James Lane Allen

“ We see him emerging upon the Kentucky barrens which were covered with vegetation and open for the sweep of the eye.
"Now, at last, he begins to meet the approach of spring in full tide: all Nature is bursting into leaf and blossom. No longer are the redbud and the dogwood and the sassafras conspicuous as its heralds. And now, overflowing the forest, advances the full-crested wave of bird-life up from the south, from the tropics. New and unknown species are everywhere before his eyes; their new melodies are in his ears; he is busy drawing, colouring, naming them for his work. ”

“ Webster held imprinted on memory from a picture those features, those all-seeing eyes; it was Wilson—weaver lad of Paisley, wandering peddler youth of the grey Scotch mountains, violinist, flutist, the poet who had burned his poem standing in the public cross, the exile, the school teacher for whom the boy caught the mouse, the failure who sent the drawing to Thomas Jefferson, the bold figure in the skiff drifting down the Ohio—the naturalist plunging into the Kentucky wilderness and walking to Lexington and shivering in White's garret—the great American ornithologist, the immortal man. ”

“ Next I want you to think of Silas Marner as an all too common figure of the present time. He is a type of those of us who go through our lives all but blind to the surpassingly beautiful life of the planet on which it is our strange and glorious destiny to spend our human days. He is a type of those of us who, in town or city, see only the implements of our trade or business ever close to our eyes—our shuttle, our thread, our loom, of whatever kind these may be. ”

“ The sun sank below the forest boughs and shot its long lances against the tree trunks. It made a straight path of gold, deeper gold, across the yellow grain. The sounds of life died away, the atmosphere grew sweeter with the odours of leaves and grasses and blossoms.
Webster recrossed the woods as he had entered it, waded through the nightshade and climbed the fence under the dark tree. ”

“ In a corner of Jenny's yard grew a locust tree, not a full forest-sized locust tree but still quite a respectable locust tree for its place and advantages. All around the trunk and up the trunk clambered the trumpet-vine. Several yards from the earth some of the branches bent over and spread out as a roof for a little arbour—Jenny's summer play-house.
One dewy morning Jenny had first noticed a humming-bird hovering about the blossoms. She did not know that it was the ruby-throat, seeking the trumpet-vine where Audubon painted him. She only knew that she was excited and delighted. ”

“ Webster wondered whether a bird ever pecked a square hole in anything. Suddenly from behind him a red-headed bird flew to the dead tree-trunk and alighted near the hole: he recognised the wood-pecker. And he remembered that this was the first bird Wilson had killed that first day he entered the American forest: he was glad that it was the first he encountered! No sooner had the wood-pecker alighted than the head of another bird appeared at the hole and the wood-pecker took to his heels—to his wings. ”

“ Thus when in April the northward migration of birds reached Kentucky, this material was everywhere ready and plentiful, and the Baltimore orioles on the bluegrass plateau built their long hanging nests of Kentucky hemp.
Webster, sitting on the fence and thinking of this, meantime laid his plans for the larger adventure of the following day: the clue he sought had unexpectedly been found: he would go out to the place where young cane grew: there he might have a real chance at the warbler.
This being settled to his satisfaction, he hurried impatiently back to his woodland pasture. ”

“ I am merely a Kentucky bank warbler. One who did his warbling years ago. There is some war left in me. I suppose there will always be war left in me, but there isn't any war-ble. I warbled one distant solitary spring to your mother. She replied beautifully in kind and lavishly in degree. We made a nest and had a hatching. Since then the male bird has been trying—not to escape the consequences of his song—but to meet his notes like a man. I have never stumbled upon your forest friend. ”

“ What creature could be coming? Then he saw just within the edge of the thicket a curious piece of head-gear—he had no knowledge of any such hat. Then he saw a gun barrel. Then the hand and forearm of a man was thrust forward and it pushed the underbrush aside; and then there stepped forth into the open the figure of a hunter, lean, vigorous, tall, athletic. The hunter stepped out with a bold stride or two and stopped and glanced eagerly around with an air of one in a search; he discovered Webster and with a look of relief stood still and smiled. ”

