Under the Trees and Elsewhere - Hamilton Wright Mabie (any book recommendations txt) 📗

the expectation of surprising Nature as Actaeon surprised Diana-in the moment of uncovered loveliness. On the other hand, when one lounges by the hour in the depths of the forest, or sits, book in hand, under the knotted and familiar apple tree, on a summer afternoon, the faculty of observation is lulled into a dreamless sleep; one ceases to be far enough away from Nature to observe her; one becomes part of the great, silent movements in the midst of which he sits, mute and motionless, while the hours slip by with the peace of eternity already upon them.

When I reached the end of my walk, and paused for a moment before retracing my steps, I was conscious of the inexhaustible richness of the world through which I had come; a thousand voices had spoken to me, and a thousand sights of wonder moved before me; I was awake to the universe which most of us see only in broken and unintelligent dreams. Through all this realm of truth and poetry men have passed and repassed these many years, I said to myself; and I began to wonder how many of those now long asleep really saw or heard this great glad world of sun and summer! I began slowly to retrace my steps, and as I reached the summit of the hill and looked beyond I saw the cattle standing knee-deep in the brook that loiters across the fields, and I heard the faint bleating of sheep borne from a distant pasturage.

These familiar sights and sounds touched me with a sudden pathos; there is nothing in human associations so venerable, so familiar, as the lowing of the home-coming kine and the bleating of the flocks. They carry one back to the first homes and the most ancient families. Older than history, more ancient than civilisation, are these familiar tones which unite the low-lying meadows and the upland pastures with the fire on the hearthstone and the nightly care of the fold. When the shadows deepen over the country-side, the oldest memories are revived and the oldest habits recalled by the scenes about the farm-house. The same offices fall to the husbandman, the same sights reveal themselves to the housewife, the same sounds, mellow with the resonance of uncounted centuries, greet the ears of the children as in the most primitive ages.

The highway itself stands as a memorial of the most venerable customs and the most ancient races. As I lift my eyes from its beaten road-bed, and look out upon it through the imagination, it escapes all later boundaries and runs back through history to the very dawn of civilisation; it marks the earliest contact of men with a world which was wrapped in mystery. The hour that saw a second home built by human hands heard the first footfall on the first highway. That narrow foot-path led to civilisation, and has broadened into the highway because human fellowships and needs have multiplied and directed the countless feet that have beaten it into permanency. Every new highway has been a new bond between Nature and men, a new evidence of that indissoluble fellowship into which they are forever united.

I have sometimes tried to recall in imagination the world of Nature before a human voice had broken the silence or a human foot left its impress on the soil; but when I remember that what I see in this sweep of force and beauty is largely what I myself put into the vision, that Nature without the human ear is soundless, and without the human eye colourless, I understand that what lies spread before me never was until a human soul confronted it and became its interpreter. This radiant world upon which I look was without form and void until the earliest man brought to the vision of it that creative power within himself which touched it with form and colour and relations not its own. Nature is as incomplete and helpless without man as man would be without Nature. He brought her varied and inexhaustible beauty, and clothed her with a garment woven on we know not what looms of divine energy; and she fed, sheltered, and strengthened him for the life which lay before him. Together they have wrought from the first hour, and civilisation, with all the circle of its arts, is their joint handiwork.

In the atmosphere of our rich modern fellowship with Nature, the unwritten poetry to which every open heart falls heir, we forget our earliest dependence on the great mother and the lessons she taught when men gathered about her knee in the childhood of the world. Not a spade turned the soil, not an axe felled a tree, not a path was made through the forest, that did not leave, in the man whose arm put forth the toil, some moral quality. In the obstacles which she placed in their pathway, in the difficulties with which she surrounded their life, the wise mother taught her children all the lessons which were to make them great. It was no easy familiarity which she offered them, no careless bestowal of bounty upon dependents; she met them as men, and offered them a perpetual alliance upon such terms as great and equal sovereigns proffer and accept. She gave much, but she asked even more than she offered, and in the first moment of intercourse she struck in men that lofty note of sovereignty which has never ceased to thrill the race with mysterious tones of power and prophecy. Men have stood erect and fearless in the presence of the most awful revelations of the forces of Nature, affirming by their very attitude a supremacy of spirit which no preponderance of power can overshadow. Face to face through all his history man has stood with Nature, and to each generation she has opened some new page of her inexhaustible story. Beginning in the hardest toil for the most material rewards, this fellowship has steadily added one province of knowledge and intimacy after another, until it has become inclusive of the most delicate and hidden recesses of character as well as those which are obvious and primary. In response to spirits which have continually come into a closer contact with her life, Nature has added to her gifts of food and wine, poetry and art, far-reaching sciences, occult wisdoms and skills; she has invited the greatest to become her ministers, and has rewarded their unselfish service by sharing with them the mighty forces that sleep and awake at her bidding; one after another the poets of truest gift have forsaken the beaten paths of cities and men, and found along her untrodden ways the vision that never fades; her voice, now that men begin to understand it again as their forefathers understood it, is a voice of worship. So, from their first work for food and shelter, men have steadily won from Nature gifts of insight and knowledge and prophecy, until now the mightiest secrets are whispered by the trees to him who listens, and the winds sometimes take up the burden of prophecy and sing of a fellowship in which all truth shall be a common possession.

