No other objects in inanimate nature touch so many hearts tenderly, like the actual presence of dear friends, as flowers. Not children alone, but men and women often look upon them with attributes not possessed by other inanimate objects. It does not seem out of place to talk to them any more than to talk to young children.
I like to picture Eldridge E. Fish (a challenge made difficult by not finding any online images of him) strolling a park in Buffalo, New York, greeting the blooming asters as he wanders past them. In a book with few interesting passages or scenes (more anon), here is a moment of true oddity. A few sentences later, though, his prose returns to its bland, though solid, form, and what little sense I have of Fish as a naturalist and scientist disappears again.
The Blessed Birds, or HIghways and Byways (1890) appears to have been Fish’s only work. I would call it his magnum opus, but I would not dare to apply that to his fairly slender volume. Fish contributed occasional pieces to the Buffalo Sunday Currier newspaper and a couple of other publications, and at some point, he decided to compile them into a book, locally published by Otto Ulbrich at 396 Main Street in Buffalo. The result is uneven but serviceable. The essays draw upon the usual cast of fellow natural history writers: Thoreau, Burroughs, Abbott, and Torrey. And we mustn’t forget Wilson Flagg, who is responsible for this horrendous poem that opens one of the pieces in this volume:
Bird of the wilderness, dearer than Philomel;
Echoes are telling thy notes from the hill and dell;
But I wander. The purpose of this post is to explore Fish’s natural history work, not his taste in 19th-century poetry.
Not surprisingly, there is no biography of Fish — not so much as a Wikipedia entry online. Finally, I found him via a Wikipedia page on New York Central College, a predecessor to Cornell that existed for ten years in Upstate New York. It was an abolitionist institution that welcomed all qualified students, one of whom was Eldridge Fish. In the Wikipedia article, Fish is described as a “scientist and school principal”. Fortunately, there is also a reference citation to a Buffalo Currier newspaper article on Buffalo area schools and their principals, which includes a couple of paragraphs about Fish. It notes that he was born in Otsego County in 1829, and raised on his father’s farm in Cortland County. In 1871, he became principal of School No. 10 in Buffalo, a position he still held in 1894. He wrote papers on botany and ornithology, and “Many of his best papers have been printed in the Courier.” Several of his students went on to Harvard and Cornell.
Unfortunately, publishing the book did not grant Fish any lasting fame. His greatest moment of success was probably on July 23rd, 1890, when Dr. John Johnston of Bolton, England visited John Burroughs at his summerhouse, Slabsides. Strewn about the table and seats were a number of magazines and books, including a copy of Fish’s The Blessed Birds. Did Burroughs actually read it? If so, did Burroughs manage to finish it?
Fish is at his strongest when offers condemnation of the ongoing destruction of forests and songbirds. Regarding logging of woodlands, Fish observes how that results not only in damage to the rural scenery but also impacts the local hydrology and climate. Here, I wonder if he might have been inspired by George Perkins Marsh, who was widely read in the last few decades of the 19th century. Fish is even more troubled by the loss of songbirds, titling an essay, “Danger of an Early Extinction of Song Birds”. He attributes their dwindling numbers to the clearing of forests, the invasion of English swallows, the killing of birds for food in the American South, lighthouses and the Statue of Liberty’s torch, the hunting out of larger game birds, ornithologists gathering bird skins and eggs for their collections, and (of course) the millinery trade. “God no more created the birds for you and me than he created you and me for the birds,” he declared. He also astutely noted that “Men are generally slow to realize the danger of losing that which is apparently abundant, especially if it costs nothing.” That sentiment is equally true today.
Before I allow Fish to return to his well-earned obscurity, I will share one other passage of note. Like many nature writers of his day, Fish advocated for readers to get outside and notice the wonders of their own backyards:
The orchard assists in teaching the lesson that objects which yield the greatest pleasure lie nearest our doors; that it is not necessary to make long journeys or to explore far-off countries to see the most interesting objects in nature. I can find more of interest in Limestone groves, in Wende’s woods and meadows and in the vicinity of Portage than I can in the Adirondacks, the wilds of Northern Michigan or the primitive forests of the Carolinas. Even this old orchard of less than a dozen acres has so many charming things growing and living, flowerless and flowering, winged and four-footed in it, that a Gray or a Nuttall would find it a field of delight and study. There are mosses on the north side of the tree trunks and lichens pendant from leafless branches. Tall ferns are growing in a shaded corner of the lot near a rivulet of pure water, and their broad fronds are as green and thrifty as in the shady woods. The jewel weed, with almost transparent stem, and leaves that look like silver, when immersed in water, are abundant and luxuriant.
Finally, in closing, a word about my copy, from 1890 — likely a first and only edition. Its green cloth cover includes this charming gold-embossed title with a picture:
What is more, my copy is signed — a bit tentatively, perhaps — by the author, with his kind regards:
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.
…the real fascination of hunting is not in the killing but in seeing the creature at home amid his glorious surroundings, and feeling the freely rushing blood, the health-giving air, the gleeful sense of joy and life in nature, both within and without.
Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson (a872-1959)was a turn-of-the-century adventurer and world traveler. After publishing this, her first book, she went on to produce nine more, chronicling her journeys to China, India, Southeast Asia, and South America. She was also the wife of the highly prolific author of wild animal accounts for young people, Ernest Thompson Seaton, whom she refers to as Nimrod in this volume. The appellation is ironic since the Biblical name has come to mean both a hunter and an idiot. I trust she had the former in mind in this case.
As a work of nature writing, this book probably isn’t, unless by association. While Ernest Seton Thompson (whose writings we will visit in future blog posts) wrote stories about the life experiences of North American wildlife (which eventually got him embroiled in the Nature Faker Controversy initiated by John Burroughs, also to be covered at a later date), his wife wrote mostly about the experience of being a woman roaming the wild West when the West was truly quite wild. The book is filled with advice to other tenderfoot wives, sometimes serious, other times more tongue-in-cheek. An entire early chapter is devoted to the best wardrobe choices for heading into the mountains on horseback. Her account leaves the reader thinking that the expedition she undertook with her husband was largely about hunting; however, there is a passage in which she reports on trapping a woodchuck which leads me to think it was mostly intended as a research opportunity.
Nimrod wanted some photographs of animals from life, and the energy which we put forth to obtain these was a constant surprise and disturbance to Uncle John and his co-loafers. They could understand why one might trap an animal, but to let it go again unhurt, after spending hours over it with a camera, was a problem that required many drinks and much quiet cogitation in the shade of the office.
For days we tried to get a woodchuck. At last we succeeded, and I find this note written in my journal for that date: “Oct. 15th: Nimrod caught a woodchuck to-day, a baby one, and we called him Johnny. Johnny stayed with us all day in his cage, while Nimrod made a sketch of him and I took his picture. Then, in the late afternoon, we took him back to his home in the stone-clad hill, and put him among his brothers and sisters, who peeped cautiously at us from various rocky niches, higher up the hill.
Little Johnny must have had a great deal to say of the strange ways and food of the big white animal. It must have been hard, too, for him to have found suitable woodchuck language to express his sensations when he was carried, oh! such a long way, in a big sack that grew on the side of his captor; and of the taste of peppermint candy, which he ate in his prettiest style, sitting on his haunches and clutching the morsel in both forepaws like any well-bred baby woodchuck. And then those delicious sugar cookies that Mrs. Spiker had just baked ! How could he make his ignorant brother chuckies appreciate those cookies ! Poor little Johnny is a marked woodchuck. He has seen the world.”
Apparently, neither she nor her husband was an expert in woodchuck nutrition.
In her charming, whimsical way, Grace then proceeds to share about her husband’s efforts to trap a skunk for photographs:
When Nimrod went hunting skunks, the group at the office gave us up. ” Locoed, plumb locoed,” was the verdict.
Have you ever been on a skunk hunt? But perhaps you have no prejudices. I had. My code of action for a skunk was, if you see a black and white animal, don’t stop to admire its beautiful bushy tail, but give a good imitation of a young woman running for her life.
This did not suit Nimrod. He assured me that there was no danger if we treated his skunkship respectfully, and, as I was the photographer, I put on my old clothes and meekly fell in line. Nimrod set several box traps in places where skunks had been. These traps were merely soap boxes raised at one end by a figure four arrangement of sticks, so that when the animal goes inside and touches the bait the sticks fall apart, down comes the box, and the animal is caged unhurt. The next morning we went the rounds. The first trap was unsprung. The second one was down. Of course we could not see inside. Was it empty? Was the occupant a rat or a skunk, and if so, what was he going to do?
Nimrod approached the trap. Just then a big tree chanced to get between me and it. I stopped, thinking that as good a place as any to await developments.
” It’s a skunk all right,” Nimrod announced gleefully.
The box was rather heavy, so Nimrod went to Yeddar’s, which was not far away, to see if he could get one of the loungers to help carry the captive to a large wire cage that we had rigged up near our shack.
There were six men near the office, bronzed mountaineers, men of guns and grit, men who had spent their lives facing danger; but, when it came to facing a skunk, each looked at Nimrod as one would at a crazy man and had important business elsewhere. For once I thoroughly appreciated their point of view, but as there was no one else I took one end of the box, and we started.
It was a precarious pilgrimage, but we moved gently and managed not to outrage the little animal’s feelings.
When the men saw us coming across the creek, with one accord they all went in and took a drink.
We gingerly urged Mr. Skunk into the big cage, and with the greatest caution, never making a sudden move, I took his picture. All was as merry as a marriage bell, and might have continued so but for that puppy Sim. That is the trouble with skunks; they will lose their manners if startled, and dogs startle skunks.
Of course the puppy barked; of course the skunk did not like it. He ruffled up his cold black nose, and elevated his bushy tail his beautiful, plumy tail. I opened the door of his cage and, snatching the puppy, fled.
The skunk was a wise and good animal, really a gentleman, if treated politely. He appreciated my efforts on his behalf. He forbearingly lowered his tail, composed his fur, and walked out of the cage and into the near-by woods as tamely as a house tabby out for a stroll.
Grace’s work opens with the observation that “This book is a tribute to the West”. Ultimately, as a semi-comedic Western adventure, it is a charming read. She does in fact go hunting with her husband, killing first an elk and then an antelope. She reminds readers, however, that having bagged these two, she hunted from that point on only with a camera.
