Dallas Lore Sharp

“ There was no peace, no stirring of small life, not even in the quiet of the deep pines; for here a hawk would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping, or I would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his keen hungry face an instant as he halted, winding me.
Fox and snake and hawk are real, but not the absence of peace and joy—except within my own breast. There is struggle and pain and death in the woods, and there is fear also, but the fear does not last long; it does not haunt and follow and terrify; it has no being, no substance, no continuance. ”

“ A huddled group under the hen-yard fence broke up and came out with the others. Death had flashed among them, but had missed them. Fear had come, but had gone. Within two minutes—in less time—from the fall of the stroke, every hen in the flock was intent at her scratching, or as intently chasing the gray grasshoppers over the pasture.
Yet, as they scratched, the high-stepping cock would frequently cast up his eye toward the treetops; would sound his alarum at the flight of a robin; and if a crow came over, he would shout and dodge and start to run. ”

“ We shall get little rest and healing out of nature until we have chased this phantom Fear into the dark of the moon. It is a most difficult drive. The pursued too often turns pursuer, and chases us back into our burrows, where there is nothing but the dark to make us afraid. If every time a bird cries in alarm, a mouse squeaks with pain, or a rabbit leaps in fear from beneath our feet, we, too, leap and run, dodging the shadow as if it were at our own heels, then we shall never get farther toward the open fields than Chuchundra, the muskrat, gets toward the middle of the bungalow floor. ”

“ In none of our nature-writers, however, is this love for the earth more manifest than in John Burroughs. It is constant and dominant in him, an expression of his religion. He can see the earth only as the best possible place to live in—to live with rather than in or on; for he is unlike the rector of Selborne and the wild-tame man of Walden in that he is married and a farmer—conditions, these, to deepen one’s domesticity. Showing somewhere along every open field in Burroughs’s books is a piece of fence, and among his trees there is always a patch of gray sloping roof. ”

“ A toad is an amphibian to the zoölogist; an ugly gnome with a jeweled eye to the poet; but to the naturalist, the lover of life for its own sake, who lives next door to his toad, who feeds him a fly or a fat grub now and then, who tickles him to sleep with a rose leaf, who waits as thirstily as the hilltop for him to call the summer rain, who knows his going to sleep for the winter, his waking up for the spring—to such an one the jeweled eye and the amphibious habits are but the forewords of a long, marvelous life-history. ”

“ It was a beautiful summer morning, tender with the half-light of breaking dawn, and fresh with dew. Leaving my kit at the mouth of the skunks’ den, I sat down on the stump to wait a [Pg 107] moment, for the loveliness and wonder of the opening day came swift upon me. From the top of a sapling, close by, a chewink sent his simple, earnest song ringing down the wooded slope, and, soft as an echo, floated up from the swampy tangle of wild grape and azalea the pure notes of a wood thrush, mellow and globed, and almost fragrant of the thicket where the white honeysuckle was in bloom. ”

“ Terror can kill the living, but it cannot hinder them from forgetting, or prevent them from hoping, or, for more than an instant, stop them from doing. Such is the law of being—the law of the Jungle, of Heaven, of my pastures, of myself, and of the little junco. The light of the sun may burn out, motion may cease, matter vanish away, and life come to an end; but so long as life continues it must continue to assert itself, to obey the law of being—to multiply and replenish the earth, and rejoice. ”

“ He devotes an entire chapter to the bluebird, a chapter to the fox, one to the apple, another to the wild strawberry. The individual, the particular thing, is always of particular interest to him. But so is its habitat, the whole of its environment. He sees the gem, not cut and set in a ring, but rough in the mine, where it glitters on the hand of nature, and glitters all the more that it is worn in the dark. ”

“ It is not every farmer who should go to writing, nor every writer who should go to farming; but there is a mighty waste of academic literature, of premature, precocious, lily-handed literature, of chicken-licken literature, because the writers do not know a spade when they see one, would not call it a spade if they knew. Those writers need to do less writing and more farming, more real work with their soft hands in partnership with the elemental forces of nature, or in comradeship with average elemental men—the only species extant of the quality to make writing worth while. ”

“ Where, then, should a man live? I will make answer only for myself, and say, Here in Hingham, right where I am, for here on Mullein Hill the sky is round and large, the evening and the Sunday silences are deep, the dooryards are wide, the houses are single, and the neighborhood ambitions are good kitchen-gardens, good gossip, fancy chickens, and clean paint.
There are other legitimate ambitions, and the Commuter is not without them; but these few go far toward making home home, toward giving point and purpose to life, and a pinch of pride. ”

“ But with only one cow, and only one colony of bees, and only one acre of yard, still how impossibly inconvenient the life of the Commuter is! A cow is truly an inconvenience if you care for her yourself—an inherent, constitutional, unexceptional inconvenience are cows and wives if you care for them yourself. A hive of bees is an inconvenience; a house of your own is an inconvenience, and, according to the figures of many of my business friends, an unwarranted luxury. ”

“ But, mortal finish or no, the spirit of the chase is neither rage nor terror, but the excitement of a matched game, the ecstasy of pursuit for the hound, the passion of escape for the fox, without fury or fear—except for the instant at the start and at the finish—when it is a finish.
This is the spirit of the chase—of the race, more truly, for it is always a race, where the stake is not life and death, as we conceive of life and death, but rather the joy of being. The hound [Pg 14] cares as little for his own life as for the life he is hunting. It is the race, instead ”

“ But the morning stars did not cackle together, and there is still a solemn music in the universe, a music that is neither an anvil nor a barnyard chorus. Life ought to mean more than turnips, more than hay, more than hens to these rural people. It ought, and it must. I had come among them. And what else was my coming but a divine providence, a high and holy mission? I had been sent unto this people to preach the gospel of the beauty of nature. And I determined that my first text should be the skunk. ”

