A colleague of mine (long deceased) introduced me to the author of this fascinating little book. I am speaking here of Horace Lunt, who shared some observations of birds and referenced “Mr. Minot” in his 1891 Short Cuts and By-Paths. The name Minot seemed oddly familiar already; in fact, Minot is a small city in eastern North Dakota, which happens to have been named after him. Henry Davis Minot (1859-1890), was a railroad financier and ornithologist. He had an adventuresome and productive though tragically brief life. At Harvard, he met Theodore Roosevelt, and the two become fast friends and traveling companions. After two years enrolled there, Minot left for a lucrative career in the railroad industry, which required extensive travel. Everywhere he went, he recorded the birds he observed. He published several full-length works on birds, beginning with Land Birds and Game Birds of New England, published when he was just 18. Three years later, he published the booklet, The Diary of a Bird. Ten years later he was dead, killed instantly in a railroad collision in Pennsylvania.
Holding it in my hands, The Diary of a Bird feels precious and fragile. Two small staples and a bit of glue (and now, a piece of archival-quality transparent tape) are all that hold it together. Apart from the inevitable browning and a smudge or two, my copy of the booklet is without a blemish. It astounds me that this little volume (selling for 25 cents in 1880 — about $7.16 today) managed to survive 142 years so unscathed. There are no bent pages, no pen or pencil marks, and no stains of coffee or tea. I have no idea how many copies remain; online, I found an image of only one, with much greater wear than this. It was offered at $25 on eBay, and I negotiated to $18. But how does one put a dollar value on something so unusual and underappreciated as this?
At the age of 21, Henry Davis Minot had already seen firsthand the peril America’s birds faced. Young and brash and wanting to do something about the problem, he wrote The Diary of a Bird, sending copies to renowned naturalists of the time, including Samuel Lockwood and John Burroughs. He hoped that the booklet of only thirty-eight pages would raise awareness of the birds’ plight and prompt action. As a work of early environmental conservation, it has been virtually forgotten (as has, I have found through my reading and research, so much of early efforts to protect bison and birds). A charming blog entry from the Massachusetts Historical Society tells Minot’s story, suggesting that his untimely death prevented him from doing more to safeguard America’s birds.
The booklet itself is difficult to categorize. Ostensibly a diary of a black-throated green warbler (“translated” by Minot), it opens with a remark by the “writer” that “I am aware that among men the keeping of a diary is ordinarily a way of misspending a part of one’s time in describing how one has wasted the rest. I disapprove of diaries among birds; yet I have decided to keep one for the purpose of amusing, instructing, and enlightening mankind.” The first few pages chronicle the bird’s arrival in the White Mountains after a long migration from the South, and his mate’s efforts to build a nest and rear their young (with his occasional support). In one early passage, the bird (who has no name, in keeping with all birds) complains about all the white pines that have been lost to logging. He also has a brief run-in with a birder, who is after his feathers for a lady’s hat.
The heart of the booklet concerns a gathering of birds in the woods to discuss The Destruction and Extermination of Birds: how caused, and how to be prevented. Each bird, in turn, shares its greatest threat; these include hunters, egg collectors, domestic cats, and lighthouse collisions. The black-throated green warbler is about to speak when hunters arrive, and the protagonist shelters in a tree cavity an owl had previously occupied. The translator interjects at this point, with statistics on bird deaths for the state of Massachusetts, concluding that humans killed approximately a quarter-million wild birds (including eggs) every year. After quoting other writers on the extent of the problem. the translator offers solutions:
How are the ravages to be checked? By arousing the better sentiment of the people, so, for instance, that birds shall be practically protected for other purposes than mere sport; by having a sufficient police to enforce the present laws, so as to prevent the wanton or illegal destruction of birds and eggs; by more descriminate, effective, and extensive legislation.
Minot goes on to call for an effective game commissioner for every state, and, wonder of wonders, a tax on firearms, “a tax which would prevent, among many other things, many accidents caused by such comparatively useless weapons as pistols.” But even that does not go far enough. “The best law for Massachusetts,” Minot declares, “would be one prohibiting the firing of a shot-gun within the state, for a term of years. (We say this advisedly after thought and consultation.)”
The translator steps aside to allow the warbler gets the last word. In a final diary entry, he makes this plea: “I trust that he to whom these pages are to be consigned, one who, as a sincere lover of Nature, seems to understand our language and to know our ways, will make some appeal to his fellow-men, in behalf of us poor, unhappy, persecuted birds.”
Was it an accident, or intention, that caused Winthrop Packard to title this volume using his own initials for inspiration (just as he had with Woodland Paths the year before)? How much is Packard playing with the reader in these essays? Does he seek to evoke a magical element in nature as a rhetorical device pointing to the wonders of the everyday? Or does he genuinely believe in it? Is his “science skepticism” real, or merely feigned? Who is laughing at whom? I honestly don’t know for sure. All I can do is present what I have read and let readers decide for themselves.
Horace Lunt opened his Short Cuts and By-Paths by noting that “not much of scientific value has been demonstrated in these pages” — then went on to describe with scientific exactitude the nature of lichens, mosses, and invertebrates of the seashore. If his work is “not much of scientific value”, I am not sure what to make of Packard’s prose. His descriptions are pleasant (he has a keen eye for colors) and he has quite a bit of botanical knowledge. He demonstrates basic awareness of common butterflies and their behaviors. And when writing about Ponkapoag Pond in Blue Hills State Reservation south of Boston, he describes the process by which a pond becomes a bog and then a marsh and eventually a field. Yet when he shares the ways of the witch hazel shrub in his chapter “Brook Magic”, he veers away from science into folklore, where he seems more comfortable:
Pluck one of the [witch-hazel] nuts of a midsummer evening and look it in the face. Note the little shrewd pig eyes of the witch ingrown in it, the funny shrewish tip-tilted nose, the puffy cheeks and eyelids. See that slender horn in the forehead, the sure mark of the witch. No wonder that it has the name witch-hazel with such ways and such faces growing all over it at a time when most other trees and shrubs have but finished blossoming. But if you want further proof that the shrub harbors witches than you need but to examine its oval, wavy-toothed leaves just at this time of the year and see the little conical red witch-caps hung on them. There need be but little doubt that, sitting under it at midnight of a full moon, you may see the witch faces detach themselves from the limbs, put on these red caps and sail off across the great yellow disk. That such things are not seen oftener is that people are dull and go to bed instead of sitting out under the witch-hazel at midnight of a full moon.
To be sure there are scientific men, grey-bearded entomologists, who will tell us that these little red caps are galls, the rearing-place of plant aphids, caused by the laying of the mother insect’s egg within the tissue of the leaf, but one might as well believe that the witches hang their hats on the witch-hazel over night as to believe that the laying of a minute egg in the tissue of a leaf could cause the plant to grow a witch hat.
No doubt these same wise men would explain to you that it is not possible to become invisible by sprinkling fern seed on your head during the dark of the moon and saying the right words, but did one of them ever try it?
It is appropriate that the witch-hazel should shade the portals through which the brook enters the glen at the foot of the pasture, for the path here enters you into a world of witchery where the glamour of the place will hold you long of a summer afternoon.
Winthrop Packard, what are you saying here? My first thought was that he was alluding to the seemingly magical facets of scientific explanations, but I wonder at that. There is another possibility, namely, that he longs to inhabit a world where magic still exists — evoking Donovan more than half a century later, “Still I hear facts, figures, and logic; fain would I hear lore, legend, and magic.” Is the scientist in Packard’s mind a wise interpreter of nature, or a bogeyman dispelling enchanting fancies in the light of empirical knowledge?
