Frederick John Lazell

“ As the heart opens to receive the beauty of the world, as the mind and soul strive, like the plants, for the highest development, so is the world redeemed from error and crime and the perfection of the race is attained. If one soul finds this truth more quickly and easily here amid the trees and flowers, for him is the old road greater than religious dogmas or social systems.
Always beautiful and interesting, in these long days of mid-July the old road is at its best. No length of day can measure its loveliness or encompass its charm. ”

“ The leisurely tapping of a downy woodpecker sounds like the ticking of a clock in a vast ancestral hall. You may actually hear a squirrel running down a tree, twenty rods away. He paws out an acorn and begins to eat. The noise of your footstep seems like a profanation of holy ground. Also it disturbs the squirrel who scurries up to the topmost twigs of an elm nearly a hundred feet high. With a glass you may see his eyes shine as he watches you. His long red tail hangs down still and straight and there is not breeze enough, even up there, to stir it. ”

“ The purple trilliums, like the Dutchman’s breeches, felt the effects of the many April and early May frosts but now they are coming into their beauty. Great colonies of umbrella-leaved May-apple are breaking into white flowers. The broad, lily-like leaves of the true and false Solomon’s seal are even more attractive than their blossoms. Ferns, bellwort, wild sarsaparilla, all help to soften our footfalls, while overhead the light daily grows more subdued as the leaf-buds break and the leaves unfold. The throb of the year’s life grows stronger. ”

“ Cup-like leaves of the honeysuckle hold bunches of scarlet berries. So on and on the creek leads to new beauties of color and form, new delights for taste and smell. Every plant has some excuse for its being, something of the loveliness and fragrance of the summer stored in its fruits. There is a lesson for the mind and the soul to be gathered with the fruit of these shrubs and vines. Summer still works with tireless energy. She has done with the leaf and the bud and the blossom; all her remaining strength is being spent in filling the fruits before the night of the white death comes. ”

“ Very beautiful is this snow as it softens the rugged, corky limbs of the mossy cup oaks. It is not like the hard, granular snow which stung your face like sand when you were out in the storm a month ago, when the trumpets of the sky were doing a fanfare, the wind raged from the northwest, the top of a tall black cherry snapped like a shipmast and crashed through the forest rigging to the white deck below, while the gnarled limbs of the big elms looked like the muscles of giants wrestling with the storm king. ”

“ Before they have passed out of sight the loud and prolonged “O-wick-o-wick-o-wick-o-wick” of the flicker makes us lift our eyes to the top of a scarlet oak and anon three or four of the handsome fellows alight nearer by so that we may the better admire their white-tailed coats, brown shoulders, scarlet napes and the beautiful black crescent on their breasts. When we hear the call of the flicker we may know that spring is here to stay. They are as infallible as the yellow-breasted larks in the meadows. ”

“ The wild raspberries on which the catbirds were feeding today would have been just as fine had there been no catbird to eat them or human eye to admire them. Had there been no human ear to delight, the song of the woodthrush would have been just as sweet. The choke-cherries crimsoning in the summer sun, the clusters of the nuts swelling among the leaves of the hickory will strive to attain perfection, whether or no there are human hands to gather them. They live in beauty, simplicity and serenity, all-sufficient in themselves to achieve their ends. ”

“ The reminders of death [Pg 46] are very few compared with the signs of life. Break off a twig from the aspen and taste the bark. The strong quinine flavor is like a spring tonic. Cut a branch of the black cherry, peel back the bark, and smell the pungent, bitter almond aroma, which of itself is enough to identify this tree. Every sense tells of life; the smell of the cherry, the taste of the aspen, the touch of the velvety mosses and the gummy buds on the poplars, the color of the twigs and buds, the music of the birds, all these say, "There is no death." ”

“ The leafy month of June will show us more foliage, but it will be of a darker and more uniform shade of green. Now, as the sun rises higher and sends [36] his rays through both the woodlands and the brushlands we thrill with delight at the kaleidoscope of color. There are no withered leaves to mar the beauty now. Seen in mass, and at a distance, the woodlands are a soft cinerous purple. But the tops, where the ruddy rays of the sun are glancing, are a hazy cloud of tender green, pink, yellow and pale purple. ”

“ There is so much beauty all around us, every day of the year, shall we not sometimes lift our eyes to behold it?
The majority of Iowa people still find pleasure in the simple life, still have the love for that which Nature so freely bestows. They find time to look upon the beauty of the world. Many a busy man finds his best recreation in the woods and fields. It may be only a few hours each week, but it is enough to keep the music of the flowing waters ever in his ears and the light of the sunshine in his eyes. ”

