There is in this day-song no suggestion of the blistering, feverish shrill of the dog-day cicada, but a far-off dreamy sound. A little before sunset it gradually gives way to that of the night. Day inevitably inspires one song and night another, as if these reacted to bring out two sets of emotions. And yet there is but one theme: the minstrels sing always of that, but serenade the fair one after one fashion by day and more serenely by the light of the stars. She, having apparently no ears, hears none the less, and perhaps detects variations in this monotonous ditty and even distinguishes the fine quality of some particular voice—some clearness of tone, some pathetic tremulo indicative of a cricket's feelings. For is not this a song-festival of all the grasshoppers? I noticed a common short-horned grasshopper stridulating in the sunshine, which he did by taking short flights and rapidly opening and shutting his wings like an accordion. This produced a series of dry, crackling sounds as the wing was scraped against the wing-cover. After thus exhibiting his powers, a female at length came from some little distance and lit beside him, as much as to say, "If you can sing like that I am yours forevermore."
One feels some sympathy with these sweet singers of the fields in knowing what a little life is theirs, how short is the span. For the most part they have but a few months to sport in the sunshine. This epithalamium is at the same time a requiem. In October it rises, a universal threnody, the death-song of the insects. Over all the land, wasps and bees and butterflies fall like leaves. Death overtakes them on the wing. They lie down to sleep, like travelers lost in the snow.
[WILD GARDENS]
Improvement easily becomes an affectation, from which all healthy natures suffer periodic reactions that take them to the mountains and the forest, to those primeval estates loved of wild bees, of the phœbe and the wren. One feels a sympathy with those renegade plants known as garden escapes—star of Bethlehem, bouncing-bet, and the rest—which have run away from the garden for the freedom of the woods and highways. The conventionalities of spade and hoe are odious to them. They wander far from the assemblage of the elect; they will live wild and free, these Philistines, following the open road wherever it may lead, with a sort of tramp instinct. Even the staid and domestic apple will break away from the fold to seek the unregenerate society of the pastures.
The hemlock woods, the meadow and the bog are wild gardens which require no cultivating themselves, but only a certain cultivation and appreciation in us, which they repay with gentle and unfailing interest year after year. What we get from them will depend on what we take to them.
Flowers are nothing away from their haunts. We must have the field in which the clover blossomed—bees and all, the cranberry-bog, the mossy bank of the violet, the white birch on which the polyporus grew. Take, for example, the clintonia, solitary amidst fallen spruce logs on the mountain slope. Imagine it transferred to a trim garden! If you have really seen that flower of the solitudes, you have seen the mossy rock overhanging it, the spruce cones lying thick about; sniffed the balsam and heard the veery on the mountain. Or consider this mountain sheep pasture with its clumps of stunted spruce and balsam, its scattered boulders and patches of sensitive fern, its reddening sorrel and running cinquefoil; bluets lie over the ground like a light fall of snow; pasture stones are incrusted with parmelias and set in a frame of hair-cap moss and reindeer lichens, incomparable mosaics; wild strawberries nestle among dainty speedwells, half hidden under the bent grass. It is a whole, an homogeneous piece of work, like a tapestry. There is not a bog-rush nor a buttercup to be spared.
From the first fragrant spicebush to the last witch-hazel, no cultivated shrub is to be compared with them, for the virtue of the wild is not to be transplanted and is never imprisoned in flower-beds. These shrubs of the pasture have a personality derived from immemorial contact with the virgin and uncultivated soil. They have been nourished by the very juices of earth and by the bone and sinew of the mountains. If you would have the barberry, you must move the pasture itself. It is of wild gardens solely, an untamed and untamable beauty. And so it is with the dogwood, for what is this but sunshine in the May woods—rifts of light breaking here and there through the overarching green of oak and tulip trees? It were as easy to catch sunbeams as to carry this away.