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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's
Life & Writings
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Autumnal Tints
by Henry D. Thoreau
Europeans coming to
America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal
foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English
poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there.
The most that Thomson says on this subject in his
"Autumn" is contained in the lines,—
But
see the fading many-colored woods,
Shade
deepening over shade, the country round
Imbrown;
a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun,
Of
every hue, from wan declining green to sooty dark:—
and the line in which
he speaks of
Autumn
beaming o’er the yellow woods.
The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep
impression on our own literature yet. October has hardly
tinged our poetry.
A great many,
who have spent their lives in cities, and have never chanced
to come into the country at this season, have never seen this,
the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember
riding with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late
for the most brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would
not believe that there had been any brighter. He had never
heard of this phenomenon before. Not only many in our towns
have never witnessed it, but it is scarcely remembered by the
majority from year to year.
Most appear
to confound changed leaves with withered ones, as if they were
to confound ripe apples with rotten ones. I think that the
change to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it
has arrived at a late and perfect maturity, answering to the
maturity of fruits. It is generally the lowest and oldest
leaves which change first. But as the perfect winged and
usually bright-colored insect is short-lived, so the leaves
ripen but to fall.
Generally,
every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it
commences a more independent and individual existence,
requiring less nourishment from any source, and that not so
much from the earth through its stem as from the sun and air,
acquires a bright tint. So do leaves. The physiologist says it
is "due to an increased absorption of oxygen." That
is the scientific account of the matter,—only a reassertion
of the fact. But I am more interested in the rosy cheek than I
am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on. The very
forest and herbage, the pellicle of the earth, must acquire a
bright color, an evidence of its ripeness,—as if the globe
itself were a fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the
sun.
Flowers are
but colored leaves, fruits but ripe ones. The edible part of
most fruits is, as the physiologist says, "the parenchyma
or fleshy tissue of the leaf" of which they are formed.
Our appetites
have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its
phenomena, color, mellowness, and perfectness, to the fruits
which we eat, and we are wont to forget that an immense
harvest which we do not eat, hardly use at all, is annually
ripened by Nature. At our annual Cattle Shows and
Horticultural Exhibitions, we make, as we think, a great show
of fair fruits, destined, however, to a rather ignoble end,
fruits not valued for their beauty chiefly. But round about
and within our towns there is annually another show of fruits,
on an infinitely grander scale, fruits which address our taste
for beauty alone.
October is
the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round
the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a
bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its
setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later
twilight.
I formerly
thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen
leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant,
when it had acquired its brightest characteristic color, in
its transition from the green to the brown state, outline it,
and copy its color exactly, with paint, in a book, which
should be entitled, "October, or Autumnal
Tints";—beginning with the earliest
reddening,—Woodbine and the lake of radical leaves, and
coming down through the Maples, Hickories, and Sumacs, and
many beautifully freckled leaves less generally known, to the
latest Oaks and Aspens. What a memento such a book would be!
You would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble
through the autumn woods whenever you pleased. Or if I could
preserve the leaves themselves, unfaded, it would be better
still. I have made but little progress toward such a book, but
I have endeavored, instead, to describe all these bright tints
in the order in which they present themselves. The following
are some extracts from my notes.
The
Purple Grasses
By the twentieth of August, everywhere in woods and swamps, we
are reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted
sarsaparilla-leaves and brakes, and the withering and
blackened skunk-cabbage and hellebore, and, by the river-side,
the already blackening pontederia.
The purple
grass (Eragrostis pectinacea) is now in the height of
its beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass
particularly. Standing on a hill-side near our river, I saw,
thirty or forty rods off, a stripe of purple half a dozen rods
long, under the edge of a wood, where the ground sloped toward
a meadow. It was as high-colored and interesting, though not
quite so bright, as the patches of rhexia, being a darker
purple, like a berry’s stain laid on close and thick. On
going to and examining it, I found it to be a kind of grass in
bloom, hardly a foot high, with but few green blades, and a
fine spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish
mist trembling around me. Close at hand it appeared but a dull
purple, and made little impression on the eye; it was even
difficult to detect; and if you plucked a single plant, you
were surprised to find how thin it was, and how little color
it had. But viewed at a distance in a favorable light, it was
of a fine lively purple, flower-like, enriching the earth.
Such puny causes combine to produce these decided effects. I
was the more surprised and charmed because grass is commonly
of a sober and humble color.
With its
beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the place,
of the rhexia, which is now leaving off, and it is one of the
most interesting phenomena of August. The finest patches of it
grow on waste strips or selvages of land at the base of dry
hills, just above the edge of the meadows, where the greedy
mower does not deign to swing his scythe; for this is a thin
and poor grass, beneath his notice. Or, it may be, because it
is so beautiful he does not know that it exists; for the same
eye does not see this and timothy. He carefully gets the
meadow hay and the more nutritious grasses which grow next to
that, but he leaves this fine purple mist for the walker’s
harvest,—fodder for his fancy stock. Higher up the hill,
perchance, grow also blackberries, John’s-Wort, and
neglected, withered, and wiry June-grass. How fortunate that
it grows in such places, and not in the midst of the rank
grasses which are annually cut! Nature thus keeps use and
beauty distinct. I know many such localities, where it does
not fail to present itself annually, and paint the earth with
its blush. It grows on the gentle slopes, either in a
continuous patch or in scattered and rounded tufts a foot in
diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by the first smart
frosts.
In most
plants the corolla or calyx is the part which attains the
highest color, and is the most attractive; in many it is the
seed-vessel or fruit; in others, as the red maple, the leaves;
and in others still it is the very culm itself which is the
principal flower or blooming part.
