This Vision of Paradise: “Under the Trees” by Hamilton Wright Mabie (1891)

 book review, Books, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Jun 092022
 

“Our soul opens to the soul of Nature, and we discover anew that we are one.”

Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846-1916) published over two dozen volumes in his lifetime, many of which were compilations of legends, myths, and fairytales for children. He also wrote fiction and essays on nature and culture. Mabie stands apart from other writers I have read throughout this project in that he was clearly not a scientific naturalist; his inspiration came not from Thoreau, Burroughs, or even Muir, but rather, from Emerson. A transcendental tone infuses his fascinating volume, Under the Trees. Midway through, Mabie reminisces about his first encounter with Emerson’s writing:

As I write, the memory of a summer afternoon long ago comes back to me. The old orchard sleeps in the dreamy air, the birds are silent, a tranquil spirit broods over the whole earth. Under the wide-spreading braches a by is intently reading. He has fallen upon a bit of transcendental writing in a magazine, and for the first time has lerned that t some men the great silent world about him, that seems so real and changeless, is immaterial and unsubstantial — a vision projected by the soul upon illimitable space. On the instant that all things are written with unreality, the solid earth shrinks beneath him. He cannot understand, but he feels what Emerson meant when he said, “The Supreme Being does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves.” That which was fixed, stable, cast in permanent forms was suddenly annihilated by a revelation which spoke to the heart rather than the intellect, and laid bare at a glance the unseen spiritual foundations upon which all things rest at last. From that moment the boy saw with other eyes, and lived henceforth in things not made with hands.

The result of that experience is a book that is difficult to capture in words. On the one hand, it contains the dreamy utterings of an upper-class American male in the Gilded Age, extolling the virtues of an all-benevolent Nature deity that seems to collaborate with and smile upon Western civilization: “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.” Missing from this worldview is any condemnation of the costs of progress, already becoming apparent in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. There is a passing reference or two to cities, which cannot compare to the bucolic countryside. But the sufferings of the urban poor and the subjugation of Native Americans have no space here. Nor does the book — unlike a handful of other works at the time — mention the wanton killing of birds and buffalo underway back then. This is a pastoral idyll in the manner of Virgil’s Georgics. Every glass is full (with wine, no doubt), and the writer spends many hours enraptured with visions of paradise. There is a naivete here that is at once both compelling and somewhat reprehensible.

And yet. And yet, there are some truly beautiful passages here where Mabie’s transcendental vision carries the reader away from the mundane world of the moment — a world filled with nouns that all seem so real and substantial — into a world of verbs, infused by forces of constant change. In flowing prose, Mabie makes the hydrologic cycle come alive as a Buddhist vision of cosmic transformation:

The rivers are the great channels through which the ceaseless interchange of the elements goes on; they unite the heart of the continents and the solitary places of the mountains with the universal sea which washes all shores and beats in melancholy refrain at each pole. Into their currents the hills and uplands pour their streams; to them the little rivulets come laughing and singing down from their sources in the forest depths. A drop falling from a passing shower into the lake of Delolo may be carried eastward, through the Zambezi, to the Indian Ocean, or westward, along the transcontinental course of the Congo, to the Atlantic. The mists that rise from great streams, separated by vast stretches of territory, commingle in the upper air, and are carried by vagrant winds to the wheat-fields of the far Northwest or the rice-fields of the South. The ocean ceaselessly makes the circuit of the globe, and summons its ributaris along all shores to itself. But it gives even more lavishly than it receives; day and night there rise over its vast expanse those invisible clouds of moisture which diffuse themselves through the atmosphere, and descend at last upon the earth to pour, sooner or later, into the rivers, and be returned from whence they came.

Endless flow. That is the underlying vision here. Everything we encounter is temporary- a book, a mountain, or a blooming rose. Nature is always at play, and by recognizing these transformations and how they point to one unified reality, we can transcend daily life’s mundane worries and demands and find lasting peace. Buddhism for the Gilded Age.

