Part 7

The morning sun strikes aslant through the wood, illuminating the trunks of the trees, especially a cluster of white birches. A lovely sisterhood! I can hardly take my eyes from them. In general all the leaves are motionless, but now and then a tree, or it may be a group of two or three at once, is jostled for an instant by a touch too soft for my coarser human apprehension. “Dee-dee,” says a titmouse; “Here,” answers a flicker. But both speak under their breath, as if they felt the spell of the hour. Listen! was that a hyla or a bird? There is no telling, so elusive and so distant-seeming was the sound. And anon it has ceased altogether.

Now, for the smallest fraction of a second, I see the flash of a moving shadow. The flicker’s, perhaps. Yes, for presently he calls as in spring, but only for four or five notes. If it were April, with the vernal inspiration in his throat, there would be four or five times as many, and all the woods would be ringing. And now the breeze freshens, and the leaves make a chorus. No thrush’s song could be sweeter. It is not a rustle. There is no word for it, unless we call it a murmur, a rumor. Even while we are trying to name it, it is gone. Leaves are true Friends, they speak only as the spirit moves. “Wicker, wicker,” says the woodpecker, and his voice is in perfect tune with the silence.

How still and happy the boulders look, with friendly bushes and ferns gathered about them, and parti-colored lichens giving them tones of beauty! Men call them dead. “Dead as a stone,” has even passed into a proverb. “Stone dead,” we say. But I doubt. They would smile, inwardly, I think to hear us. We have small idea, the wisest of us, what we mean by life and death. Men who hurry to and fro, scraping money together or chasing a ball, consider themselves alive. The trees, and even the stones, know better.

Yes, that is a crow, cawing; but far, far off. Distance softens sound as it softens the landscape, and as time, which is only another kind of distance, softens grief. A cricket at my elbow plays his tune, irregularly and slowly. The low temperature slackens his tempo. Now he is done. There is only the stirring of leaves. Some of the birch leaves, I see, are already turning yellow, and once in a while, as the wind whispers to one of them, it lets go its hold and drops. “Good-by,” I seem to hear it say; “my summer is done.” How tenderly the air lets it down, as loving arms lower a child to its burial. Yet the trees are still happy. And so am I. The wood has blessed me. I have sensations, but no thoughts. It is for this that I have been sitting here at this silent concert. I wish for nothing. The best that such an hour can do for us is to put us into a mood of desirelessness, of complete passivity; such a mood as mystics covet for a permanent possession; a state of surrender, selflessness, absorption in the infinite. I love the feeling. All the trees have it, I think.

So I sit in their shadow, my eyes returning again and again to those dazzling white birch boles, where loose shreds of filmy bark twinkle as the breeze and the sunlight play upon them. Once two or three chickadees come into the branches over my head and whisper things to each other. Very simple their utterances sound, but perhaps if I could understand them I should know more than all the mystics.

SOUTHWARD BOUND

Although it is the 20th of September, the autumnal migration of birds, as seen in this neighborhood, is still very light. Robins are scattered throughout the woods in loose flocks--a state of things not to be witnessed in summer or winter; the birds rising singly from the ground as the walker disturbs them, sometimes all silent, at other times all cackling noisily. Chickadees, too, are in flocks, cheerful companies, good to meet in any weather; behaving just as they will continue to do until the nesting season again breaks the happy assembly up into happier pairs.

My wood pewee--a particular bird in a grove near by--whistled pretty constantly till the 17th, and a warbling vireo was still true to his name on the 19th. I have heard no yellow-throated vireos since the 6th, and conclude that they must have taken their departure. May joy go with them. This morning, for the first time in several weeks, a pine warbler was trilling. Song sparrows have grown numerous within a few days, but are almost entirely silent. One fellow sang his regular song--not his confused autumnal warble--on the 19th. I had not heard it before since the month opened.

No blackpoll warblers showed themselves with me till the 18th, though I had word of their presence elsewhere a few days earlier. On that day I saw three; yesterday and to-day have shown but one bird each. The movement is barely begun.

