Henry David Thoreau – CommonPlace Nature

The Woods and Fields Are Poem-Full: “The Face of the Fields” by Dallas Lore Sharp (1911)

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Oct 052022

“Dallas Lore Sharp”, 2012-06-11, https://hdl.handle.net/1912/17140

We entered the tiny road (for in this kind of hunting a mouse is as good as a mink), and found ourselves descending the woods toward the garden-patch below. Halfway down we came to a great red oak, into a hole at the base of which, as into the portal of some mighty castle, ran the road of the mice. That was the end of it. There was not a single straying footprint beyond the tree.
I reached in as far as my arm would go, and drew out a fistful of pop-corn cobs. So here was part of my scanty crop ! I pushed in again, and gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-nuts, and several neatly rifled hazelnuts. This was story enough. There was a nest, or family, of mice living under the slashing pile, who for some good reason kept their stores here in the recesses of this ancient red oak. Or was this some squirrel’s barn being pilfered by the mice, as my barn is the year round ? It was not all plain. But this question, this constant riddle of the woods, small, indeed, in the case of the mouse, and involving no great fate in its solution, is part of our constant joy in the woods. Life is always new, always strange, always fascinating.
It has all been studied and classified according to species. Any one knowing the woods at all would know that these were mice-tracks, the tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and not the tracks of the jumping mouse, the house mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the whole small story of these prints ? What purpose, intention, feeling do they spell? What and why? a hundred times!
But the scientific books are dumb. Indeed, they do not consider such questions worth answering, just as under the species Mus they make no record of the fact that
The present only toucheth thee.
But that is a poem. Burns discovered that Burns, the farmer! The woods and fields are poem-full, and it is largely because we do not know, and never can know, just all that the tiny snow-prints of a wood-mouse may mean, nor understand just what
root and all, and all in all, / the humblest flower is.
The pop-corn cobs, however, were a known quantity, a tangible fact, and falling in with a gray squirrel’s track not far from the red oak, we went on, our game-bag heavier, our hearts lighter at the thought that we, by the sweat of our brow, had contributed a few ears of corn to the comfort of this snowy winter world.

The more I read the works of Dallas Lore Sharp, the more I appreciate his flair for seeing both the scientific and the poetic elements in nature. The marriage of the two, as I have observed in many past blogs, was a common theme in American nature writing of this period. Sometimes the combinations were forced, like an arranged marriage between polar opposites, enforced by an author who is either a poet or a scientist, but rarely both at once. And sometimes a lovely description is marred by bad poetry, or a poetic account is marred by poor science. But in Sharp’s finest work, the two seem supremely natural when joined together. Neither alone can capture the complexity, majesty, wonder, and magic of nature, either in our own backyard or in the remote wilds. (In Sharp’s case, mostly rural nature, close at hand.)

This volume of Sharp’s essays is a trove of delightful writing. If I had to single out a few for praise, I would certainly highlight “Turtle Eggs for Aggasiz”, a somewhat humorous second-hand account of a naturalist’s frantic effort to secure turtle eggs for the renowned scientist Louis Agassiz, under the stipulation that the eggs had to have been laid no more than four hours previously. This essay, which is about as close to a page-turner as nature writers from this era ever achieve, is frequently anthologized. (Frequently, that is, relative to practically anything else I have read for the blog thus far.) Another essay celebrates John Burroughs; however, he borrowed heavily from it for his eulogy to Burroughs, The Seer of Slabsides, after the author’s death. The title essay, “The Face of the Fields”, celebrates the childlike quality of nature, in contrast to adults’ feelings of fear and dread we feel as we confront death in its many guises:

We cannot go far into the fields without sight-ing the hawk and the snake, the very shapes of Death. The dread Thing, in one form or another, moves everywhere, down every wood-path and pasture-lane, through the black close waters of the mill-pond, out under the open of the winter sky, night and day, and every day, the four seasons through. I have seen the still surface of a pond break suddenly with a swirl, and flash a hundred flecks of silver into the light, as the minnows leap from the jaws of the pike. Then a loud rattle, a streak of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl, and I see the pike, twisting and bending in the beak of the kingfisher. The killer is killed; but at the mouth of the nest-hole in the steep sandbank, swaying from a root in the edge of the turf above, hangs the black snake, the third killer, and the belted kingfisher, dropping the pike, darts off with a cry. I have been afield at times when one tragedy has followed another in such rapid and continuous succession as to put a whole shining, singing, blossoming world under a pall. Everything has seemed to cower, skulk, and hide, to run as if pursued. There was no peace, no stirring of small life, not even in the quiet of the deep pines; for here a hawk would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping, or I would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his keen hungry face an instant as he halted, winding me.
Fox and snake and hawk are real, but not the absence of peace and joy except within my own breast. There is struggle and pain and death in the woods, and there is fear also, but the fear does not last long; it does not haunt and follow and terrify; it has no being, no substance, no continu- ance. The shadow of the swiftest scudding cloud is not so fleeting as this shadow in the woods, this Fear. The lowest of the animals seem capable of feeling it; yet the very highest of them seem incapable of dreading it; for them Fear is not of the imagination, but of the sight, and of the passing moment.
The present only toucheth thee!
It does more, it throngs him our fellow mortal of the stubble field, the cliff, and the green sea. Into the present is lived the whole of his life — none of it is left to a storied past, none sold to a mortgaged future. And the whole of this life is action; and the whole of this action is joy. The moments of fear in an animal’s life are moments of reaction, negative, vanishing. Action and joy are constant, the joint laws of all animal life, of all nature, from the shining stars that sing together, to the roar of a bitter northeast storm across these wintry fields.
We shall get little rest and healing out of nature until we have chased this phantom Fear into the dark of the moon. It is a most difficult drive. The pursued too often turns pursuer, and chases us back into our burrows, where there is nothing but the dark to make us afraid. If every time a bird cries in alarm, a mouse squeaks with pain, or a rabbit leaps in fear from beneath our feet, we, too, leap and run, dodging the shadow as if it were at our own heels, then we shall never get farther toward the open fields than Chuchundra, the muskrat, gets toward the middle of the bun- galow floor. We shall always creep around by the wall, whimpering.
But there is no such thing as fear out of doors. There was, there will be; you may see it for an instant on your walk to-day, or think you see it; but there are the birds singing as before, and as before the red squirrel, under cover of large words, is prying into your purposes. The universal chorus of nature is never stilled. This part, or that, may cease for a moment, for a season it may be, only to let some other part take up the strain; as the winter’s deep bass voices take it from the soft lips of the summer, and roll it into thunder, until the naked hills seem to rock to the measures of the song.

As nature lives only in the moment, fear and dread are largely absent. The predator strikes and kills, then death departs again — its presence a fleeting shadow, quickly forgotten again. At the close of the essay, Sharp reprises this theme in a haunting, poetic passage that explains the meaning of the essay title:

Life, like Law and Matter, is all of one piece. The horse in my stable, the robin, the toad, the beetle, the vine in my garden, the garden itself, and I together with them all, come out of the same divine dust ; we all breathe the same divine breath; we have our beings under the same divine law; only they do not know that the law, the breath, and the dust are divine. If I do know, and yet can so readily forget such knowledge, can so hardly cease from being, can so eternally find the purpose, the hope, the joy of life within me, how soon for them, my lowly fellow mortals, must vanish all sight of fear, all memory of pain! And how abiding with them, how compelling, the necessity to live! And in their unquestioning obedience what joy!
The face of the fields is as changeful as the face of a child. Every passing wind, every shifting cloud, every calling bird, every baying hound, every shape, shadow, fragrance, sound, and tremor, are so many emotions reflected there. But if time and experience and pain come, they pass utterly away; for the face of the fields does not grow old or wise or seamed with pain. It is always the face of a child, asleep in winter, awake in summer, a face of life and health always, if we will but see what pushes the falling leaves off, what lies in slumber under the covers of the snow; if we will but feel the strength of the north wind, and the wild fierce joy of the fox and hound as they course the turning, tangling paths of the woodlands in their race with one another against the record set by Life.