If I permit my thought to rest upon this fragrant flower, to touch petal and stem and root, and unite them with the vast world in which, by a universal contribution of force, they have come to maturity, I find myself face to face with the oldest and deepest questions men have ever sought to answer. Elements of earth and sea and sky are blended here in one of those forms of radiant and vanishing beauty with which the unseen life of Nature counts the years in endless and inexhaustable profusion. As it budded and opened into full flower in the garden, how complete it seemed in itself, and how isolated from all other visible things! But in reality how dependent it was, how entirely the creation of forces as far apart as earth and sky! The great tide from the Unseen cast it for a moment into my possession; for an hour it has filled a human home with its far-brought sweetness; to-morrow it will fall apart and return whence it came. As I look into its heart of passionate colour, the whole visible universe, that seems so fixed and stable, becomes immaterial, evanescent, vanishing; it is no longer a permanent order of seas and continents and rounded skies; it is a vision painted by an unseen hand against a background of mystery… It is the momentary creation of forces that stream through it in endless ebb and flow, that are to-day touching the sky with elusive splendour, and to-morrow springing in changeful loveliness from the depths of earth. The continents are transformed into the seas that encircle them; the seas rise into the skies that overarch them; the skies mingle with the arth, and send back from theuplifted faces of flowers greetings to the stars they have deserted…

In the unbroken vision of the centuries all things are plastic and in motion; a divine energy surges through all; substantial for a moment here as a rock, fragile and vanishing there as a flower; but everywhere the same, and always sweeping onward through its illimitable channel to its appointed end. It is this vital tide on which the universe gleams and floats like a mirage of immutability; ever the same for a single moment to the soul that contemplates it: a new creation every hour and to every eye that rests upon it.

The world is spinning, and I am dizzy with his prose. I pause, look down to earth (more precisely, the dust-infused carpet of my cluttered home office), and catch my breath. I think I may have reached my daily limit for cosmic rapture, and it is only 8 am.

Without a doubt, my favorite essay in this collection is “The Earliest Insights” in which Mabie turns his thoughts toward the mysteries of the childhood experience with nature. Here, in his flowery way, he reaches many of the same realizations I have held for years. Specifically, as Edith Cobb noted in her Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, for young children, the border between self and other has not yet developed, enabling the child to have a consciousness infused with nature — continuous with it, fully present with it. Amazingly, Mabie’s thoughts on the quest to rediscover that childhood way of being in nature (which I have pondered all my life) seem to presage T.S. Eliot’s vision in “Little Gidding” (published 51 years later) of returning to where we started our explorations and knowing the place for the first time. Could Eliot have encountered Mabie’s work? Unlikely though that may seem, Mabie also writes of children under an apple tree, just as children in an apple tree appear in the very next lines of “Little Gidding.” And did I mention that a rose bush appears in the essay, too? First, here is the extended passage from T.S. Eliot, published in 1942:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

And here is Mabie’s more labored yet still inspiring prose, originally published in 1891:

When I came across the field a few moments ago, a voice called me from under the apple trees, and a little figure, with a flush of joy on her face and the fadeless light of love in her eyes, came running with uneven pace to meet me. How slight and frail was that vision of childhood to the thought which saw the awful forces of nature at work, or rather at play, about her! And yet how serene was her look upon the great world dropping its fruit at her feet; how familiar and at ease her attitude in the presence of these sublime mysteries! She is at one with the hour and the scene; she has not begun to think of herself as apart from the things which surround her; that strange and sudden sense of unreality which makes me at times alien and a stranger in the presence of nature, “moving about in the world not realised,” is still far off. For her the sun shines and the winds blow, the flowers bloom and the stars glisten, the trees hold out their protecting arms and the grass waves its soft garment, and she accepts them without a thought of what is behind them or shall follow them; the painful process of thought, which is first to separate her from Nature and then to reunite her to it in a higher and more spiritual fellowship, has hardly begun. She still walks in the soft light of faith, and drinks in the immortal beauty, as the flower at her side drinks in the dew and the light. It is she, after all, who is right as she plays, joyously and at home, on the ground which the earthquake may rock, and under the sky which storms will darken and rend. The far-brought instince of childhood accepts without a question that great truth of unity and fellowship to which knowledge comes only after long and agonising quest. Between the innocent sleep of childhood in the arms of Nature and the calm repose of the old man in the same enfolding strength there stretches the long, sleepless day of question, search, and suffering; at the end the wisest returns to the goal from which he set out.

