Within a few days we must have the grand September influx of warblers—crowds of blackpolls, myrtles, black-throated greens, and many more. For two months yet the procession will be passing.
FOUR DREAMERS
I remember the first man I ever saw sitting still by himself out-of-doors. What his name was I do not know. I never knew. He was a stranger, who came to visit in our village when I was perhaps ten years old. I had crossed a field, and gone over a low hill (not so low then as now), and there, in the shade of an apple tree, I beheld this stranger, not fishing, nor digging, nor eating an apple, nor picking berries, nor setting snares, but sitting still. It was almost like seeing a ghost. I doubt if I was ever the same boy afterward. Here was a new kind of man. I wondered if he was a poet! Even then I think I had heard that poets sometimes acted strangely, and saw things invisible to others’ ken.
I should not have been surprised, I suppose, to have found a man looking at a picture, some “nice,” high-colored “chromo,” such as was a fashionable parlor ornament in our rural neighborhood, where there was more theology to the square foot (and no preacher then extant with orthodoxy strait enough to satisfy it, though some could still make the blood curdle) than there was of art or poetry to the square acre; but to be looking at Nat Shaw’s hayfield and the old unpainted house beyond—that marked the stranger at once as not belonging in the ranks of common men. If he was not a poet, he must be at least a scholar. Perhaps he was going to be a minister, for he seemed too young to be one already. A minister had to think, of course (so I thought then), else how could he preach? and perhaps this man was meditating a sermon. I fancied I should like to hear a sermon that had been studied out-of-doors.
Times have changed with me. Now I sit out-of-doors myself, and by myself, and look for half an hour together at a tree, or a bunch of trees, or a lazy brook, or a stretch of green meadow. And I know that such things can be enjoyed by one who is neither a poet nor a preacher, but just a quite ordinary, uneducated mortal, who happens, by the grace of God, to have had his eyes opened to natural beauty and his heart made sensitive to the delights of solitude. I have learned that it is possible to enjoy scenery at home as well as abroad,—scenery without mountains or waterfalls; scenery that no tourist would call “fine;” a bit of green valley, an ancient apple orchard, a woodland vista, an acre of marsh, a cattle pasture. In fact, I have observed that painters choose quiet subjects like these oftener than any of the more exceptional and stupendous manifestations of nature. Perhaps it is because such subjects are easier; but I suspect not. I suspect, indeed, that they are harder, and are preferred because, to the painter’s eye, they are more permanently beautiful.
At this very moment I am looking at a patch of meadow inclosing a shallow pool of standing water, over the surface of which a high wind is chasing little waves. A few low alders are near it, and the grass is green all about. That of itself is a sight to make a man happy. For the world just now is consumed with drought. All the uplands are sere, and every roadside bush is begrimed with dust. I have come through the woods to this convenient knoll on purpose to find relief from the prevailing desolation—to rest my eyes upon green grass. For the eye loves green grass as well, almost, as the throat loves cold water.
Even in my boyish country neighborhood, though nobody, or nobody that I knew (which may have been a very different matter), did what I am now doing, there were some, I think (one or two, at least), who in their own way indulged much the same tastes that I have come to felicitate myself upon possessing. I remember one man, dead long since, who was continually walking the fields and woods, always with a spaniel at his heels, alone except for that company. He often carried a gun, and in autumn he snared partridges (how I envied him his skill!); but I believe, as I look back, that best and first of all he must have loved the woods and the silence. He was supposed to have his faults. No doubt he had. I have since discovered that most men are in the same category. I believe he used to “drink,” as our word was then. But I think now that I should have liked to know him, and should have found him congenial, if I had been mature enough, and could have got below the protective crust which naturally grows over a man whose ways of life and thought are different from those of all the people about him. I have little question that when he was out of the sight of the world he was accustomed to sit as I do to-day, and look and look and dream.
One thing he did not dream of,—that a boy to whom he had never spoken would be thinking of him forty years after he had taken his last ramble and snared his last grouse.
“An idler,” said his busier neighbors, though he earned his own living and paid his own scot.
“A misspent life,” said the clergy, though he harmed no one.