Bradford Torrey

“ Cape Cod birds, like Cape Cod men, know how to shift their course with the wind. Where else would one be likely to see prairie warblers, black-throated greens, and black-and-white creepers scrambling in company over the red shingles of a house-roof, and song sparrows singing day after day from a chimney-top?
In all my wanderings in Dyer's Hollow, only once did I see anything of that pest of the seashore, the sportsman; then, in the distance, two young fellows, with a highly satisfactory want of success, as well as I could make out, were trying to take the life of a meadow lark. ”

“ The pine-tree and the orchid are not friends by accident, however the case may look to us who cannot see behind the present nor beneath the surface. There are no mysteries per se, but only to the ignorant. Yet ignorance itself, disparagingly as we talk of it, has its favorable side,—as it is pleasant sometimes to withdraw from the sun and wander for a season in the half-light of the forest. Perhaps we need be in no haste to reach a world where there is never any darkness. In some moods, at least, I go with the partridge-berry vine and the lady's-slipper. ”

“ Verily the clouds are no respecters of persons. It is nothing to them how far you have come, nor how worthy your errand. So I reflected, having nothing better to do, when my wagonful of pilgrims had dropped out of sight in the fog—as a pebble drops into the lake—leaving me with the house to myself; and presently, as I sat at the window, I heard a white-throated sparrow singing outside. ”

“ Wonderful is human speech,—the work of generations upon generations, each striving to express itself, its feelings, its thoughts, its needs, its sufferings, its joys, its inexpressible desires. Wonderful is human speech, for its complexity, its delicacy, its power. But the pine-tree, under the visitations of the heavenly influence, utters things incommunicable; it whispers to us of things we have never said and never can say,—things that lie deeper than words, deeper than thought. ”

“ How refreshing to turn from all these, from the thistle and the bramble, yea, even from the rose itself, to gentle spirits like the violet and anemone, the arbutus and hepatica! These wage no war. They are of the original Society of Friends. Who will may spoil them without hurt. Their defense is with their Maker. I wonder whether anybody ever thinks of such flowers as representative of any order of grown people, or whether to everybody else they are forever children, as I find, on thinking of it, they have always been to me. ”

“ The same engaging habit is noticeable in the case of some of our very commonest plants. After the golden-rods and asters have had their day, late in October or well into November, when witch-hazel, yarrow, and clover are almost the only blossoms left us, you will stumble here and there upon a solitary dandelion reflecting the sun, or a violet giving back the color of the sky. And even so, you may find, once in a while, an old man in whom imaginative impulses have sprung up anew, now that all the prosaic activities of middle life are over. ”

“ Now, however, with these unhappy butternuts in my eye, I began to look, not at the forest, but at the trees, and I found that the spared butternuts were in no sense exceptional. All the trees were deformed. They had grown as they could, not as their innate proclivities would have led them. A tree is no better than a man; it cannot be itself if it stands too much in a crowd.
I set it down, unwillingly, to the discredit of the Weymouth pine,—a symptom of some ancestral taint, perhaps,—that it suffers less than most trees from being thus encroached upon. ”

“ The forest, like every other community, prospers—we may rather say exists—at the expense of individual perfection. But the expense is true economy, for, however it may be in ethics, in æsthetics the end justifies the means. The solitary pine, unhindered, symmetrical, green to its lowermost twig, as it rises out of the meadow or stands a-tiptoe on the rocky ledge, is a thing of beauty, a pleasure to every eye. ”

“ There must be time for the old life to drop off, as it were, while eye and ear grow wonted to novel sights and sounds. Doubtless I did take note of trivial things,—the call of a bird and the fragrance of a flower. ”

“ This way my thoughts were running when all at once two birds dashed by me—a black-poll warbler in hot pursuit of an olive-backed thrush. The thrush alighted in a tree and commenced singing, and the warbler sat by and waited, following the universal rule that a larger bird is never to be attacked except when on the wing. ”

“ The pine wood loves a clean floor, and is intolerant of undergrowth. Grasses and sedges, with all bushes, it frowns upon, as a model housekeeper frowns upon dirt. A plain brown carpet suits it best, with a modest figure of green—preferably of evergreen—woven into it; a tracery of partridge-berry vine, or, it may be, of club moss, with here and there a tuft of pipsissewa and pyrola. ”