“ The distant green forest and the locust tree with the trumpet-vine and the humming-bird—these, though distant from one another, became in Webster's mind part of something deep and powerful in his life, toward which he was moving.
If no road opened before him at home, none opened at school. ”

“ Watch, I say, how a troubled ray, low on life's horizon, at last becomes a star in the world of men, high fixed and resplendent—to be seen by human eyes as long as there shall be human eyes to see anything. ”

“ But if you had finished high school, on this first day of vacation you were on the Boy's Common: schools behind you, the world of business around you, ahead of you ambitious college or the stately University. Webster had been turned loose on the Boy's Common.
The family were at breakfast. Every breakfast in the cottage was much the same breakfast: routine is the peace of the roadless. ”

“ When they lie along the trenches of France as thick as fallen brown autumn leaves in woodland hollows, it will be the flight of bird-like emblems of destruction that will guide them like hurricane-rushing leaves as they sweep toward their evil enemy."
"Through all ages the flight of the bird alone has been the interpreter of the human spirit. ”

“ Yesterday an old self, today a new self. We have been shifted completely away from our last foot-prints and our steps move off in another direction, taking a truer course.
Beyond all else a high, solemn sense subdued Webster with the thought, that in his sleep he had come near as to unearthly things. The long-dead hunter, who had appeared to him, spoke as though he lived elsewhere than on the earth and lived more nobly; his accents, [Pg 182] the majesty of his countenance, were moulded as by higher wisdom and goodness. ”

“ The bird music we hear in these human ages are morning songs. Back of that morning stretches the earth's long dawn; and the rocks tell us that thrushes were singing in the green forests of the earth millions of years before man had been moulded of the dust and had awakened and begun to listen to them. Thus bird music which seems to us so fresh is the [Pg 154] oldest music of the earth—millions of years older than man's. And yet all this is still but a morning song. The earth is young, the birds are young, man is young—all young together at the morning of the earth's geologic day. ”

“ Jenny whispered, with reproach and vexation.
It was the first invitation. It was the first acceptance of an invitation. There would have been a second acceptance but the invitation was not there to accept.
When Webster turned in at his home gate, everything was just as he had foreseen: his father sat on one side of the porch, smoking the one daily cigar; his mother faced him from the opposite side, slowly rocking. Elinor crouched on the top step between them: he would have to walk around her or over her. ”

“ There then you see him: no longer a youth but still young; every road he had tried closed to him in America as in Scotland: not a doctor, not a minister, not a good poet, not a good flutist, not a good violinist, not a copper-plate engraver, not a willing weaver, not a willing peddler, not a willing school-teacher—none of these. ”

“ If you are taught to look for great things early in life, you will early learn how to find great things; and the things you love to find will be the things you will desire and try to do. I wish not to give you a single trivial, mean weak thought."
"The Kentucky warbler for over a hundred years has worn the name of the State and has carried it all over the world—leading the students of bird life to form some image of a far country and to fix their thoughts at least for some brief moment on this same beautiful spot of the world's surface. ”

“ Some of you this summer during your vacation may go out to some nearby strip of woods—what little is left of the old forest—in quest of the warbler. Seek the wildest spots you can find. The Kentucky bluegrass landscape is thin and tame now, but there are places of thick undergrowth where the bird still spends his Kentucky summer. ”

“ And in what other country is that spectacle so common as in our American democracy, where progress is so swift and the future so vast and untrod and untried that nearly every generation in thousands of cottages represents a revolt and a revolution of children against their parents, their work and their ways? But Webster's father and mother were not philosophers as to how Nature works out her plan through our American democracy: they merely had their parental apprehensions and confidentially discussed these. ”