The last is
especially the case with the poke or garget (Phytolacca
decandra). Some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle
me with their purple stems now and early in September. They
are as interesting to me as most flowers, and one of the most
important fruits of our autumn. Every part is flower (or
fruit), such is its superfluity of color,—stem, branch,
peduncle, pedicel, petiole, and even the at length yellowish
purple-veined leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of berries of
various hues, from green to dark purple, six or seven inches
long, are gracefully drooping on all sides, offering repasts
to the birds; and even the sepals from which the birds have
picked the berries are a brilliant lake-red, with crimson
flame-like reflections, equal to anything of the kind,—all
on fire with ripeness. Hence the lacca, from lac,
lake. There are at the same time flower-buds, flowers, green
berries, dark purple or ripe ones, and these flower-like
sepals, all on the same plant.
We love to
see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is
the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a
bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it
must be seen at this season of the year. On warm hill-sides
its stems are ripe by the twenty-third of August. At that date
I walked through a beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet
high, on the side of one of our cliffs, where they ripen
early. Quite to the ground they were a deep brilliant purple
with a bloom, contrasting with the still clear green leaves.
It appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and
perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer.
What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a
successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is
an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly,
root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the
poke! I confess that it excites me to behold them. I cut one
for a cane, for I would fain handle and lean on it. I love to
press the berries between my fingers, and see their juice
staining my hand. To walk amid these upright, branching casks
of purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow,
tasting each one with your eye, instead of counting the pipes
on a London dock, what a privilege! For Nature’s vintage is
not confined to the vine. Our poets have sung of wine, the
product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as
if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers.
Indeed, this has been called by some the American grape, and,
though a native of America, its juices are used in some
foreign countries to improve the color of the wine; so that
the poetaster may be celebrating the virtues of the poke
without knowing it. Here are berries enough to paint afresh
the western sky, and play the bacchanal with, if you will. And
what flutes its ensanguined stems would make, to be used in
such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend the
evening of the year musing amid the Poke-stems. And perchance
amid these groves might arise at last a new school of
philosophy or poetry. It lasts all through September.
At the same
time with this, or near the end of August, a to me very
interesting genus of grasses, andropogons, or beard-grasses,
is in its prime. Andropogon furcatus, forked
beard-grass, or call it purple-fingered grass; Andropogon
scoparius, purple wood-grass; and Andropogon (now
called Sorghum) nutans, Indian-grass. The first
is a very tall and slender-culmed grass, three to seven feet
high, with four or five purple finger-like spikes raying
upward from the top. The second is also quite slender, growing
in tufts two feet high by one wide, with culms often somewhat
curving, which, as the spikes go out of bloom, have a whitish
fuzzy look. These two are prevailing grasses at this season on
dry and sandy fields and hill-sides. The culms of both, not to
mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help
to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have the more
sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer,
and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored,
like ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did
not suggest. Only the August sun could have thus burnished
these culms and leaves. The farmer has long since done his
upland haying, and he will not condescend to bring his scythe
to where these slender wild grasses have at length flowered
thinly; you often see spaces of bare sand amid them. But I
walk encouraged between the tufts of purple wood-grass, over
the sandy fields, and along the edge of the shrub-oaks, glad
to recognize these simple contemporaries. With thoughts
cutting a broad swathe I "get" them, with
horse-raking thoughts I gather them into windrows. The
fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe. These two
were almost the first grasses that I learned to distinguish,
for I had not known by how many friends I was surrounded,—I
had seen them simply as grasses standing. The purple of their
culms also excites me like that of the poke-weed stems.
Think what
refuge there is for one, before August is over, from college
commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the
tufts of purple wood-grass on the borders of the "Great
Fields." Wherever I walk these afternoons, the
purple-fingered grass also stands like a guide-board, and
points my thoughts to more poetic paths than they have lately
travelled.
A man shall
perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his head,
and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have
cut many tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed
them to his cattle for years. Yet, if he ever favorably
attends to them, he may be overcome by their beauty. Each
humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to
express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it
stands in vain! I had walked over those Great Fields so many
Augusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these purple
companions that I had there. I had brushed against them and
trodden on them, forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were,
rose up and blessed me. Beauty and true wealth are always thus
cheap and despised. Heaven might be defined as the place which
men avoid. Who can doubt that these grasses, which the farmer
says are of no account to him, find some compensation in your
appreciation of them? I may say that I never saw them
before,—though, when I came to look them face to face, there
did come down to me a purple gleam from previous years; and
now, wherever I go, I see hardly anything else. It is the
reign and presidency of the andropogons.
Almost the
very sands confess the ripening influence of the August sun,
and methinks, together with the slender grasses waving over
them, reflect a purple tinge. The impurpled sands! Such is the
consequence of all this sunshine absorbed into the pores of
plants and of the earth. All sap or blood is now wine-colored.
At last we have not only the purple sea, but the purple land.
The chestnut
beard-grass, Indian-grass, or wood-grass, growing here and
there in waste places, but more rare than the former (from two
to four or five feet high), is still handsomer and of more
vivid colors than its congeners, and might well have caught
the Indian’s eye. It has a long, narrow, one-sided, and
slightly nodding panicle of bright purple and yellow flowers,
like a banner raised above its reedy leaves. These bright
standards are now advanced on the distant hill-sides, not in
large armies, but in scattered troops or single file, like the
red men. They stand thus fair and bright, representative of
the race which they are named after, but for the most part
unobserved as they. The expression of this grass haunted me
for a week, after I first passed and noticed it, like the
glance of an eye. It stands like an Indian chief taking a last
look at his favorite hunting-grounds.
The
Red Maple
By the twenty-fifth of September, the red maples generally are
beginning to be ripe. Some large ones have been conspicuously
changing for a week, and some single trees are now very
brilliant. I notice a small one, half a mile off across a
meadow, against the green wood-side there, a far brighter red
than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous.
I have observed this tree for several autumns invariably
changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens its
fruit earlier than another. It might serve to mark the season,
perhaps. I should be sorry, if it were cut down. I know of two
or three such trees in different parts of our town, which
might, perhaps, be propagated from, as early ripeners or
September trees, and their seed be advertised in the market,
as well as that of radishes, if we cared as much about them.