One other particularly noteworthy essay in this volume is “The Nature-Writer”, which sheds light upon the character of the Nature Writing Movement of the time. Early in the essay, Sharp observes that “the nature-writer has now evolved into a distinct, although undescribed, literary species.” Sharp goes on to attempt to elucidate what characterizes him (or her, though usually him):

…the nature-writer, while he may be more or less of a scientist, is never mere scientist — zoologist or botanist. Animals are not his theme; flowers are not his theme. Nothing less than the universe is his theme, as it pivots on him, around the distant boundaries of his immediate neighborhood.
His is an emotional, not an intellectual, point of view; a literary, not a scientific, approach; which means that he is the axis of his world, its great circumference, rather than any fact any flower, or star, or tortoise. Now to the scientist the tortoise is the thing: the particular species Tbalassochelys kempi; of the family Testudinidse; of the order Chelonia; of the class Reptilia; of the branch Vertebrata. But the nature-writer never pauses over this matter to capitalize it. His tortoise may or may not come tagged with this string of distinguishing titles. A tortoise is a tortoise for a’ that, particularly if it should happen to be an old Sussex tortoise which has been kept for thirty years in a yard by the nature-writer’s friend, and which [quoting Gibert White] “On the 1st November began to dig the ground in order to the forming of its hybernaculum, which it had fixed on just beside a great tuft of hepaticas.”

The nature-writer also becomes deeply familiar with a particular spot of Earth, inhabiting it deeply and sharing its lessons with readers.

It is characteristic of the nature-writer… to bring home his outdoors, to domesticate his nature, to relate it all to himself. His is a dooryard universe, his earth a flat little planet turning about a hop-pole in his garden — a planet mapped by fields, ponds, and cow-paths, and set in a circumfluent sea of neighbor townships, beyond whose shores he neither goes to church, nor works out his taxes on the road, nor votes appropriations for the schools.
He is limited to his parish because he writes about only so much of the world as he lives in, as touches him, as makes for him his home…
It is a large love for the earth as a dwelling-place, a large faith in the entire reasonableness of its economy, a large joy in all its manifold life, that moves the nature-writer. He finds the earth most marvelously good to live in — himself its very dust; a place beautiful beyond his imagination, and interesting past his power to realize — a mystery every way he turns. He comes into it as a settler into a new land, to clear up so much of the wilderness as he shall need for a home.

Alas, Sharp’s examples of nature writers are mostly the familars — Gilbert White, Henry David Thoreau, and John Burroughs. (“In none of our nature-writers… is this love for the earth more manifest than in John Burroughs. It is constant and dominant in him, an expression of his religion.”) Later in the essay, Sharp does make brief reference to Dr. C. C. Abbott and Maruice Maeterlinck (Belgian playwright and author of The Life of the Bee). But no others make the cut — not even Bradford Torrey. Alas, “the sad case with much nature-writing… is that it not only fails to answer to genuine observation, but it also fails to answer to genuine emotion. Often as we detect the unsound natural history, we much oftener are aware of the unsound, the insincere, art of the author.” Here, it would have been most helpful for Sharp to identify a few particular authors and their works, as a caution to the reader. Which of the many nature authors I have read, I wonder, would Sharp have placed in this category?

Sharp closes his essay with this poetic passage about good nature writing. Essentially, good nature writing is true to life, expressing an abiding love of the natural world.

Good nature-literature, like all good literature, is more lived than written. Its immortal part hath elsewhere than the ink-pot its beginning. The soul that rises with it, its life’s star, first went down behind a horizon of real experience, then rose from a human heart, the source of all true feeling, of all sincere form. Good nature-writing particularly must have a pre-literary existence as lived reality; its writing must be only the necessary accident of its being lived again in thought. It will be something very human, very natural, warm, quick, irregular, imperfect, with the imperfections and irregularities of life. And the nature-writer will be very human, too, and so very faulty; but he will have no lack of love for nature, and no lack of love for the truth. Whatever else he does, he will never touch the flat, disquieting note of make-believe. He will never invent, never pretend, never pose, never shy. He will be honest which is nothing unusual for birds and rocks and stars ; but for human beings, and for nature-writers very particularly, it is a state less common, perhaps, than it ought to be.

A Pleasant Bit of Natural History: “Knocking About the Rockies” by Ernest Ingersoll (1883)

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Sep 192022

The next fortnight was not productive of many adventures or noteworthy incidents, though it contained plenty of hard work. Our track led across into the head of the San Luis Park, and so on down to Saguache — a Mexican town near the Rio Grande. There was a pleasant bit of natural history picked up along here, though.
The plover of these interior valleys does not seem to care for marshes, like the most of his race, but haunts the dry uplands. It is closely related to the golden plover, and is named in books Aegialitis montanus. A flock of these plovers dropped down on the plain one day, and I determined to get them for dinner, if possible. Jumping off my horse — who would stand stock-still wherever I left him— I approached to where they had dropped, and finally caught sight of one by distinguishing the dark dot of its eye against the light-tinted surface of the ground. Even then I really could not follow with my eye the outline of the bird’s body, so closely did the colors of the plumage agree with the white sand and dry grass. I shot it ; then found another, shot that; and so on until all were killed, none of them flying away, because their ” instinct,” or habit of thought, had taught them that when danger threatened they must invariably keep quiet ; movement would be exposure, and exposure would be fatal. I and my gun formed a danger they had had no experience of, and here their inherited “instinct” was at fault. When I had shot them I was unable, with he most careful searching, to find all the dead birds.

Ernest Ingersol’s early book, Knocking About the Rockies, chronicles two trips he took into the Rockies (1874 and 1877), accompanying scientific and surveying expeditions. His flair for natural history (he would go on to write a dozen works in the “nature” realm, one previously covered in this blog, with several more awaiting reading) led me to this book and his subsequent one about travels by train through the Rockies (The Crest of the Continent, 1885). I eagerly anticipated observations and reflections on the wildlife of the region. And he delivered well, including several allusions to Thoreau. What I had not reckoned on was that many of them would take a culinary turn. Here, “a pleasant bit of natural history” includes identifying a new bird species and then shooting it for dinner. Or not even dinner. Maybe just as a specimen to observe more closely, or possibly just because his gun is handy?

Climbing a high point back of our tents, which were in the midst of a sage-brush flat, close to the river, I had a queer little bit of good luck one evening. It was just at nightfall, and as I reached the top a large owl came swooping down and perched on a crag some distance off. Drawing my revolver, I held it up and walked slowly nearer, expecting neither to get within range nor hit the bird if I fired; but he let me get so near that at last, about thirty yards off, I blazed away, and down came the owl. Rushing up, I could see him lying in the brush a little way below; but it was some time before I got courage enough to reach down and take hold of him, for a bite or talon-grasp from a wounded owl is no joke. He proved to be stone-dead, and it was a long time before I found out the bloodless wound, the bullet having gone in at the base of the skull and out of the open mouth, without tearing any of the feathers. He was a fine barred or “cat” owl, about two feet long.

I am sure the owl did not appreciate this “queer little bit of good luck”.

