Sprung from the man, whose guilty fall
Corrupts his race and taints us all,”
—sings Watts with Augustine, with gusto and with more unction and consolation to me than in any other of his hymns. To know that we still inherit a portion of the original Adam, if only the naughty of him, is tremendously heartening. Anything original, if only original sin, in this day of the decorous and the conventional, is stimulating. For, if we do still come by all of Adam’s original badness, do we not, by the same token, come by all of his original goodness, and are we not then wholly original, as the original Adam? We must be; as surely as the clod is; full, like the clod of wild weed-seed, and capable, like the clod, under the proper care, of producing tomato plants: Jewel, Earliana, and Bonny Best, regenerate and select.
I say the heart of a man is of the same steady stuff as the other clay. What it was, it is, and will be—wild, and ever seeking an escape from the decorous, the conventional, the routine of his subdued and ordered round.
How constant the heart of nature is to itself I saw again the other day at Walden Pond. Almost half a century before I came to this planet, Thoreau wrote of Walden Pond: “But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.” Those many years have long since come and gone. Thoreau is gone; his cabin is gone; and a cairn of stones marks the spot where it stood. Over the stumps he saw, tall stranger trees now stand; and once more there is rambling through their shadowy aisles, and vistas through which you catch glimpses of the beloved face of Walden, calm and pure as when he last looked upon it.
“Why, here is Walden!” I hear him exclaim, “the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lusty as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface as was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its maker, aye”—and it has now been set aside as a reservation that its liquid joy and happiness may be ours forever.
Change is constant, but it is the change of the ever-returning wheel. Thoreau’s cabin is gone, and no other cabin can now be built on the shores of Walden Pond. But the trees have come back to stay, and if, “on the surface of things” Thoreau “has been there before us,” we must go below or above the surface and find our frontier.
“Magical chances?” a young aviator on the Pacific Coast wrote lately. “I thought of them to-day as I flirted with a little bunch of cotton-wool clouds eight thousand five hundred feet above Point Loma. And I wondered what Dana would have thought had one of his shipmates sauntered across the deck of the Pilgrim, and, clapping him on the back, said: ‘I’ll meet you, old man, in fifteen minutes up there in that fleet of little clouds; if they whift and drift into space, wait for me at the five-thousand-foot altitude’?”
So the frontier comes back. Pushed past the suburbs of Astoria City into the Pacific, it is seen crawling out on the sandy shores of Cape Cod with the next great storm. The single line of human footsteps across the polar snows has not left too packed and plain a trail. New snows have covered it, as new trees have shadowed the shores of Walden.
Peary’s footprints, and Dr. Cook’s, too, would be very hard to follow.