With reference to the near past, we all occupy the region of common sense, but in the prospect of the future we are, by instinct, transcendentalists.
We affirm that all things are possible, but only these things have been to our knowledge. I do not even infer the future from what I know of the past. I am hardly better acquainted with the past than with the future. What is new to the individual may be familiar to the experience of his race. It must be rare indeed that the experience of the individual transcends that of his race. It will be perceived that there are two kinds of change,—that of the race, and that of the individual within the limits of the former.
One of those gentle, straight-down rainy days, when the rain begins by spotting the cultivated fields as if shaken from a pepper-box; a fishing day, when I see one neighbor after another, having donned his oil-cloth suit, walking or riding past with a fish-pole, having struck work,—a day and an employment to make philosophers of them all.
When introduced to high life I cannot help perceiving how it is as a thing jumped at, and I find that I do not get on in my enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, because my attention is wholly occupied with the jump, remembering that the greatest genuine leap on record, due to human muscles alone, is that of certain wandering Arabs who cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. The first question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is, “Who boosts you?” Are you one of the ninety-nine who fail or the hundredth, who succeeds?
June 8. Sunday. In F. A. Michaux’s, i. e. the younger Michaux’s, “Voyage à l’ouest des Monts Alléghanys, 1802,” printed at Paris, 1808:—
He says the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “‘From what part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the point of union (réunion, meeting) and the common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”[193]
The current of the Ohio is so swift in the spring that it is not necessary to row. Indeed rowing would do more harm than good, since it would tend to turn the ark out of the current on to some isle or sand-bar, where it would be entangled amid floating trees. This has determined the form of the bateaux, which are not the best calculated for swiftness but to obey the current. They are from fifteen to fifty feet long by ten to twelve and fifteen, with square ends, and roof of boards like a house at one end. The sides are about four and a half feet above the water. “I was alone on the shore of the Monongahela, when I perceived, for the first time, in the distance, five or six of these bateaux which were descending this river. I could not conceive what those great square boxes were, which, abandoned to the current, presented alternately their ends, their sides, and even (or also (?), et même) their angles. As they came nearer, I heard a confused noise but without distinguishing anything, on account of the elevation of the sides. It was only on ascending the bank of the river that I perceived, in these bateaux, many families carrying with them their horses, cows, poultry, dismounted carts (charrettes), plows, harnesses, beds, agricultural implements, in short all that constitute the movables of a household (ménage) and the carrying on (exploitation) of a farm.” But he was obliged to paddle his log canoe “sans cesse” because of the sluggishness of the current of the Ohio in April, 1802.
A Vermonter told him that the expense of clearing land in his State was always defrayed by the potash obtained from the ashes of the trees which were burnt, and sometimes people took land to clear on condition that they should have what potash they could make.
After travelling more than three thousand miles in North America, he says that no part is to be compared for the “force végétative des forêts” to the region of the Ohio between Wheeling and Marietta. Thirty-six miles above the last place he measured a plane tree on the bank of the Ohio which, at four feet from the ground, was forty-seven in circumference. It is true it was “renflé d’une manière prodigieuse.” Tulip and plane trees, his father had said, attained the greatest diameter of North American trees.
Ginseng was then the only “territorial” production of Kentucky which would pay the expense of transportation by land to Philadelphia. They collected it from spring to the first frosts. Even hunters carried for this purpose, beside their guns, a bag and a little “pioche.” From twenty-five to thirty “milliers pesant” were then transported annually, and this commerce was on the increase. Some transported it themselves from Kentucky to China, i. e. without selling it [to] the merchants of the seaboard. Traders in Kentucky gave twenty to twenty-four “sous” the pound for it.