It is easy, in hindsight, to condemn this behavior in a would-be naturalist. Of course, the great bird illustrator John James Audubon shot all his bird specimens, too, attaching their lifeless bodies to branches in order to draw them. While one or more cameras accompanied these expeditions — several of the illustrations in the book are engravings from photographs — photography had not advanced enough yet to make close-up images of wildlife possible. The understood technique for close study of animals was to shoot them first. This was slowly changing, as birders began carrying opera glasses into the field instead. And Ingersoll, himself, would rein in his hunting proclivities in his later volumes. Finally, it is to be noted that, in order to travel light and save money, the expeditions carried little food, intending that protein needs be satisfied with hunting and trapping.

Now that we have gotten that aspect of this book out of the way, we can sit back and enjoy some lovely late 19th Century prose about the wilds of the Colorado Rockies (including some delightful geological terms). Here is Grand Lake as seen (more like imagined, actually) from a mountaintop, sounding truly grand indeed:

From this pinnacle, in daylight, there is visible a picture of blue mountains whose sharp, serrated outline indicates a portion of the main range in front of Long’s Peak. Among those immutable yet ever-changing bulwarks lies a lake in a circle of guardian peaks whose heads tower thousands of feet above it, and whose bases meet no one knows how far below the surface of its dark waters. It is Grand Lake, a spot taboo among Indians and mysterious to white men. The scenery is primeval and wild beyond description: Roundtop is one mountain at least that has suffered no desecration since the ice ploughed its furrowed sides. The lake itself lies in the trough of a glacier basin, and its western barrier is an old terminal moraine, striking evidences of glacial action occurring on all sides in the scored cliffs and lateral moraines that hem it in. Its extent is about two miles by three, and its greatest depth unfathomable with a line six hundred feet in length. The water is cold, and clear near the shore, but of inky blackness in the middle. In the reflection usually pictured upon its calm bosom all the cloud-crowned heads about it meet in solemn conclave; but not seldom, and with little warning, furious winds sweep down and lash its lazy waters till the waves vie with each other in terrible energy.

Ingersoll clearly had a passion for climbing peaks and gazing out upon the landscape from their heights. Here, he waxes religious in extolling the glories of just such an experience:

However interesting it might prove, time forbids even to suggest all that meets the eye and is implanted in the memory while one is sitting for two or three hours on a peak of the Rocky Mountains — the surprising clearness of the air, so that your vision penetrates a hundred and fifty miles; the steady gale of wind sucked up from the heated valleys ; the frost and lightning shattered fragments of rock incrusted with lichens, orange and green and drab and white; the miniature mountains and scheme of drainage spread before you; the bright blue and yellow mats of moss-blossoms ; the herds of big-horned sheep, unconscious of your watching; the hawks leisurely sailing their vast aerial circles level with your eye ; the shadows of the clouds chasing each other across the landscape; the clouds and the azure dome itself; the purple, snow-embroidered horizon of mountains, “upholding heaven, holding down earth.” I can no more express with leaden types the ineffable, intangible ghost and grace of such an experience than I can weigh out to you the ozone that empurples the dust raised by the play of the antelopes in yonder amethyst valley. Moses need have chosen no particular mountain whereon to receive his inspiration. The divine Heaven approaches very near all these peaks.

Not that Ingersoll found every experience on his travels filled him with awe and wonder. Here, he expresses quite different sentiments in a dark spruce forest in the mountains:

What a sombre world that of the pine-woods is! None of the cheerfulness of the ash and maple groves — the alternation of sunlight and changing shadow, rustling leaves and fragrant shrubbery underneath, variety of foliage and bark on which to rest the jaded eye, exciting curiosity and delight: only the straight, upright trunks; the colorless, dusty ground; the dense masses of dead green, each mass a repetition of another; the scraggy skeletons of dead trees, all their bare limbs drooping in lamentation. The sound of the wind in the pines is equally grewsome. If the breeze be light, you hear a low, melancholy monody; if stronger, a hushed kind of sighing; when the hurricane lays his hand upon them the groaning trees wail out in awful agony, and, racked beyond endurance, cast themselves headlong to the stony ground. At such times each particular fibre of the pine’s body seems resonant with pain, and the straining branches literally shriek. This is not mere fancy, but something quite different from anything to be observed in hardwood forests. There the tempest roars; here it howls. I do not think the idea of the Banshee spirits could have arisen elsewhere than among the pines ; nor that any mythology growing up among people inhabiting these forests could have omitted such supernatural beings from its theogony.
But do not conclude that the gloom of the pine-woods clouded our spirits. So many trees had fallen where our tents were pitched that the sunshine peered down there, and at night the moon looked in upon us, rising weirdly over a vista of dead and lonely tree-tops. Then, too, the brook was always singing in our ears — absolutely singing! The sound of the incessant tumble of the water and boiling of the eddies made a heavy undertone, like the surf of the sea; but the breaking of the current over the higher rocks and the leaping of the foam down the cataracts produced a distinctly musical sound — a mystical ringing of sweet-toned bells. There is no mistaking this metallic melody, this clashing of tiny cymbals, and it must be this miniature blithe harmony that fine ears have heard on the beach in summer where the surf breaks gently.

While Ingersoll viewed these mountains, forests, and grasslands with rapture, he also saw what would soon be. Observing extensive grasslands at the feet of the mountain peaks, Ingersoll remarked that “Here are the future pastures for millions of cattle, and they are sure to be occupied.” I find it strange that for all the natural beauty he witnessed, he seemed resigned to (or even somewhat enthusiastic about) a future in which the Rockies would be dramatically modified — and the bison would nearly go extinct.

A Perpetual Letter from God: “Star Papers: Experiences of Art and Nature” by Henry Ward Beecher (1855)

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Aug 282022

Nature becomes to the soul a perpetual letter from God,

I am not quite certain what to make of this book or its author, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887). A contemporary of Thoreau, the two may have met but were certainly not close acquaintances. Thoreau does report in his journal about attending church in New York City to see him preach. It is not known whether Beecher, a Unitarian clergyman, ever read Emerson or Thoreau. Beecher wrote one novel — Norwood — entirely unknown today, though his sister’s novel remains famous for helping start the Civil War (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Beecher published only this one collection of writings that included nature essays (among other topics in the volume). Yet he is not an obvious progenitor of any later nature authors, although he did develop a close friendship with William Hamilton Gibson late in his life (this friendship included marrying Gibson and Emma Ludlow Blanchard in 1878). The book title is one of its most mysterious features, though there is no cosmic significance intended. It turns out that Beecher had written a number of columns for the New York Independent Newspaper, with the ones authored by him denoted with a star. Inevitably, then, this book is a compilation of those starred papers.

Opening the book with care — it is one of the oldest titles in my collection — I steeled myself for flowery, overwrought prose and a lot of reflections of a religious bent (as the title of this blog post suggests). And while these characteristics are present, so, too, is a passion for nature and a delightfully whimsical and occasionally even self-deprecating sense of humor. His essay on books and bookshops (see my previous post) rings amazingly true for me today. And while he was certainly no scientist, he did have a keen command of plant identification and basic botanical nomenclature (both wildflowers and trees) and a working knowledge of common names of birds. Here are two passages on flowering weeds from “A Discourse on Flowers” that opens the Nature section of his book. First, dog fennel, a tall and odoriferous weed I contend with each year on my property in Georgia:

What shall we say of mayweed, irreverently called dog-fennel by some? Its acrid juice, its heavy pungent odor, make it disagreeable; and being disagreeable, its enormous Malthusian propensities to increase render it hateful to damsels of white stockings, compelled to walk through it on dewy mornings. Arise, O scythe, and devour it!

And second, the lowly dandelion that covers my yard with its festive yellow blooms:

You can not forget, if you would, those golden kisses all over the cheeks of the meadow, queerly called dandelions. There are many greenhouse blossoms less pleasing to us than these. And we have reached through many a fence, since we were incarcerated, like them, in a city, to pluck one of these yellow flower drops. Their passing away is more spiritual than their bloom. Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than the transparent seed-globe — a fairy dome of splendid architecture.