I should like to know how common it is for blackpolls to sing on their southward migration. Eleven years ago, in September, 1889, they came very early,--or I had the good fortune to see them very early,--and on the 4th and 5th of the month a few were “in full song,” so my notes record, “quite as long and full as in May.” I had never heard them sing before in autumn, nor have I ever had that pleasure since. Neither have I ever again seen them so early. Probably the two things--the song and the exceptional date--were somehow connected. At the time, I took the circumstance as an indication that the adult males migrate in advance of the great body of the species; and I fancied that, having detected them once thus early and thus musical, I should be likely to repeat the experience. If I am ever to do so, however, I must be about it. Eleven years is a large slice out of an adult man’s remaining allowance.

On the 18th I found a single olive-backed thrush, silent, in company with a flock of robins, or in the same grove with them--a White Mountain bird, thrice welcome; and this morning a few white-throated sparrows appeared. The first one that I saw--the only one, in fact--was a young fellow, and as I caught sight of him facing me, with his clear white throat, and his breast prettily streaked, with a wash of color across it, I was half in doubt what to call him. While I was taking observations upon his plumage, trying to make him look like himself, he began to chip, as if to help me out, and a second one unseen fell to singing near by; a very feeble and imperfect rendering of the dear old tune, but well marked by the “Peabody” triplets. It was a true touch of autumn, a voice from the hills.

Shortly before this I had spent a long time in watching the actions of a Lincoln finch. He was feeding upon Roman worm-wood seeds by the roadside, in company with two or three chipping sparrows; very meek and quiet in his demeanor, and happily not disposed to resent my inquisitiveness, which I took pains to render as little offensive as possible. I had not seen the like of him since May, and have seen so few of his race at any time that every new one still makes for me an hour of agreeable excitement.

In the same neighborhood an indigo-bird surprised me with a song. He was as badly out of voice as the white-throat, but his spirit was good, and he sang several times over. One would never have expected music from him, to look at his plumage. The indigo color was largely moulted away--only the rags of it left. It was really pitiful to see him; so handsome a coat, now nothing but shreds and patches. Most likely he was not a traveler from farther north, but a lingering summer resident of our own, as I remember to have seen three birds of his name in the same spot fifteen days ago. It would be interesting to know whether bright creatures of this kind do not feel humiliated and generally unhappy when they find their beauty dropping away from them, like leaves from the branch, as the summer wanes.

The best bird of the month, so far,--better even than the Lincoln finch,--was a Philadelphia vireo, happened upon all unexpectedly on the 17th. I had stopped, as I always do in passing, to look down into a certain dense thicket of shrubbery, through which a brook runs, a favorite resort for birds of many kinds. At first the place seemed to be empty, but in answer to some curiosity-provoking noises on my part a water thrush started up to balance himself on a branch directly under my nose, and the next moment a vireo hopped into full sight just beyond him; a vireo with plain back and wings, with no dark lines bordering the crown, and having the under parts of a bright yellow. He was most obliging; indeed, he could hardly have been more so, unless he had sung for me, and that was something not fairly to be expected. For a good while he kept silence. Then, in response to a jay’s scream, he began snarling, or complaining, after the family manner. I enjoyed the sight of him as long as I could stay (he was the second one I had ever seen with anything like certainty), and when I returned, an hour later, he was still there, and still willing to be looked at.

And then, to heighten my pleasure, a rose-breasted grosbeak, invisible, but not far away, broke into a strain of most entrancing music; with no more than half his spring voice, to be sure, but with all his May sweetness of tone and inflection. Again and again he sang, as if he were too happy to stop. I had heard nothing of the kind for weeks, and shall probably hear nothing more for months. It was singing to be remembered, like Sembrich’s “Casta Diva,” or Nilsson’s “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

Scarlet tanagers are still heard and seen occasionally,--one was calling to-day,--but none of them in tune, or wearing so much as a single scarlet feather. Here and there, too, as we wander about the woods, we meet--once in two or three days, perhaps--a lonesome-acting, silent red-eyed vireo. A great contrast there is between such solitary lingerers and the groups of gossiping chickadees that one falls in with in the same places; so merry-hearted, so bubbling over with high spirits, so ready to be neighborly. When I whistle to them, and they whistle back, I feel myself befriended.

Within a few days we must have the grand September influx of warblers--crowds of blackpolls, myrtles, black-throated greens, and many more. For two months yet the procession will be passing.