Packard is not quite done arguing with science, however serious or whimsical his remarks might be. In a later essay on “Some Butterfly Friends,” he speaks more directly about scientific knowledge. In the passage below, he engages in a flight of fancy before coming back to earth with a more viable explanation of pollination:
I do not know what the clethra which gleams in white in the dusk should need anything more than its own white beautfy to call the moth to its wooing. Perhaps it does not need more. Perhaps all this fine fragrance isbut the overflow of its soul’s delight at being young and chastely beautiful, and trembling in the ultra violet darkness on that delicious verge of life that waits the wooer. I half fancy that it is true of all perfume of flowers, that it is less a call to butterfly or bee to come to their winning than it is a radiation of delight from their own pure hearts at the dawning of the full joy of living. I am not always willing to take the word of the scientific investigator on these points as final. The scientists of the not very remote past have known so much that is not so!
It is possible that, just as a hunting dog picks up a scent that is strong in his nostrils and has no power in ours, so the flowers that we call scentless send out an odor too faintly fine for our senses, yet one that the antennae of moth or bee may entangle as it passes and hold for a certain clue. Perhaps the scents that are only faint to us carry far for the butterfly, but if so, and if flower perfumes are made only for the calling of insects, why need they be made so intoxicating to the human senses?
And there is a third possibility — that it is all just a game, these evocations of magic in pastures and streams, this poking at scientists. Just like the naming of his books — Wild Pastures, Woodland Paths. Still, at least his words, images, and imaginings make for fairly pleasant if somewhat insipid reading — an acceptable diversion for a long sultry summer afternoon. Oh — and the book cover is pretty, too.
Winthrop Packard is decidedly obscure, having thus far avoided an entry in Wikipedia. He lived from 1862 until 1943, and he wrote quite a few books in the “nature” genre. One source notes that he was also a lyricist and composer. Thanks to a newspaper obituary, I also know that Packard was secretary-treasurer of the Massachusetts Audobon Society and that he established and financed the Society’s first bird sanctuary (Moose Hill) in Sharon, Massachusetts in 1916. He graduated from MIT in 1885 and worked as a chemist in Boston. He somehow ended up in the newspaper business, becoming editor of the Canton Journal in 1894 and then switching to National Magazine, Youth’s Companion, and finally the Transcript. He was a member of an expedition to Alaska and Siberia in 1900. He married Alice Petrie and had four sons.
My copy of Wild Pastures is in superb shape; the cover looks practically new. It was signed by a previous owner, Ethel R. Ulrick (Ulrich?) on October 25th, 1911; she appears to have accomplished an even greater level of Internet obscurity than Packard.
In 1891, Horace Lunt published what would be the last in a trio of nature books. The first, Across Lots (1888), was previously reviewed in this blog. The middle volume, As the Wild Bee Hums, appears to be available only through online archives. I return to an original volume of his work. In addition to obtaining a glimpse of his nature studies three years later, this process also resulted in online research that turned up a few more fragments of information about his life. More about that anon.
The publisher used the same decorative cover for this volume as is found on Across Lots. One suggestion that Lunt has “come up in the world” a bit as a writer since 1888 is that this volume has several black and white illustrations, most notably the pair of chickadees above. Another difference is that, while much of the book is filled with Lunt’s trademark nature rambles in New England over different seasons of the year, there are also several essays suggesting that Lunt has broadened his connections to other scientists, while also gaining scientific knowledge himself. In various parts of the book, Lunt writes about invertebrate life in ocean tidepools, diverse species of flies, lichens (considered plants at the time), and mosses. In each case, he makes certain to use the appropriate scientific terms; for lichens, those include apothecia, gonidia, thallus, and podetia. Unfortunately, the book’s illustrations are strictly decorative, and for the lichen novice, trying to grasp the nature of lichens without visuals strikes me as well nigh impossible. The same problem, unfortunately, is true of Lunt’s flies, tidepool life, and mosses. Lunt’s self-professed enthusiasm for nature is evident throughout; however, even robust (at times, bordering on eloquent) descriptive text is insufficient to convey many of those natural wonders to his readers.
Lunt’s circle of correspondents and/or writers he has read appears to have expanded considerably over three years. Not surprisingly, he mentions Torrey, Burroughs, Darwin, and Thoreau. But he also mentions a “Mr. Minot” — Henry Davis Minot (1859-1890), a railway magnate and ornithologist with whom we will become better acquainted in a future post. He also mentions George B. Emerson (1797-1881), educator and President of the Boston Society of Natural History as well as the cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His work, A Report on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts (1846), has been identified by some scholars as marking the beginning of the American Conservation Movement due to its advocacy of wiser forest management practices. Lunt names a female correspondent, Corinne Hoyt Coleman, living in New Hampshire. Finally, Lunt also refers to a “Robinson”, but his steadfast refusal to offer a first name or other details ensures that person’s enduring anonymity.
Before I close my review of this book, I will share a couple of Lunt’s most noteworthy descriptive passages. This first is from a visit to the seaside in his essay, “By the Sea” (complete with an obligatory military simile):
To Norwood’s bluffs, or the long stretch of sandy beach, I go to study the wonders of the shore in detail, and to obtain a nearer view of the ocean’s wrinkled face. It has character — its face is sterner and more imposing and expressive than the face of an inland sea. It’s voice is “The eternal bass in nature’s anthem,” and its breath has a healthful savoriness, a briny flavor, as refreshing to the scent as the perfume of flowers is to the homeward-bound sea voyager.
The winds play with it till it becomes impatient and beats itself against the rocks. Its plastic lips are wrought into a thousand gnarls and convolutions, as they curl through the fissures and caverns, while its foamy tongues, licking the stony bluffs as they recede, leave behind them many pretty cascades that flow gently down the slopes, till the waters mingle again with the incoming waves.
As there are lulls in the wind on a breezy day, so at intervals, as if exhausted with its fury, the sea by the shore becomes suddenly almost calm. Only gurgling, purling sounds are heard for a minute or two, as the wavelets lap the edges of the rocks. But it is gathering strength for another onslaught. Far out, the seas are running high again. A long procession of them swell up from the waters and roll toward the shore at the rate of four hundred feet in thirty seconds. I watch the leader rising higher and concaving as it comes rapidly on. Its crest undulates and throws up streamers of spray, like the flying hairs on the mane of a galloping horse. Now the climax is reached. The sharp edge bends in graceful curves, tumbles over and breaks with dull, heavy roar, into a long line of foam, that shoots swiftly up the steep, shingly beach; then, as it retreats, rolls back a thousand stones, which, as they strike against each other, make a crackling, rattling sound, like the snapping of musket caps by a regiment of soldiers.
Finally, here are a couple of excerpts from Lunt’s encounter with the moss world in his “Winter Sketches”:
So these modest, unpretentious mosses are humbling fulfilling their mission on the earth. They are continually making new leaves, while the old leaves are converted into rich mld, from which in time will spring up an army of higher plants, with their flourish of trumpets and their flying colors. Here at the foot of a tree is a large clump of moss with finer leaves and the thickly matted stems more delicately spun. If a yard or two of yellowish green plush with long hirsute pile had been carelessly spread out and conformed to the general unevenness of the ground, it could hardly have been distinguished, at a distance, from this beautiful piece of Nature’s weaving. The numerous awl-shaped, strongly curved leaves are arranged only on one side of the stem, as if the heavy winds blowing constantly on them from one direction had bent them, like grass-blades in the meadows. From out this soft, mossy bed has grown a mimic forest of brownish-yellow stems or pedicels on which are attached tiny fruit-cups — cornucopiae, arched or bent over like bows. A month or two ago each one of these fruit-cases was completely sealed by a ring of cells growing between the rim of the orofice and cover, that the vessels might be impervious to the weather during the growth of the spores. As the cases ripened, the cells were ruptured and the covers thus dropped off, and the spores or moss seeds were poured out and sown by the Winter’s wind…
If the attentive, descriminating rambler accepts the invitation which these humble but cheerful plants offer, he will be surprised to know how many species will salute him, and impart to him the various entertaining lessons in moss lore during an ordinary woodland walk. Each kind takes him by the button, as it were, and talks to him privately of its special characters and peculiarities.
I am struggling here with the image of a carefree talking moss plant. I think I may prefer Lunt in his more martial moments.