At present
these burning bushes stand chiefly along the edge of the
meadows, or I distinguish them afar on the hill-sides here and
there. Sometimes you will see many small ones in a swamp
turned quite crimson when all other trees around are still
perfectly green, and the former appear so much the brighter
for it. They take you by surprise, as you are going by on one
side, across the fields, thus early in the season, as if it
were some gay encampment of the red men, or other foresters,
of whose arrival you had not heard.
Some single
trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen against others of their
kind still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more
memorable than whole groves will be by-and-by. How beautiful,
when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe
juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all
aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more
remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for
miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred
but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity,
and get into the mythology at last.
The whole
tree thus ripening in advance of its fellows attains a
singular preëminence, and sometimes maintains it for a week
or two. I am thrilled at the sight of it, bearing aloft its
scarlet standard for the regiment of green-clad foresters
around, and I go half a mile out of my way to examine it. A
single tree becomes thus the crowning beauty of some meadowy
vale, and the expression of the whole surrounding forest is at
once more spirited for it.
A small red
maple has grown, perchance, far away at the head of some
retired valley, a mile from any road, unobserved. It has
faithfully discharged the duties of a maple there, all winter
and summer, neglected none of its economies, but added to its
stature in the virtue which belongs to a maple, by a steady
growth for so many months, never having gone gadding abroad,
and is nearer heaven than it was in the spring. It has
faithfully husbanded its sap, and afforded a shelter to the
wandering bird, has long since ripened its seeds and committed
them to the winds, and has the satisfaction of knowing,
perhaps, that a thousand little well-behaved maples are
already settled in life somewhere. It deserves well of
Mapledom. Its leaves have been asking it from time to time, in
a whisper, "When shall we redden?" And now, in this
month of September, this month of travelling, when men are
hastening to the sea-side, or the mountains, or the lakes,
this modest maple, still without budging an inch, travels in
its reputation,— runs up its scarlet flag on that hill-side,
which shows that it has finished its summer’s work before
all other trees, and withdraws from the contest. At the
eleventh hour of the year, the tree which no scrutiny could
have detected here when it was most industrious is thus, by
the tint of its maturity, by its very blushes, revealed at
last to the careless and distant traveller, and leads his
thoughts away from the dusty road into those brave solitudes
which it inhabits. It flashes out conspicuous with all the
virtue and beauty of a maple,—Acer rubrum. We may now
read its title, or rubric, clear. Its virtues,
not its sins, are as scarlet.
Notwithstanding the red maple is the most intense scarlet of
any of our trees, the sugar-maple has been the most
celebrated, and Michaux, in his "Sylva" does not
speak of the autumnal color of the former. About the second of
October, these trees, both large and small, are most
brilliant, though many are still green. In
"sprout-land" they seem to vie with one another, and
ever some particular one in the midst of the crowd will be of
a peculiarly pure scarlet, and by its more intense color
attract our eye even at a distance, and carry off the palm. A
large red maple swamp, when at the height of its change, is
the most obviously brilliant of all tangible things, where I
dwell, so abundant is this tree with us. It varies much both
in form and color. A great many are merely yellow, more
scarlet, others scarlet deepening into crimson, more red than
common. Look at yonder swamp of maples mixed with pines, at
the base of a pine-clad hill, a quarter of a mile off, so that
you get the full effect of the bright colors, without
detecting the imperfections of the leaves, and see their
yellow, scarlet, and crimson fires, of all tints, mingled and
contrasted with the green. Some maples are yet green, only
yellow or crimson-tipped on the edges of their flakes, like
the edges of a hazel-nut burr; some are wholly brilliant
scarlet, raying out regularly and finely every way,
bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf; others, of more
irregular form, when I turn my head slightly, emptying out
some of its earthiness and concealing the trunk of the tree,
seem to rest heavily flake on flake, like yellow and scarlet
clouds, wreath upon wreath, or like snow-drifts driving
through the air, stratified by the wind. It adds greatly to
the beauty of such a swamp at this season, that, even though
there may be no other trees interspersed, it is not seen as a
simple mass of color, but, different trees being of different
colors and hues, the outline of each crescent tree-top is
distinct, and where one laps on to another. Yet a painter
would hardly venture to make them thus distinct a quarter of a
mile off.
As I go
across a meadow directly toward a low rising ground this
bright afternoon, I see, some fifty rods off toward the sun,
the top of a maple swamp just appearing over the sheeny russet
edge of the hill, a stripe apparently twenty rods long by ten
feet deep, of the most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange,
and yellow, equal to any flowers or fruits, or any tints ever
painted. As I advance, lowering the edge of the hill which
makes the firm foreground or lower frame of the picture, the
depth of the brilliant grove revealed steadily increases,
suggesting that the whole of the inclosed valley is filled
with such color. One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers
of the town are not out to see what the trees mean by their
high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing that some
mischief is brewing. I do not see what the Puritans did at
this season when the maples blaze out in scarlet. They
certainly could not have worshipped in groves then. Perhaps
that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round
with horse-sheds for.
THE ELM
Now too, the first of October, or later, the elms are at the
height of their autumnal beauty, great brownish-yellow masses,
warm from their September oven, hanging over the highway.
