Sitting at the Feet of Nature: “Prose Pastorals” by Herbert Milton Sylvester (1887)

 book review, Environmental conservation, Insects, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Jul 022022
 
The Emerald Pool by Albert Bierstadt (1870)

A half-hour’s climb ends at the well-worn path that follows the steep descent to the edge of Emerald Pool, made famous by its portrait by Bierstadt… At first glance at the liquid emerald below, one’s inclination is to sit down upon the rude plank seat upheld between two huge spruces growing just above the Pool, so restful and so full of repose is this charming nook. It is a place above all others in which to dream and drowse. Strange fancies flit through the brain, and the world is forgotten. I am sitting at the feet of Nature, spellbound by the magic of her subtle influences. Above is the dark silhouette of the treetops against the sky, and below is a circular sheet of water, less than a hundred feet in diameter, unsurpassed in its natural beauty by any woodland pool I have ever seen, and so translucent as to reflect the minutest object above it. It is an emerald cup brimful of liquid amber. At its head, massive buttresses of granite stretch almost across the stream, to stay the torrent of the Peabody but a moment, that with tumultuous roar pushes through the narrow flume of these rocks out into the basin of deep, calm water, leaving a track white as the snow of winter. A few feet below the commotion of the cascade, the boiling, seething current is soon lost in faint and ever-widening ripples, tinged with every shade of green from dark to light, — to almost the paleness of sherry as they reach out toward the shallows at its lower edge, where they again escape in wild, broken leaps over the mountain roadway, paved with immense boulders, into the valley. An old gnarled wide-limbed canoe birch, dirty-white, spotted with blotches of sienna and umber, leans far out over the Pool, every limb and tiny twig of which is reproduced in reverse upon or within its polished surface, while around its ragged margin the tall shapely spruces keep stately watch over this jewel of the mountain, most beautiful when the sun pours down its strong vertical light, when the waters become transparent like crystal, and that are like a huge palette strown with rare colors of sky and wood.

Herbert Milton Sylvester (1849-1923) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, where his father held a management position of some kind in a cotton mill. When Sylvester was 10, his father related to a farm in Maine for his health. Sylvester spent the rest of his childhood there and at Bridgton Academy, a boarding school in rural Maine. After college (location unknown), he went into legal practice, serving in Portland for 13 years before relocating to Boston. While living there, he wrote Prose Pastorals (1887) and Homestead Highways (1888). True to its title, Prose Pastorals is a series of poetic vignettes, mostly reminiscences of Sylvester’s rural childhood in Maine. While not strictly nature writing (farm life figures prominently in some passages), the presence of Nature is woven throughout and is never far from the farmhouse door. “All out-of-door life is filled with poetry and charm,” he announces at one point early in the book. While he finds abundant nature in the farm fields, “It is in the woods,” he observes, “that I find the most perfect repose in nature.”

As a writer, he is perhaps a shade or two shy of profound, and some of his word images, in the style of the times, can be a bit flowery. His poetry, which infuses the book, is solid if some of the rhymes are a tad forced. It is easy to take him as a wealthy city dweller longing for the peace and quiet of his long-lost country life, and that sentiment is present here. Another theme running through the work is his spirituality, heavily influenced by Emerson’s concept of the Over-soul, the transcendent unity of nature of which we are all part. “The lover of Nature,” Sylvester declares,

must, of a truth, be a worshipper at God’s altars. Touch a single key of the piano, and the harp which stands beside will respond with perfect sympathy, but only that string of the harp which accords with that note of the piano will answer with its vibration. Men who are in sympathy with the great Tone constantly sounding throughout Nature will find their hearts unconsciously thrilled with a willing unison of purpose and desire, unconsciously answering its subtle harmonies, unconsciously obedient to the Infinite Hand which has so wonderfully laid the foundations of the grand cathedrals of the woods and mountains. The woods are filled with hosts of unseen worshippers, the mountains with countless altars whose smokes of incense are the white morning mists which lie so lightly along the tree-tops, hiding the battlements of gray, turretted stone and filling the skies with fleecy clouds. The leaping waters that jar the firmly-set rocks the feet of the ever-rising domes, with their tummult and deep reverberations, make the heavy diapson to which all other sounds are attuned. Nature’s grand melodies are ever pitched upon the same key-note. Nature knows no discord. From ocean depth and roar of breaking surf to the light treble of the shallows of the mountain brooklet the harmony is sustained and its rendering is faultless. God sounds the key-note in many a subtle touch of color, tone, and form, animate and inanimate, and wherever he finds a responsive heart there he finds a willing worshipper.