Elsewhere in the book, she shares a delightful story about getting lost with her husband. She also describes scenes of ducks swimming, does prancing, coyotes calling, and pikas gathering hay in the high Rockies. Throughout the book, the author conveys a fortitude that contradicts her fairly frequent self-deprecating remarks. As she notes by the end of the book, her adventures turned her into a seasoned traveler, and she was no longer able to claim the title of Woman Tenderfoot.
You shall not be deceived in this book. It is nothing but a handful of rustic variations on the old tune of ” Rest and be thankful,” a record of unconventional travel, a pilgrim’s scrip with a few bits of blue-sky philosophy in it. There is, so far as I know, very little useful information and absolutely no criticism of the universe to be found in this volume. So if you are what Izaak Walton calls “a severe, sour- complexioned man,” you would better carry it back to the bookseller, and get your money gain, if lie will give it to you, and go your way rejoicing after your own melancholy fashion.
But if you care for plain pleasures, and informal company, and friendly observations on men and things, (and a few true fish-stories) then perhaps you may find something here not unworthy your perusal. And so I wish that your winter fire may burn clear and bright while you read these pages; and that the summer days may be fair, and the fish may rise merrily to your fly, whenever you follow one of these little rivers.
I am still not entirely clear what blue-sky philosophy means, even though I think it describes this book well. There is no suffering or sorrow in these pages, nor does the book dive deeply into anything. It is like a stone skipping along the surface of a pond, carrying the reader merrily along to nowhere in particular. Its author and protagonist is Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933): writer of fiction and essays, educator, foreign diplomat, and clergyman. His many volumes, popular in their day, are virtually unread now. Quite a few of them were issued with stunning Art Nouveau covers by Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944), and this has earned them a space in many art museum collections. Alas, in this case, the four dragonflies gracing the cover do not appear in the text.
OK, I admit that I jumped at the excuse to read a work of Van Dyke (one might even say that I angled for it), simply to own a copy of one of Margaret Armstrong’s stunning works from the 1903/4 edition of the book. I had hoped that it would turn out to fit well into the “nature book” category, even though I knew it was ostensibly about fishing. Van Dyke’s literary knowledge is fairly wide-ranging, and he includes quotes by Hamilton Mabie and John Burroughs. Indeed, when suggesting books one might take on a nature outing, he asks, “Are not John Burroughs’ cheerful, kindly essays full of woodland truth and companionship?” His botanical and ornithological knowledge seems fairly robust, though he shows a marked preference for common names over Latin ones. Alas, though, the skipping stone gathers no moss; having named a plant or bird, he rarely pauses long enough to describe its habits. Van Dyke carries the reader along on his journeys to rivers in New England, Quebec, and Europe, often accompanied by his wife, whom he refers to as “Graygown”. He tells a pleasant story about his travels and the fish he catches (or fails to catch) and remarks about the human and natural landscapes he encounters along the way. One of the few brief “nature passages” I found was this one, reporting his ascent of Nuvolau, a mountain in Italy:
Monte Nuvolau is not a perilous mountain. I am quite sure that at my present time of life I should be unwilling to ascend a perilous mountain unless there were something extraordinarily desirable at the top, or remarkably disagreeable at the bottom. Mere risk has lost the attractions which it once had. As the father of a family I felt bound to abstain from going for amusement into any place which a Christian lady might not visit with propriety and safety. Our preparation for Nuvolau, therefore, did not consist of ropes, ice-irons, and axes, but simply of a lunch and two long sticks.
Our way led us, in the early morning, through the clustering houses of Lacedel, up the broad, green slope that faces Cortina on the west, to the beautiful Alp Pocol. Nothing could exceed the pleasure of such a walk in the cool of the day, while the dew still lies on the short, rich grass, and the myriads of flowers are at their brightest and sweetest. The infinite variety and abundance of the blossoms is a continual wonder. They are sown more thickly than the stars in heaven, and the rainbow itself does not show so many tints. Here they are mingled like the threads of some strange embroidery; and there again nature has massed her colours; so that one spot will be all pale blue with innumerable forget-me-nots, or dark blue with gentians; another will blush with the delicate pink of the Santa Lucia or the deeper red of the clover; and another will shine yellow as cloth of gold. Over all this opulence of bloom the larks were soaring and singing. I never heard so many as in the meadows about Cortina. There was always a sweet spray of music sprinkling down out of the sky, where the singers poised un-seen. It was like walking through a shower of melody.
I will close this post with my favorite passage, from a fishing journey by canoe down the Peribonka River in Quebec. This excerpt concludes with Van Dyke pursuing his favorite pastime.
The river leaped, shouting, down its double stairway of granite, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race. The after-glow in the western sky deepened from saffron to violet among the tops of the cedars, and over the cliffs rose the moonlight, paling the heavens but glorifying the earth. There was something large and generous and untrammelled in the scene, recalling one of Walt Whitman’s rhapsodies : —
“Earth of departed sunsets ! Earth of the mountains misty-topped !
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!”
All the next day we went down with the current. Regiments of black spruce stood in endless files like grenadiers, each tree capped with a thick tuft of matted cones and branches.