Their leaves are perfectly ripe. I wonder if there is any
answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath
them. As I look down our street, which is lined with them,
they remind me both by their form and color of yellowing
sheaves of grain, as if the harvest had indeed come to the
village itself, and we might expect to find some maturity and flavor
in the thoughts of the villagers at last. Under those bright
rustling yellow piles just ready to fall on the heads of the
walkers, how can any crudity or greenness of thought or act
prevail? When I stand where half a dozen large elms droop over
a house, it is as if I stood within a ripe pumpkin-rind, and I
feel as mellow as if I were the pulp, though I may be somewhat
stringy and seedy withal. What is the late greenness of the
English elm, like a cucumber out of season, which does not
know when to have done, compared with the early and golden
maturity of the American tree? The street is the scene of a
great harvest-home. It would be worth the while to set out
these trees, if only for their autumnal value. Think of these
great yellow canopies or parasols held over our heads and
houses by the mile together, making the village all one and
compact,—an ulmarium, which is at the same time a
nursery of men! And then how gently and unobserved they drop
their burden and let in the sun when it is wanted, their
leaves not heard when they fall on our roofs and in our
streets; and thus the village parasol is shut up and put away!
I see the market-man driving into the village, and
disappearing under its canopy of elm-tops, with his
crop, as into a great granary or barn-yard. I am tempted to go
thither as to a husking of thoughts, now dry and ripe, and
ready to be separated from their integuments; but, alas! I
foresee that it will be chiefly husks and little thought,
blasted pig-corn, fit only for cob-meal,—for, as you sow, so
shall you reap.
FALLEN LEAVES
By the sixth of October the leaves generally begin to fall, in
successive showers, after frost or rain; but the principal
leaf-harvest, the acme of the Fall, is commonly about
the sixteenth. Some morning at that date there is perhaps a
harder frost than we have seen, and ice formed under the pump,
and now, when the morning wind rises, the leaves come down in
denser showers than ever. They suddenly form thick beds or
carpets on the ground, in this gentle air, or even without
wind, just the size and form of the tree above. Some trees, as
small hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves
instantaneously, as a soldier grounds arms at a signal; and
those of the hickory, being bright yellow still, though
withered, reflect a blaze of light from the ground where they
lie. Down they have come on all sides, at the first earnest
touch of autumn’s wand, making a sound like rain.
Or else it is
after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a fall
of leaves there has been in the night, though it may not yet
be the touch that loosens the rock-maple leaf. The streets are
thickly strewn with the trophies, and fallen elm-leaves make a
dark brown pavement under our feet. After some remarkably warm
Indian-summer day or days, I perceive that it is the unusual
heat which, more than anything, causes the leaves to fall,
there having been, perhaps, no frost nor rain for some time.
The intense heat suddenly ripens and wilts them, just as it
softens and ripens peaches and other fruits, and causes them
to drop.
The leaves of
late red maples, still bright, strew the earth, often
crimson-spotted on a yellow ground, like some wild
apples,—though they preserve these bright colors on the
ground but a day or two, especially if it rains. On causeways
I go by trees here and there all bare and smoke-like, having
lost their brilliant clothing; but there it lies, nearly as
bright as ever, on the ground on one side, and making nearly
as regular a figure as lately on the tree. I would rather say
that I first observe the trees thus flat on the ground like a
permanent colored shadow, and they suggest to look for the
boughs that bore them. A queen might be proud to walk where
these gallant trees have spread their bright cloaks in the
mud. I see wagons roll over them as a shadow or a reflection,
and the drivers heed them just as little as they did their
shadows before.
Birds’
nests, in the huckleberry and other shrubs, and in trees, are
already being filled with the withered leaves. So many have
fallen in the woods, that a squirrel cannot run after a
falling nut without being heard. Boys are raking them in the
streets, if only for the pleasure of dealing with such clean
crisp substances. Some sweep the paths scrupulously neat, and
then stand to see the next breath strew them with new
trophies. The swamp-floor is thickly covered, and the Lycopodium
lucidulum looks suddenly greener amid them. In dense woods
they half-cover pools that are three or four rods long. The
other day I could hardly find a well-known spring, and even
suspected that it had dried up, for it was completely
concealed by freshly fallen leaves; and when I swept them
aside and revealed it, it was like striking the earth, with
Aaron’s rod, for a new spring. Wet grounds about the edges
of swamps look dry with them. At one swamp, where I was
surveying, thinking to step on a leafy shore from a rail, I
got into the water more than a foot deep.
When I go to
the river the day after the principal fall of leaves, the
sixteenth, I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with
the leaves of the golden willow under which it is moored, and
I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I
empty it, it will be full again to-morrow. I do not regard
them as litter, to be swept out, but accept them as suitable
straw or matting for the bottom of my carriage. When I turn up
into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large fleets
of leaves are floating on its surface, as it were getting out
to sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a little
further up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the
water for a rod in width, under and amid the alders,
button-bushes, and maples, still perfectly light and dry, with
fibre unrelaxed; and at a rocky bend where they are met and
stopped by the morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and
dense crescent quite across the river. When I turn my prow
that way, and the wave which it makes strikes them, list what
a pleasant rustling from these dry substances grating on one
another! Often it is their undulation only which reveals the
water beneath them. Also every motion of the wood-turtle on
the shore is betrayed by their rustling there. Or even in
mid-channel, when the wind rises, I hear them blown with a
rustling sound. Higher up they are slowly moving round and
round in some great eddy which the river makes, as that at the
"Leaning Hemlocks," where the water is deep, and the
current is wearing into the bank.
Perchance, in
the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly calm
and full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream,
and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove where I
unexpectedly find myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like
fellow-voyagers, which seem to have the same purpose, or want
of purpose, with myself. See this great fleet of scattered
leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in this smooth river-bay,
each one curled up on every side by the sun’s skill, each
nerve a stiff spruce-knee,—like boats of hide, and of all
patterns, Charon’s boat probably among the rest, and some
with lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the
ancients, scarcely moving in the sluggish current,—like the
great fleets, the dense Chinese cities of boats, with which
you mingle on entering some great mart, some New York or
Canton, which we are all steadily approaching together. How
gently each has been deposited on the water! No violence has
been used towards them yet, though, perchance, palpitating
hearts were present at the launching. And painted ducks, too,
the splendid wood-duck among the rest, often come to sail and
float amid the painted leaves,—barks of a nobler model
still!