Since my last blog on Horace Lunt, I learned a bit more about him. He was born in York, Maine, and became an orphan at age five. He and his brother Samuel were raised by their aunt and uncle in Kittery, Maine. Another new tidbit about his life was that he may have had a leg amputated following the Civil War. His interest in nature evidently predated the war. In addition to writing, Lunt also gave public speeches. He was found dead in Essex County, Massachusetts, in May 1911 at the age of 74.
My volume of Short Cuts and By-Paths is neither signed nor stamped.
The book that started me on this peculiar quest to resurrect long-dead obscure nature writers was In American Fields and Forests, published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1909. It was an anthology of six American nature writers. Two have retained their renown to this day — Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. One was quite famous at the time and, though largely forgotten today, still has several works in print — John Burroughs. (He will soon become a regular in this blog — more on that anon.) The remaining three are lost to the history of nature writing, though I hope to change that in some small way. They were Bradford Torrey, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Olive Thorne Miller. I have already read several books by Torrey and Sharp (with others waiting on my shelf). But I have been putting off Olive Thorne Miller, until now.
Harriet Mann Miller (1831-1918) published several books on birds under the pen name of Olive Thorne Miller. She had a fairly uneventful childhood (apart from moving every few years), then married Watts Todd Miller, bore and raised four children, and wrote several children’s books. She was introduced to ornithology by Sara Hubbard (director of the Illinois Audobon Society) in 1880 and quickly became an avid bird watcher. She wrote eleven bird books between 1885 and 1904. I have obtained four but have been putting them off for one simple reason: I hereby confess that I am not a birder. I appreciate birds — their colorful forms, fascinating behaviors, lovely songs (and raucous cries). I am particularly fond of American cranes, sandhill and whooping. Hawks and eagles are stunning, and the intelligence of crows gives me pause. But I cannot identify birds by call, and I have a minimal capacity for spotting birds calling in dense foliage. I know a dozen bird species — and a dozen more that are found along the Maine Coast, courtesy of a summer narrating puffin tours for Project Puffin many years back. But I am quite frankly intimidated by birders — their expensive cameras with telephoto lenses that look like they might have cost more than my house, their fascination with life lists, and their stunning capacities for identifying birds from faint calls or a momentary flash of color in a tree. OK, I admit it: they intimidate me. I will stick to insects and plants. I have yet to meet a botanist with special camera equipment to capture chestnut trees or May apples, bearing a life-list of plant species they have encountered or able to identify any plant from the merest fragment of a leaf.
So I have been putting off reading Miller’s work, even while I managed to accrue four of her titles, including her first and last bird books (Little Brothers of the Air was her second one.) I am doing my best to track down early women natural history writers, of which there were quite a few. So I didn’t want to ignore her completely. And Torrey was mostly an ornithologist, so I have already read books laden with passing bird descriptions. In an age before photography was readily available and easy to use in the field, ornithological writers provided rich text descriptions of the birds they saw — all of which fled my mind the moment I read them. Torrey’s books don’t have illustrations, and neither does this volume by Miller. So text is practically all there is to paint the scene and the feathered beings inhabiting it.
I am proud to say that I survived Little Brothers of the Air, though I am in no hurry to read the remaining three books of hers in my collection. She was a fine writer and notable for her independence and spirit of scientific inquiry. While some of her field outings were accompanied by a companion or two (usually female), many of her nature outings were solitary affairs. She was highly dedicated to closely observing birds, which might mean watching a nest through an opera-glass for one or two weeks at a time (or even, in one case, two months!). (“One must be an enthusiast to spy out the secrets of a bird’s life,” she remarks at one point.) Here she describes the privations she underwent in her nature studies:
Didst ever, dear reader, sit in one position on a camp-stool without a back, with head thrown back, and eyes fixed upon one small bird thirty feet from the ground, afraid to move or turn your eyes, lest you miss what you are waiting for, while the sun moves steadily on till his hottest rays pour through some opening directly upon you; while mosquitoes sing about your ears (would that they sang only!), and flies buzz noisily before your face; while birds flit past, and strange notes sound from behind; while rustling in the dead leaves at your feet suggests snakes, and a crawling on your neck proclaims spiders? If you have not, you can never appreciate the enthusiasms of a bird student, nor realize what neck-breaks and other discomforts one will cheerily endure to witness the first flight of a nestling.
The volume is a collection of vignettes of bird behavior, particularly nesting. Some chapters chronicle her observations of a particular nest, from construction through the fledging of the young — or not. She reported that, over a season, about half the nests she watched failed to produce young, often due to the depredations of chipmunks, other birds, or a couple of neighbor boys who stole eggs from nests. Other chapters are based on her travels in New England. She would stay in a friend’s cabin and set out every day to make her acquaintance with all the bird species in the area. Along the way, she might also describe the landscape and vegetation features, offering a delightful reprieve from all the feathers flying.
Occasionally, too, she would complain about something; I enjoyed this feisty side to her nature. She complained about farmers logging their wood lots, though she admitted that the lumber provided a valuable income from their point of view. She complained about farmers replacing old zig-zag stone walls with barbed wire fences: “Nature doesn’t take kindly to barbed wire.” She complained vigorously about the lack of nature knowledge among country folk: “A chapter might be written on the ignorance of country people of their own birds and plants. A chapter, did I say? A book, a dozen books, the country is full of material.” Finally, she also complained about how naturalists like to name everything (a bit ironic, given her own tendency to do so):
Why have we such a rage for labeling and cataloguing the beautiful things of Nature? Why can I not delight in a bird or flower, knowing it by what it is to me, without longing to know what it has been to some other person? What pleasure can it afford to one not making a scientific study of birds to see such names as “the blue and yellow-throated warbler,” “the chestnut-headed golden warbler,” “the yellow-bellied, red-poll warbler,” attached to the smallest and daintiest beauties of the woods?
Before I close the covers of this unassuming green cloth volume with gilt letters on the cover, I ought to say a few words about Miller’s descriptive style. Her careful observation of birds is evident on every page. However, she also frequently goes beyond mere action to interpretation — investing particular behaviors with motivations. Frequently, those motivations mirror human ones. Sometimes, the result is a bit disconcerting to the modern reader, used to reading about birds as non-human beings rather than as quasi-human persons. For example, she describes a male kingbird as singing to his mate while she is brooding her eggs to encourage her in the task. Elsewhere, she describes a young bluebird who “talked with himself for company, a very charming monologue in the inimitable bluebird tone. with modifications suggesting that a new and wonderful song was possible to him. He was evidently too full of joy to keep still.” On rare occasions, she endeavors to offer justification for her accounts. For example, in one of the last essays in the volume, she describes the behaviors of a pair of goldfinches. The female sat on the eggs, and the male would show up whenever she called to him. He would fly above her, trying to locate other birds that might be annoying her.
Sometimes that conduct did not reassure the uneasy bird, and she called again. Then he brought some tidbit in his beak, went to the edge of the nest, and fed her. Then she was pacified; but do not mistake her, it was not hunger that prompted her actions; when she was hungry, she openly left her nest and went for food. It was, as I am convinced. the longing desire to know that he was near her, that he was still anxious t serve her, that he had not forgotten her in her long absence from his side. This may sound a litle fanciful to one who has not studied birds closely, but she was so “human” in all her actions that I feel justified in judging of her motives exactly as I should judge had she measured five feet instead of five inches, and wore silk instead of feathers.”
Miller’s confidence in drawing such brazen parallels between bird behavior and human behavior does strike me as somewhat far-fetched at times. Of course, one could argue that this kind of personification of animals was common back then and would only become more pronounced by the time of the “nature faker” controversy a decade later. Furthermore, whatever the actual motives behind them, the birds’ actions themselves were painstakingly observed and (generally speaking) accurately described. I am confident, too, that her books encouraged many a reader to take up a notebook and opera-glass, and venture into the local woods and fields.
My copy of Little Brothers of the Air is in great condition for its age. The blank page after the flyleaf bears the signature of Lydia Bell Moscrif, June, ’97.