“ I am not to be understood as praising the pine at the expense of other trees. All things considered, no evergreen can be equal to a summer-green, on which we see the leaves budding, unfolding, ripening, and falling,—a "worlde whiche neweth everie daie." What would winter be worth without the naked branches of maples and elms, beeches and oaks? We speak of them sadly:
"Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." ”

“ For that purpose, were it given me to choose, I would have one that had grown by itself; full of branches on all sides, but with no suggestion of primness; in short, a perfect tree, a miracle hardly to be found in any forest, since the forest would be no better than a park if the separate members of it were allowed room to develop each after its own law. Nature is too cunning an artist to spoil the total effect of her picture by too fond a regard for the beauty of particular details. ”

“ Such weather would drive the birds under shelter. The next forenoon, therefore, I betook myself to a hill covered thickly with pines and cedars. Here I soon ran upon several robins, feeding upon the savin berries, and in a moment more was surprised by a tseep so loud and emphatic that I thought at once of a fox sparrow. Then I looked for a song sparrow,—badly startled, perhaps,—but found to my delight a white-throat. He was on the ground, but at my approach flew into a cedar. ”

“ It does seem a thing to be regretted—yes, a thing to be ashamed of—that a bird so beautiful, so musical, so romantic in its choice of a dwelling-place, and withal so characteristic of New England should be known, at a liberal estimate, to not more than one or two hundred New Englanders! ”

“ I remember, too, how the whole summit, from the Nose to the Chin, was sprinkled with the modest and beautiful Greenland sandwort, springing up in every little patch of thin soil, where nothing else would flourish, and blossoming even under the door-step of the hotel. Unpretending as it is, this little alpine adventurer makes the most of its beauty. The blossoms are not crowded into close heads, so as to lose their individual attractiveness, like the florets of the golden-rod, for example ”

“ Some plants, like some people (but the plants, be it noted, are mostly weeds) , seem to flourish best away from home; others die under the most careful transplanting. Some are lovers of the open, and cannot be too much in the sun; others lurk in deep woods, under the triple shadow of tree and bush and fern. Some take to sandy hill-tops; others must stand knee-deep in water. One insists upon the richest of meadow loam; another is content with the face of a rock. ”

“ If one has done nothing, or worse than nothing, it is hardly worth while to boast of the original fashion in which he has gone about it. Moreover, the very plants of which we are speaking bear witness to the fact that it is possible to accept help, and still retain to the full one's own individuality. The strawberry is no more a plagiarist than the smilax, nor the grape than the nettle. If the vine clings to the cedar, the connection is but mechanical. Its spirit and life are as independent of the savin as of the planet Jupiter. ”

“ Where shall we hear better preaching, more searching comment upon life and death, than in this same cathedral? Verily, the pine is a priest of the true religion. It speaks never of itself, never its own words. Silent it stands till the Spirit breathes upon it. ”

“ Again the olive-back perched and sang, and again the black-poll waited. Three times these manœuvres were repeated, before the birds passed out of my range. Some wrong-doing, real or fancied, on the part of the larger bird, had excited the ire of the warbler. Why should he be [Pg 100] imposed upon, simply because he was small? The thrush, meantime, disdaining to defend himself, would only stop now and then to sing, as if to show to the world (every creature is the centre of a world) that such an insect persecution could never ruffle his spirit. ”

“ What would life be worth without its occasional enthusiasm, laughable in the retrospect, perhaps, but in itself pleasurable almost to the point of painfulness?
It was a glorious day. I enjoyed the climb, the lessening forest, the alpine [Pg 23] plants (the diapensia was in full flower, with its upright snowy goblets, while the geum and the Greenland sandwort were just beginning to blossom) , the magnificent prospect, the stimulating air, and, most of all, the mountain itself. I sympathized then, as I have often done at other times, with a remark once made to me by a Vermont farmer's wife. ”

“ The air is sweet with their calls at this moment, and once in a while some father of the flock lets his happiness run over in song. One cannot go far now without finding the road full of chipping sparrows, springing up in their pretty, characteristic way, and letting the breeze catch them. The fences and wayside apple-trees are lively with kingbirds and phœbes. ”