What
wholesome herb drinks are to be had in the swamps now! What
strong medicinal, but rich, scents from the decaying leaves!
The rain falling on the freshly dried herbs and leaves, and
filling the pools and ditches into which they have dropped
thus clean and rigid, will soon convert them into
tea,—green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of all degrees of
strength, enough to set all Nature a-gossiping. Whether we
drink them or not, as yet, before their strength is drawn,
these leaves, dried on great Nature’s coppers, are of such
various pure and delicate tints as might make the fame of
Oriental teas.
How they are
mixed up, of all species, oak and maple and chestnut and
birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect
husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is
thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere
grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees are
now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from
it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf’s
thickness to the depth of the soil. This is the beautiful way
in which Nature gets her muck, while I chaffer with this man
and that, who talks to me about sulpher and the cost of
carting. We are all the richer for their decay. I am more
interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in
the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields
and forests, on which the earth fattens. It keeps our
homestead in good heart.
For beautiful
variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not merely
the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that
we know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing
maple, the poison-sumac blazing its sins as scarlet, the
mulberry ash, the rich chrome-yellow of the poplars, the
brilliant red huckleberry, with which the hills’ backs are
painted, like those of sheep. The frost touches them, and,
with the slightest breath of returning day or jarring of
earth’s axle, see in what showers they come floating down!
The ground is all party-colored with them. But they still live
in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in
the forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount
higher in coming years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the
sap in the trees, and the sapling’s first fruits thus shed,
transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in after-years,
it has become the monarch of the forest.
It is
pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and
rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how
gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!—painted of a
thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they
troop to their last resting-place, light and frisky. They put
on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth,
selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence,
whispering all through the woods about it,— some choosing
the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering beneath, and
meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they rest
quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how
contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low,
resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford
nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to
flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the
time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in
immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,—with
such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they
do their hair and nails.
When the
leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk
in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here
are no lying nor vain epitaphs. What though you own no lot at
Mount Auburn? Your lot is surely cast somewhere in this vast
cemetery, which has been consecrated from of old. You need
attend no auction to secure a place. There is room enough
here. The loose-strife shall bloom and the huckleberry-bird
sing over your bones. The woodman and hunter shall be your
sextons, and the children shall tread upon the borders as much
as they will. Let us walk in the cemetery of the
leaves,—this is your true Greenwood Cemetery.
THE SUGAR MAPLE
But think not that the splendor of the year is over; for if
one leaf does not make a summer, neither does one fallen leaf
make an autumn. The smallest sugar maples in our streets make
a great show as early as the fifth of October, more than any
other trees there. As I look up the Main Street they appear
like painted screens standing before the houses; yet many are
green. But now, or generally by the seventeenth of October,
when almost all red maples, and some white maples are bare,
the large sugar maples also are in their glory, glowing with
yellow and red, and show unexpectedly bright and delicate
tints. They are remarkable for the contrast they often afford
of deep blushing red on one half and green on the other. They
become at length dense masses of rich yellow with a deep
scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the exposed surfaces.
They are the brightest trees now in the street.
The large
ones on our Common are particularly beautiful. A delicate, but
warmer than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with
scarlet cheeks. Yet, standing on the east side of the Common
just before sundown, when the western light is transmitted
through them, I see that their yellow even, compared with the
pale lemon yellow of an elm close by, amounts to a scarlet,
without noticing the bright scarlet portions. Generally, they
are great regular oval masses of yellow and scarlet. All the
sunny warmth of the season, the Indian summer, seems to be
absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and inmost leaves next
the bole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and green,
like the complexion of young men brought up in the house.
There is an auction on the Common to-day, but its red flag is
hard to be discerned amid this blaze of color.
Little did
the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success,
when they caused to be imported from farther in the country
some straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called
sugar maples; and, as I remember, after they were set out, a
neighboring merchant’s clerk, by way of jest, planted beans
about them. Those which were then jestingly called bean-poles
are to-day far the most beautiful objects noticeable in our
streets. They are worth all and more than they have
cost,—though one of the selectmen, while setting them out,
took the cold which occasioned his death,—if only because
they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich
color unstintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask them to
yield us sugar in the spring, while they afford us so fair a
prospect in the autumn. Wealth in-doors may be the inheritance
of few, but it is equally distributed on the Common. All
children alike can revel in this golden harvest.
Surely trees
should be set in our streets with a view to their October
splendor; though I doubt whether this is ever considered by
the "Tree Society." Do you not think it will make
some odds to these children that they were brought up under
the maples? Hundreds of eyes are steadily drinking in this
color, and by these teachers even the truants are caught and
educated the moment they step abroad. Indeed, neither the
truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the
schools. These are instead of the bright colors in
apothecaries’ shops and city windows. It is a pity that we
have no more red maples, and some hickories, in our
streets as well. Our paint-box is very imperfectly filled.
Instead of, or beside, supplying such paint-boxes as we do, we
might supply these natural colors to the young. Where else
will they study color under greater advantages? What School of
Design can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of painters
of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and
paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by
these autumnal colors. The stationer’s envelopes may be of
very various tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves
of a single tree. If you want a different shade or tint of a
particular color, you have only to look farther within or
without the tree or the wood. These leaves are not many dipped
in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they are dyed in light of
infinitely various degrees of strength, and left to set and
dry there.
Shall the
names of so many of our colors continue to be derived from
those of obscure foreign localities, as Naples yellow,
Prussian blue, raw Sienna, burnt Umber, Gamboge?— (surely
the Tyrian purple must have faded by this time)—or from
comparatively trivial articles of commerce,—chocolate,
lemon, coffee, cinnamon, claret?—(shall we compare our
hickory to a lemon, or a lemon to a hickory?)—or from ores
and oxides which few ever see? Shall we so often, when
describing to our neighbors the color of something we have
seen, refer them, not to some natural object in our
neighborhood, but perchance to a bit of earth fetched from the
other side of the planet, which possibly they may find at the
apothecary’s, but which probably neither they nor we ever
saw? Have we not an earth under our feet,—ay, and a
sky over our heads? Or is the last all ultramarine?