Tall white birches leaned out over the stream, Narcissus-like, as if to see their own beauty in the moving mirror. There were touches of colour on the banks, the ragged pink flowers of the Joe-Pye-weed (which always reminds me of a happy, good-natured tramp), and the yellow ear-drops of the jewel-weed, and the intense blue of the closed gentian, that strange flower which, like a reticent heart, never opens to the light. Sometimes the river spread out like a lake, between high bluffs of sand fully a mile apart; and again it divided into many channels, winding cunningly down among the islands as if it were resolved to slip around the next barrier of rock without a fall. There were eight of these huge natural dams in the course of that day’s journey. Sometimes we followed one of the side canals, and made the portage at a distance from the main cataract; and sometimes we ran with the central current to the very brink of the chute, darting aside just in time to escape going over. At the foot of the last fall we made our camp on a curving beach of sand, and spent the rest of the afternoon in fishing.
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.
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.
As the tendency of mankind to crowd into towns grows stronger, the joys of country life and the workings of Nature are more and more excluded from the daily experience of humanity. In a few the primal love of the wild is too strong for suppression, and turning from the hot and noisy streets they find it a refreshment of spirit to meet our little brothers of earth and air in the wider spaces of their own territory.
IN A WORK EVOCATIVE OF MARY TREAT’S ESSAYS, THE PECKHAMS SET OUT, IN THIS VOLUME, TO SHARE THEIR RESEARCH INTO THE BEHAVIOR OF SOLITARY AND SOCIAL WASPS. The result, like that of Mary Treat’s own essays, is a book that both impressed me for the painstaking observations of the authors (spending days in midsummer watching a single insect) and eventually numbed me somewhat with all of the data provided. It seems the Peckhams watched hundreds of wasps belonging to dozens of species as they all went about their daily routines, most involving building nesting chambers, paralyzing or killing prey species (caterpillars, grasshoppers, spiders, and others), and bringing the prey back to the nests for the young larvae to feed upon. (Ironically, despite the opening reference to “little brothers”, nearly all the Peckham’s studies focused on the females of their species.) Nowadays, research into the behaviors of individuals would be agglomerated and presented that way to the reader; but in this book, one is regaled with a myriad of life stories of wasps, some intelligent, some daring, some shy, and some clumsy. Writing about the mud dauber wasps, for example, the Peckhams remark:
All animated by the same compelling instinct, they are still individuals, and the character of each enters into her work. One picks up the first spider she sees, no matter how tiny it may be, and makes twenty-five or thirty journeys before her cell is filled, while another seems to have a calculating term of mind, using four or five big spiders instead of a quantity of small ones. Has she made a note of the calibre of her cell, and determined to save herself trouble by looking farther and selecting the largest ones that will go in?
AND HERE, THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION OF THE BOOK REVEALS ITSELF. As echoed by the title of the book’s final essay, Instinct and Intelligence, the book sets out to answer whether members of a species all behave identically (evidence for instinct at work) or uniquely (evidence for varying degrees of intelligence). As a legacy of Rene Descartes, animals were assumed to be the equivalents of machines, acting entirely by instinct What the Peckhams and other naturalists revealed at the time is a very different story. To do this, however, necessitates trying to see the world through a wasp’s eyes, in a form of “wasp psychology”:
The necessity of interpreting the actions of animals in terms of our own consciousness must be always with us. To interpret them at all we must consider what our own mental states would be under similar circumstances, our safeguard being to keep always before us the progressive weakening of the evidence as we apply it to animals whose structure is less and less like our own.
Here is one such interpretation, a short story with a wasp as protagonist:
When we went to the garden at eight o’clock on the following morning…, [Pompilus] scelestus was still sound asleep in her leafy bower. We thought it best to awaken her, for a large spider had spread its web just below, and if the wasp should drop upon it nothing could save her. We therefore aroused her gently, whereupon she crept slowly up the stem and, taking her stand on the highest point, surveyed the world. Then, after stretching herself sleepily, she made her toilet, cleaning off her wings and legs, and washing her face with her feet like a cat. When these duties were finished she walked slowly about for an hour, visiting her nest every now and then. Suddenly, at half past nine o’clock, her whole manner changed, and seeming very much excited she ran rapidly along, parallel with the fence, for fifteen or twenty feet and then, rising on her wings, flew far away into the woods. She had evidently gone hunting at last, and we watched eagerly for her return. She was not successful at once, however, for at half past ten she came back without anything, stayed at the nest for a few minutes, and then flew to the woods again with the same excited manner as before. Perhaps she had already caught her spider at some far distant spot, and was getting her bearings preparatory to bringing it home; but it was half past one when she suddenly appeared, five or six inches from the next, coming back through the fence, and dragging a large Lycosid [spider]. This she laid down close by, and began to bite at the legs…. Her movements were full of nervous excitement, in marked contrast to those of the previous day. Presently she went to look at her nest, and seemed to be struck with a thought that had already occurred to us — that it was decidedly too small to hold the spider. Back she went for another survey of her bulky victim, measured it with her eye, without touching it, drew her conclusions, and at once returned to the nest and began to make it larger….
