Part 15

A flock of snow buntings will perform their aerial evolutions with a precision that the best-trained soldiery cannot equal. Have the birds an extra sense which we have not? A brood of young partridges in the woods will start up like an explosion, every brown particle and fragment hurled into the air at the same instant. Without word or signal, how is it done?

XII

LOVERS OF NATURE

We love nature with a different love at different periods of our lives. In youth our love is sensuous. It is not so much a conscious love as it is an irresistible attraction. The senses are keen and fresh, and they crave a field for their exercise. We delight in the color of flowers, the perfume of meadows and orchards, the moist, fresh smell of the woods. We eat the pungent roots and barks, we devour the wild fruits, we slay the small deer. Then nature also offers a field of adventure; it challenges and excites our animal spirits. The woods are full of game, the waters of fish; the river invites the oar, the breeze, the sail, the mountain-top promises a wide prospect. Hence the rod, the gun, the boat, the tent, the pedestrian club. In youth we are nearer the savage state, the primitive condition of mankind, and wild nature is our proper home. The transient color of the young bird points its remote ancestry, and the taste of youth for rude nature in like manner is the survival of an earlier race instinct.

Later in life we go to nature as an escape from the tension and turmoil of business, or for rest and recreation from study, or seeking solace from grief and disappointment, or as a refuge from the frivolity and hypocrisies of society. We lie under trees, we stroll through lanes, or in meadows and pastures, or muse on the shore. Nature "salves" our worst wounds; she heals and restores us.

Or we cultivate an intellectual pleasure in nature, and follow up some branch of natural science, as botany, or ornithology, or mineralogy.

Then there is the countryman's love of nature, the pleasure in cattle, horses, bees, growing crops, manual labor, sugar-making, gardening, harvesting, and the rural quietness and repose.

Lastly, we go to nature for solitude and for communion with our own souls. Nature attunes us to a higher and finer mood. This love springs from our religious needs and instincts. This was the love of Thoreau, of Wordsworth, and has been the inspiration of much modern poetry and art.

Dr. Johnson said he had lived in London so long that he had ceased to note the changes of the seasons. But Dr. Johnson was not a lover of Nature. Of that feeling for the country of which Wordsworth's poetry, for instance, is so full, he probably had not a vestige. Think of Wordsworth shut up year in and year out—in the city! That lover of shepherds, of mountains, of lonely tarns, of sounding waterfalls,

"Who looked upon the hills with tenderness, And made dear friendships with the streams and groves."

Dr. Johnson's delight was in men and in verbal fisticuffs with them, but Wordsworth seems to have loved Nature more than men; at least he was drawn most to those men who lived closest to Nature and were more a part of her. Thus he says he loved shepherds, "dwellers in the valleys,"

"Not verily For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills Where was their occupation and abode."

Your real lover of nature does not love merely the beautiful things which he culls here and there; he loves the earth itself, the faces of the hills and mountains, the rocks, the streams, the naked trees no less than the leafy trees,—a plowed field no less than a green meadow. He does not know what it is that draws him. It is not beauty, any more than it is beauty in his father and mother that makes him love them. It is "something far more deeply interfused,"—something native and kindred that calls to him. In certain moods how good the earth, the soil, seems! One wants to feel it with his hands and smell it—almost taste it. Indeed, I never see a horse eat soil and sods without a feeling that I would like to taste it too. The rind of the earth, of this "round and delicious globe" which has hung so long upon the great Newtonian tree, ripening in the sun, must be sweet.

I recall an Irish girl lately come to this country, who worked for us, and who, when I dug and brought to the kitchen the first early potatoes, felt them, and stroked them with her hand, and smelled them, and was loath to lay them down, they were so full of suggestion of the dear land and home she had so lately left. I suppose it was a happy surprise to her to find that the earth had the same fresh, moist smell here that it had in Ireland, and yielded the same crisp tubers. The canny creature had always worked in the fields, and the love of the soil and of homely country things was deep in her heart. Another emigrant from over the seas, a laboring man, confined to the town, said to me in his last illness, that he believed he would get well if he could again walk in the fields. A Frenchman who fled the city and came to the country said, with an impressive gesture, that he wanted to be where he could see the blue sky over his head.

These little incidents are but glints or faint gleams of that love of Nature to which I would point,—an affection for the country itself, and not a mere passing admiration for its beauties. A great many people admire Nature; they write admiring things about her; they apostrophize her beauties; they describe minutely pretty scenes here and there; they climb mountains to see the sun set, or the sun rise, or make long journeys to find waterfalls, but Nature's real lover listens to their enthusiasm with coolness and indifference. Nature is not to be praised or patronized. You cannot go to her and describe her; she must speak through your heart. The woods and fields must melt into your mind, dissolved by your love for them. Did they not melt into Wordsworth's mind? They colored all his thoughts; the solitude of those green, rocky Westmoreland fells broods over every page. He does not tell us how beautiful he finds Nature, and how much he enjoys her; he makes us share his enjoyment.