What do we know of sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, amber,
and the like,—most of us who take these names in vain? Leave
these precious words to cabinet-keepers, virtuosos, and
maids-of-honor, to the Nabobs, Begums, and Chobdars of
Hindostan, or wherever else. I do not see why, since America
and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves should
not compete with the precious stones in giving names to
colors; and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the
names of some of our trees and shrubs, as well as flowers,
will get into our popular chromatic nomenclature.
But of much
more importance than a knowledge of the names and distinctions
of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored
leaves excite. Already these brilliant trees throughout the
street, without any more variety, are at least equal to an
annual festival and holiday, or a week of such. These are
cheap and innocent gala-days, celebrated by one and all
without the aid of committees or marshals, such a show as may
safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers or rum-sellers,
nor requiring any special police to keep the peace. And poor
indeed must be that New England village’s October which has
not the Maple in its streets. This October festival costs no
powder, nor ringing of bells, but every tree is a living
liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags are waving.
No wonder
that we must have our annual cattle-show, and fall training,
and perhaps cornwallis, our September courts, and the like.
Nature herself holds her annual fair in October, not only in
the streets, but in every hollow and on every hill-side. When
lately we looked into that red-maple swamp all a-blaze, where
the trees were clothed in their vestures of most dazzling
tints, did it not suggest a thousand gypsies beneath,—a race
capable of wild delight,— or even the fabled fawns, satyrs,
and wood-nymphs come back to earth? Or was it only a
congregation of wearied wood-choppers, or of proprietors come
to inspect their lots, that we thought of? Or, earlier still,
when we paddled on the river through that fine-grained
September air, did there not appear to be something new going
on under the sparkling surface of the stream, a shaking of
props, at least, so that we made haste in order to be up in
time? Did not the rows of yellowing willows and button-bushes
on each side seem like rows of booths, under which, perhaps,
some fluviatile egg-pop equally yellow was effervescing? Did
not all these suggest that man’s spirits should rise as high
as Nature’s,—should hang out their flag, and the routine
of his life be interrupted by an analogous expression of joy
and hilarity?
No annual
training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs
and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of
the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the
trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored
drapery,—flags of all her nations, some of whose private
signals hardly the botanist can read,—while we walk under
the triumphal arches of the elms. Leave it to Nature to
appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring States or
not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can
understand them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her
woodbine flag! What public-spirited merchant, think you, has
contributed this part of the show? There is no handsomer
shingling and paint than this vine, at present covering a
whole side of some houses. I do not believe that the Ivy never
sear is comparable to it. No wonder it has been
extensively introduced into London. Let us have a good many
maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze
away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all
the colors a village can display? A village is not complete,
unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are
important, like the town-clock. A village that has them not
will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an
essential part is wanting. Let us have willows for spring,
elms for summer, maples and walnuts and tupeloes for autumn,
evergreens for winter, and oaks for all seasons. What is a
gallery in a house to a gallery in the streets, which every
market-man rides through, whether he will or not? Of course,
there is not a picture-gallery in the country which would be
worth so much to us as is the western view at sunset under the
elms of our main street. They are the frame to a picture which
is daily painted behind them. An avenue of ems as large as our
largest and three miles long would seem to lead to some
admirable place, though only C——— were at the end of it.
A village
needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering
prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two
villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the
glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treeless
waste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I
shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most
starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate
drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone will be
exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their
barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I
shall look to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to
accept the most barren and forlorn doctrine,—as that the
world is speedily coming to an end, or has already got to it,
or that they themselves are turned wrong side outward. They
will perchance crack their dry joints at one another and call
it a spiritual communication.
But to
confine ourselves to the maples. What if we were to take half
as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them
out,—not stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia stems?
What meant
the fathers by establishing this perfectly living
institution before the church,—this institution which needs
no repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and
repaired by its growth? Surely they
Wrought
in a sad sincerity;
Themselves
from God they could not free;
They
planted better than they knew;—
The
conscious trees to beauty grew.
Verily these maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled,
which preach their half-century, and century, ay, and
century-and-a-half sermons, with constantly increasing unction
and influence, ministering to many generations of men; and the
least we can do is to supply them with suitable colleagues as
they grow infirm.
THE SCARLET OAK
Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful
form of its leaves, I suspect that some scarlet oak leaves
surpass those of all other oaks in the rich and wild beauty of
their outlines. I judge from an acquaintance with twelve
species, and from drawings which I have seen of many others.
Stand under
this tree and see how finely its leaves are cut against the
sky,—as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a
midrib. They look like double, treble, or quadruple crosses.
They are far more ethereal than the less deeply scalloped oak
leaves. They have so little leafy terra firma that they
appear melting away in the light, and scarcely obstruct our
view. The leaves of very young plants are, like those of
full-grown oaks of other species, more entire, simple, and
lumpish in their outlines; but these, raised high on old
trees, have solved the leafy problem. Lifted higher and
higher, and sublimated more and more, putting off some
earthiness and cultivating more intimacy with the light each
year, they have at length the least possible amount of earthy
matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of skyey influences.
There they dance, arm in arm with the light,—tripping it on
fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial halls. So
intimately mingled are they with it, that, what with their
slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at
last what in the dance is leaf and what is light. And when no
zephyr stirs, they are at most but a rich tracery to the
forest-windows.
I am again
struck with their beauty, when, a month later, they thickly
strew the ground in the woods, piled one upon another under my
feet. They are then brown above, but purple beneath. With
their narrow lobes and their bold deep scollops reaching
almost to the middle, they suggest that the material must be
cheap, or else there has been a lavish expense in their
creation, as if so much had been cut out. Or else they seem to
us the remnants of the stuff out of which leaves have been cut
with a die. Indeed, when they lie thus one upon another, they
remind me of a pile of scrap-tin.