THE RESULT IS A REMARKABLY DIFFERENT PORTRAIT OF THE LIFE OF A WASP THAN WHAT MOST OF US IMAGINE. Living in an age when invertebrates have been “othered” to the point that they seem akin to aliens, I found this account almost jarring. Consider the human characteristics this wasp exhibits, from her lazy morning stretch upon waking up to her careful problem-solving of the puzzle of the small nest hole and large spider. Through the Peckhams’ eyes, the wasps are another culture, yes, but one that merits our respect. Granted, at other moments the Peckhams behave more like conventional field scientists, digging up nest burrows to view their occupants or altering the landscape around a ground nest to see how a wasp responds to the changes. Somewhat comically, the scientists also express an awareness of the harm their research is causing some of the wasps:
We had not supposed that the digging up of her nest would much disturb our Sphex, since her connection with it was nearly at an end; but in this we were mistaken. When we returned to the garden about half an hour after we had done the deed, we heard her loud and anxious humming from a distance. She was searching far and wide for her treasure house, returning every few minutes to the same spot, although the upturned earth had entirely changed its appearance. She seemed unable to believe her eyes, and her persistent refusal to accept the fact that her nest had been destroyed was pathetic. She lingered about the garden all through the day, and made so many visits to us, getting under our umbrellas and thrusting her tremendous personality into our very faces, that we wondered if she were trying to question us as to the whereabouts of her property. Later we learned that we had wronged her more deeply than we knew. Had we not interfered she would have excavated several cells to the side of the main tunnel, storing a grasshopper in each. Who knows, but perhaps our Golden Digger, standing among the ruins of her home, or peering under our umbrella, said to herself: “Men are poor things: I don’t know why the world thinks so much of them.”
THAT LAST THOUGHT MAKES A SPLENDID CLOSURE TO THIS POST. In the end, I found this book highly captivating at first, though rather repetitive after the first few dozen pages, as the Peckhams shifted from one genus of wasp to another one. (Clearly the Peckhams were patient and highly devoted to their research subjects). From the standpoint of 2020, 115 years on, the authors led me into a truly foreign world — a quite different perception of wasps and their natures than what most of us have today. I also noticed the sheer number, and variety, of wasps the Peckhams encountered on a bit of rural land outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sadly, I suspect that repeating her project in the Eastern United States nowadays would be far more difficult. So many of our insects have been reduced dramatically in number. This book helps me see how much of a tragedy that loss really is — the diminution of other societies of beings, with their thoughts and plans and lives to lead.
BEFORE CLOSING, I OUGHT TO REMARK ON TWO OTHER FIGURES THAT ARE ASSOCIATED WITH THIS BOOK. The first is James Henry Emerton, the illustrator. His drawings are, in my humble opinion, stunning, though I will leave a more in-depth critique to others. According to Wikipedia, Emerton (1847-1931) was an arachnologist in addition to being an illustrator (and watercolor artist), who spent most of his life in Massachusetts. His magnum opus was Common Spiders of the United States, which was reprinted by Dover Books in 1961 with a sufficiently garish cover that I feel compelled to reproduce it below. The image is accompanied by a somewhat blurry image of Emerton himself, who probably would also have disapproved of the cover, or being associated with it in this way.
THE SECOND PERSON I NEED TO MENTION IS NONE OTHER THAN THE SAGE OF SLABSLIDES, JOHN BURROUGHS. Burroughs wrote an introduction to the book, no doubt contributing markedly to its sales in the process. He heaped considerable praise on the work, noting that
It is a wonderful world of patient, exact, and loving observation, which has all the interest of a romance. It opens up a world of Lilliput right at our feet, wherein the little people amuse and delight us with their curious human foibles and whimsicalities, and surprise us with their intelligence and individuality. Here I had been saying in print that I looked upon insects as perfect automata, and all of the same class as nearly alike as the leaves of the trees or the sands upon the beach. I had not reckoned with the Peckhams and their solitary wasps. The solitary ways of these insects seem to bring out their individual traits, and they differ one from another, more than any other wild creatures known to me….
I am free to confess that I have had more delight in reading this book than in reading any other nature book in a long time.
AT LAST, I HAVE QUITE A TALE TO TELL ABOUT THE JOURNEY MY COPY OF THIS BOOK HAS TAKEN. In fact, the book contains a nearly complete, and rather amazing, account of its journeys. In an amazing coincidence, this book comes from the homeland of another author from this time period — Frank Boles! First, I know that the book was published in 1905, and sold by W. B. Clarke Co. Booksellers. The purchaser identifies herself as Mrs. Edd Hallowell, who then gave the book to someone else (probably J.H. Bartlett) on August 15th, 1905. Some time after that, it passed “thence to the Chocorua Library”, a gift of J.H. Bartlett. Chocorua Library, in Chocorua, New Hampshire, is situated just a short distance south of Lake Chocorua and the summer country home of Frank Coles. It was volume number 2260 in the humble and nondescript Chocorua Public Library building, where it spent its days until quite recently. According to the stamp date on the back library card pocket, it was last due July 31st 2003. Soon after that, I assume that it was sold at a library book sale (one of those treats of northern New England summer weekends) and probably purchased there by Robert Purmort Books, Newport, New Hampshire, which sold the copy to me via ABE Books on 26 July of this year.