There is virtually no structure to this volume by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, unless you consider the frontispiece. That image depicts a moonglade, the path made by moonlight on the water. The term was first used by James Russell Lowell in the mid-1800s and commandeered by Higginson for an essay of the same name some years later. The Prefatory Note to this work teasingly remarks, “It may interest some readers to know that the designer of the frontispiece to this volume is identical with the child described in its closing pages.” (It also notes that the view in the frontispiece is in Newport, Rhode Island.) And thus, this image and its accompanying essay bookend the text. But who is the mysterious artist? Higginson only identifies her as “this little maiden who sits beside me in the shadow.” Fortunately, she placed her initials on the work; unfortunately, “MBM” has proven elusive. There was a writer of children’s fiction, Mary Bertha Toland, née MacKenzie (1825?-1875), but she would have been too close in age to Higginson to have been a child at the time he originally wrote the essay.
“Moonglade” is evocative of the esthetics of Ruskin mingled with a touch of Transcendentalism; as such, it makes as good a place as any for approaching this slender volume. Higginson opens the essay by remarking that “There is no Americanism more graceful than the word ‘moonglade.’ Later, he observes,
So calm are sometimes the summer evenings by this bay that all motion sees at an end, and the weary play of events to have stopped forever. But Nature never really rests, and the moon, which seems only an ornament for this quiet water, is in reality leading it along with restless progress, bidding it roll lazily over reefs, surge into sea caves, and sweep away with it any boat that is not moored.
This notion of nature as constant flux is a fine candidate for a theme of many of these essays, beginning with “The Procession of the Flowers.” As advertised, that essay considers the progression of blooms from spring until autumn in New England (more precisely, Worcester, Massachusetts, where Higginson served as minister of the Worcester Free Church). In a later essay on“April Days“, Higginson writes about how many flowering plants native to the Boston region have been displaced by human development. The result is an abundance of naturalized plants, including dandelion, buttercup, chickweed, celandine, mullein, burdock, and yarrow, among others. “Bigelow’s delightful book Florula Bostoniensis,” he keenly observes, “is becoming a series of epitaphs.” The result is two contrasting forms of change: Nature’s change across the seasons (always happening, but consistent year to year), and the landscape changes of Massachusetts (urbanization and suburbanization) with their radical impact on the local flora — and “the special insects who haunt them.” Do I detect a hint of woe in Higginson’s observation (quoting a letter from Dr. Thaddeus William Harris) that so many native plants have “disappeared from their former haunts, driven away, or exterminated perhaps, by the changes effected therein”? I cannot help but read Higginson in the light of the ongoing modern-day global climate disruption, where even the reliable progression of the flowers is being considerably impacted. “Fair is foul, foul is fair,” three witches once remarked.
Another theme in several pieces in this volume is the human need for Nature. Here, Higginson seems to presage recent research into the role of nature experiences in child development (including the intellect):
No man can measure what a single hour with Nature may have contributed to the moulding of his mind. The influence is self-renewing, and if for a long time it baffles expression by reason of its fineness, so much the better in the end.
The soul is like a musical instrument; it is not enough that it be framed for the most delicate vibration, but it must vibrate long and often before the fibres grow mellow to the finest waves of sympathy. I perceive that in the veery’s carolling, the clover’s scent, the glistening of the water, the waving wings of butterflies, the sunset tints, the floating clouds, there are attainable infinitely more subtile modulations of thought than I can yet reach the sensibility to discriminate, much less describe.
Cue applause from Ralph Waldo Emerson in the shadows.
Spending time in nature, Higginson argues, ought to be a vital part of healthy education for children. “The little I have gained from colleges and libraries,” he declares, “has certainly not worn as well as the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and insect.” Alas, schools at the time (and now) generally did not (do not) offer those opportunities to young people. “Under the present educational system we need grammars and languages far less than a more thorough out-door experience.”
By way of a miscellany (which reflects this book well), another thing I particularly noticed while reading it was the natural philosophy and science community in which HIgginson lived and wrote. At various points in the book, he quotes Humboldt; he refers to “so good an observer as Wilson Flagg”; he quotes Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, American entymologist; and he mentions Ralph Waldo Emerson. His greatest praise is reserved for Thoreau: “Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond, and show us that absolutely nothing in nature has every yet been described, — not a bird nor a berry of the woods, not a drop of water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor winter, nor sun, nor star.” Later, he refers to a conversation with Thoreau about local bird distributions in December, 1861, just five months before he died: “…he mentioned most remarkable facts in that department, which had fallen under his unerring eyes.”
Following my encounters with the Collector in Wild Honey by Samuel Scoville, Jr., I was refreshed to discover in Higginson a strong resistance to violence against birds. I think it is in keeping with his radical abolitionist spirit (he was one of Secret Six that backed John Brown’s Raid) and strong moral principles regarding freedom and basic rights for all that he extends similar care to the birds:
The small number of birds yet present in early April gives a better opportunity for careful study, — more especially if one goes armed with the best of fowling-pieces, a small spy-glass; the best, — since how valuable for purposes of observation is the bleeding, gasping, dying body, compared with the fresh and living creature, as it tilts, trembles, and warbles on the branch before you!
Before I close my book and place it next to all the others collecting in my bookshelf of completed texts, I offer up this lovely descriptive passage as evidence of the soaring, elegant prose Higginson sometimes achieved:
As I sat in my boat, one sunny afternoon of last September, beneath the shady western shore of our quiet lake, with the low sunset striking almost level across the wooded banks, it seemed as if the last hoarded drops of summer’s sweetness were being poured over all the world. The air was full of quiet sounds. Turtles rustled beside the brink and slithered into the water, — cows plashed in the shallows, — fishes leaped from the placid depths, — a squirrel sobbed and fretted on a neighboring stump, — a katydid across the lake maintained its hard, dry croak, — the crickets chirped pertinaciously, but with little, fatigued pauses, as if glad that their work was almost done, — the grasshoppers kept up their continual chant, which seemed thoroughly melted and amalgamated into the summer, as if it would go on indefinitely, though the body of the little creature were dried into dust. All this time the birds were silent and invisible, as if they would take no more part in the symphony of the year. Then, seemingly by preconcerted signal, they joined in: Crows cawed anxiously afar; Jays screamed in the woods; a Partridge clucked to its brood, like the gurgle of water from a bottle; a Kingfisher wound his rattle, more briefly than in spring, as if we now knew all about it and the merest hint ought to suffice; a Fish-Hawk flapped into the water, with a great, rude splash, and then flew heavily away; a flock of Wild Ducks went southward overhead, and a smaller party returned beneath them, flying low and anxiously, as if to pick up some lost baggage; and, at last, a Loon laughted loud from behind a distant island, and it was pleasant to people these woods and waters with that wild shouting, linking them with Katahdin Lake and Amperzand.
Next, a few words about Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) and my copy of his book. According to Wikipedia, Higginson was a Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, and soldier. During the Civil War, he served as Colonel of the first federally recognized black regiment. He was a correspondent and mentor to Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). His own books covered a range of topics, from his Civil War experiences to the rights of women. HIs few nature essays originally appeared in Outdoor Papers, published in 1889. In 1897, he extracted most of the nature essays, combining them with “Moonglade” to produce the present volume.
According to a signature inside the book, my copy was previously owned by Isabella L. Houghton of North Adams, Massachusetts; she obtained the book on March 17, 1900. The only thing I was able to learn about her online is that she also signed her name in a copy of Women and the Alphabet: A Series of Essays, also by Higginson, published in 1900. I assume that she passed the newspaper clipping with a poem by S.R. Smith of Kingston in the front. For the curious, S.R. Smith happens to be the name of the world’s leading manufacturer of pool deck equipment. Enough said. The back page of the book contains a passage from Paolo and Francesca that appears to have been copied in Isabella’s hand. The work was a tragedy in four acts (first performed in 1902) by the English poet and dramatist Steven Phillips (1864-1915). The particular copied bit was spoken by Franc (frankly?); the copyist took a bit of liberty with the first line. Here is the original:
And yet, Nita, and yet — can any tell
How sorrow forth doth come? Is there a step,
A light step, or a dreamy drip of oars?