Or bring one
home, and study it closely at your leisure, by the fireside.
It is a type, not from any Oxford font, not in the Basque nor
the arrow-headed character, not found on the Rosetta Stone,
but destined to be copied in sculpture one day, if they ever
get to whittling stone here. What a wild and pleasing outline,
a combination of graceful curves and angles! The eye rests
with equal delight on what is not leaf and on what is
leaf,—on the broad, free, open sinuses, and on the long,
sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple oval outline would
include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf; but
how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep
scallops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are
embayed! If I were a drawing-master, I would set my pupils to
copying these leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and
gracefully.
Regarded as
water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded
promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each
side, while its watery bays extend far inland, like sharp
friths, at each of whose heads several fine streams empty
in,—almost a leafy archipelago.
But it
oftener suggests land, and, as Dionysius and Pliny compared
the form of the Morea to that of the leaf of the Oriental
plane-tree, so this leaf reminds me of some fair wild island
in the ocean, whose extensive coast, alternate rounded bays
with smooth strands, and sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as
fitted for the habitation of man, and destined to become a
centre of civilization at last. To the sailor’s eye, it is a
much-indented shore. Is it not, in fact, a shore to the aerial
ocean, on which the windy surf beats? At sight of this leaf we
are all mariners,—if not vikings, buccaneers, and
filibusters. Both our love of repose and our spirit of
adventure are addressed. In our most casual glance, perchance,
we think, that, if we succeed in doubling those sharp capes,
we shall find deep, smooth, and secure havens in the ample
bays. How different from the white-oak leaf, with its rounded
headlands, on which no light-house need be placed! That is an
England, with its long civil history, that may be read. This
is some still unsettled New-found Island or Celebes. Shall we
go and be rajahs there?
By the
twenty-sixth of October the large scarlet oaks are in their
prime, when other oaks are usually withered. They have been
kindling their fires for a week past, and now generally burst
into a blaze. This alone of our indigenous deciduous
trees (excepting the dogwood, of which I do not know half a
dozen, and they are but large bushes) is now in its glory. The
two Aspens and the sugar maple come nearest to it in date, but
they have lost the greater part of their leaves. Of
evergreens, only the pitch-pine is still commonly bright.
But it
requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these
phenomena, to appreciate the wide-spread, but late and
unexpected glory of the scarlet oaks. I do not speak here of
the small trees and shrubs, which are commonly observed, and
which are now withered, but of the large trees. Most go in and
shut their doors, thinking that bleak and colorless November
has already come, when some of the most brilliant and
memorable colors are not yet lit.
This very
perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in
an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth,
is now, the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark
scarlet,—every leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had
been dipped into a scarlet dye. The whole tree is much like a
heart in form, as well as color. Was not this worth waiting
for? Little did you think, ten days ago, that that cold green
tree would assume such color as this. Its leaves are still
firmly attached, while those of other trees are falling around
it. It seems to say,— "I am the last to blush, but I
blush deeper than any of ye. I bring up the rear in my red
coat. We scarlet ones, alone of oaks, have not given up the
fight."
The sap is
now, and even far into November, frequently flowing fast in
these trees, as in maples in the spring; and apparently their
bright tints, now that most other oaks are withered, are
connected with this phenomenon. They are full of life. It has
a pleasantly astringent, acorn-like taste, this strong oak
wine, as I find on tapping them with my knife.
Looking
across this woodland valley, a quarter of a mile wide, how
rich those scarlet oaks, embosomed in pines, their bright red
branches intimately intermingled with them! They have their
full effect there. The pine boughs are the green calyx to
their red petals. Or, as we go along a road in the woods, the
sun striking endwise through it, and lighting up the red tents
of the oaks, which on each side are mingled with the liquid
green of the Pines, makes a very gorgeous scene. Indeed,
without the evergreens for contrast, the autumnal tints would
lose much of their effect.
The scarlet
oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late October days.
These bring out its colors. If the sun goes into a cloud, they
become comparatively indistinct. As I sit on a cliff in the
southwest part of our town, the sun is now getting low, and
the woods in Lincoln, south and east of me, are lit up by its
more level rays; and in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally
over the forest, there is brought out a more brilliant redness
than I had believed was in them. Every tree of this species
which is visible in those directions, even to the horizon, now
stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift their red
backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge roses
with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a
small grove of white pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the
very verge of the horizon, alternating with the pines on the
edge of the grove, and shouldering them with their red coats,
look like soldiers in red amid hunters in green. This time it
is Lincoln green, too. Till the sun got low, I did not believe
that there were so many redcoats in the forest army. Theirs is
an intense burning red, which would lose some of its strength,
methinks, with every step you might take toward them; for the
shade that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at
this distance, and they are unanimously red. The focus of
their reflected color is in the atmosphere far on this side.
Every such tree becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where,
with the declining sun, that color grows and glows. It is
partly borrowed fire, gathering strength from the sun on its
way to your eye. It has only some comparatively dull red
leaves for a rallying-point, or kindling-stuff, to start it,
and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire, which
finds fuel for itself in the very atmosphere. So vivacious is
redness. The very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and
season. You see a redder tree than exists.
If you wish
to count the scarlet oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand
thus on a hill-top in the woods, when the sun is an hour high,
and every one within range of your vision, excepting in the
west, will be revealed. You might live to the age of
Methuselah and never find a tithe of them, otherwise. Yet
sometimes even in a dark day I have thought them as bright as
I ever saw them. Looking westward, their colors are lost in a
blaze of light; but in other directions the whole forest is a
flower-garden, in which these late roses burn, alternating
with green, while the so-called "gardeners," walking
here and there, perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot,
see only a few little asters amid withered leaves.