His greatest rapture, though, he reserves for the stately Connecticut elms. This extended passage evokes what America has lost, and how different the small town landscape must have been 150 years ago when elms were commonplace:

A village shaded by thoroughly grown elms can not but be handsome. Its houses may be huts; its streets may be ribbed with rocks, or channeled with ruts; it may be as dirty as New York, and as frigid as Philadelphia; and yet these vast, majestic tabernacles of the air would redeem it to beauty. These are temples indeed, living temples, neither waxing old nor shattered by Time, that cracks and shatters stone, but rooting wider with every generation and casting a vaster round of grateful shadow with every summer. We had rather walk beneath an avenue of elms than inspect the noblest cathedral that art ever accomplished. What is it that brings one into such immediate personal and exhilarating sympathy with venerable trees! One instinctively uncovers as he comes beneath them; he looks up with proud veneration into the receding and twilight recesses; he breathes a thanksgiving to God every time his cool foot falls along their shadows. They waken the imagination and mingle the olden time with the present. Did any man of contemplative mood ever stand under an old oak or elm, without thinking of other days, — imagining the scenes that had transpired in their presence? These leaf-mountains seem to connect the past and the present to us as mountain ridges attract clouds from both sides of themselves…
No other tree is at all comparable to the elm. The ash is, when well grown, a fine tree, but clumpy; the maple has the same character. The horse-chestnut, the linden, the mulberry, and poplars, (save that tree-spire, the Lombardy poplar,) are all of them plump, round, fat trees, not to be despised, surely, but representing single dendrological ideas. The oak is venerable by association, and occasionally a specimen is found possessing a kind of grim and ragged glory. But the elm, alone monarch of trees, combines in itself the elements of variety, size, strength, and grace, such as no other tree known to us can at all approach or remotely rival. It is the ideal of trees; the true Absolute Tree! Its main trunk shoots up, not round and smooth, like an over-fatted, lymphatic tree, but channeled and corrugated, as if its athletic muscles showed their proportions through the bark, like Hercules’ limbs through his tunic. Then suddenly the whole idea of growth is changed, and multitudes of long, lithe branches radiate from the crotch of the tree, having the effect of straightness and strength, yet really diverging and curving, until the outermost portions droop over and give to the whole top the most faultless grace. If one should at first say that the elm suggested ideas of strength and uprightness, on looking again he would correct himself, and say that it was majestic, uplifting beauty that it chiefly represented. But if he first had said that it was graceful and magnificent beauty, on a second look he would correct himself, and say that it was vast and rugged strength that it set forth. But at length he would say neither; he would say both; he would say that it expressed a beauty of majestic strength, and a grandeur of graceful beauty.
Such domestic forest treasures are a legacy which but few places can boast. Wealth can build houses, and smooth the soil; it can fill up marshes, and create lakes or artificial rivers; it can gather statues and paintings; but no wealth can buy or build elm trees — the floral glory of New England. Time is the only architect of such structures; and blessed are they for whom Time was pleased to fore-think! No care or expense should be counted too much to maintain the venerable elms of New England in all their regal glory!

Elm trees are not the only living beings lost or diminished since Beecher’s days. Similarly, we are rapidly losing the diversity and number of insects that were once present in the American landscape. Consider this account of a trouting excursion gone awry. Can you imagine encountering this many (and this great a diversity of) grasshoppers on a rural New England fishing trip today?

Still further north is another stream, something larger, and much better or worse according to your luck. It is easy of access, and quite unpretending. There is a bit of a pond, some twenty feet in diameter, from which it flows; and in that there are five or six half-pound trout who seem to have retired from active life and given themselves to meditation in this liquid convent. They were very tempting, but quite untemptable. Standing afar off, we selected an irresistible fly, and with long line we sent it pat into the very place. It fell like a snow-flake. No trout should have hesitated a moment. The morsel was delicious. The nimblest of them should have flashed through the water, broke the surface, and with a graceful but decisive curve plunged downward, carrying the insect with him. Then we should, in our turn, very cheerfully, lend him a hand, relieve him of his prey, and, admiring his beauty, but pitying his untimely fate, bury him in the basket. But he wished no translation. We cast our fly again and again; we drew it hither and thither; we made it skip and wriggle; we let it fall plash like a blundering bug or fluttering moth; and our placid spectators calmly beheld our feats, as if all this skill was a mere exercise for their amusement, and their whole duty consisted in looking on and preserving order.
Next, we tried ground-bait, and sent our vermicular hook down to their very sides. With judicious gravity they parted, and slowly sailed toward the root of an old tree on the side of the pool. Again, changing place, we will make an ambassador of a grasshopper. Laying down our rod, we prepare to catch the grasshopper. That is in itself no slight feat. At the first step you take, at least forty bolt out and tumble headlong into the grass; some cling to the stems, some are creeping under the leaves, and not one seems to be within reach. You step again; another flight takes place, and you eye them with fierce penetration, as if thereby you could catch some one of them with your eye. You can not, though. You brush the grass with your foot again. Another hundred snap out, and tumble about in every direction. There are large ones and small ones, and middling-sized ones; there are gray and hard old fellows; yellow and red ones; green and striped ones. At length it is wonderful to see how populous the grass is. If you did not want them, they would jump into your very hand. But they know by your looks that you are out a-fishing. You see a very nice young fellow climbing up a steeple stem, to get a good look-out and see where you are. You take good aim and grab at him. The stem you catch, but he has jumped a safe rod. Yonder is another creeping among some delicate ferns. With broad palm you clutch him and all the neighboring herbage too. Stealthily opening your little finger, you see his leg; the next finger reveals more of him; and opening the next you are just beginning to take him out with the other hand, when, out he bounds and leaves you to renew your entomological pursuits! Twice you snatch handfuls of grass and cautiously open your palm to find that you have only grass. It is quite vexatious. There are thousands of them here and there, climbing and wriggling on that blade, leaping off from that stalk, twisting and kicking on that vertical spider’s web, jumping and bouncing about under your very nose, hitting you in your face, creeping on your shoes, or turning summersets and tracing every figure of parabola or ellipse in the air, and yet not one do you get. And there is such, a heartiness and merriment in their sallies! They are pert and gay, and do not take your intrusion in the least dudgeon. If any tender-hearted person ever wondered how a humane man could bring himself to such a cruelty as the impaling of an insect, let him hunt for a grasshopper in a hot day among tall grass; and when at length he secures one, the affixing him upon the hook will be done without a single scruple, with judicial solemnity, and as a mere matter of penal justice.
Now then the trout are yonder. We swing our line to the air, and give it a gentle cast toward the desired spot, and a puff of south wind dexterously lodges it in the branch of the tree. You plainly see it strike, and whirl over and over, so that no gentle pull will loosen it. You draw it north and south, east and west; you give it a jerk up and a pull down; you try a series of nimble twitches; in vain you coax it in this way and solicit it in that. Then you stop and look a moment, first at the trout and then at your line. Was there ever anything so vexatious? Would it be wrong to get angry? In fact you feel very much like it. The very things you wanted to catch, the grasshopper and the trout, you could not; but a tree, that you did not in the least want, you have caught fast at the first throw. You fear that the trout will be scared. You cautiously draw nigh and peep down. Yes, there they are, looking at you and laughing as sure as ever trout laughed! They understand the whole thing. With a very decisive jerk you snap your line, regain the remnant of it, and sit down to repair it, to put on another hook, you rise up to catch another grasshopper, and move on down the stream to catch a trout!