Is there a stirring of leaves, or ruffle of wings?
I have read nearly 50 “nature books” for this blog (with easily close to 100 to go), spanning the eighty years from 1861 to 1941. Yet this is the first time I can say that, while this work scarcely reads like a novel, it has an antagonist known as The Collector. While not present in every essay, he dominates the scene and dictates the “nefarious calling” that all other outing members, including the author, participate in: egg collecting, a.k.a., nest robbing. A host of other archetypal characters play bit roles in the drama: the Banker, the Naturalist, the Ornithologist, the Botanist, and the Native. Since Scoville does not elect to assign himself a persona, I will call him the Author. These lesser characters are enablers of the wanton destruction that repeatedly happens throughout this book’s pages. Indeed, the Author reports with pride his many successful ventures at locating birds’ nests to be plundered for the Collector’s collections. He even remarks at one point on how
some of the happiest days of my life have been spent with collectors of birds’ eggs — oölogists, they call themselves. They are all so eager and excited and happy over their hobby that it is a pleasure to be with them. They regard me rather pityingly, however, because I take no share of the findings; yet I think that I have chosen the better part. Boxes of blown eggs leave me cold, but I shall never forget the days and nights in the wilderness which I have had on bird-trips, and the excitement of discovering rare nests and the pleasure of learning secrets of bird life, unknown to me before.
And the Collector does not select one egg from each nest; he takes them all. On one outing to a New Jersey marsh, the Author discovers the first pileated woodpecker nest in the state. Despite its apparent rarity, “urged on by the Collector,” the Author attempts to rob it — without success, I am grateful to report. And when out of the Collector’s company — as in several other essays in the book — the Author generally behaves with greater reverence toward most animals. He does approach venomous snakes with repugnance, however. Pointing out a “very real menace” rattlesnakes supposedly posed to humans, he proposed that big game hunters capture them all for “various zoölogical gardens.” (Lest he appears to be advocating a live capture solution, however, it should be noted that the skins of at least two timber rattlesnakes dispatched by the Author hung on the walls of his cabin in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.)
Venting over. Beyond the domain of the Collector, there is some delightful descriptive prose in this book. He mentions John Burroughs several times, though he does not identify any other nature writers or scientists of the day. (The Naturalist and the Ornithologist and the Botanist are never named.) For his faults, the Author is a skilled ornithologist and botanist who also takes a keen interest in how many landscapes of the Eastern US are haunted by traces of the human past. An old track through the pines was once a busy road for glassmakers and ironmakers in the Pine Barrens, while an old mill site in Connecticut once hummed with industrial activity. In recognizing stories in the landscape, he ties natural history into human history in a way that few other writers of his day did.
While there is no lofty poetry here, no sweeping metaphors or cosmic sentiments, there are still passages like this one describing an encounter with a bluebird:
Once, among all these interesting strangers, we heard the “far-away, far-away” of a bluebird — those lovely contralto notes which fall from the sky like drops of molten silver. Looking up, we saw that dear, brave bird of the North flying toward the sunset with the sky color on his back and the color of the red clay of the South on his breast, and we watched him until he was lost in a mother-of-pearl cloud.
Here, he describes the sounds of the night at his cabin in the Pine Barrens:
The shadows of the waving trees made a fretted, magical pattern on the smooth surface of the water. A pine-barren pickerel frog, all emerald and gold and purple-black, snored, and some other frogs unknown to me gave a couple of loud, startling notes which sounded like the clapping of two boards together. Then suddenly, in the distance, the stressed, hurried notes of a whippoorwill pealed through the darkness, to be answered by one close to the cabin. Over and over and over again these birds of the night repeated their triple notes with a little click after each one, hurrying as if they feared to be interrupted before they could finish. As the wild, sweet melody thrilled through the darkness, it seemed to me as if the moonlight itself had been set to music.
I will close my review of Wild Honey with this lovely passage describing a December boat journey into Okefenokee Swamp:
In the ice-blue sky the moon showed in the afternoon light like a bowl of alabaster, fretted and carved in shadowy patterns. In front of me stretched a fourteen-mile canal. The wine-brown water reflected the deep green of the long-leaf pines on either side of the stream, with now and then gleams of dragon’s blood and carmine-lake as the leaves of the black and sweet gums stained by the frost reflected their clors in the water. Everywhere were towering cypresses silvered with festoons of Spanish moss. Above the setting sun the western sky was a sea of amber and dim gold with shoals of violet and heliotrope clouds in its depths.
A few words about Samuel Scoville, Jr. (1872-1950) and my book copy are in order. Above is a photograph of the Author, circa 1918. According to his terse Wikipedia entry, Scoville was an American writer, naturalist, and lawyer. From Wild Honey, I can gather a few details; he resided in Haverford, Pennsylvania at the time of this book and worked on the thirteenth floor of an office building in Philadelphia. His practice was apparently lucrative; he also owned a home in Cornwall, Connecticut; a cabin (“Faraway”) in the New Jersey Pine Barrens; and a small peninsula on the coast of Maine. He married Katharine Gallaudet Trumbull in Philadelphia and had four children (all boys). He wrote a dozen books, mostly for children and mostly about nature. Wild Honey appears to have been his last collection of nature essays, though clearly with an adult audience in mind.
By 1929, the golden age of the artistic book cover had ended. My volume (the first and only edition) looks like most hardcovers of today, with textured board instead of cloth. The front cover is blank save for a small image impressed into the center, pictured above. What Poseidon and his trident have to do with this book is a mystery. The closest connection I can find is that the guides on his excursions into Okefenokee Swamp all used a “three-pronged push poll peculiar to the Swamp” to navigate the boat through the various waterways and hidden channels in the depths of Okefenokee.
I have to wonder how well this book was received. Its timing was far from ideal. It was published in October of 1929; at the end of that month came the great Stock Market Crash. I wonder how many Americans were looking to buy a nature book then? Furthermore, the Nature Movement, as described by Dallas Lore Sharp, was well over by then; World War I and the passing of John Burroughs in 1921 marked its close.
The Author inscribed my particular copy of Wild Honey to “my best customer and kindest critic” E. Lawrence Dudley on December 4th, 1929. Dudley (1879-1947) was the author of at least five works of biography and fiction, one of which was turned into a movie (Voltaire, 1933).
I return to Torrey as an old friend of long acquaintance. The inspiration behind the blog was the discovery of an early compilation of nature writers, which included extensive work by Thoreau, several essays of Burroughs, and a few pieces each by Bradford Torrey, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Olive Thorne Miller. All three were fairly renowned in their day, publishing extensively in the nature essay genre, particularly ornithological pieces. And all three are nearly forgotten today — so they join the inevitable company of a host of other obscure authors who never managed to achieve much fame. Was I to read all the books the three together wrote, that would take me the better part of a year. Still, I have decided to explore several works by each to gain a richer sense of how they encountered the natural world.
According to the scanty lines on him in Wikipedia, Torrey lived from 1843 until 1912. He is known today mainly as an ornithologist. He frequently contributed to periodicals, compiling his published essays into nine books. The Foot-Path Way was his third work. The first half of the book is given over to travel essays — works where Torrey ventures afield and reports on all the birds he has seen (or not seen). His ramblings take him to Cape Cod, northern New Hampshire, and Mount Mansfield, Massachusetts. His descriptions are fairly dry, a point to which he alludes upon occasion. Here, Torrey laments how rare it is that he truly rhapsodizes on the beauty of nature:
So it is with our appreciation of natural beauty. We are always in its presence, but only on rare occasions are our eyes annointed to see it. Such ecstasies, it seems, are not for every day. Sometimes I fear they grow less frequent as we grow older.
We will hope for better things; but, should the gloomy prognostication fall true, we will but betake ourselves the more assiduously to lesser pleasures, — to warbers and willows, roses and strawberries. Science will never fail us. If worse comes to worst, we will not despise the moths.