“ He is a typical bird of June. His color matches the June roses, his songs are full and sweet and rich as the June days, and the eggs of his soberly dressed spouse are usually laid and hatched in June. There is a nest in a hawthorn bush where the wild grape twines her crimson-green clusters and by the time the blossoms break and fill the air with fragrance, no accidents coming meanwhile, four young grosbeaks will be the pride of as warm a paternal heart as ever beat in bird or human breast. ”

“ On the left there is a clear view for fully twenty miles, out to where the lavender haze hangs softly on the forest-fringed horizon. The plowed fields lie mellow and chocolate-hued in the sunlight and the russet meadows are beginning to show a faint undertone of green. The golden green of the willow fences which separate some of the fields shines from afar in the abundant light and there is a quickening crimson in the tops of the red maple groves around the homesteads. The deep blue of the high-domed sky gives a glory to the landscape. ”

“ Later in the autumn I have watched your green leaves take on a wondrous wine-red beauty, as the splendor of a soul sometimes shines most vividly in the hour before it is called home; and they taught me not to grieve or to murmur because death must come to us all. In the winter I have seen the squirrel digging beneath the snow to find the acorns he had planted in the fall. He didn't find them all; some of them came up in the springtime as tiny trees and spoke to me of the life that knows no end. ”

“ The snow is piling high under the hazelbrush and the sumac, stumps of trees become soft white mounds, and the little brook has curving banks of beauty.
There is a thrill and an exaltation in such a storm. The depressing influences of the earlier day are no more. As you resolutely walk homeward through the storm and the deep snow, you feel the heart grow strong as it pumps the blood to every fiber of your being. You know why the men of the north, Iowa men, have virile brain and sovereign will. ”

“ Always the same soft lavender haze there, while the woods here run through all the gamut of color, from the downy pinks and whites and the tender greens of spring through the deeper greens of summer to the crimson and scarlet of the fall, and the russets, grays, and coffee-browns of the winter. When the foliage of the forest has deepened into one dark shade of verdure then we know that June is far spent, spring has gone and summer is here. The uniform green is not monotonous. ”

“ A cuckoo droops from a tall wild cherry tree on one side of the road to a tangle of wild grape on the other; he peers out and gives his rain-crow call. [Pg 47] So is the warp of the summer woven of bird-flight and threaded through with song.
When evening comes the sun's last smiles reach far into the timber and linger lovingly on the boles of the trees with a tender beauty. Wood-flowers face the vanishing light and hold it until the scalloped edges of the oak leaves etched against the sky have been blurred by the gathering darkness. ”

“ There is an increasing desire to get away from the roar and rattle of the streets, away from even the prim formality of suburban avenues and artificial bits of landscape gardening into the panorama of woodland, field, and stream. Men with means are disposing of their palatial residences in the cities and moving to real homes in the country, where they can see the sunrise and the death of day, hear the rhythm of the rain and the murmur of the wind, and watch the unfolding of the first flowers of spring. ”

“ But the elms are a glory of dull gold; every twig is fringed with blossoms. The maples have lost their fleecy white softness, for the staminate flowers which were so beautiful in March have withered now. But the fruit blossoms remind us of Lowell’s line, “The maple puts her corals on in May.” In Iowa he might have made it April instead of May. But that would have spoiled his verse.
For long we sit and drink in the beauty of the scene. Meanwhile the birds on this wooded slope are asking us to use our ears as well as our eyes. ”

“ The scattered berries of the green-brier will be black in winter, but their September hue is a bronze green of a delicate shade which artists might envy. It will take another month to ripen the drupes of the black-haw into their blue-black beauty; now they are green on one side and red on the other, like a ripening apple. It's a fine education to know just which fruits you may nibble and which you must not eat. Red-stalked clusters of black berries hang from the vines of the Virginia creeper among leaves just touched with the hectic flame that tells of their passing, all too soon. ”

“ The cowbirds, male and female, are all free lovers. There is no mating among them. The female lays her eggs in some other bird’s nest, like the English cuckoo, as if she were too busy with the duties and pleasures of society to care for her own children.
A diskcissel sits on a tree instead of a reed or a bush as usual and sings “See, see, Dick Cissel, Cissel.” Chewinks are down scratching among the dry leaves with the white-throated sparrows, their strong-muscled legs sending the leaves flying as if a barnyard hen were doing the scratching. A beautiful hermit thrush is near but he is silent. ”

“ Listen to the majestic roar of the winds in a grove of rugged oaks, and then again, for contrast, where the timber on the river bottom is all-yielding birch. It is like changing from the great diapason to the dulciana stop. In the mixed woodlands, so common in Iowa, the effect is even more delightful. The coarse, angular, unyielding twigs of the oaks give deep tones like the vibrations of the thick strings on the big double bass. The opposite, widespreading twigs of the ash sing like the cello, and the tones of the alternate spray of the lindens are finer, like the viola. ”