These are my
China-asters, my late garden-flowers. It costs me
nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the
forest, are protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at
what is to be seen, and you will have garden enough, without
deepening the soil in your yard. We have only to elevate our
view a little, to see the whole forest as a garden. The
blossoming of the scarlet oak,—the forest-flower, surpassing
all in splendor (at least since the Maple)! I do not know but
they interest me more than the Maples, they are so widely and
equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy, a
nobler tree on the whole;—our chief November flower, abiding
the approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to early
November prospects. It is remarkable that the latest bright
color that is general should be this deep, dark scarlet and
red, the intensest of colors. The ripest fruit of the year;
like the cheek of a hard, glossy, red apple from the cold Isle
of Orleans, which will not be mellow for eating till next
spring! When I rise to a hill-top, a thousand of these great
oak roses, distributed on every side, as far as the horizon! I
admire them four or five miles off! This my unfailing prospect
for a fortnight past! This late forest-flower surpasses all
that spring or summer could do. Their colors were but rare and
dainty specks comparatively (created for the near-sighted, who
walk amid the humblest herbs and underwoods), and made no
impression on a distant eye. Now it is an extended forest or a
mountain-side, through or along which we journey from day to
day, that bursts into bloom. Comparatively, our gardening is
on a petty scale,—the gardener still nursing a few asters
amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters and roses,
which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his
care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and
held up against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and
broader views, walk in the great garden, not skulk in a little
"debauched" nook of it? consider the beauty of the
forest, and not merely of a few impounded herbs?
Let your
walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If,
about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the
outskirts of our town, and probably of yours, and look over
the forest, you may see——well, what I have endeavored to
describe. All this you surely will see, and much more,
if you are prepared to see it,—if you look for it.
Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is,
whether you stand on the hill-top or in the hollow, you will
think for threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at
this season, sear and brown. Objects are concealed from our
view, not so much because they are out of the course of our
visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to
bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself,
any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far
and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The
greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason
concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the
gardener’s garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the
supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls
before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in
the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain
more. The actual objects which one man will see from a
particular hill-top are just as different from those which
another will see as the beholders are different. The scarlet
oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We
cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of
it, take it into our heads,—and then we can hardly see
anything else. In my botanical rambles, I find, that, first,
the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it
may seem very foreign to this locality,—no nearer than
Hudson’s Bay,—and for some weeks or months I go thinking
of it, and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length I surely
see it. This is the history of my finding a score or more of
rare plants, which I could name. A man sees only what concerns
him. A botanist absorbed in the study of grasses does not
distinguish the grandest pasture oaks. He, as it were,
tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most sees
only their shadows. I have found that it required a different
intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different
plants, even when they were closely allied, as Juncaceć
and Gramineć: when I was looking for the former, I did
not see the latter in the midst of them. How much more, then,
it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to
attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently
the poet and the naturalist look at objects!
Take a
New-England selectman, and set him on the highest of our
hills, and tell him to look,—sharpening his sight to the
utmost, and putting on the glasses that suit him best (ay,
using a spy-glass, if he likes),—and make a full report.
What, probably, will he spy?—what will he select
to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre of
himself. He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and,
perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is,
since he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius Cćsar,or
Immanuel Swedenborg, or a Fejee Islander, and set him up
there! Or suppose all together, and let them compare notes
afterward. Will it appear that they have enjoyed the same
prospect? What they will see will be as different as Rome was
from Heaven or Hell, or the last from the Fejee Islands. For
aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always at
our elbow.
Why, it takes
a sharp-shooter to bring down even such trivial game as snipes
and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what
he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he
fired at random into the sky, being told that snipes were
flying there. And so is it with him that shoots at beauty;
though he wait till the sky falls, he will not bag any, if he
does not already know its seasons and haunts, and the color of
its wing,—if he has not dreamed of it, so that he can anticipate
it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every step, shoots double
and on the wing, with both barrels, even in cornfields. The
sportsman trains himself, dresses and watches unweariedly, and
loads and primes for his particular game. He prays for it, and
offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. After due and long
preparation, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and
asleep, with gun and paddle and boat he goes out after
meadow-hens, which most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed
of, and paddles for miles against a head-wind, and wades in
water up to his knees, being out all day without his dinner,
and therefore he gets them. He had them half-way into
his bag when he started, and has only to shove them down. The
true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his
windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? It comes and
perches at last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the
world never see it with the feathers on. The geese fly
exactly under his zenith, and honk when they get there, and he
will keep himself supplied by firing up his chimney; twenty
musquash have the refusal of each one of his traps before it
is empty. If he lives, and his game-spirit increases, heaven
and earth shall fail him sooner than game; and when he dies,
he will go to more extensive, and, perchance, happier
hunting-grounds. The fisherman, too, dreams of fish, sees a
bobbing cork in his dreams, till he can almost catch them in
his sink-spout. I knew a girl who, being sent to pick
huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by the quart, where no
one else knew that there were any, because she was accustomed
to pick them up country where she came from. The astronomer
knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his
mind before any have seen it with a glass. The hen scratches
and finds her food right under where she stands; but such is
not the way with the hawk.
These bright leaves which I have mentioned are not the
exception, but the rule; for I believe that all leaves, even
grasses and mosses, acquire brighter colors just before their
fall. When you come to observe faithfully the changes of each
humblest plant, you find that each has, sooner or later, its
peculiar autumnal tint; and if you undertake to make a
complete list of the bright tints, it will be nearly as long
as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.
Illustration from The
Atlantic Monthly, not reprinted in Excursions and
Poems
[The Writings of Henry David
Thoreau] (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)
A
Note on the Text:
-
1st
published in The Atlantic Monthly (October 1862)
-
Source:
Excursions and Poems [The Writings of Henry David
Thoreau] (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906) p. [249]-289.
-
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