In a later essay in the volume, on the passing of birds overhead during the autumn migration, Torrey remarks upon a screech-owl he has frequently observed sitting atop a tall tree: “More than half the time he is there, and always with his eye on me. What an air he has! — like a judge on the bench! If I were half as wise as he looks, these essays of mine would never more be dull.”
The second half of the book is predominantly bird studies: essays where Torrey seeks answers to questions about bird behavior through his detailed observations and occasional anecdotes from others. For example, he explores whether or not male ruby-throated hummingbirds assist the females with incubating the eggs or raising their young. (He concludes that he suspects not, but that he is not convinced one way or the other; scientists now know that males only remain with the females for courtship and mating.) He also explores roosting behavior among American robins (which appears to be limited to young birds and unmated males). He notes the seasonal passage of long numbers of songbirds overhead, many too high up to see with the naked eye — much larger numbers than we would likely experience today. He freely confesses his fascination with birds: “A happy man is the bird-lover; always another species to look for, another mystery to solve.” That said, Torrey attributes personhood to birds, asserting that “Birds and men are alike parts of nature, having many things in common not only with each other, but with every form of animate existence.” Studying birds, therefore, can ultimately teach us about ourselves: “To become acquainted with the peculiarities of plants or birds is to increase one’s knowledge of beings of his own sort.”
More, still, might be gleaned from plants if we only knew how to interpret them. In one essay, Torrey considered similarities between plants and people; alas, he restricted himself to analogous ones, such as how roses with thorns mirror lovely people with a few uncommendable qualities. If only he had wondered more about plant behavior, he might have been far ahead of his time. The last essay is a brief paean to the white pine (which Torrey prefers to call the Weymouth pine). In one of his most poetic passages in the book, he writes about the pine’s mysterious communications:
…the pine is a priest of the true religion. It speaks never of itself, never its own words. Silent it stands till the Spirit breathes upon it. Then all its innumerable leaves awake and speak as they are moved… …the pine tree, under the visitation of the heavenly influence, utters things incommunicable; it whispers to us of things we have never said and never can say, — things that lie deeper than words, deeper than thought. Blessed are our ears if we hear, for the message is not to be understood by every comer, nor, indeed, by any, except at happy moments. In this temple all hearing is given by inspiration, for which reason the pine-tree’s language is inarticulate, as Jesus spake in parables.
My well-worn copy of Torrey’s book has had quite a history. It appears to have been given to Mary Cornelia Dodd by Ella in 1894. I managed to locate information on several Mary C. Dodds, living and deceased, but none whose life trajectories quite fit this one. There was a Mary C. Dodd who was born in Arkansas in 1973, and would have been 21 in 1894; however, she married John Archie Fain in 1891 and would likely have taken his last name, in keeping with traditions at the time.
The book found its way into the possession of Clark L. Thayer of Amherst, Massachusetts, in September 1936. Here, I was surprised to find a likely owner: Clark Leonard Thayer, who graduated from UMass Amherst in 1913, with a degree in Floriculture. In World War I, Thayer served in the Infantry and Ammunition Train. After the war, he became an instructor in Floriculture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1928, he published Spring Flowering Bulbs: Hardy and Desirable Materials for Use in the Home Garden. At some point before 1936, Thayer relocated to Amherst, probably to teach there. He died in 1982 at the age of 91 in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and is buried in Quabbin Park Cemetery in Ware, Massachusetts.
The final “signature” is an herbal tea stain visible on Mary Dodd’s signature. That was the work of Evil Kitten, our mischievous black cat. By jumping at precisely the right angle onto a low bookshelf at the foot of the bed, he managed to knock a half-glass of tea onto the bed itself, where this book conveniently happened to be sitting a the time.
According to Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge), Horace Lunt was a linguist in Slavic Studies who lived from 1918 until 2010. Unfortunately, that does not explain how he managed to publish a book of New Hampshire nature essays in 1888. Hence the problem. While trying to gain information about this author, every site I visited invariably led to the wrong Horace Lunt. Finally, I stumbled upon a scan of a book on the Lunt family of New England, which included a paragraph about the right Horace. What I learned only made him more mysterious to me. Horace was born on March 17, 1838. He worked as a house servant before joining a local militia company in 1861 and then a Maine infantry regiment a year and a half later. His regiment fought in many battles during the Civil War, including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and Appomattox. He was one of the few members of his regiment to survive the war, although one of his legs was severely impaired due to the long marches and other hardships. After the war, he became a nature writer, publishing three books; Across Lots was the first. He died in 1911. I could not find an image of his grave, let alone of him.
So I fill in the blanks as best I can. What happened to him between 1865 and the publication of his first book? Did he try his hand at other careers along the way? Did he have the 19th Century equivalent of PTSD? (How could he have possibly endured so many horrific battles psychologically unscathed?) Did he perhaps seek solace in nature, a calming presence to soothe his troubled memories? I don’t know. I did notice the presence of his past, in terms of how frequently he would use military images to describe natural scenes in his essays. Here is how the first essay, “A March Ramble,” opens:
March, in New England, is the disputable month between the seasons spring and winter; the space, as it were, between the picket lines of both armies, where many battles are fought for the mastery and power of governing the land. Winter commands Boreas to station his wind batteries on the bleak northern hills to belch forth a storm of snow and hail, and a general frigid icicle charge is ordered along the whole line until not a vestige of spring is seen. Then the frost army, wearied with its fierce onslaught, sleeps, and the vernal force, driven far southward, turns again its face toward the foe, insidiously creeps along the flank, and takes the gray old general in his fancied stronghold by surprise… Winter wakes again and marshals his strength, but his front is not so vigorous. He sullenly retires before the genial commander of the other side, that moves slowly and steadily forward to the vernal equinox.
Equinox? Appomatox? They practically rhyme. Only, in this version of the story, the South ultimately wins (for the spring, at least).
I truly wanted to enjoy Lunt’s work. His essays are vivid, and his emulation of Thoreau is uncanny. He captures a couple of Thoreau’s mannerisms from his journals, including a tendency to interrupt description to declare something fervently and his frequent addition of questions without answers. However, he lavishes the most praise on John Burroughs, “whose writings have the true sylvan ring — to read them is next to walking in the woods.” And that, I suppose, is what Lunt is chiefly after in his book — using text to evoke a virtual reality through which the reader can travel, as if out of doors. Lunt keeps his own musings to a minimum and eschews references to literature and history. Reading his descriptive passages, I feel like I am there with him — roaming the woods, gazing down into a pond, following a half-tumbled-down wall. Consider this delightful passage on autumnal plants and how they disperse their seeds:
As I walk across-lots, I am struck with the varied and ingenious methods the different plants have used to scatter their seeds. Here is an army of goldenrods and asters, milk-weeds and epilobiums, holding aloft on their wand-like stems millions of seeds, to which are attached balloons, parachutes and wings, that the wind at the proper time may carry them miles away. I wave one of these wands when, as if by magic, hundreds of the winged grains go sailing through the air like the flight of insects. Here, too, are hooks, barbs, and prickles that cling to the dress of passers-by or to the hairs of cattle, and thus are carried away to be rubbed off and deposited in some other locality. Other seeds artfully hide themselves in lucious, brilliant wrappings that the birds may be attracted to them. Strawberries, raspberries, and the early drupes have scattered their seeds by this process; but the various cornels, honeysuckles, greenberries, rose and spice bushes, the bright red fruit clusters of the winter-berry, the purple panicles of the prim, that feast the eyes of the autumn rambler, are still waiting patiently for the snows to put an embargo on other supplies near the ground.
Here I chose a botanical passage. But Lunt’s observational skills were far-ranging. He emphasized birds the most (meticulously describing their color patterns, as if the poor reader could ever remember them in a book devoid of illustrations). But he also wrote about snakes, turtles, small mammals, insects, and even microscopic pond life. While his command of animal behavior was perhaps average for nature writers of the time, his skills in identifying and describing organisms were prodigious. And yet I struggled with feeling that the book was missing something vital — without which it simply could not stand alongside Thoreau. After reading one of the last passages from the final essay, “Cross-cut Views of Winter,” I finally figured it out.