In this brief passage, also on the theme of fishing, Beecher gazes longingly at a brook plunging down the mountainside. He urges readers to leave some wild places unfished (untouched). Or then again…

…we are on the upper brink of another series of long down-plunges, each one of which would be enough for a day’s study. Below these are cascades and pools in which the water whirls friskily around like a kitten running earnestly after its tail. But we will go no further down. These are the moun- tain jewels ; the necklaces which it loves to hang down from its hoary head upon its rugged bosom.
Shall we take out our tackle? That must be a glorious pool yonder for trout ! No, my friend, do not desecrate such a scene by throwing a line into it with piscatory intent. Leave some places in nature to their beauty, unharassed, for the mere sake of their beauty. Nothing could tempt us to spend an hour here in fishing; — all the more because there is not a single trout in the whole brook.

To declare Beecher an early conservationist akin to Thoreau would be a stretch, I think. But he does make a strident call for respecting old trees instead of cutting them down. Ultimately, his motivation is less for the sake of the tree itself, however, than for its spiritual significance as a creation of God.

Thus do you stand, noble elms! Lifted up so high are your topmost boughs, that no indolent birds care to seek you; and only those of nimble wings, and they with unwonted beat, that love exertion, and aspire to sing where none sing higher. — Aspiration! so Heaven gives it pure as flames to the noble bosom. But debased with passion and selfishness it comes to bo only Ambition!
It was in the presence of this pasture-elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow that we had indeed become owners of the soil ! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, This is mine, there was a shrinking as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory, at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said, “I may not call thee property, and that property mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise God. Thou belongest to no man’s hand, but to all men’s eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God ! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots, and the ax from thy trunk.”
For, remorseless men there are crawling yet upon the face of the earth, smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that it is food for the ax and the saw ! These are the wretches of whom the Scripture speaks: “A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees.“
Thus famous, or rather infamous, was the last owner but one, before me, of this farm. Upon the crown of the hill, just where an artist would have planted them, had he wished to have them exactly in the right place, grew some two hundred stalworth and ancient maples, beeches, ashes, and oaks, a narrow belt-like forest, forming a screen from the northern and western winds in winter, and a harp of endless music for the summer. The wretched owner of this farm, tempted of the Devil, cut down the whole blessed band and brotherhood of trees, that he might fill his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for the wood! Well, his pocket was the best part of him. The iron furnaces have devoured my grove, and their huge stumps, that stood like gravestones, have been cleared away, that a grove may be planted in the same spot, for the next hundred years to nourish into the stature and glory of that which is gone.
In other places, I find the memorials of many noble trees slain; here, a hemlock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into the winter air; there, a huge double-trunked chestnut, dear old grandfather of hundreds of children that have for generations clubbed its boughs, or shook its nut-laden top, and laughed and shouted as bushels of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree exists only in the form of loop-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do hope the fellow got a sliver in his finger every time he touched the hemlock plank, or let down the bars made of those chestnut rails !
What then, it will be said, must no one touch a tree? must there be no fuel, no timber? Go to the forest for both. There are no individual trees there, only a forest. One trunk here, and one there, leaves the forest just as perfect as before, and gives room for young aspiring trees to come up in the world. But for a man to cut down a large, well-formed, healthy tree from the roadside, or from pastures or fields, is a piece of unpardonable Vandalism. It is worse than Puritan hammers upon painted windows and idolatrous statues. Money can buy houses, build walls, dig and drain the soil, cover the hills with grass, and the grass with herds and flocks. But no money can buy the growth of trees. They are born of Time. Years are the only coin in which they can be paid for. Beside, so noble a thing is a well-grown tree, that it is a treasure to the community, just as is a work of art. If a monarch were to blot out Euben’s Descent from the Cross, or Angelo’s Last Judgment, or batter to pieces the marbles of Greece, the whole world would curse him, and for ever. Trees are the only art-treasures which belong to our villages. They should be precious as gold.
But let not the glory and grace of single trees lead us to neglect the peculiar excellences of the forest. We go from one to the other, needing both ; as in music we wander from melody to harmony, and from many-voiced and intertwined harmonies back to simple melody again.
To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different forests as between different communities. A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resinous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the sound of its leaves.

Do I detect, at the close of this passage, incipient thoughts about the diversity of forest ecosystems? Alas, it is a thought he carries no further, beyond remarking on his favorite blending of forest trees.

Ultimately, his thoughts of nature are bounded by his ultimate aim, appreciating God in all his glory. Here, toward the end of the book, Beecher considers the various uses of nature. While he does not identify fully with the utilitarian perspective, he does not reject it, either. Ultimately, he advocates nature appreciation as a form of religious devotion. We will leave him there, pondering the ineffable as the sun sinks low in the sky over New England.

As things go in our utilitarian age, men look upon the natural world in one of three ways: the first, as a foundation for industry, and all objects are regarded in their relations to industry. Grass is for hay, flowers are for medicine, springs are for dairies, rocks are for quarries, trees are for timber, streams are for navigation or for milling, clouds are for rain, and rain is for harvests. The relation of an object to some commercial or domestic economy, is the end of observation. Beyond that there is no interest to it.
The second aspect in which men behold nature, is the purely scientific. We admire a man of science who is so all-sided that he can play with fancy or literality, with exactitudes or associations, just as he will. But a mere man of accuracy, one of those conscientious-eyed men, that will never see any thing but just what is there, and who insist upon bringing every thing to terms; who are for ever dissecting nature, and coming to the physical truths in their most literal forms, these men are our horror. We should as soon take an analytic chemist to dine with us, that he might explain the constituent elements of every morsel that Eve ate; or an anatomist into a social company, to describe the bones, and muscles, and nerves that were in full play in the forms of dear friends. Such men think that nature is perfectly understood when her mechanism is known; when her gross and physical facts are registered, and when all her details are catalogued and described. These are nature’s dictionary-makers. These are the men who think that the highest enjoyment of a dinner would be to be present in the kitchen and that they might see how the food is compounded and cooked.
A third use of nature is that which poets and artists make, who look only for beauty.
All of these are partialists. They all misinterpret, because they all proceed as if nature were constructed upon so meager a schedule as that which they peruse; as if it were a mere matter of science, or of commercial use, or of beauty; whereas these are but single developments among hundreds.
The earth has its physical structure and machinery, well worth laborious study; it has its relations to man’s bodily wants, from which spring the vast activities of industrial life; it has its relations to the social faculties, and the finer sense of the beautiful in the soul; but far above all these are its declared uses, as an interpreter of God, a symbol of invisible spiritual truths, the ritual of a higher life, the highway upon which our thoughts are to travel toward immortality, and toward the realm of just men made perfect that do inherit it.

For its vast age, my copy of this book offers few clues as to its history. There is a bookseller stamp for J.T. Heald, Bookseller and Binder, 127 Market Street, Wilmington, Delaware. There is also a signature without a date or other identifying information. The name appears to be Hannah B. Michner. I was unable to locate the name online when searched with Delaware, Pennsylvania,

Wilmington, or Philadelphia. I am not clear if the last name is a maiden name or a name received upon marriage. Nor do I have any hint regarding whether the owner purchased the book new, in Delaware, or used, somewhere else.

For Those Who Have But Just Begun to Observe: “Nature Studies in Berkshire” by John Coleman Adams (1899)

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Jul 262022

John Coleman Adams (1849-1922) graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1872 and went on to serve as pastor at five Universalist churches during his lifetime. He wrote several books on religion, philosophy, and other topics. Nature Studies in Berkshire was his only book in the nature genre unless one counts a biography of William Hamilton Gibson, another nature author of the time.