Mabie closes his essay with a call for regaining the sense of being in Nature that we knew in our earliest years, a way that perceived the flow of natural forces and participated in it: “If we could but revive the consciousness of childhood, if we could but look out once more through its unclouded eyes, what divinity would sow the universe with light and make it radiant with fadeless visions of beauty and truth!” This same quest to see nature anew “through the eyes of a child” has infused much of my thought and work, including doctoral research on sense of place in middle childhood.

But back to Mabie. Or Mabie not. I will leave the author there, with some of his most intriguing writing on nature and children. Plenty of other sections are tedious and overwrought; I will spare the reader those. But the words are not all that comprise the book I read. I consciously sought out the 1902 edition, rather than the first edition from a decade earlier, so that I could experience a truly classic volume (in more ways than one) ornamented in the art nouveau style of turn-of-the-century America by C.L Hinton. His work graces the cover and greets you on the title page:

Every page is bordered, on three sides, by scenes of rural nature, filled with youths and satyrs playing musical instruments. The reader is immersed in Hinton’s world.

There are also several full-page images in black and white, behind protective translucent pages, depicting barefoot female figures clad in white robes:

The result is a truly immersive reading experience — a paradisal world that the reader inhabits from the moment he pulls the book off the shelf. The words coalesce with the background images and the full-page artwork and the magnificent gilt cover. The reading experience is the entire work, not just the blocks of text. The book is an Object of Wonder and Mystery, a tribute to the craftsmanship of book design in 1902 America.

Arriving at No Particular Place: “Across Lots” by Horace Lunt (1888)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Reptiles  No Responses »
Jun 082022
 

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.

A Peek at Effie Bignell’s “Woodland Intimates” (1903)

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Jun 062022
 
My Woodland Intimates (1903)

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…

A Work of Dredgery: “Up and Down the Brooks” with Mary Bamford (1889)

 Backyard Nature, Books, Insects, Natural History, Snails  No Responses »
Jun 052022
 

For my latest book, I have chosen Volume 4 from The Riverside Library for Young People, Up and Down Brooks by Mary E. Bamford. At a bit smaller than five by seven inches, this little tome invites smaller hands or perhaps the pocket of a knapsack. The book itself is a carefree romp with a quirky, playful, scholarly “self-named “bug-hunter” as she makes her way up and down brooks, armed with a cloth dredger and a bucket, collecting water beetles and anything else she can find in the streams of Alameda County, California. Along the way, at an (and every) opportunity, she makes some sort of connection to classical or medieval history, culture, and literature. The result is, well, exhausting. Perhaps her literary allusions were common to readers at the time (maybe even younger ones), but most of them were entirely lost on me. As a guidebook for how to study streams, the book also fails. The reader is halfway through the text (of over 200 pages) before mention is made of how to make a dredger of one’s own. And there are few common names for insects; instead, Bamford resolutely names them by genera. Thus, a hellgrammite becomes “larva of horned Corydalus,” and the adult dobson-fly is simply “Horned Corydalus.” Who are her readers, then? How many children would have a clue what her various insect names signify? At the same time, some of her playful passages definitely seem best suited to a child (or childlike adult). Consider her experiences with a captive predacious water stick-insect, Ranatra (again, the genus name):

I think Ranatra had no music in his soul, and he probably never missed the bird-twitterings of his native brook. As a personal favor and a reminder of the days when he lived in the creek, I sometimes took a flute and played “Way down upon the Swanee River” close to his jar. But the calmness with which he received the serenade was only equal to that with which he usually surveyed the world when no music was going on. Neither the “growly” nor the “squeeky” parts of the piano affected his nerves, even when his bottle was placed touching the instrument next the keys.

