Part 17

The soil, too--let others pen-and-ink the sea, the air, (as I sometimes try)--but now I feel to choose the common soil for theme--naught else. The brown soil here, (just between winter-close and opening spring and vegetation)--the rain-shower at night, and the fresh smell next morning--the red worms wriggling out of the ground--the dead leaves, the incipient grass, and the latent life underneath--the effort to start something--already in shelter'd spots some little flowers--the distant emerald show of winter wheat and the rye-fields--the yet naked trees, with clear insterstices, giving prospects hidden in summer--the tough fallow and the plow-team, and the stout boy whistling to his horses for encouragement--and there the dark fat earth in long slanting stripes upturn'd.

BIRDS AND BIRDS AND BIRDS

A little later--bright weather.--An unusual melodiousness, these days, (last of April and first of May) from the blackbirds; indeed all sorts of birds, darting, whistling, hopping or perch'd on trees. Never before have I seen, heard, or been in the midst of, and got so flooded and saturated with them and their performances, as this current month. Such oceans, such successions of them. Let me make a list of those I find here:

Black birds (plenty,) Meadow-larks (plenty,) Ring doves, Cat-birds (plenty,) Owls, Cuckoos, Woodpeckers, Pond snipes (plenty,) King-birds, Cheewinks, Crows (plenty,) Quawks, Wrens, Ground robins, Kingfishers, Ravens, Quails, Gray snipes, Turkey-buzzards, Eagles, Hen-hawks, High-holes, Yellow birds, Herons, Thrushes, Tits, Reed birds, Woodpigeons.

Early came the

Blue birds, Meadow-lark, Killdeer, White-bellied swallow, Plover, Sandpiper, Robin, Wilson's thrush, Woodcock, Flicker.

FULL-STARR'D NIGHTS

May 2l.--Back in Camden. Again commencing one of those unusually transparent, full-starr'd, blue-black nights, as if to show that however lush and pompous the day may be, there is something left in the not-day that can outvie it. The rarest, finest sample of long-drawn-out clear-obscure, from sundown to 9 o'clock. I went down to the Delaware, and cross'd and cross'd. Venus like blazing silver well up in the west. The large pale thin crescent of the new moon, half an hour high, sinking languidly under a bar-sinister of cloud, and then emerging. Arcturus right overhead. A faint fragrant sea-odor wafted up from the south. The gloaming, the temper'd coolness, with every feature of the scene, indescribably soothing and tonic--one of those hours that give hints to the soul, impossible to put in a statement. (Ah, where would be any food for spirituality without night and the stars?) The vacant spaciousness of the air, and the veil'd blue of the heavens, seem'd miracles enough.

As the night advanc'd it changed its spirit and garments to ampler stateliness. I was almost conscious of a definite presence, Nature silently near. The great constellation of the Water-Serpent stretch'd its coils over more than half the heavens. The Swan with outspread wings was flying down the Milky Way. The northern Crown, the Eagle, Lyra, all up there in their places. From the whole dome shot down points of light, rapport with me, through the clear blue-black. All the usual sense of motion, all animal life, seem'd discarded, seem'd a fiction; a curious power, like the placid rest of Egyptian gods, took possession, none the less potent for being impalpable. Earlier I had seen many bats, balancing in the luminous twilight, darting their black forms hither and yon over the river; but now they altogether disappear'd. The evening star and the moon had gone. Alertness and peace lay camly couching together through the fluid universal shadows.

Aug. 26.--Bright has the day been, and my spirits an equal forzando. Then comes the night, different, inexpressibly pensive, with its own tender and temper'd splendor. Venus lingers in the west with a voluptuous dazzle unshown hitherto this summer. Mars rises early, and the red sulky moon, two days past her full; Jupiter at night's meridian, and the long curling-slanted Scorpion stretching full view in the south, Aretus-neck'd. Mars walks the heavens lord-paramount now; all through this month I go out after supper and watch for him; sometimes getting up at midnight to take another look at his unparallel'd lustre. (I see lately an astronomer has made out through the new Washington telescope that Mars has certainly one moon, perhaps two.) Pale and distant, but near in the heavens, Saturn precedes him.

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 cluster-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 orb 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 hoarser 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-shore, 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, grass, 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 grass, the sun shone out enough to show the shadow moving with me. Somehow I seem'd to get identity 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-class philosophy, beauty, heroism, form, illustrated by the old Hellenic 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 passes 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 grass, 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 pronouncedly the emotional part, that identity between himself subjectively and Nature objectively which Schelling 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 grass, 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?