We are not so much like debauchees as in the afternoon.
The mind is subject to moods, as the shadows of clouds pass over the earth. Pay not too much heed to them. Let not the traveller stop for them. They consist with the fairest weather. By the mood of my mind, I suddenly felt dissuaded from continuing my walk, but I observed at the same instant that the shadow of a cloud was passing over [the] spot on which I stood, though it was of small extent, which, if it had no connection with my mood, at any rate suggested how transient and little to be regarded that mood was. I kept on, and in a moment the sun shone on my walk within and without.
The button-bush in blossom. The tobacco-pipe in damp woods. Certain localities only a few rods square in the fields and on the hills, sometimes the other side of a wall, attract me as if they had been the scene of pleasure in another state of existence.
But this habit of close observation,—in Humboldt, Darwin, and others. Is it to be kept up long, this science? Do not tread on the heels of your experience. Be impressed without making a minute of it. Poetry puts an interval between the impression and the expression,—waits till the seed germinates naturally.
July 24. 5 a. m.—The street and fields betray the drought and look more parched than at noon; they look as I feel,—languid and thin and feeling my nerves. The potatoes and the elms and the herbage by the roadside, though there is a slight dew, seem to rise out of an arid and thirsty soil into the atmosphere of a furnace slightly cooled down. The leaves of the elms are yellow. Ah! now I see what the noon was and what it may be again. The effects of drought are never more apparent than at dawn. Nature is like a hen panting with open mouth, in the grass, as the morning after a debauch.
July 25. Friday. Started for Clark’s Island at 7 a. m.
At 9 a. m. took the Hingham boat and was landed at Hull. There was a pleasure party on board, apparently boys and girls belonging to the South End, going to Hingham. There was a large proportion of ill-dressed and ill-mannered boys of Irish extraction. A sad sight to behold! Little boys of twelve years, prematurely old, sucking cigars! I felt that if I were their mothers I should whip them and send them to bed. Such children should be dealt with as for stealing or impurity. The opening of this valve for the safety of the city! Oh, what a wretched resource! What right have parents to beget, to bring up, and attempt to educate children in a city? I thought of infanticide among the Orientals with complacency. I seemed to hear infant voices lisp, “Give us a fair chance, parents.” There is no such squalidness in the country. You would have said that they must all have come from the house of correction and the farm-school, but such a company do the boys in Boston streets make. The birds have more care for their young,—where they place their nests. What are a city’s charities? She cannot be charitable any more than the old philosopher could move the earth, unless she has a resting-place without herself. A true culture is more possible to the savage than to the boy of average intellect, born of average parents, in a great city. I believe that they perish miserably. How can they be kept clean, physically or morally? It is folly to attempt to educate children within a city; the first step must be to remove them out of it. It seemed a groping and helpless philanthropy that I heard of.
I heard a boy telling the story of Nix’s Mate to some girls, as we passed that spot, how “he said, ‘If I am guilty, this island will remain; but if I am innocent, it will be washed away,’ and now it is all washed away.”[253] This was a simple and strong expression of feeling suitable to the occasion, by which he committed the evidence of his innocence to the dumb isle, such as the boy could appreciate, a proper sailor’s legend; and I was reminded that it is the illiterate and unimaginative class that seizes on and transmits the legends in which the more cultivated delight. No fastidious poet dwelling in Boston had tampered with it,—no narrow poet, but broad mankind, sailors from all ports sailing by. They, sitting on the deck, were the literary academy that sat upon its periods.
On the beach at Hull, and afterwards all along the shore to Plymouth, I saw the datura, the variety (red-stemmed), methinks, which some call Tatula instead of Stramonium. I felt as if I was on the highway of the world, at sight of this cosmopolite and veteran traveller. It told of commerce and sailors’ yarns without end. It grows luxuriantly in sand and gravel. This Captain Cook among plants, this Norseman or sea pirate, viking or king of the bays, the beaches. It is not an innocent plant; it suggests commerce, with its attendant vices.[254]
Saw a public house where I landed at Hull, made like some barns which I have seen, of boards with a cleat nailed over the cracks, without clapboards or paint, evidently very simple and cheap, yet neat and convenient as well as airy. It interested me, as the New House at Long Island did not, as it brought the luxury and comfort of the seashore within reach of the less wealthy. It was such an exhibition of good sense as I was not prepared for and do not remember to have seen before. Ascended to the top of the hill, where is the old French fort, with the well said to be ninety feet deep, now covered.[255] I saw some horses standing on the very top of the ramparts, the highest part of Hull, where there was hardly room to turn round, for the sake of the breeze.[256] It was excessively warm, and their instincts, or their experience perchance, guided them as surely to the summit as it did me. Here is the telegraph, nine miles from Boston, whose State-House was just visible,—movable signs on a pole with holes in them for the passage of the wind. A man about the telegraph station thought it the highest point in the harbor; said they could tell the kind of vessel thirty miles off, the number at masthead ten or twelve miles, name on hull six or seven miles. They can see furthest in the fall. There is a mist summer and winter, when the contrast between the temperature of the sea and the air is greatest. I did not see why this hill should not be fortified as well as George’s Island, it being higher and also commanding the main channel. However, an enemy could go by all the forts in the dark, as Wolfe did at Quebec.[257] They are bungling contrivances.