A page later, Bamford reports on Ranatra’s unexpected death:

Peace to his ashes. I never did know how I loved him until he died. Never did I part from a bug with such regret… The jar looked lonely without him, he had lived in it so long, and I felt half inclined to that, in spite of his having dwelt with them so securely for so long a time, he had at last fallen a victim to those cowardly cousins of his, the scorpion-bugs. They rushed about as usual, evidently caring nothing for the death of the bug that was worth twenty of them.

As the reader can plainly observe, Bamford does not hold back on her feelings about the various organisms she encounters. There is a whimsy to her descriptions and even sometimes abject silliness. Her many failed attempts to raise a tiger beetle larva to adulthood in captivity included the following individuals (forever immortalized in her prose): Conqueror of Coffee-Pot-Lid Lake; Conqueror II; The Hesitator; Larva of Yeast-Powder-Lid Lake; Scarer of Soapdish-Lid-Lake; Triumpher of Tin-Pan Lake; Monarch of Mortar Lake; “The Last”; Oliver; Frightener of Flower-Pot Lake; and “The Last-But-One.” Yet beneath all the craziness and the random references to obscure etymologies and myths, there is also an observant and patient scientist noting the minutiae of lives mostly overlooked at the time. Consider her assessment of a snail’s lot:

Yet the fact of the matter is that there is not much character to a pond-snail. To slip out of a mass of jelly with one’s house on one’s back, to float on the surface of the pond, to dine on leaves or confervae, to rest when weary and to journey when so disposed, to retreat into one’s house when in danger, to pass along through life in a somewhat humdrum fashion with small spirit or vim in one, to cleanse the pool what little one may, and finally to drop down through the water and whiten with one’s lifeless shell the scum of the pond, to have that slime close at last over one’s shell and leave one buried in oblivion while all the pond-life goes on above one still, — this is the snail’s life. Devoid of fighting instincts, not gifted with ambition to soar like the beetles, or to be ever in sight like the skaters, treating all the pond-neighbors with quiet reserve, going one’s own way and doing much good in the world, such is the pond-snail. If he is not brilliant, he is good, and what more could be asked of him?

The respect Bamford grants many f the insects she encounters is not always expressed toward the many local residents, particularly children, who see her with dredger in hand and assume she is trying to catch fish. All too few of them, she complains more than once, have any interest in insects — like this teen who disrupts her work:

“What are you catching? Fish?” demands a voice, and I look up to see the yellow head of an inquisitive foureen-year-old youth peering over the bank.

“Water-beetles,” and I hold up my pail to show the contents.

“What are they good for?” proceeds the utilitarian.

I hesitate a moment. Shall I tell him of the decaying leaves that these numerous Hydrophilidae devour, assisted by these pond-snails; of the yearly plague of frogs from which we are delivered by the disappearance of the juices of the polliwogs through the proboscides of these water-boatmen; of the multitudes of mosquitoes who never have a chance to bite us, because as wigglers they have met their fates under the masks of these dragon-fly larvae? I excuse myself from this lesson on zoology, and make answer, “I take them home and keep them, and study their habits.”

What motivates Bamford to make such a study of stream life, especially insects? At one point in her ramblings, she shares this early memory with her readers, offering a window into her motivations:

I remember the day when the idea first entered my brain that other creatures than human have interesting lives. I must have been about eight or nine years old. I had been taking a walk in a little mining town among the Sierra Nevada foothills. A minister was with me, and he had a hand-microscope or glass in his pocket.

We sat down under the trees on a hill somewhere back of a church, and he showed me through the glass a multitude of little creatures living in the heart of a yellow flower… I remember that as a very wonderful day, one on which I did not see half enough through that glass to suit me, but still one on which I obtained a glimpse of a world very different from that in which I usually lived.

Indeed, it is a world with very different rules. Toward the book’s close, Bamford remarks on “how hard-hearted the insects are toward one another! In all the time I have watched them, I do not recollect ever having seen an act of compassion performed by any kind of insect for another.” She then proceeds to describe her experiences waiting for a caterpillar to pupate, only for many parasitic flies to emerge instead, having fed upon the caterpillar’s body. Yet through this all, she ultimately conveys a sense of wonder and delight in this foreign world beneath the water’s surface.

