here we strike the rim of sharp low hills that run quite around this garden of the State, from the Ohio River on the west to the Ohio again on the north and east. Kentucky is a great country for licks; there are any number of streams and springs that bear the names of licks. Probably the soil of no other State in the Union has been so much licked and smacked over as that of Kentucky. Colonel Shelby's farm is near a stream called Knob Lick, and within a few miles of a place called Blue Lick. I expected to see some sort of salt spring where the buffalo and deer used to come to lick; but instead of that saw a raw, naked spot of earth, an acre or two in extent, which had apparently been licked into the shape of a clay model of some scene in Colorado or the Rocky Mountains. There were gullies and chasms and sharp knobs and peaks as blue and barren as could be, and no sign of a spring or of water visible. The buffalo had licked the clay for the saline matter it held, and had certainly made a deep and lasting impression.
From Shelby City we went west sixty or more miles, skirting the blue-grass region, to Lebanon Junction, where I took the train for Cave City. The blue-grass region is as large as the State of Massachusetts, and is, on the whole, the finest bit of the earth's surface, with the exception of parts of England, I have yet seen. In one way it is more pleasing than anything one sees in England, on account of the greater sense of freedom and roominess which it gives one. Everything is on a large, generous scale. The fields are not so cut up, nor the roadways so narrow, nor the fences so prohibitory. Indeed, the distinguishing feature of this country is its breadth: one sees fields of corn or wheat or clover of from fifty to one hundred acres each. At Colonel Alexander's I saw three fields of clover lying side by side which contained three hundred acres: as the clover was just in full bloom, the sight was a very pleasing one. The farms are larger, ranging from several hundred to several thousand acres. The farmhouses are larger, with wide doors, broad halls, high ceilings, ample grounds, and hospitality to match. There is nothing niggardly or small in the people or in their country. One sees none of the New York or New England primness and trimness, but the ample, flowing Southern way of life. It is common to see horses and cattle grazing in the grounds immediately about the house; there is nothing but grass, and the great forest trees, which they cannot hurt. The farmhouses rarely stand near the highway, but are set after the English fashion from a third to half a mile distant, amid a grove of primitive forest trees, and flanked or backed up by the many lesser buildings that the times of slavery made necessary. Educated gentlemen farmers are probably the rule more than in the North. There are not so many small or so many leased farms. The proprietors are men of means, and come the nearest to forming a landed gentry of any class of men we have in this country. They are not city men running a brief and rapid career on a fancy farm, but genuine countrymen, who love the land and mean to keep it. I remember with pleasure one rosy-faced young farmer, whose place we casually invaded in Lincoln County. He was a graduate of Harvard University and of the Law School, but here he was with his trousers tucked into his boot-legs, helping to cultivate his corn, or looking after his herds upon his broad acres. He was nearly the ideal of a simple, hearty, educated country farmer and gentleman.
But the feature of this part of Kentucky which struck me the most forcibly, and which is perhaps the most unique, is the immense sylvan or woodland pastures. The forests are simply vast grassy orchards of maple and oak, or other trees, where the herds graze and repose. They everywhere give a look to the land as of royal parks and commons. They are as clean as a meadow and as inviting as long, grassy vistas and circles of cool shade can make them. All the saplings and bushy undergrowths common to forests have been removed, leaving only the large trees scattered here and there, which seem to protect rather than occupy the ground. Such a look of leisure, of freedom, of amplitude, as these forest groves give to the landscape!