At first glance, I was fearful that the book was going to be, well, vacuous. The opening chapter on “Our Berkshire” is a work overwrought with boosterism that includes this cliché-riddled passage:

To know Berkshire is to love it. To love it is to feel a sort of proprietorship in it, a pride in its glories, a joy in its beauties, such as owners have in their estates, and patriots in their native land. He who was born here, clings to the soil if he stays, or reverts to it if he moves from it, with a New England stead- fastness, as intense and deep as a moral principle. He who visits Berkshire is almost certain to visit again and yet once more. He would fain revel in the old delight of air and scene and influence. He believes he has not exhausted the possible experiencesto be found in this spot. And so the charm grows, and the sense of belonging to the soil, and the belief that there is nowhere the like of this blend of tonic and restful scenery, of wild nature and cultivated land, of hill-country and broad plains.

I am grateful to report that the book gets much better. As a dominie (the term for a pastor that Adams preferred to apply to himself), he includes some religious sentiment; but it is muted for the most part, and not overly didactic. I found it strangely endearing to read, early on, Adams’ declaration that “I am a stranger in bird-land”; so many other writers of the time, such as Olive Thorne Miller and Brandford Torrey, reveled in descriptions of the feathered folk. Birds still appear here — robins, thrushes, and a few others — but only briefly, and mostly concerning their songs or behaviors, not their plumage or nesting habits. His botanical knowledge is much stronger; unlike early Burroughs, Adams identifies the wake-robin trillium as being deep purple. In his 1901 biography of William Hamilton Gibson, Adams identifies Thoreau, Burroughs, and Gibson as the greatest nature writers of the time. In this slightly earlier book, Adams mentions John Burroughs, Grant Allen (stay tuned for a future blog post or two on this Canadian writer who wrote popular pieces about plant evolution), and Bradford Torrey, along with the poetry of Wordsworth and Emerson.

I found the simple, straightforward nature of Adams’ prose to be quite refreshing after Field-Farings. I lifted the title of this blog post from the book because I think it describes Adams’ audience well — novices at nature study, those seeking inspiration in charming accounts of the out-of-doors. Nearly all of the chapters are set in the summer because that is when Adams would stay in the Berkshires; the rest of the year, he was a parson at All Souls’ Universalist Church in Brooklyn. The chapters are accounts of excursions he took in the area, or reflections upon various landscape features — trees, brooks, lakes, and clouds. While his prose rarely waxes eloquent, I admit to enjoying this passage about a delightful afternoon visit to a stream near his home:

…sweetest of all our memories will be that bright morning when we wandered to the brookside, with a little child for company, and lay stretched on a greensward shaded by the meeting boughs of a maple and a butternut, while she played like a baby naiad in the stream, and the brook sang, and the trees whispered, and the birds hopped on branches close beside us, and the kingfisher from downstream dropped in to call, and the tenant frog stared at us from his pool, and the oxen in the next lot sent looks of fellowship across the stone wall, and we seemed to blend our lives with that of the brook, and for each of us, child, man, and woman, the poet’s word was true: ” Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.”

Like many nature authors of his time (particularly of the religious persuasion), Adams believed that connecting with nature was ultimately a religious experience. He explained the connection between religion and nature thus:

I have grown to feel that the love of nature and its beauty and inner life have much to do with the enrichment of the religious life. Religion has been the gainer both from science and art, for these interpreters of nature have broadened our vision, lifted our ideals, and expanded all our conceptions of the universe and of its Creator.

I am confident that Hamilton Wright Mabie, among others, would have agreed with him.

Before I consign this book to my rapidly expanding “finished books” shelf, I will share excerpts from three chapters in the volume that particularly caught my attention. The first is a passage singing the praises of the music of the thrush in the forest:

The breeze lulls for a moment ; the far sounds from the farms come to our ears softened and sweet. But best and dearest of all sounds, across the glen, from out those woody coverts, there floats the tender, liquid trill of the thrush. It is the harbinger of the evening, the first notice the birds serve that the day is waning, and that the shadows are gathering in the forests on the eastern slopes. There is no other woodland note like this. It is perpetual music. It touches the emotions like profoundest poetry. It calls on the religious nature and stirs the deepest soul to joyous praise. There is no bird, among the many which have found their way into song, in other lands or other times, whose note deserves so much of poet and lover of nature as the wood-thrush. The very spirit of the forest thrills in this vesper-song. It is the trembling note of solitude, rich with the emotions born of silence and of shadow, rising like the sighing of the evergreens, to fill the soul at once with joy over its sweetness, and with sadness because that sweetness must be so evanescent. When one has heard the song of the thrush there is no richer draught of joy in store for him in any sound of the woods. There is nothing to surpass it, save the ineffable ecstasy of the silence which reigns in their deepest shades.

The second excerpt presages Edwin Way Teale’s North With the Spring, published half a century later:

Now if I had the means and the time, I should every year in this same fashion run ahead of the vernal advance, the procession of leaves and blossoms and birds and butterflies, as it moves northward from the Carolinas to the Canadas. There is such an exquisite pleasure in watching the burst of life, the outbreak of colour and fragrance, the clothing of field and forest with verdure, that one would be glad to prolong the sensation. In these days it would be an easy matter to keep just ahead of summer for a good two months. And then one might halt on the banks of the St. Lawrence and let the pageant pass by; for when it has gone as far north as that, the line of march is nearly done.

Finally, I was surprised to find in Adams a kindred spirit with Enos Mills. Indeed, one might imagine the two meeting for conversation — the New England parson extolling the rural delights of the Berkshires with their “gracious air of culture and refinement”, and a John Muir wannabe backwoodsman with endless tales to tell of adventures in the rugged Rockies. Both men, however, clearly recognized the importance of trees to civilization and the environment. Indeed, many points Mills offers about the value of forests to humans and ecosystems in “The Wealth of the Woods” from The Spell of the Rockies (1911) also appear in Adams’ 1899 essay, “Fruitful Trees”. I suspect that both writers were in turn influenced, at least in part, by George Perkins Marsh’s much earlier work, Man and Nature (1864). “Nature has made the tree one of the great conservators of the soil,” Adams declares. He goes on to explore how trees moderate the local hydrology (diminishing the severity of floods and droughts) and play a key role in preventing soil erosion.

…cut down the trees, clear the hillsides, and see what happens. The thin soil, no longer protected by the trees, no longer held in place by their netted roots, no longer shaded by their leafy branches, grows dry, and crumbles, and loosens. The heavy rains wash it bodily into the valleys. The bare ledges appear. The vegetation dwindles. The hill or mountain becomes a barren crag. Its brooks and springs dry up as soon as they are filled. The drench of the hillsides is hurried in bulk down into the valleys; and every rain-storm becomes a swift freshet, destroying the crops and threatening house, barn, and factory, at the same time that it washes down the sand and gravel from the heights to deaden and impoverish the lowland meadows. But as soon as the rain stops, the streams stop too. They dry up and shrink in their beds. They disappear under the scorch of the sun. The same fields which were inundated in the springtime are parched and dusty in the heats of midsummer. That is the way we are enriching ourselves. We are paying dividends at the sawmill, and putting mortgages on the farms. We are burying our fields at the same time that we are destroying our forests.

On the whole, I found Adams a worthy nature writer. And any lightness in his prose was more than counteracted by the weight of his book: 2.4 pounds, with pages made of some of the heaviest paper I have seen — approaching cardstock. The photographs are lovely, each one shielded by vellum with a brief text excerpt printed in red ink. It was a charming read. Alas, no previous owner left their mark, so I cannot tell anything about the history of this volume itself, beyond the fact that it was a slightly later edition of the work, published in 1901.

