II
And it is as near as he ought to come to reality and facts—according to the philosopher.
“We want only the facts of nature,” says the scientist. “Nothing in nature is worth while,” says the philosopher, “but mood, background, atmosphere.”
“Nor can I recollect that my mind,” says one of our philosophers, “in these walks, was much called away from contemplation by the petty curiosities of the herbalist or birdlorist, for I am not one zealously addicted to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets of nature. It never seemed to me that a flower was made sweeter by knowing the construction of its ovaries.... The wood thrush and the veery sing as melodiously to the uninformed as to the subtly curious. Indeed, I sometimes think a little ignorance is wholesome in our communion with nature.”
So it is. Certainly if ignorance, a great deal of ignorance, were unwholesome, then nature-study would be a very unhealthy course, indeed. For, when the most curious of the herbalists and birdlorists (Mr. Burroughs, say) has made his last prying peep into the private life of a ten-acre woodlot, he will still be wholesomely ignorant of the ways of nature. Is the horizon just back of the brook that marks the terminus of our philosopher’s path? Let him leap across, walk on, on, out of his woods to the grassy knoll in the next pasture, and there look! Lo! far yonder the horizon! beyond a vaster forest than he has known, behind a range of higher rolling hills, within a shroud of wider, deeper mystery.
There isn’t the slightest danger of walking off the earth; nor of unlearning our modicum of wholesome ignorance concerning the universe. The nature-lover may turn nature-student and have no fear of losing nature. The vision will not fade.
Let him go softly through the May twilight and wait at the edge of the swamp. A voice serene and pure, a hymn, a prayer, fills all the dusk with peace. Let him watch and see the singer, a brown-winged wood thrush, with full, spotted breast. Let him be glad that it is not a white-winged spirit, or a disembodied voice. And let him wonder the more that so plain a singer knows so divine a song.
Our philosopher mistakes his own dominant mood for the constant mood of nature. But nature has no constant mood. No more have we. Dawn and dusk are different moods. The roll of the prairie is unlike the temper of a winding cowpath in a New England pasture. Nature is not always sublime, awful, and mysterious; and no one but a philosopher is persistently contemplative. Indeed, at four o’clock on a June morning in some old apple orchard, even the philosopher would shout,—
“Hence, loathèd melancholy!”
He is in no mind for meditation; and it is just possible, before the day is done, that the capture of a drifting seed of the dandelion and the study of its fairy wings might so add to the wonder, if not to the sweetness, of the flower, as to give him thought for a sermon.
There are times when the companionship of your library is enough; there are other times when you want a single book, a chapter, a particular poem. It is good at times just to know that you are turning with the earth under the blue of the sky; and just as good again to puzzle over the size of the spots in the breasts of our several thrushes. For I believe you can hear more in the song when you know it is the veery and not the wood thrush singing. Indeed, I am acquainted with persons who had lived neighbors to the veery since childhood, and never had heard its song until the bird was pointed out to them. Then they could not help but hear.
No amount of familiarity will breed contempt for your fields. Is the summer’s longest, brightest day long enough and bright enough, to dispel the brooding mystery of the briefest of its nights? And tell me, what of the vastness and terror of the sea will the deep dredges ever bring to the surface, or all the circumnavigating drive to shore? The nature-lover is a man in a particular mood; the nature-student is the same man in another mood, as the fading shadows of the morning are the same that lengthen and deepen in the afternoon. There are times when he will go apart into the desert places to pray. Most of the time, however, he will live contentedly within sound of the dinner horn, glad of the companionship of his bluebirds, chipmunks, and pine trees.
This is best. And the question most frequently asked me is, How can I come by a real love for my pine trees, chipmunks, and bluebirds? How can I know real companionship with nature?
How did the boy along the starlit lake come by it,—a companionship so real and intimate that the very cliffs knew him, that the owls answered him, that even the silences spoke to him, and the imagery of his rocks and skies became a part of the inner world in which he dwelt? Simply by living along Winander and hallooing so often to the owls that they learned to halloo in reply. You may need to be born again before you can talk the language of the owls; but if there is in you any hankering for the soil, then all you need for companionship with nature is a Winander of your own, a range, a haunt, that you can visit, walk around, and get home from in a day’s time. If this region can be the pastures, woodlots, and meadows that make your own door-yard, then that is good; especially if you buy the land and live on it, for then Nature knows that you are not making believe. She will accept you as she does the peas you plant, and she will cherish you as she does them. This farm, or haunt, or range, you will come to know intimately: its flowers, birds, walls, streams, trees,—its features large and small, as they appear in June, and as they look in July and in January.
For the first you will need the how-to-know books,—these while you are getting acquainted; but soon acquaintance grows into friendship. You are done naming things. The meanings of things now begin to come home to you. Nature is taking you slowly back to herself. Companionship has begun.
Many persons of the right mind never know this friendship, because they never realize the necessity of being friendly. They walk through a field as they walk through a crowded street; they go into the country as they go abroad. And the result is that all this talk of the herbalist and birdlorist, to quote the philosopher again, seems “little better than cant and self-deception.”
But let the philosopher cease philosophizing (he was also a hermit), and leave off hermiting; let him live at home with his wife and children, like the rest of us; let him work in the city for his living, hoe in his garden for his recreation; and then (I don’t care by what prompting) let him study the lay of his neighbor fields, woods, and orchards until he knows every bird and beast, every tree-hole, earth-hole, even the times and places of the things that grow in the ground; let him do this through the seasons of the year,—for two or three years,—and he will know how to enjoy a woodchuck; he will understand many of the family affairs of his chipmunks; he will recognize and welcome back his bluebirds; he will love and often listen to the solemn talk of his pines.
All of this may be petty prying, not communion at all; it may be all moonshine and sentiment, not science. But it is not cant and self-deception,—in the hearts of thousands of simple, sufficient folk, who know a wood thrush when they hear him, and whose woodpaths are of their own wearing. And if it is not communion with nature, I know that it is at least real pleasure, and rest, peace, contentment, red blood, sound sleep, and, at times, it seems to me, something close akin to religion.