“ To begin with, the clam farm is self-working, ploughed, harrowed, rolled, and fertilized by the tides of the sea; the farmer only sowing the seed and digging the crop. Sometimes even the seed is sown for him by the hands of the tide; but only on those flats that lie close to some natural breeding-bar, where the currents, gathering up the tiny floating “spats,” and carrying them swiftly on the flood, broadcast them over the sand as the tide recedes. ”

“ The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to strum; the owl slips out and drifts away; a whippoorwill drops on the bare knoll near me, clucks and shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition a thousand times repeated by the voices that call to one another down the long empty aisles of the swamp; a big moth whirs about my head and is gone; a bat flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, but is blotted out by the darkness, only to blaze again, and again be blotted, and so passes, his tiny lantern flashing into a night that seems the darker for the quick, unsteady glow.
We do not stir. ”

“ THE EDGE OF NIGHT BEYOND the meadow, nearly half a mile away, yet in sight from my window, stands an apple tree, the last of an ancient line that once marked the boundary between the upper and lower pastures. For an apple tree it is unspeakably woeful, and bent, and hoary, and grizzled, with suckers from feet to crown. Unkempt and unesteemed, it attracts only the cattle for its shade, and gives to them alone its gnarly, bitter fruit. ”

“ Thus all nature-writers do with all their nature in some manner or other, not necessarily by post-chaise for eighty miles. It is characteristic of the nature-writer, however, to bring home his outdoors, to domesticate his nature, to relate it all to himself. His is a dooryard universe, his earth a flat little planet turning about a hop-pole in his garden—a planet mapped by fields, ponds, and cow-paths, and set in a circumfluent sea of neighbor townships, beyond whose shores he neither goes to church, nor works out his taxes on the road, nor votes appropriations for the schools. ”

“ One needs to spend a vacation, at least, in the wilderness and solitary place, where no other human being has ever come, and there, where the animals know man only as a brother, go to the school of the woods and study the wild folk, one by one, until he discovers them personally, temperamentally, all their likes and dislikes, their little whimseys, freaks, and fancies—all of this, there, far removed from the cankering cares of hens and chickens, for the sake of the right attitude toward nature. ”

“ The truth in his story of the Cock and the Fox is a different kind of truth from the truth about Burroughs’s “Winter Neighbors,” yet no less the truth. Good nature-writing is literature, not science, and the truth we demand first and last is a literary truth—the fidelity of the writer to himself. He may elect to use facts for his material; yet they are [Pg 133] only material, and no better as material than fancies. For it is not matter that counts last in literature; it is manner. It is spirit that counts. It is the man. Only honest men make literature. ”

“ How the world was made—its geology, its biology—is the great question, for its answer is poetry and religion and life itself. Mr. Burroughs is serenely sure as to who made the world; the theological speculation as to why it was made, he answers by growing small fruits on it, living upon it, writing about it.
Temperamentally Mr. Burroughs is an optimist, as vocationally he is a writer, and avocationally a vine-dresser. He plants and expects to gather—grapes from his grape-vines, books from his book-vines, years, satisfactions, sorrows, joys, all that is due him. ”

“ The Commuter knows the dark gray city, knows it darker and grayer than the scholar, for the Commuter works there, shut up in a basement, or in an elevator, maybe, six days a week; he feels and hears the throbbing heart of man all the day long; and when evening comes he hurries away to the open country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, where he can listen a little to the beating of his own. ”

“ One has a right to sell one’s ideas, to barter one’s literary inventions; one has a right, a duty it may be, to invent inventions for sale; but one may not, without sure damnation, make “copy” of one’s emotions. In other words, one may not invent emotions, nor observations either, for the literary trade. The sad case with much of our nature-writing is that it has become professional, and so insincere, not answering to genuine observation nor to genuine emotion, but to the bid of the publisher.
You will know the sincere nature-writer by his fidelity to fact. ”

“ Life is never so tangible, never so compact and satisfactory as while still wrapped up and tied with a string. One’s clothes, to take a single example, as one bears them home in a box, are an anticipation and a pure joy—the very clothes that, the next day, one wears as a matter of course, or wears with disconcerting self-consciousness, or wears, it may be, with physical pain. ”

“ My fields and swamps and ponds are not one wide battlefield, as if the only work of my wild neighbors were bloody war, and the whole of their existence a reign of terror. This is a universe of law and order and marvelous balance; conditions these of life, of normal, peaceful, joyous life. Life and not death is the law, joy and not fear is the spirit, is the frame of all that breathes, of very matter itself. ”

“ The knoll yonder may be a kind of High Place, and its old apple tree a kind of altar for you when you had better not go to church, when your neighbor needs to be let alone, when your children are in danger of too much bread and of too many books—for the time when you are in need of that something which comes only out of the quiet of the fields at the close of day. ”

“ Any lover of the city could live as far out as this. I have no quarrel with the city as a place to work in. Cities are as necessary as wheat-fields and as lovely, too—from twenty miles away, or from Westminster Bridge at daybreak. The city is as a head to the body, the nervous centre where the multitudinous sensations are organized and directed, where the multitudinous and interrelated interests of the round world are directed. The city is necessary; city work is necessary; but less and less is city living necessary. ”

“ A house is for the body; a home for body and soul; and the soul needs as much room outside [Pg 232] as inside the house,—needs a garden and some domestic animal and the starry vault of the sky.
It is better to be cramped for room within the house than without. Yet the yard need not be large, certainly not a farm, nor a gentleman’s estate, nor fourteen acres of woodchucks, such as my own. Neither can it be, for the Commuter, something abandoned in the remote foothills, nor something wanton, like a brazen piece of sea-sand “at the beach.” ”