Go Out into the Night: “Notes of the Night” by Charles C. Abbott (1896)

Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Night No Responses »

Jul 142022

Though you may have been familiar with the locality by day for all of your life, it is another world now. Go out into the night with no disturbing thoughts. Gaze awhile at the stars and lose in a measure your earthiness, and a song of a dreaming bird will arouse you to a quicker sympathy with the creatures to which it is now day.

I return again to the indomitable and highly prolific author Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D. (1843-1919). Again I wend my way through the thickets of his prose, hoping to glean a few literary morsels like the lovely bit above to record in my notebook and share with my readers. It is slow going. Abbott is not easy on the reader. He rambles interminably, and his sentences, while not quite labyrinthine, rarely capture my attention. As a resident of the Trenton area, the flora and fauna he describes are quite similar to that of my own native home in Horsham, Pennsylvania. The Delaware River at his doorstep runs through my own childhood by way of canoe trips (well upstream) and many visits to its banks. His interest in the past — both prehistory and colonial days — mirrors my own. And yet I struggle to keep moving forward. The challenge, I think, lies in his tendency toward prolix description. Nothing happens. Rarely does he lead you from his doorstep, out into the meadows and woods around his home, then back again. In the moments when he offers a narrative thread to bind his observations and thoughts together, the result almost works. Abbott is capable of applying an endearing humorous tone to his prose, though he does that all too rarely.

My favorite part of the book is set in the brutal heat and humidity of midsummer in the Delaware Valley. I will quote it in full if only for my own future enjoyment looking back through these past posts:

Liquify brass by heat and then reduce the liquid to a yellow gas, and you will have what did duty for atmosphere at high noon recently. It was 95^o in the shade, on the north porch, and away above 100^o out in the fields. For this reason, I took to the fields, and finding only crickets equal to the occasion, kept on, and soon plunged into a ferny thicket with three big oaks and a bubbling spring. Here the thermometer showed but 88^o, so I had found a cool spot and concluded to tarry. It was all very well to let enthusiasm suggest examining the animal life of a field at noon, but to carry out such suggestions does not pay for the danger involved. It was hot enough to melt your brain, and I shall never forget the languid look of one poor toad that by some cause had been ousted from his day-time retreat and found it too hot to go hunt up another. That toad would not hop, but let me roll him over with the toe of my shoe. The rattling creak of the crickets sounded precisely like the crisp crackling of dry twigs in a fire. What is to be known of open fields at mid-day in summer, let others tell me.

The scene continues with Abbott remaining in the shade by the spring, watching the birds. Eventually, he disturbs a cloud of mosquitoes which drives him back out into the sun-baked field. After a few moments of contemplating the absurdity of being forced out of a relatively pleasant retreat and back into the hot sun, he screws up his courage and returns to the spring and the calling birds. This time, the mosquitoes stay away. It may not be the makings of a movie or even a short story, but it is the closest to high drama that Abbott allows himself to get.

As I read through the book, I did extract some odds and ends of interest. With regard to the literary influences on Abbott, Thoreau is undoubtedly first. Abbott references Thoreau several times and ends his book with a brief and rather lackluster essay on him. The only other writer mentioned, interestingly enough, is John Muir; in his first essay, Abbott remarks that “I had been reading that day Muir’s volume, and the mountains of California seem to have settled over the Jersey meadows.” Another aspect of the book that I appreciated was that Abbott approached nature without fear, urging others to do the same. While recognizing that people tend to have an innate fear of being outdoors at night, Abbott encouraged his readers to overcome that fear and explore the “night country” (as Loren Eisley would later call it). In a later essay in which Abbott dedicated several pages to local reptiles, he remarked on how “utterly unreasonable it is to be afraid of snakes.” Indeed, he urged readers to get out into nature and observe animals with an open mind, letting go of preconceptions and seeking to know the purpose that animal serves in nature. Of course, this outlook did not preclude him from determining the whereabouts of a snapping turtle’s nest and gathering all the eggs to eat.

Finally, throughout the book are passages that speak to the human impacts on nature at the time. For the most part, Abbott seems to recognize that humans have been rather destructive to their environment, yet he generally stops short of advocating a solution. At one point, he observes that “the stream that has a factory on its banks too often has nothing in its waters.” Elsewhere, he notes that “we are doing so little to preserve what remains of our forests.” In yet another essay, Abbott complains about the dwindling number of bluebirds in New Jersey due to egg collectors and invasive sparrows. Here, he goes so far as to call for more protective laws to safeguard songbird numbers. In another passage, he acknowledges human impacts on natural systems, observing that “We should remember that the so-called balance of nature is necessarily disturbed by men’s interference.” Yet he is not willing to discard the possibility that humans have been a positive influence on some species. In particular, thanks to humans, many small birds have more nesting sites and an abundant food supply. This argument has been noted in the writings of others at this time and appears to have been a general belief. Of course, this was also a time in which many Americans were convinced that “rain follows the plow.”

To Take the Earth As One Finds It: “The Seer of Slabsides” by Dallas Lore Sharp (1921)

Backyard Nature, book review, Books 2 Responses »

Jul 102022

To take the earth as one finds it, to plant oneself in it, to plant one’s roof-tree in it, to till it, to understand it and the laws which govern it, and the Perfection which created it, and to love it all — that is the heart of John Burroughs’ religion, the pith of his philosophy, the conclusion of his books.

In the end of March, 1921, John Burroughs passed away while on a train taking him back from California to his beloved home in New York State. A few months later, Dallas Lore Sharp, an admirer and friend of Burroughs, published this brief volume (71 pages in large print) as a eulogy to the fallen nature writer. The various copyright dates in the front (1910, 1913, 1921) hint at how it is a hastily cobbled-together affair. It says relatively little by way of biography; a good portion of the book is actually a comparison of Burroughs and Thoreau. Along the way, however, it sheds considerable light on why Burroughs was such a central figure in the literary Nature Movement of the previous half-century.

One immediate shock the reader receives, upon opening the book with its mahogany veneer cover, is the dedication: “To Henry Ford / Lover of Birds / Friend of John Burroughs”. Here, one can immediately see a difference between Thoreau and Burroughs. Thoreau, I am confident, would never have befriended a robber baron, choosing instead to advocate for the “common man”. I am certain that Ford’s political views would have sat very uneasy with Thoreau. But for Burroughs, largely free of political views, it was a marvelous thing to ride about the countryside in a Model T given t him by Henry Ford.

As Sharp describes Burroughs early in the book, “He loved much, observed and interpreted much, speculated a little, and dreamed none at all.” He was a “…teacher and interpreter of the simple and the near at hand.” He brought a sense of wonder and curiosity to all that he encountered. According to Sharp, during his last visit with Burroughs a few months before the writer’s death, the two noticed a woodchuck, and Burroughs remarked, “How eternally interesting life is! I’ve studied the woodchuck my whole life, and there’s no getting to the bottom of him.” In various essays, he shed particular light on facets of the natural world, from woodchucks to bluebirds. Over 50 years, Burroughs produced what Sharp describes as “…beyond dispute, the most complete, the most revealing of all our outdoor literature.” Ultimately, Burroughs was after the whole of nature, more than just its individual living components: “His theme has not been this or that, but nature in its totality, as it is held within the circle of his horizon, as it surrounds, supports, and quickens him.”

A few pages later, Sharp presents the argument that the “modern” (i.e., 1921) nature writer model has its roots in Burroughs: “The essay whos matter is nature, whose moral is human, whose manner is strictly literary, belongs to John Burroughs.” As practiced by Burroughs, Sharp explains, good outdoor writing demonstrated both fidelity to fact and sincerity of expression. Sharp proposes two questions for testing all nature writing: 1) Is the record true?; and 2) Is the writing honest?