FOUR DREAMERS

I remember the first man I ever saw sitting still by himself out-of-doors. What his name was I do not know. I never knew. He was a stranger, who came to visit in our village when I was perhaps ten years old. I had crossed a field, and gone over a low hill (not so low then as now), and there, in the shade of an apple tree, I beheld this stranger, not fishing, nor digging, nor eating an apple, nor picking berries, nor setting snares, but sitting still. It was almost like seeing a ghost. I doubt if I was ever the same boy afterward. Here was a new kind of man. I wondered if he was a poet! Even then I think I had heard that poets sometimes acted strangely, and saw things invisible to others’ ken.

I should not have been surprised, I suppose, to have found a man looking at a picture, some “nice,” high-colored “chromo,” such as was a fashionable parlor ornament in our rural neighborhood, where there was more theology to the square foot (and no preacher then extant with orthodoxy strait enough to satisfy it, though some could still make the blood curdle) than there was of art or poetry to the square acre; but to be looking at Nat Shaw’s hayfield and the old unpainted house beyond--that marked the stranger at once as not belonging in the ranks of common men. If he was not a poet, he must be at least a scholar. Perhaps he was going to be a minister, for he seemed too young to be one already. A minister had to think, of course (so I thought then), else how could he preach? and perhaps this man was meditating a sermon. I fancied I should like to hear a sermon that had been studied out-of-doors.

Times have changed with me. Now I sit out-of-doors myself, and by myself, and look for half an hour together at a tree, or a bunch of trees, or a lazy brook, or a stretch of green meadow. And I know that such things can be enjoyed by one who is neither a poet nor a preacher, but just a quite ordinary, uneducated mortal, who happens, by the grace of God, to have had his eyes opened to natural beauty and his heart made sensitive to the delights of solitude. I have learned that it is possible to enjoy scenery at home as well as abroad,--scenery without mountains or waterfalls; scenery that no tourist would call “fine;” a bit of green valley, an ancient apple orchard, a woodland vista, an acre of marsh, a cattle pasture. In fact, I have observed that painters choose quiet subjects like these oftener than any of the more exceptional and stupendous manifestations of nature. Perhaps it is because such subjects are easier; but I suspect not. I suspect, indeed, that they are harder, and are preferred because, to the painter’s eye, they are more permanently beautiful.

At this very moment I am looking at a patch of meadow inclosing a shallow pool of standing water, over the surface of which a high wind is chasing little waves. A few low alders are near it, and the grass is green all about. That of itself is a sight to make a man happy. For the world just now is consumed with drought. All the uplands are sere, and every roadside bush is begrimed with dust. I have come through the woods to this convenient knoll on purpose to find relief from the prevailing desolation--to rest my eyes upon green grass. For the eye loves green grass as well, almost, as the throat loves cold water.

Even in my boyish country neighborhood, though nobody, or nobody that I knew (which may have been a very different matter), did what I am now doing, there were some, I think (one or two, at least), who in their own way indulged much the same tastes that I have come to felicitate myself upon possessing. I remember one man, dead long since, who was continually walking the fields and woods, always with a spaniel at his heels, alone except for that company. He often carried a gun, and in autumn he snared partridges (how I envied him his skill!); but I believe, as I look back, that best and first of all he must have loved the woods and the silence. He was supposed to have his faults. No doubt he had. I have since discovered that most men are in the same category. I believe he used to “drink,” as our word was then. But I think now that I should have liked to know him, and should have found him congenial, if I had been mature enough, and could have got below the protective crust which naturally grows over a man whose ways of life and thought are different from those of all the people about him. I have little question that when he was out of the sight of the world he was accustomed to sit as I do to-day, and look and look and dream.

One thing he did not dream of,--that a boy to whom he had never spoken would be thinking of him forty years after he had taken his last ramble and snared his last grouse.

“An idler,” said his busier neighbors, though he earned his own living and paid his own scot.

“A misspent life,” said the clergy, though he harmed no one.

But who can tell? “Who knoweth the interpretation of a thing?” Perhaps his, also, was--for him--a good philosophy. As one of the ancients said, “A man’s mind is wont to tell him more than seven men that sit upon a tower.” If we are not born alike, why should we be bound to live alike? “A handful with quietness” is not so bad a portion.

Yes, but time is precious. Time once past never returns.