Richard Jefferies was probably as genuine a lover of Nature as was Wordsworth, but he had not the same power to make us share his enjoyment. His page is sometimes wearisome from mere description and enumeration. He is rarely interpretative; the mood, the frame of mind, which Nature herself begets, he seldom imparts to us. What we finally love in Nature is ourselves, some suggestion of the human spirit, and no labored description or careful enumeration of details will bring us to this.

"Nor do words Which practiced talent readily affords, Prove that her hand has touched responsive chords."

It has been aptly said that Jefferies was a reporter of genius, but that he never (in his nature books) got beyond reporting. His "Wild Life" reads like a kind of field newspaper; he puts in everything, he is diligent and untiring, but for much of it one cares very little after he is through. For selecting and combining the things of permanent interest so as to excite curiosity and impart charm, he has but little power.

The passion for Nature is by no means a mere curiosity about her, or an itching to portray certain of her features; it lies deeper and is probably a form of, or closely related to, our religious instincts. When you go to Nature, bring us good science or else good literature, and not a mere inventory of what you have seen. One demonstrates, the other interprets.

Observation is selective and detective. A real observation begets warmth and joy in the mind. To see things in detail as they lie about you and enumerate them is not observation; but to see the significant things, to seize the quick movement and gesture, to disentangle the threads of relation, to know the nerves that thrill from the cords that bind, or the typical and vital from the commonplace and mechanical—that is to be an observer. In Thoreau's "Walden" there is observation; in the Journals published since his death there is close and patient scrutiny, but only now and then anything that we care to know. Considering that Thoreau spent half of each day for upward of twenty years in the open air, bent upon spying out Nature's ways and doings, it is remarkable that he made so few real observations.

Yet how closely he looked! He even saw that mysterious waving line which one may sometimes note in little running brooks. "I see stretched from side to side of this smooth brook where it is three or four feet wide what seems to indicate an invisible waving line, like a cobweb against which the water is heaped up a very little. This line is constantly swayed to and fro, as if by the current or wind, bellying forward here and there. I try repeatedly to catch and break it with my hand and let the water run free, but still to my surprise I clutch nothing but fluid, and the imaginary line keeps its place."

A little closer scrutiny would have shown him that this waving water line was probably caused in some way by the meeting of two volumes or currents of water.

The most novel and interesting observation I can now recall is his discovery of how the wild apple-tree in the pastures triumphs over the browsing cattle, namely, by hedging itself about by a dense thorny growth, keeping the cows at arm's length as it were, and then sending up a central shoot beyond their reach.

One of the most acute observations Thoreau's Journals contain is not upon nature at all, but upon the difference between men and women "in respect to the adornment of their heads:" "Do you ever see an old or jammed bonnet on the head of a woman at a public meeting? But look at any assembly of men with their hats on; how large a proportion of the hats will be old, weather-beaten, and indented; but, I think, so much more picturesque and interesting. One farmer rides by my door in a hat which it does me good to see, there is so much character in it, so much independence, to begin with, and then affection for his old friends, etc., etc. I should not wonder if there were lichens on it. . . . Men wear their hats for use, women theirs for ornament. I have seen the greatest philosopher in the town with what the traders would call a 'shocking bad hat' on, but the woman whose bonnet does not come up to the mark is at best a blue-stocking."

So clever an observation upon anything in nature as that is hard to find in the Journals.

To observe is to discriminate and take note of all the factors.

One day while walking in my vineyard, lamenting the damage the storm of yesterday had wrought in it, my ear caught, amid the medley of other sounds and songs, an unfamiliar bird-note from the air overhead. Gradually it dawned upon my consciousness that this was not the call of any of our native birds, but of a stranger. Looking steadily in the direction the sound came, after some moments I made out the form of a bird flying round and round in a large circle high in air, and momentarily uttering its loud sharp call. The size, the shape, the manner, and the voice of the bird were all strange. In a moment I knew it to be an English skylark, apparently adrift and undecided which way to go. Finally it seemed to make up its mind, and then bore away to the north. My ear had been true to its charge.

The man who told me that some of our birds took an earth bath, and some of them a water bath, and a few of them took both, had looked closer into this matter than I had. The sparrows usually earth their plumage, but the English sparrow does both. The farm boy who told a naturalist a piece of news about the turtles, namely, that the reason why we never see any small turtles about the fields is because for two or three years the young turtles bury themselves in the ground and keep quite hidden from sight, had used his eyes to some purpose. This was a real observation.