At this point, Thoreau enters the scene. In the next dozen pages or so, Sharp argues (without slighting Thoreau) that the founding figure of the Nature Movement is not Thoreau, but Burroughs. Thoreau’s thoughts were lofty, his demeanor iconoclastic. Burroughs was companionable and firmly grounded in everyday realities, with a prose style immediately accessible to the general public. In writing about their own garden or woodlot and observing the birds and trees, aspiring nature writers could hope to emulate Burroughs’ tone and voice; Thoreau’s was out of reach. “Burroughs takes us along with him,” Sharp explains, “Thoreau comes upon us in the woods, jumps out at us from behind some bush, with a ‘Scat!’ Burroughs brings us home in time for tea; Thoreau leaves us tangled up in the briars.” Thoreau hoed beans as a reenactment of the roots of civilization; Burroughs maintained an 18-acre vineyard and made a living from it. As Burroughs himself once asserted, “Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am.” Sharp follows with this vivid comparison of “…Thoreau, searching by night and day in all wild places for his lost horse and hound, while Burroughs quietly worshipped, as his rural divinity, the ruminating cow.” Burroughs made no new discoveries, but he saw old things anew and invited others to do the same.

As a closing observation, Sharp noted that there were many themes in Burroughs’ works, but only one central message: “…that this is a good world to live in; that these are good men and women to live with; that life is good; here and now, and altogether worth living.”

My somewhat weatherbeaten copy of this book bears no dedications or signatures but does have a tiny bookseller’s label from Dennen’s Book Shop, 37 East Grand River Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. Whoever owned the book at very least had it off the shelf for a time; there is some water staining along the edges of the first few pages, and the first half of the book has a gentle fold. But toward the end of the brief volume, I still found an uncut page.

To Interpret Nature: “Wake-Robin” by John Burroughs (1871)

Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants No Responses »

Jul 092022

Wake-Robin Trillium, Smoky Mountains (Wikimedia Commons)

The literary naturalist does not take liberties with facts; facts are the flora upon which he lives. The more and the fresher the facts the better. I can do nothing without them, but I must give them my own flavor. I must impart to them a quality which heightens and intensifies them.
To interpret Nature is not to improve upon her: it is to draw her out; it is to have an emotional intercourse with her, absorb her, and reproduce her tinged with the colors of the spirit.

Thus states John Burroughs (1837-1921) in the introduction to his first nature book, Wake-Robin. Presented as “mainly a book about the Birds,” Burroughs actually took his title from the local flora, with a name evoking the birds but also suggesting a broader view of the natural world. Ironically, given his statement about not taking liberties with facts, in this case, John Burroughs was in error; he defines wake-robin as “the common name of the white Trillium, which blooms in all our woods, and which marks the arrival of all the birds.” However, as shown above, the wake-robin trillium is actually dark red, with a nodding flowerhead. Here I would grant Burroughs some slack; the book was actually written far away from his native New York State, while he was working as a clerk in Washington, D.C. In the introduction, he described his writing place: “I was the keeper of a vault in which many millions of bank-notes were stored. During my long periods of leisure I took refuge in my pen. How my mind reacted from the iron wall in front of me, and sought solace in memories of all the birds and of summer fields and woods!” I am confident I could not compose essays so evocative of the natural world of these while facing a bank vault door hundreds of miles away.

Why am I back reading Burroughs? After all, he is the second most well-known nature writer of his day (admittedly, a fairly distant second) after John Muir. Many of his books are still in print, and an annual nature-writing medal bears his name. However, the more I delve into the nature-writing world of the 1860s through the 1920s (after which it virtually disappears for a couple of decades), the more I come to realize that Burroughs was its High Priest. His name is the one most mentioned by other nature writers, either well-known in their day or utterly obscure then and now. He set the tone for the time; to understand many of the nature books that followed and the Nature Movement (as Dallas Lore Sharpe calls it) of which they were a part, it is vital to come to grips with Burroughs, including his style, subject matter, and outlook. A few essays will not suffice. I have invested (money and time) in getting to know him well, through all twenty-three volumes of his Collected Works, published three years after his death in the “Wake-Robin Edition”. I was fortunate enough to locate a copy of the set in excellent condition for a third of the price (converted to 2022 dollars) that the set would have cost new. In one volume, I noticed a few pencil marks; otherwise, there is no writing in any of the volumes, no sign of ownership whatsoever. The bindings are tight, the covers undamaged. The pages are a bit tanned, but still of a paper quality sufficient to have deckled sides and a gilt top edge. The cover is supposedly a very dark green, though closer to black. On my bookshelf, the volumes comprise a two-foot dark wall awaiting me. I suspect it will be many years before I reach its end.

Meanwhile, from time to time, I will pull the next volume down from the shelf and saunter through it. It will help keep me reminded of Burroughs’ centrality to nature-writing between shortly after the passing of Thoreau and his own death in 1921. Why he played such a leading role in the Nature Movement is a question that will take much pondering to answer; however, I will sketch out an initial explanation in my next blog post. In this first volume of his work, I encounter a young(ish) John Burroughs in his mid-thirties. According to the dates at the ends of each essay in the book, though, its contents date from 1863 through 1869, when he was in his 20s. In keeping with the day, Burroughs included in his outdoor experiences both hunting and fishing. It was perfectly reasonable to shoot a bird in order to identify it or to describe a trout that had been caught and eaten. At times it is tempting to be deeply troubled by this; then I recall that I am at the beginning of Burroughs’ 50-year journey as a writer, during which his outlook toward nature certainly changed.

The essays in this volume can be dispatched in relatively short order. His opening salvos in the nature field definitely emphasize birds; as he notes in the preface, he wishes the book to be “an invitation to the study of Ornithology.” As such, it is one I must turn down. Most of the essays are highly bird-centric, with the notable exception of “Birch Browsings”, a whimsical account of a nature excursion (with the aim of trout fishing) that Burroughs undertook with some friends. The trip was mostly a disaster, since the fishing party was unable to figure out the directions to the lake, and ended up somewhat lost in the woods with practically no food. Along the way, Burroughs describes some of the flora and fauna. The essay is a delightful mix of story and nature experience and is frequently anthologized.

Throughout the essays, I paid close attention to any name-dropping, seeking to identify Burroughs’ early influences. He mentioned Thoreau repeatedly, and Wilson Flagg once. He quoted Wordsworth but did not mention Emerson. In the more strictly ornithological realm, he mentioned John James Audubon, Thomas Nuttall, and Alexander Wilson; twice he referred to a “Dr. Brewer”. I was surprised to locate Thomas Mayo Brewer (1814-1880) right away using Google.

Those looking for early glimmers of a conservation outlook will not find them here. In fact, in his very first essay, “The Return of the Birds,” Burroughs argues that human civilization has been highly beneficial to many American bird species. Many songbirds, he suggested, are more abundant and sing more now that they have meadows and forests created by European settlers clearing the forest. (The recognition that Native American peoples intentionally cleared forest areas using fire long before the arrival of the Mayflower would have to wait on William Cronon 132 years later.) Here is Burroughs’ argument, in full:

Yet, notwithstanding that birds have come to look upon man as their natural enemy, there can be little doubt that civilization is on the whole favorable to their increase and perpetuity, especially to the smaller species. With man come flies and moths, and insects of all kinds in greater abundance; new plants and weeds are introduced, and, with the clearing up of the country, are sowed broadcast over the land.

As noted earlier in this post, this is a snapshot of John Burroughs in his early days as a writer; I am eager to see how his views may change across half a century of his work. It is unlikely that he realized when he first issued his invitation to others to get out into nature and study the birds that he was at the inception of a Nature Movement that would span the rest of his life, and in which he would take considerable part.