I note the tracks of various prowlers in the woods. A rabbit has lately passed along, making indentations in the snow at regular intervals, as if he had been surveying or pacing off a certain portion of the lot for himself. Further on the lines appear more numerous; cross and re-cross each other, and are tangled in such a knot that it would be a hopeless task to find the creatures’ homes. They seem to have gone everywhere, and arrived at no particular place.
Thank you, Horace! That is precisely what I mean. Your book goes everywhere (within your New Hampshire woodland domain) and arrives at no particular place. There is no point to your essays — or rather, the point of your essays is the ramble itself. Unless I include your understandable fascination with war imagery, there are no connection to anything larger than the moment and the walk and the things you discover along the way. There is no destination. A reader could pick up the book and begin anywhere — could probably even read the paragraphs in backward order, and it wouldn’t matter. Across Lots is intended as a vehicle for virtual experience at a time long before the coffee-table photography book, video, and virtual reality headsets. And as such, it can end equally at any point, such as here.
Effie Molt Bignell is one of those most unusual personages, an author who does not even have a Wikipedia page to her name. I was able to glean from a few bits and pieces online that she was born in 1855 in Burlington, Vermont. A member of the American Ornithological Union, she authored several books, including two with a nature focus: Mr. Chupes and Miss Jenny (about two robins) and this one. She married William J. Bignell. That is all that I know about her. I cannot even locate her picture. I might add that my information search was impeded a bit by the title of this book, which tended to yield Google results such as this one:
NOT My Woodland Intimates
No, this is not THAT kind of book! In fact, it is a flowing, charming romp through a wooded grove and adjacent gardens belonging to an obviously wealthy woman with abundant time on her hands. As she describes in the book, her home is quite large, with a carriage drive in the front, and employing at least one maid and gardener. Her aristocratic bearing is telegraphed to readers through her occasional cultured French phrases (untranslated, of course) such as feu-de-joie, haute société, and table d’hôte. With the exception of the last chapter (a trip to a rural community near the St. Lawrence River in Quebec), the book entirely takes place, over the course of a year, on Effie Bignell’s estate somewhere in eastern New Jersey. There, she entertains the reader as an honored guest, telling stories about the birds and squirrels of her domain, and pointing ut the various seasonal sights of her woods. I admit that I found her companionship in text quite affable, her descriptions vivid and poetic. There is no particular storyline or grand adventure. There is, though, a bit of escape into an affluent suburban yard of more than 100 years ago. Her hope, in writing this work, was that “to someone in sick room or city pent, these pages might carry restful little messages from “God’s out-of-doors,” or pleasing suggestions of woodland friends.” At the close of the volume, I confess that I was sorry to part company with the author, as she remarked on the journeys we had taken together:
Do you realize that nearly a twelvemonth had elapsed since you and I took our first stroll through the grove together? How rapidly the “mounds of years” heap themselves up! How quickly the cycles pass! Oh, for unlimited leisure, for unbounded opportunities for investigation, and the vision that penetrates to the heart of the mysteries by which we are surrounded.
In-between preface and closing line, seasons change, but otherwise precious little happens. There are no grand ecological discoveries, spectacular events, profound statements, or even “walks afield” (at least, until the final chapter). There is the house and the yard and the trees. Yet her flowing imagery carries the reader along, and her childlike delight in nature is quite enticing. Consider this lovely, languid description of a summer afternoon:
The noonday lull has already set in. No sound now save the bees’ drowsy droning and the rustling of wind-swayed leaves. In the wild garden daisies and buttercups are nodding to each other, and soft waves and ripples are playing over the tops of the tall grasses. How caressing, how soothing the fragrance-laden breeze as it fans one’s brow and lightly touches one’s hair, whispering all the time of beautiful, mystical things to which the heart responds though it but dimly understands.
The reader is overcome with this desire to pull up a lounge chair and take it all in. Heck, in her world, even decaying leaves are worthy of appreciation, as she relates below in her chapter Good-by to Summer:
Several bird families have already left us, and others are on the eve of departure. In this beautiful secluded corner a pair of wood-thrushes have held a perpetual At Home from early in the season. It is just the wild, unmolested spot to take the fancy of those ardent wood-lovers. Broken boughs have piled themselves up undisturbed under the interlocking branches from which they fell, and moist, rich leaf-mold, boasting of layers and layers, generaions and generations of decay, mats itself around the deeply shaded tree-bases. Think of the lucious larder this represents!
Along the way, Bignell gently nudges readers toward taking action on behalf of songbirds. She shares tips for feeding birds in the winter and reminds readers about how much plant and tree destruction by insects is prevented by the work of birds. Like many writers of the time, she is clearly quite taken with her avian visitors. At one point, she fervently declares,
What wonderful beings birds are! Earth, tree-tops, and sky are at their service, and, for some of their number, even surging waves make a safe resting-place and deep snows a warm covering. How pitiful and small and labored do even the swiftest and most extensive of our voyages seem in comparison with the free, untrammelled journeyings of these “brothers of the air”.
Apart from all the birds (lots and lots of them, calling from practically every page) and a few squirrels (named, of course), the only other character in Bignell’s book is her dog, “a vigilant little Chihuahuan” also known as “The Mexican”. A feisty protector of birds, she patrols the area where Bignell puts out seeds, nuts, and breadcrumbs for the birds, making sure that the birds can dine without putting their lives at risk. “Such is the power of valor,” Bignell declares, “that all the cats of the neighborhood flee in terror before the redoubtable little creature; three pounds and a half of dog!”
Reluctantly, I close the book. Another half-dozen titles arrived today, continuing to build my library of obscure American nature authors from 100 years ago or more. Other volumes and authors are jostling me for attention. Yet I hold this book — completely free of marks from past owners — in my hands for a moment longer. It feels light, smooth, and comfortable. Maybe I’ll visit again someday…
Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924) was 40 when The Song of the Cardinal was published. Her first book, it was the start of a long lineage of works, primarily fiction, extolling the wonders of the natural world. Though it tells a story (in a manner of speaking), along the way, The Song of the Cardinal offers a rich tapestry of Edenic landscapes, including both an orange grove in Florida and Limberlost Swamp and a farm along the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana. The 1912 edition that I read (a copy of which is housed in the collections of The Met in NYC) is graced by a truly magnificent art nouveau cover attributed to Margaret Armstrong. Armstrong (1867-1944) was one of the premier artists of the golden age of book design. A year after this book was published, Armstrong left the cover design field to write her own books: first an illustrated wildflower guide for the Western US, then biographies and mystery novels.
Most of the book is told from the viewpoint of a male Cardinal, as he returns north for the spring and struggles to attract a mate. Humans briefly appear on the scene — an old man and his daughter in the orange grove — then vanish from the story. Later, the reader meets 60-year-old Abram and his wife Maria, a farming couple growing corn and keeping chickens along the Wabash River in Indiana. From that point forward, the book alternates between their rustic dialogue and the viewpoint of the cardinal. Throughout the book, nature is really the central character. Early on, Porter introduces us to the glories of Limberlost Swamp:
Three thousands of acres of black marsh-much stretch under summers’ sun and winters’ snws. There are darksome pools of murky water, bits of swale and high morass. Giants of the forest reach skyward, or, coated with velvet slime, lie decaying in sun-flecked pools, while the underbrush is almost impenetrable.
The swamp resembles a big dining table for the birds. Wild grape vines clamber to the tops of the highest trees, spreading umbrella-like over the banches, and their festooned floating trailers wave like silken fringe in the play of the wind. The birds loll in the shade, peel bark, gather dried curlers for nest material, and feast on the pungent fruit. They chatter in swarms over the wild-cherry trees, and overload their crops with red haws, wild plums, pawpaws, blackberries and mandrake. The alders around the edge draw flocks in search of berries, and the marsh grasses and weeds are weighted with seed hunters. The muck is alive with worms; and the whole swamp ablaze with flowers, whose colors and perfumes attract myriads of insects and butterflies.