“ As long as he remains in the forests of the earth, he will keep the name of Kentucky alive though all else it once meant shall have perished and been forgotten. He is thus, as nearly as anything [Pg 148] in Nature can be, its winged worldwide emblem, ever young as each spring is young, as the green of the woods is young. ”

“ Genius builds with lavish magnificence and inconceivable swiftness; and hardly had he succeeded with his first drawings before he had wrought out a monumental plan: to turn himself free as soon as possible into the vast, untravelled forest of the North American continent and draw and paint its birds. ”

“ On this fine June morning, the first day of his vacation, Webster was late for breakfast. He arranged to be late. From his bathroom-bedroom he could hear the family with their usual morning talk, Elinor's shrill chatter predominating. When her chatter ceased he would know that she had satisfied her whimsical appetite and had slipped from her chair, impatient either to get to the front porch with its creaky rocking-chair or to dart out the gate to other little girls in the block; restlessly seeking some adventure elsewhere [Pg 106] if none should pass before her eyes at home. ”

“ When the schoolboys of the village came to the hedges in autumn to gather nuts or in spring to look for bird-nests—you boys still do that, I hope—when they came and heard the uncanny sound of the loom, so unlike that of the familiar flail on threshing floors, they would crowd around the windows and peep in at the weaver in his treadmill attitude, weaving like a solitary spider month after month and year after year his endless [Pg 52] web. ”

“ It is the form and flight of the bird alone that has given man at last the mastery of the atmosphere. Without the bird as a living model we have not the slightest reason to believe that he could have ever learned the mechanism of flight. Now it is the flight of the bird, studied under the American sky, that has given the [Pg 152] nations the war engine that will perhaps rule the destiny of the human race henceforth. The form of the bird will fly before our autumn-brown American armies as they cross the sea—leading them as the symbol of their victory. ”

“ Many questions vex us: all others lead to one: when man vanishes, does he pass into the stillness of the earth's atmosphere and sink toward the stillness of its rocks like every other species? He answers with his faith: that his spirit is here he knows not why, but takes flight from it he knows not how or whither. ”

“ Or if he could not quite bring anything so luscious and graspable as fruit, he might at least stand in their full view on the boundary of his kingdom and mark out, across that dubious Common which lies between high school and college, a path that would lead a boy straight to some one of the world's great highways of knowledge. ”

“ Thus, like Silas Marner, he became a poor weaver and peddler but not with Silas Marner's eyes. Seldom in any human head has the mechanism of vision been driven by a mind with such power and eagerness to observe. And [Pg 61] he had the special memory of the eye. There are those of us who have the special memory of the ear or of taste or of touch. He had the long, faithful recollection of things seen. With this pair of eyes during the next several years he traversed on foot three-fourths of Scotland. Remember, you boys of the rolling bluegrass plateau, what the scenery of Scotland is! ”

“ Only the president of a bank enjoys the right to have a disposition. All the rest of us are mere habits—certain habits on uncertain salaries. Let Elinor go to her select school and I'll go a little more ragged. The outside world thinks it a bank joke when they look through the windows and see bank clerks at work in ragged coats: instead they know better. [Pg 32] Let Elinor go and let the damages fall on her father. He will be glad to take the extra cost off his own back as a tribute to his unbanked boyhood. ”

“ Eight professors had come, eight professors had gone, it was now April, a professor of Geology, as next to the last lecturer, stood before them.
[Pg 48]
Interest in the lectures had steadily mounted from the first and was now at highest pitch. He faced an audience eager, intelligent, respectful and grateful. On their part they consented that the man before them embodied what he had come to teach—the blending of life and learning. Plainly the study of the earth's rocks had not hardened him, acquaintance with fossils had not left him a human fossil. ”

“ The street cry of a vendor, no matter how urgent her duty anywhere in the cottage at the moment, brought her to a front window or to the front porch or even swept her out to the front gate, to gratify her eyes with memories and pay her respects to the impossible. ”