“ But the pine forest, dark, spacious, slumberous, musical! Here is something better than beauty, dearer than pleasure. When we enter this cathedral, unless we enter it unworthily, we speak not of such things. Every tree may be imperfect, with half its branches dead for want of room or want of sun, but until the [Pg 238] devotee turns critic—an easy step, alas, for half-hearted worshipers—we are conscious of no lack. Magnificence can do without prettiness, and a touch of solemnity is better than any amusement. ”

“ They are handsome, and they know it. What is beauty for, if not to be admired? They mass their tiny blossoms first into solid heads, then into panicles and racemes, and have no idea of hiding their constellated brightness under a bushel. "Let your light shine!" is the word they go on. How eagerly they crowd along the roadside, till the casual passer-by can see scarce anything else! If he does not see them, it is not their fault. ”

“ How they must envy its happier fortune! It sees them browsed upon by the cattle, and can hardly be blamed if it chuckles a little to itself as the greedy creatures pass it by untouched. School-girls and botanists break down the golden-rods and asters, and pull up the gerardias and ladies'-tresses; but neither school-girl nor collector often troubles the thistle. It opens its gorgeous blossoms and ripens its feathery fruit unmolested. Truly it is a great thing to wear an armor of prickles! ”

“ It is good, I think, to be lifted above the every-day level, and to enjoy the society—and the absence of society—which the heights afford. Looking over my notes of this excursion, I come upon the following sentence: "To sit on a stone beside a mountain road, with olive-backed thrushes piping on every side, the ear catching now and then the distant tinkle of a winter wren's tune, or the nearer zee, zee, zee of black-poll warblers, while white-throated sparrows call cheerily out of the spruce forest—this is to be in another world." ”

“ Birds are to be commiserated, perhaps, on having such an excess of what we call human nature; but the misfortune certainly renders them the more interesting to us, who see our more amiable weaknesses so often reflected in their behavior.
For the sympathetic observer every kind of bird has its own temperament. On one of my jaunts down this Mount Mansfield road I happened to espy a Canada jay in a thick spruce. ”

“ They boast not (rare stoics!) , but they set us a brave example. No "blasts that blow the poplar white" can cause the pine-tree to blanch. No frost has power to strip it of a single leaf. Its wood is soft, but how dauntless its spirit!—a truly encouraging paradox, lending itself, at our private need, to endless consolatory moralizings. The great majority of my brothers must be comforted, I think, by any fresh reminder that the battle is not to the strong.
For myself, then, like the lowly partridge-berry vine, I would be always the pine-tree's neighbor. ”

“ No botanist, nor even a semi-scientific lover of growing things, like myself, can ever walk in new fields without an eye for new plants. While coming down the Cape in the train I had seen, at short intervals, clusters of some strange flower,—like yellow asters, I thought. At every station I jumped off the car and looked hurriedly for specimens, till, after three or four attempts, I found what I was seeking,—the golden aster, Chrysopsis falcata. Here in Truro it was growing everywhere, and of course in Dyer's Hollow. ”

“ In any case I was glad to hear him, though I cannot in the spirit of veracity call him a good singer. Whist! There goes an oriole, a gorgeous creature, flashing from one elm to another, and piping in his happiest manner as he flies. It might be the middle of May, to judge from his behavior. He likes dog-day weather, there can be no question of that, however the rest of the world may grumble.
This is a time when one sees many birds, but few species. Bluebirds are several times as abundant as in June. ”

“ Could anything be more characteristic of human nature than just such inconsistencies? Suavity and trickery, harshness and integrity, a fiery temper and a gentle heart,—how often do we see the good and the bad dwelling together! ”

“ Whether they have any less sensuous motive for loving to wander over such heights, who will presume to determine? It may very well be that their almost ethereal structure—such spread of wing with such lightness of body—is only the outward sign of gracious thoughts and feelings, of a sensitiveness to beauty far surpassing anything of which we ourselves are capable. What a contrast between them and the grub gnawing ceaselessly under the spruce-tree bark! Can [Pg 106] the highest angel be as far above the lowest man? ”

“ On moonlight evenings the tremulous, haunting cry of the screech-owl comes to your ears, always from far away, and if you walk through the chestnut grove aforesaid in the daytime you may chance to catch his faint, vibratory, tree-frog whistle. ”