And so the traveler beside this brook and over these hills may learn, if he looks, that man is not the only creature who builds houses and is disappointed about living in them. There is material here for a fine sermon after all, take the brook through and through. Here are fightings and murders and thefts and trickeries, the semblance of death, the awakening from slumber, the rising to new life, the change from the grovelling on the earth to the soaring of wings in the sunshine.

And the ultimate point of the sermon? Here, Banford slips back into a comfortable corner within Nineteenth-Century American Christianity, declaring fervently that “The majority of people scarcely pause to realize that the different kinds of creatures represent so many of God’s different thoughts and that it might possibly be worth while to glance at the things that He has deigned to place on earth.”

Mary Bamford’s grave, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland

And what of Mary Ellen Bamford? She was born to a pioneer settler couple in Healdsburg, California, in 1857. After attending public school in Oakland, she worked for four years as an assistant in the Oakland Free Public Library. After that, she became a full-time writer, producing over a dozen books, including several titles for the American Baptist Publishing Society. She was a prohibitionist and advocate for Asian immigration into the US. She died in 1946 at the age of 88.

My first (only) edition of this book was previously in the collections of the Reed Free Library in Surrey, New Hampshire.

Whole Earth’s a Sanctuary: “The Song of the Cardinal” by Gene Stratton Porter (1903)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Birds, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Jun 032022
 

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.

The Great Plan of Economy: “The Life of North American Insects” by B. Jaeger (1859)

 Backyard Nature, Books, Insects, Natural History  3 Responses »
Jun 032022
 

The book is quite literally falling apart. The pages are browned and foxed, the cover fabric (sporting a gilt impression of a moth) is pulling loose from the spine, the binding disintegrating. It feels like an old book. And it is. B. (Benedict) Jaeger’s volume on North American Insects predates the Civil War. It is the oldest book I have read for this blog so far, taking us back toward the beginnings of the late 19th Century’s fascination with nature. My volume is copyright 1859, though the book was published five years earlier, in a more limited edition that included five color plates (and costs considerably more today than this one). And 1859 was — as diehard natural historians likely know — the year that Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species”. Jaeger’s writing offers a window into the foreign and intriguing world of natural history before evolution revolutionized it. Terms and concepts that evoke a kind of proto-ecology jostle on the page with paeans to God’s handiwork, in a book that at times is as much a religious text as a biological one. And through it all, the rambling voice of Benedict Jaeger, world traveler, natural philosopher, and bane of editors.

Who was Jaeger? The title page of the book notes that he was a “late Professor of Zoology and Botany for the College of New Jersey.” According to Bugguide.net, a catalog of his papers at Princeton University notes that he was a professor of natural history and modern languages at Princeton from 1832 until 1843. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1789, and died in Brooklyn, New York in 1869. He supposedly wrote many books on insects. And that is all I was able to find out about him, besides what might be gleaned from his travel stories scattered throughout this book.

Given the year the book was published, and the fact that Henry David Thoreau lived until 1861, could he have read this book, or at least glanced at it? For all that it is unknown today, Jaeger’s rather slender tome was the first general book on North American insects ever published. Though far from a field guide as we know it today (relatively few insects are covered at the species level, and amounts of information on different types of insects vary widely), the book was still a landmark in American entomology. So I like to imagine Thoreau thumbing through it (and possibly frowning at some of its more extreme anthropocentric declarations). And, in fact, he probably did. The Concord Library website includes a listing of books from the library of Edwin Way Teale (scholar of Thoreau and a nature writer to boot). The list includes the following item:

Jaeger, Benedict. The Life of North American Insects. By B. Jaeger … Assisted by H.C. Preston, M.D. With Numerous Illustrations from Specimens in the Cabinet of the Author. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859.

319 pages. Illustrated. 19.5 cm.

Inscription in ink on front free endpaper: A duplicate of one / of the insect books / that Thoreau used. / For the Teales from / the Walter Hardings. / Hampton, Conn., August / 20th, 1963.

A few marginal markings in pencil.