WHEN THOMAS WILSON FLAGG DROPPED HIS FIRST NAME EARLY IN HIS WRITING CAREER, IT WAS HIS FIRST AND LAST ACT AS EDITOR. What would follow, over the course of a lengthy and prolific writing career, would be dozens and dozens of highly detailed accounts of nature — birds, trees, the functions of a forest. What they nearly all share is a writing style that one admiring reader called “whimsical” but I would classify instead as soporific. I will allow the modern-day reader to judge from this supposedly “whimsical” passage:
Evening calls [the botanist] out from his retreat, to pursue another varied journey among the fairy realms of vegetation, and ere she parts with him curtains the heavens with splendor and prompts her choir of sylvan warblers to salute him with their vespers.
Another example, the inspiration for the title of this post:
The White Cedar constitutes with the southern cypress the principal timber of the Great Dismal Swamp, and is the last tree, except the red maple, which is discovered when travelling through an extensive morass.
FLAGG IS NOTABLE TODAY CHIEFLY FOR BEING A CONTEMPORARY OF HENRY THOREAU, RECOGNIZING THOREAU, GEORGE PERKINS MARSH, AND JOHN BURROUGHS AS SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. Alas, he and Thoreau never met (nor did he meet the the other two, from what I have found). However, in an 1857 letter to Daniel Rickerson, Thoreau voiced his opinion of Flagg’s work in no uncertain terms; after reading 300 pages of Flagg’s writing, I honestly confess that I agree with Thoreau on this one:
Your Wilson Flagg seems a serious person, and it is encouraging to recognize a contemporary who recognizes nature so squarely…. But he is not alert enough. He wants stirring up with a pole…. His style, as I remember, is singularly vague (I refer to the book) and before I got to the end of the sentences I was off the track.
TO BE FAIR TO FLAGG, THE BOOK I READ PUTS HIM AT A CONSIDERABLE DISADVANTAGE FOR WINNING OVER THE READER. During his lifetime, he produced dozens of essays, and all of his books are essay compilations. One of them followed the year round, making use of an organizational structure that was commonly employed from the 1840s through the 1940s, and is still encountered in some modern-day nature writing. The one I read — the only volume I could afford, I might add, due (I expect) to the relative scarcity of the other tiles — was “A Year Among the Trees”. It consists of a subset of essays, taken from a larger work, “The Woods and Byways of New England”. The common theme in this work is trees and shrubs. Unfortunately, most of the essays highlight particular tree and shrub species, giving them a rather field-guidish treatment but often without illustrations and without scientific names in the text (though they are included in the table of contents). Flag tends to focus his account on aesthetic considerations, highlighting the degree to which a tree form is picturesque or not, and the extent to which the tree is more or less attractive than its English counterpart (when there is one). Combine that with wandering sentences generally long on Latinate words, and the result is a sort of mind-numbing tedium, a morass of tree limbs, leaf forms, and flowery words.
THERE IS ANOTHER KIND OF ESSAY IN THIS BOOK, TOO; IT INCLUDES SOME OF HIS FINEST WORK AND ALSO SOME OF HIS MOST PECULIAR IDEAS. In a series of essays scattered throughout the book (with no clear order to them), Flagg explores the nature and functions of forests. The volume opens with an essay on The Primitive Forest in which Flagg proposes that, prior to European settlement, most of North America east of “The Great American Desert” (as the Great Plains was called at the time) was densely covered with forest. Subsequent clearing of the trees has led to regional warming, for reasons explained here:
The American climate is now in that transitional state which has been caused by opening the space to the winds from all quarters by operations which have not yet been carried to their extreme limit. These changes of the surface have probably increased the mean annual temperature of the whole country by permitting the direct rays of the sun to act upon a wider area….
WHILE HIS CLIMATOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS FELL WIDE OF THE MARK, HIS CONCERNS ABOUT THE LOGGING OF STEEP SLOPES REMAIN SCIENTIFICALLY VALID. As in his thoughts about the influence of forest cover on climate, it is not clear the extent to which Flagg’s ideas are original; in this case, for instance, he may owe a debt to George Perkins Marsh (who he mentions in another essay in the book). In his essay Relations of Trees to Water, Flagg explains,
If each owner of land would keep all his hills and declivities, and all slopes that contain only a thin deposit of soil or a quarry, covered with forest, he would lessen his local inundations from vernal thaws and summer rains. Such a covering of wood tends to equalize the moisture that is distributed over the land, causing it, when showered upon the hills, to be retained by the mechanical action of the trees and their undergrowth of shrubs and herbaceous plants, and by the spongy surface of the soil underneath them, made porous by mosses, decayed leaves, and other debris, so that the plains and valleys have a moderate oozing supply of moisture for a long time after every shower. Without this covering, the water when precipitated upon the slopes, would immediately rush down over an unprotected surface in torrents upon the space below.
AS AN AMATEUR GEOMORPHOLOGIST, FLAGG IS QUITE NOTEWORTHY. Indeed, his musings remind me of some of Thoreau’s own unpublished research and observations on the effects of dams on stream flow. Like Thoreau, Flagg looked closely and thought deeply about natural processes in his native Massachusetts. Also like Thoreau, he calls for the establishment of parks to protect the remaining New England forests. First, here is Thoreau, from the last pages of his manuscript “Wild Fruits” as edited by Bradley Dean:
I think that each town should have a park, or rather primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres…where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses — a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.
And here is Wilson Flagg’s proposal, from his essay The Dark Plains; though not quite as plainly spoken, he echoes Thoreau’s general sentiment well:
Some spacious wood ought to remain, in every region, in which the wild animals would be protected, and we might view the grounds as they appeared when the wild Indian was lord of this continent.
FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK ITSELF. This time, the closest I could come to an original volume by the author was an edition of Flagg from 1889, eight years after the original edition, and five years after Flagg’s death. Apart from the gilt cover with pine branch and cones, the book is fairly nondescript. The work includes three photo illustrations, including the roadside elm above. It also includes a number of line drawings of the parts of various trees and shrubs. Affixed to the inside of the front cover is a book label, indicating this book was once part of the Private Library of Walter S. Athearn. Here my tale potentially gets more interesting. Out of curiosity, I did a Google search of the name, and this biography turned up. Dr. Walter Scott Athearn lived from 1872 until 1934, and was a pioneering religious educator. While much of his life was spent in Iowa, he did move east in 1916 to serve for 13 years as a Graduate School Dean at Boston University. Could he have purchased the title in some used bookshop upon his arrival, perhaps with an eye toward learning more about the trees and forests of his new home state? Or could the person who owned my book just happened to have had the same name? I could not locate any obituaries online for a different Walter S. Athearn, but I doubt I will ever know for certain. Meanwhile, his photo brings a fitting closure to this post.
…the student and lover of nature has this advantage over people who gad up and down the world, seeking some novelty and excitement; he has only to stay at home and see the procession pass. The great globe swings round to him like a revolving showcase; the change of seasons is like the passage of strange and new countries; the zones of the earth, with all their beauties and marvels, pass one’s door and linger long in the passing…. I sit here among the junipers of the Hudson, with purpose every year to go to Florida, or to the West Indies, or to the Pacific coast, yet the seasons pass and I am still loitering, with a half-defined suspicion, perhaps, that, if I remain quiet and keep a sharp lookout, these countries will come to me.
AFTER THREE QUITE OBSCURE NATURE WRITERS, I THOUGHT IT WAS TIME TO VISIT FAMILIAR GROUND, SO I PULLED MY VOLUME OF BURROUGHS DOWN FROM THE SHELF. Granted, many casual natural history readers forget “the other John”, recalling from this time period only John Muir (who, like Burroughs, sported a white beard and spoke exultantly of nature’s marvels). The two, though, are remarkably different. John Muir was a mountain prophet, speaking in tones of religious rapture about his beloved Sierra Nevada fastnesses. John Burroughs, on the other hand, grew up and lived out his days in the Catskills of New York State, keeping close to the Hudson River. Muir walked long distances alone in the mountains and climbed a redwood in a thunderstorm just to feel it rocking in the wind; Burroughs, meanwhile, remarked self-deprecatingly about his own efforts to venture into the wilds. After a particularly difficult short camping trip with a few companions, he observed that “On this excursion…I was taught how poor an Indian I should make, and what a ridiculous figure a party of men may cut in the woods when the way is uncertain and the mountains high.” It must be added that the highest point in the Catskill “Mountains” is Slide Mountain, at 4189 feet; the highest point in the Sierras, Mount Whitney, is 14,505 feet.
JOHN BURROUGHS’ PROSE WANDERS COMFORTABLY THROUGH THAT LIMINAL RURAL SPACE BETWEEN CIVILIZATION AND THE WILD. I would classify him as a ruderal writer, using a term most commonly applied to plants that are the first to colonize ground disturbed by human action, such as an abandoned field. Cattle roam across many a page, and he frequently writes of fields and weeds. My particular copy of this book, the second edition from 1901, features about 50 photographs (all black and white, of course) of John Burroughs in the landscape and at home. Most of his out-of-door images show predominantly open farmland dotted with occasional trees. In these familiar haunts, Burroughs encountered, and wrote about, numerous birds, trees, and forbs (flowering ground plants), occasionally drifting into comments about his other “neighbors”, from bumblebees to black bears. In all of his walks, his enduring goal, I think, was to realize himself as more deeply a part of his home landscape, and to more fully understand not only nature, but himself as part of it:
One’s on landscape comes in time to be be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mor those hills, and he suffers…. Man can have but one interest in nature, namely, to see himself reflected or interpreted there; and we quickly neglect both poet and philosopher who fail to satisfy, in some measure, this feeling.
FOR BURROUGHS, KEEPING A SHARP LOOKOUT INVOLVED ALL THE SENSES, NOT JUST THE KEEN EYE. In his essays in this volume (collected from his previous works), Burroughs wrote with equal enthusiasm about the scents and sounds of the fields and woodlands near his home. For instance, writing about early April, he enthusiastically remarked:
Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and indescribable odors — the perfume of the bursting sod, of the quickened roots and rootlets, of the mould under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No other month has odors like it. The west wind the other day came fraught with a perfume that was to the sense of smell what a wild and delicate strain of music is to the ear. It was almost transcendental.
Speaking of “music to the ear”, here Burroughs describes the sounds of tiny frogs (species not identified) “piping in the marshes” in late April:
…toward the last of the month, there is a shrill musical uproar, as the sun is setting, in every marsh and bog in the land. It is a plaintive sound, and I have heard people from the city speak of it as lonesome and depressing, but to the lover of the country it is a pure spring melody.
