But Maine, perhaps, will soon be where Massachusetts is. A good part of her territory is already as bare and common-place as much of our neighborhood, and her villages generally are not so well shaded as ours. We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man. Consider Nahant, the resort of all the fashion of Boston,--which peninsula I saw but indistinctly in the twilight, when I steamed by it, and thought that it was unchanged since the discovery. John Smith described it in 1614 as "the Mattahunts, two pleasant isles of groves, gardens, and cornfields"; and others tell us that it was once well wooded, and even furnished timber to build the wharves of Boston. Now it is difficult to make a tree grow there, and the visitor comes away with a vision of Mr. Tudor's ugly fences a rod high, designed to protect a few pear-shrubs. And what are we coming to in our Middlesex towns?--a bald, staring town-house, or meeting-house, and a bare liberty-pole, as leafless as it is fruitless, for all I can see. We shall be obliged to import the timber for the last, hereafter, or splice such sticks as we have;--and our ideas of liberty are equally mean with these. The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder,--and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.
They have even descended to smaller game. They have lately, as I hear, invented a machine for chopping up huckleberry-bushes fine, and so converting them into fuel!--bushes which, for fruit alone, are worth all the pear-trees in the country many times over. (I can give you a list of the three best kinds, if you want it.) At this rate, we shall all be obliged to let our beards grow at least, if only to hide the nakedness of the land and make a sylvan appearance. The farmer sometimes talks of "brushing up," simply as if bare ground looked better than clothed ground, than that which wears its natural vesture,--as if the wild hedges, which, perhaps, are more to his children than his whole farm beside, were dirt. I know of one who deserves to be called the Tree-hater, and, perhaps, to leave this for a new patronymic to his children. You would think that he had been warned by an oracle that he would be killed by the fall of a tree, and so was resolved to anticipate them. The journalists think that they cannot say too much in favor of such "improvements" in husbandry; it is a safe theme, like piety; but as for the beauty of one of these "model farms," I would as lief see a patent churn and a man turning it. They are, commonly, places merely where somebody is making money, it may be counterfeiting. The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.
Nevertheless, it was a relief to get back to our smooth, but still varied landscape. For a permanent residence, it seemed to me that there could be no comparison between this and the wilderness, necessary as the latter is for a resource and a background, the raw material of all our civilization. The wilderness is simple, almost to barrenness. The partially cultivated country it is which chiefly has inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets, such as compose the mass of any literature. Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodmen and rustics,--that is, selvaggia, and the inhabitants are salvages. A civilized man, using the word in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of peat. At the extreme North, the voyagers are obliged to dance and act plays for employment. Perhaps our own woods and fields,--in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,--with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have,--the common which each village possesses, its true paradise, in comparison with which all elaborately and wilfully wealth-constructed parks and gardens are paltry imitations. Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago. The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.
But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.
The kings of England formerly had their forests "to hold the king's game," for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them; and I think that they were impelled by a true instinct. Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be "civilized off the face of the earth,"--our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation,--not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?
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[MY CHILDREN]
Have you seen Annie and Kitty, Two merry children of mine? All that is winning and pretty Their little persons combine. Annie is kissing and clinging Dozens of times in a day,-- Chattering, laughing, and singing, Romping, and running away. Annie knows all of her neighbors. Dainty and dirty alike,-- Learns all their talk, and, "be jabers," Says she "adores little Mike!" Annie goes mad for a flower, Eager to pluck and destroy,-- Cuts paper dolls by the hour, Always her model--a boy! Annie is full of her fancies, Tells most remarkable lies, (Innocent little romances,) Startling in one of her size. Three little prayers we have taught her, Graded from winter to spring; Oh, you should listen my daughter Saying them all in a string! Kitty--ah, how my heart blesses Kitty, my lily, my rose! Wary of all my caresses, Chary of all she bestows. Kitty loves quietest places, Whispers sweet sermons to chairs, And, with the gravest of faces, Teaches old Carlo his prayers. Matronly, motherly creature! Oh, what a doll she has built-- Guiltless of figure or feature-- Out of her own little quilt! Nought must come near it to wake it; Noise must not give it alarm; And when she sleeps, she must take it Into her bed, on her arm. Kitty is shy of a caller, Uttering never a word; But when alone in the parlor, Talks to herself like a bird. Kitty is contrary, rather, And, with a comical smile, Mutters, "I won't," to her father,-- Eyeing him slyly the while. Loving one more than the other Isn't the thing, I confess; And I observe that their mother Makes no distinction in dress. Preference must be improper In a relation like this; I wouldn't toss up a copper-- (Kitty, come, give me a kiss!) |
[THE KINLOCH ESTATE, AND HOW IT WAS SETTLED.]
[Continued.]
CHAPTER VII.
Early Monday morning, Mr. Hardwick walked across the green to call upon Mrs. Kinloch. Lucy Ransom, the house-maid, washing in the back-yard, saw him coming, and told her mistress;--before he rang, Mrs. Kinloch had time to tie on her lace cap, smooth her hair, and meet him in the hall.