As I walk along the old highway, the deepening shadows touch the familiar landscape with mystery; one landmark after another vanishes until the lights in the scattered farm-houses gleam like reflected constellations. A deep silence fills the great heavens and broods over the wide earth; all things have become dim and strange; and yet I feel no loneliness in the midst of this star-lit solitude. The heavens shining over me, and the scattered household fires declare to me that fellowship of light in which Nature holds out her hand to man and leads him, step by step, to the unspeakable splendours of her central sun.


Chapter V

The Open Fields

One of the sights upon which my eyes rest oftenest and with deepest content is a broad sweep of meadow slowly climbing the western sky until it pauses at the edge of a noble piece of woodland. It is a playground of wind and flowers and waving grasses. There are, indeed, days when it lies cold and sad under inhospitable skies, but for the most part the heavens are in league with cloud and sun to protect its charm against all comers. When the turf is fresh, all the promise of summer is in its tender green; a little later, and it is sown thick with daisies and buttercups; and as the breeze plays upon it these frolicsome flowers, which have known no human tending, seem to chase each other in endless races over the whole expanse. I have seen them run breathlessly up the long slope, and then suddenly turn and rush pell-mell down again. If the wind had only stopped for a moment its endless gossip with the leaves, I am sure I should have heard the gleeful shouts, the sportive cries, of these vagrant flowers whose spell is rewoven over every generation of children, and whose unstudied beauty and joy recall, with every summer, some of the clews which most of us have lost in our journey through life. Even as I write, I see the white and yellow heads tossing to and fro in a mood of free and buoyant being, which has for me, face to face with the problems of living, an unspeakable pathos.

What a depth of tender colour fills the arch of heaven as it bends over this playground of the blooming and beauty-laden forces of nature! The great summer clouds, shaping their courses to invisible harbours across the trackless aerial sea, love to drop anchor here and slowly trail their mighty shadows, vainly groping for something that shall make them fast. The winds, that have come roaring through the woodlands, subdue their harsh voices and linger long in their journey across this sunny expanse. It is true, they sing no lullabies as in the hollow under the hill where they themselves often fall asleep, but the music to which they move has a magical cadence of joy in it, and sets our thought to the dancing mood of the flowers.

Sometimes, on quiet afternoons, when the great world of work has somehow seemed to drop its burdens into space, and carries nothing but rest and quietude along its journey under the summer sky, I have seen a pageant in the open fields that has made me doubt whether a dream had not taken me unawares. I have seen the first sweet flowers of spring rise softly out of the grass where they had been hiding and call gently to each other, as if afraid that a single loud word would dissolve the charm of sun and warm breeze for which they had waited so long. After their dreamless sleep of months, these beautiful children of Mother Earth seemed almost afraid to break the stillness from which they had come, and strayed about noiselessly, with subdued and lovely mien, exhaling a perfume as delicate as themselves. Then, with a rush and shout, the summer flowers suddenly burst upon the scene, overflowing with life and merriment; in lawless troops they ran hither and thither, flinging echoes of their laughter over the whole country-side, and soon overshadowing entirely their older and more sensitive fellows; these, indeed, soon vanish altogether, as if lonely and out of place under the broad glare and high colours of mid-summer. And now for weeks together the game went on without pause or break; the revelry grew fast and furious, until one suspected that some night the Bacchic throng had passed that way and left