BURROUGHS ALSO CELEBRATES SEASONAL CHANGE, AND HOW IT REFLECTED THE NATURE’S INNATE VITALITY. “Does not the human frame yield to and sympathize with the seasons?” he asked the reader, in his essay “Autumn Tides”. Underlying it all, no matter how much insight science can offer us, is an abiding mystery: “The only thing inexplicable is the inherent impulse to experiment, the original push, the principle of Life.”
BURROUGHS IS AT HIS MOST PROFOUND, I FEEL, IN HIS MUSINGS ABOUT SCIENCE AND POETRY. In his written work, he moves comfortably between the two worlds, appreciating their kindred natures. As he explains toward the close of his essay, “A Sharp Lookout”,
You may go to the fields and the woods, and gather fruit that is ripe for the palate without any aid of yours, but you cannot do this in science and in art. Here truth must be disentangled and interpreted — must be made in the image of man. Hence all good observation is more or less a refining and transmuting process, and the secret is to know the crude material when you see it…. Before a fact can become poetry, it must pass through the heart or the imagination of the poet; before it can become science, it must pass through the understanding of the scientist.
THE PACE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE DURING HIS LIFETIME WAS QUITE DRAMATIC. He was already in his late 20s when the Civil War broke out, but by the last decade of his life he gleefully roamed the countryside in a Model T automobile given to him by Henry Ford. His long life (he died just short of his 84th birthday) spanned America’s transition from a largely agrarian society to a rapidly industrializing one. Yet he maintained a confidence in what science and technology have to offer. I wonder if he would still maintain this outlook if he were alive today?
Science does not mar nature. The railroad, Thoreau found, after all, to be about the wildest road he knew of, and the telegraph wires the best aeolian harp out of doors. Study of nature deepens the mystery and charm because it removes the horizon farther off. We cease to fear, perhaps, but how can one cease to marvel and to love?
BEFORE CLOSING THIS ESSAY, I CANNOT RESIST COMPARING HIS WRITING STYLE WITH THAT OF HIS CONTEMPORARY, EDITH THOMAS. Both of them, it turns out, wrote about gossamer — the slender threads of spider silk festooning the landscape in the autumntime. Thomas actually devoted an entire essay to it, and provides a more detailed picture of the phenomenon than Burroughs does. Here is an excerpt:
During this season [of gossamer summer], …miles and miles of hazy filament (if it could be measured linearly) are floating about in the soft, indolent air. Especially, late in the afternoon, with a level and glowing sun, do these mysterious threads flash out along the ground, horizontally between shrubs, slantwise from grass to tree, or else cut adrift, and sailing as the wind wills…. It takes nothing from the poetry that lies in the weft of the gossamer when it is known to be the work of an unconsidered spider…. By some, it is claimed that this floating web is not spread with predaceous intent, but rather as a means of aerial navigation; indeed, these vague and indeterminate threads would hardly disturb a gnats’ cotillion, if blown in their path. Hitherto, we have regarded the spider as an humble, plodding creature of the earth, an unaspiring, stay-at-home citizen, but this new aeronautic hypothesis hints that the poor insect is a very transcendentalist, an ideal voyager…. Some naturalists assert that the gossamer spider instinctively takes advantage of the levity of the atmosphere, thrusting out its threads until they reach a current of warmer and rarer air, which draws them upward, the spider going along with the uncompleted web. Whether it is capable of cutting short its journey and casting anchor at pleasure is indeed questionable.
And here is gossamer again, this time described by Burroughs:
A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be seen of a clear afternoon late in the season. Looking athwart the fields under the sinking sun, the ground appears covered with a shining veil of gossamer. A fairy net, invisible at midday and which the position of the sun now reveals, rests upon the stubble and the spears of grass covering acres in extent — the work of innumerable little spiders. The cattle walk through it, but do not seem to break it. Perhaps a fly would make his mark upon it. At the same time, stretching from the tops of the trees, or from the top of a stake in the fence, and leading off toward the sky, may be seen the cables of the flying spider, — a fairy bridge from the visible to the invisible. Occasionally seen against a deep mass of shadow, and perhaps enlarged by clinging particles of dust, they show quite plainly and sag down like a stretched rope, or sway and undulate like a hawser in the tide.
(A hawser is a thick rope for mooring or towing a ship.)
AS A POSTSCRIPT, I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WHAT I CAN ABOUT MY PARTICULAR VOLUME OF BURROUGHS. I was able to obtain an original second edition from 1901 (augmented by a biographical sketch of Burroughs and the some further photos by Clifton Johnson). It has a lovely gold gilt cover, and includes dozens of photographs of Burroughs, posing on rocks, standing in the doorway of his study, pointing out tracks in the snow with his walking stick, etc. My copy bears almost no marks of its 119-year journey to me, with the notable exception of a normally blank back page filled with text in ink. It is a poem (not inspiring particularly, but a step up from Bradford Torrey’s), entitled “The Lure o’ the Woodland”, attributed to Thomas S. Jones, Jr. Thanks to the marvel of the Internet, I was able to discover that the work originally appeared in Ainslee’s magazine in November, 1907. Unfortunately, every year of the magazine is available online except for 1907. So this transcription of the poem, semi-legible though it is, may be the only copy left in existence. Of the copy-writer, all I know is that his or her initials were JWD, and that he or she was in Jacksonville, Florida on March 19, 1911.