What rescues Sylvester, in my eyes, at least, is that there is another thread running through many of these pastoral pieces. He does not merely celebrate grand vistas and dramatic weather. He also bends down to the ground to explore the myriad invertebrates lurking in the forest leaf litter. He describes ant behaviors from close observations, and frequently mentions (and quotes) John Burroughs. Even Charles Darwin is mentioned a couple of times. He may find “poetry and charm” in nature, but what he notices also piques his curiosity and wonder:

Bird-life and insect-life are full of interest and fascination, and they tell charming stories of intellect and intelligence; and their movements are full of constant surprises, even to those who know them best. The big-bodied humblebee of the fields and meadows, his coat slashed with gold and black velvet, with pollen-covered wings, probing the pink-hewed tubes of the field-clover for their nectar, while the wind sways both bee and clover blossom to and fro like a child in a swing; the ant-carpenter sawing away diligently at a twig or leaf, making lumber for the building and finishing of his house; the gray field-spider setting his filmy trap for a dinner or a breakfast, or else dragging his prey into his funnel-shaped den to sup upon at his leisure, are all abundant in attractions, and are but two or three of the hosts of magicians who make the study of Nature so charming.

Humbled by the complexity of Nature, Sylvester embraces its study as a lifelong endeavor: “How much there is to see in these tramping-grounds of Nature, and how much there is to learn! The ground is written over in all directions with intelligible signs for men’s deciphering.” The passage quoted here, unfortunately, goes on to identify some of those who might seek to decipher these signs: the bee-hunter, the sportsman, the fox-hunter. Indeed, Sylvester admits to a bit of hunting and fishing; after extolling the magnificence of Emerald Pool, he casts a line into the waters and immediately catches a trout. He also shares his approval of crow-hunting, confessing that he finds no redeeming qualities in crows. But while Sylvester may have been too conventional in his leanings to bemoan disappearing birds or logged forests in his writings, he also appears to have avoided the naturalist’s worst vices of the day — shooting birds as specimens and collecting their eggs and nests. I would like to think that he may have felt some faint conservationist leanings, even if they never seem to arise in this book.

In this closing paragraph, I will share a few reflections on my reading experience. This is the third book I have read in a row (not counting the booklet by Minot) that had uncut pages in it, despite its age. In the other two volumes, I did not come across an uncut page until quite a distance into the work. In this case, though, I made it only 13 pages before the first one. According to a hastily scrawled note inside the front cover, the book was a gift from HRP to LS in July of 1887. Apparently, HRP was not a good judge of the reading material LS preferred. That said, reading the book was a tactile delight. The pages are gilt at the top, deckled at the edge, and constituted of high-quality, laid paper. The volume is covered in plain, dark blue cloth that has a pleasant softness in the hand. My copy is in remarkable condition; I was honored to be its first reader, only 135 years after it was originally published.

Their Nefarious Calling: “Wild Honey” by Samuel Scoville, Jr. (1929)

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Night  No Responses »
Jun 172022
 

I have read nearly 50 “nature books” for this blog (with easily close to 100 to go), spanning the eighty years from 1861 to 1941. Yet this is the first time I can say that, while this work scarcely reads like a novel, it has an antagonist known as The Collector. While not present in every essay, he dominates the scene and dictates the “nefarious calling” that all other outing members, including the author, participate in: egg collecting, a.k.a., nest robbing. A host of other archetypal characters play bit roles in the drama: the Banker, the Naturalist, the Ornithologist, the Botanist, and the Native. Since Scoville does not elect to assign himself a persona, I will call him the Author. These lesser characters are enablers of the wanton destruction that repeatedly happens throughout this book’s pages. Indeed, the Author reports with pride his many successful ventures at locating birds’ nests to be plundered for the Collector’s collections. He even remarks at one point on how

some of the happiest days of my life have been spent with collectors of birds’ eggs — oölogists, they call themselves. They are all so eager and excited and happy over their hobby that it is a pleasure to be with them. They regard me rather pityingly, however, because I take no share of the findings; yet I think that I have chosen the better part. Boxes of blown eggs leave me cold, but I shall never forget the days and nights in the wilderness which I have had on bird-trips, and the excitement of discovering rare nests and the pleasure of learning secrets of bird life, unknown to me before.

And the Collector does not select one egg from each nest; he takes them all. On one outing to a New Jersey marsh, the Author discovers the first pileated woodpecker nest in the state. Despite its apparent rarity, “urged on by the Collector,” the Author attempts to rob it — without success, I am grateful to report. And when out of the Collector’s company — as in several other essays in the book — the Author generally behaves with greater reverence toward most animals. He does approach venomous snakes with repugnance, however. Pointing out a “very real menace” rattlesnakes supposedly posed to humans, he proposed that big game hunters capture them all for “various zoölogical gardens.” (Lest he appears to be advocating a live capture solution, however, it should be noted that the skins of at least two timber rattlesnakes dispatched by the Author hung on the walls of his cabin in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.)