Although the male cardinal in this story fledged there and first returned there after his winter in the south, ultimately he abandons Limberlost for a bucolic farm and woodland along the Wabash River, home of Abram and Maria. “To my mind,” Abram declares to the cardinal (whom he greets as Mr. Redbird), “it’s jest as near Paradise as you’ll strike on earth.”
Old Wabash is a twister for curvin’ and windin’ round, an’ it’s limestone bed half the way, an’ the water’s as pretty an’ clear as in Maria’s springhouse. An’ as for trimmin’, why say, Mr. Redbird, I’ll just leave it t you if she ain’t all trimmed up like a woman’s spring bonnit. Look at that grass a-creepin’ right dwn till it’ a-trailin’ in the water! Did you ever see jest quite such fie frigy willers? An’ you wait a little, an’ the flowerin’ mallows ‘at grows long the shinin’ old river are fine as garden hollyhocks. Maria says ‘at they’d be purtier ‘an hurs if they wer eonly double; but, lord, Mr. Redbird, they are! See ’em once on the bak, an’ agin in the water! An’ back a little an’ there’s jest thickets of pawpaw, an’ thorns, an’ wild grapevines, an’ crab, an’ red an’ black haw, an’ dogwod, an’ sumac, an’ spicebush, an’ trees! Lord! Mr. Redbird, the sycamrs, an’ maples, an’ tulip, an’ ash, an’ elm rees are so bustin’ fine ‘long the old Wabash they put ’em in poetry books an’ sing songs about ’em. What do you think of that? Jest back o’ you a little there’s a sycamore split into five trunks, any one of them a famous big tree, tops up ‘mong the cluds, an’ roots diggin’ under the old river; an’ over a little further ‘s a maple ‘at’s eight big trees in one. Most anything you can name, you can find it ‘long the old Wabash, if you only know where to hunt for it.
To her credit, while Gene Stratton Porter describes her Indiana natural landscapes in Edenic terms, that does not mean that the wolf lies with the lamb and the leopard lays down with the kid. There is predation and death; for instance, a cardinal chick falling into the water is at once snatched up by a mackerel. And the birds, for all their lovely songs, do not all behave in considerate ways toward each other. Indeed, Porter uses a pair of woodpeckers nesting in a sycamore tree to portray domestic abuse, long before that was a topic for everyday conversation:
…the woodpecker had dressed his suit in finest style, and with dulcet tones and melting tenderness had gone a-courting. Sweet as the dove’s had been his wooing…yet scarcely had his plump, amiable little mate consented to his caresses and approved the sycamore, before he turned on her, pecked her severely, and pulled a tuft of plumage from her breast. There was not the least excuse for this tyrranical action; and the sight filled the Cardinal with rage. He fully expected to see Madam Woodpecker divorce herself and flee her new home, and he most earnestly hoped that she would; but she did no such thing. She meekly flattened her feathers, hurried work in a lively manner, and tried in every way to anticipate and avert her mate’s displeasure. Under this treatment he grew more abusive, and now Madam Woodpecker dodged every time she came within his reach.
The woodpecker is one of the exceptions, though. On the whole, the natural world in Porter’s tale tends to be filled largely with flowers and birdsong. The true serpent in this paradise is Man the Hunter. It is he who threatens to disrupt the pastoral tranquility, wantonly killing birds and other wildlife. Abram attempts to protect the cardinal and all the other birds on his farm by posting “No Hunting” signs, explaining that
…them town creatures…call themselves sportsmen, an’ kill a hummi’ bird to see if they can hit it. Time was when trees an’ underbrush were full o’ birds an’ squirrels, any amount o’ rabbits, an’ the fish fairly crowdin’ in the river. I used to kill all the quail an’ wild turkeys about here to make an appetizing change. It was always my plan to take a little an’ leave a little. But just look at it now. Surprise o’ my life if I get a two-pound bass. Wild turkey gobblin’ would scare me out o’ my senses, an’, as for the birds, there are just about a fourth what there used to be, an’ the crops eaten to pay for it.
Here, Abram’s complaints seem hauntingly familiar, as scientists continue to report on the decline of songbirds across the US. Of course, the signs prove insufficient. Abram observes a hunter walking down his lane and confronts him. The hunter claims to be merely passing through, and Abram lets him continue. Before Abram can stop him, the hunter has fired at the cardinal in a sumac tree, fortunately missing him completely. Abram arrives in time to prevent any killing, launching into a several-page impassioned tirade about needing to protect the natural world. I wonder if the entire book, with its minimal narrative, was intended primarily as a vehicle for sentiments such as these:
Sky over your head, earth under foot, trees around you, an’ river there, — all full o’ life ‘at you ain’t no mortal right to touch, ‘cos God made it, an’ it’s His! Course, I know ‘at he said distinct ‘at man was to have “dominion over the beasts o’ the field, an’ the fowls o’ the air.” An’ ‘at means ‘at you’re free to smash a copper-head instead of letting it sting you. Means at’ you better shoot a wolf than to let it carry off your lambs. Means ‘at its right to kill a hawk an’ save your chickens; but God knows ‘at shootin’ a redbird just to see the feathers fly isn’t having dominion over anything; it’s just makin’ a plumb beast o’ yourself.
Alas, Porter’s concern for wildlife included a number of exceptions that would make the modern-day environmentalist cringe. Still, Porter’s central argument stands: humans need to protect other beings, because they have a spiritual origin. Ultimately, caring for God’s creation is more than just a Biblical obligation in Porter’s mind; it is a profoundly religious act. As Abram explains (further along in the same tirade, while the hunter stands mute):
To my mind, ain’t no better way to love an’ worship God, ‘an to protect an’ ‘preciate these fine gifts he’s given for our joy an’ use. Worshippin’ that bird’s a kind o’ religion with me. Getting the beauty from the sky, an’ the trees, ‘an the grass, ‘an the water that God made, is nothin’ but doin’ him homage. Whole earth’s a sanctuary. You can worship from sky above to grass underfoot.
Finally, the hunter, reduced to jelly by the farmer’s words (either their intent, or merely their duration) pleads for forgiveness, abandons his gun to Abram’s keeping, and flees, declaring that “I’ll never kill another harmless thing.” Summer ends, and with the autumn, the cardinal and his brood take flight for the orange grove in Florida, bringing the book full circle.
As a work of literature, Porter’s Song of the Cardinal has faded into fitting obscurity; the story simply doesn’t manage to live up to its cover (at least, not the 1912 art nouveau one). Very little happens in the tale, and what does occur is either highly predictable or rather silly. Yet there is poetry in Porter’s rich descriptions, along with a wealth of firsthand knowledge of the plants and animals of her native state, gleaned from many years of fieldwork in the swamps, fields, and woods around her homes (she had a house on Sylvan Lake in Rome City, and a cabin on the edge of Limberlost Swamp). And the passionate call for better treatment of wildlife, so vital at the time, qualifies her as an early member of the American environmental movement. Her fascination with birds would continue long beyond this book, in her early wildlife photography efforts documented in non-fiction works published later in her life. She also wrote (and illustrated with photos) a guide to the moths of the Limberlost. I have secured copies of these books and will devote posts to them at some point in the future.
As I noted a the beginning of this post, I preferentially sought out the 1912 edition of this book (rather than a 1903 first edition) because of its spectacular cover. The artwork on this spine, though, is a bit, well, odd. Apparently the spine was stamped upside down. So rather than displaying the title with flowers above and below it, the title stands by itself at the top of the spine, with flowers bracketing bare cloth further down. From what I was able to find out online, the remaining copies of this edition appear equally split between the correct stamping of the spine and this alternative (accidental) one.
My book was previously the property of Mary S. Jones of Fairfield, Alabama; her name (printed in blue ink) and a return address sticker are found on the flyleaf. The sticker looks more recent than the actual book. I was unable to locate any information about Mary S. Jones, though the task was made difficult by her rather common last name.