How exciting! That said, I am quite confident that Jaeger’s outlook on nature was not one that Thoreau shared. And as a tool for insect identification, it was definitely wanting.

“Philosophy,” Jaeger declares in his opening line, “has invested even the commonest objects of Nature with charms unknown to the uneducated.” But why study insects, in particular? Ultimately, because insects are useful:

It is time that our people in general, and particularly our youth, should be made acquainted with a class of animals which everywhere surround us, day and night, and which furnish us amusements, food, coloring substances, and medicines, in order that they may be able to distinguish the useful from the injurous ones, the harmless from the noxious, and to discover those which may furnish new articles for manufacture, commerce, and domestic industry.

There is a deeper reason, though (cue choir of heavenly angels). Learning about insects opens the door to “…a more general knowledge of Natural History, and a deeper admiration of the ten thousand sublime and beautiful creatures that, in one common song of praise, pour out their gratitude and proclaim their dependence upon one common Father.” In this image, Jaeger evokes spiritual unity — there is a whole to nature because nature is holy. And that implies that the individual constituents of the natural world (living and nonliving) must interact and function as one great system. Here, he was inspired in part by Alexander Humboldt, whose first volume of Cosmos was published in 1845:

…we find all these different varieties of the three natural kingdoms [plant, animal, mineral] united under one general law; all dependent upon one another, as component parts of one great universal whole, aand we are forced, with he great philosopher Humboldt, to exclaim, “Nature is the unity in variety.”

Intriguingly, going down this path leads Jaeger to affirm principles that would years later be echoed in rudimentary ecology. Since nature is a system created by God, there cannot be any part that is irrelevant or without purpose: “…none of the works of nature are so insignificant as to be wholly without use in the great plan of economy.” How does that plan work? Consider the caterpillars, Jaeger suggests, who feed on plants and therefore pose a threat to agriculture. The obvious choice would be to kill them all, to safeguard our crops and flowers. But that would be unwise, Jaeger cautions:

…were we to annihilate caterpillars, our gardens, wods, and fields would be abandoned by the whole feathered tribe who feed on them, and melancholy sadness shroud the abodes of man. Ardently, then, would bwe long for the return of the oxious Caterpillars, and with them the joyous songsters of the forest. …so beautifully is the doctrine of compensation illustrated throughout the Animal Kingdom, as well as in all the objects of Nature.

Elsewhere, Jaeger refers to this same principle as the law of antagonization instead:

[Insects] afford a constant evidence of the working of Nature’s great law of antagonization — the one undoing wha the other does; the injuries which one species would infliec upon man are checked by other species, which prevent their superabundance and keep an even balance in the scale of being.

Carrying capacity, anyone? Ironically, this law does not prevent Jaeger from declaring firmly a few pages later that herbivorous beetles “are noxious and should be destroyed wherever encountered.” There appears to be a disconnect between Jaeger’s pre-ecological mindset and practical reality.

Lest we extoll this pre-Darwinian model of the Cosmos as brilliant and ahead of its time, while Nature may be a system created by God, it is still a hierarchical one. And guess who is at the top?

It is more than wonderful, it is sublime, to view atom after atom of the whole creation unceasingly changing place, that man, the lord of creation, may be abundantly supplied with all his comforts and his luxuries.; to see the lilies of the field, and the insects of the earth and air, living and dying for man, yielding up their lives for man’s sustenance and adornment.

To rework a line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All living things are significant, but some are more significant than others.” “The great plan of economy,” is clearly under man’s rule. At least one can find a bit of solace, though, in the fact that women are not entirely forgotten: “I write also for the young ladies,” Jaeger announces midway through his book.

My copy is definitely in “fair” shape. For its considerable age, all I can say about the book’s past is that it was once owned by William Mansell (thank you, Kent, for your correction on my reading of this signature), who dated it August 18?9. (My guess is that the mysterious digit is a 5, as it could not be a 2. Given that the book was published in 1859, it is most likely that Maxwell obtained it then.) Efforts to find information about William Mansell online were unsuccessful. There are plenty of somewhat famous persons with this name, but none of them quite fit this time period.

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