Venting over. Beyond the domain of the Collector, there is some delightful descriptive prose in this book. He mentions John Burroughs several times, though he does not identify any other nature writers or scientists of the day. (The Naturalist and the Ornithologist and the Botanist are never named.) For his faults, the Author is a skilled ornithologist and botanist who also takes a keen interest in how many landscapes of the Eastern US are haunted by traces of the human past. An old track through the pines was once a busy road for glassmakers and ironmakers in the Pine Barrens, while an old mill site in Connecticut once hummed with industrial activity. In recognizing stories in the landscape, he ties natural history into human history in a way that few other writers of his day did.

While there is no lofty poetry here, no sweeping metaphors or cosmic sentiments, there are still passages like this one describing an encounter with a bluebird:

Once, among all these interesting strangers, we heard the “far-away, far-away” of a bluebird — those lovely contralto notes which fall from the sky like drops of molten silver. Looking up, we saw that dear, brave bird of the North flying toward the sunset with the sky color on his back and the color of the red clay of the South on his breast, and we watched him until he was lost in a mother-of-pearl cloud.

Here, he describes the sounds of the night at his cabin in the Pine Barrens:

The shadows of the waving trees made a fretted, magical pattern on the smooth surface of the water. A pine-barren pickerel frog, all emerald and gold and purple-black, snored, and some other frogs unknown to me gave a couple of loud, startling notes which sounded like the clapping of two boards together. Then suddenly, in the distance, the stressed, hurried notes of a whippoorwill pealed through the darkness, to be answered by one close to the cabin. Over and over and over again these birds of the night repeated their triple notes with a little click after each one, hurrying as if they feared to be interrupted before they could finish. As the wild, sweet melody thrilled through the darkness, it seemed to me as if the moonlight itself had been set to music.

I will close my review of Wild Honey with this lovely passage describing a December boat journey into Okefenokee Swamp:

In the ice-blue sky the moon showed in the afternoon light like a bowl of alabaster, fretted and carved in shadowy patterns. In front of me stretched a fourteen-mile canal. The wine-brown water reflected the deep green of the long-leaf pines on either side of the stream, with now and then gleams of dragon’s blood and carmine-lake as the leaves of the black and sweet gums stained by the frost reflected their clors in the water. Everywhere were towering cypresses silvered with festoons of Spanish moss. Above the setting sun the western sky was a sea of amber and dim gold with shoals of violet and heliotrope clouds in its depths.

A few words about Samuel Scoville, Jr. (1872-1950) and my book copy are in order. Above is a photograph of the Author, circa 1918. According to his terse Wikipedia entry, Scoville was an American writer, naturalist, and lawyer. From Wild Honey, I can gather a few details; he resided in Haverford, Pennsylvania at the time of this book and worked on the thirteenth floor of an office building in Philadelphia. His practice was apparently lucrative; he also owned a home in Cornwall, Connecticut; a cabin (“Faraway”) in the New Jersey Pine Barrens; and a small peninsula on the coast of Maine. He married Katharine Gallaudet Trumbull in Philadelphia and had four children (all boys). He wrote a dozen books, mostly for children and mostly about nature. Wild Honey appears to have been his last collection of nature essays, though clearly with an adult audience in mind.

By 1929, the golden age of the artistic book cover had ended. My volume (the first and only edition) looks like most hardcovers of today, with textured board instead of cloth. The front cover is blank save for a small image impressed into the center, pictured above. What Poseidon and his trident have to do with this book is a mystery. The closest connection I can find is that the guides on his excursions into Okefenokee Swamp all used a “three-pronged push poll peculiar to the Swamp” to navigate the boat through the various waterways and hidden channels in the depths of Okefenokee.

I have to wonder how well this book was received. Its timing was far from ideal. It was published in October of 1929; at the end of that month came the great Stock Market Crash. I wonder how many Americans were looking to buy a nature book then? Furthermore, the Nature Movement, as described by Dallas Lore Sharp, was well over by then; World War I and the passing of John Burroughs in 1921 marked its close.

The Author inscribed my particular copy of Wild Honey to “my best customer and kindest critic” E. Lawrence Dudley on December 4th, 1929. Dudley (1879-1947) was the author of at least five works of biography and fiction, one of which was turned into a movie (Voltaire, 1933).