W. C. Bartlett

“ Oh, venerable friend, dwelling in Arcadia! there is much broken pottery in this world which is past all mending; and more which is awaiting its turn to go into the rubbish heap. All that was discovered in the interior of a Western mound was a few fragments of earthenware; for the rest, Time had beaten it all back to the dust. The images, whether of brass, wood, or stone, could not be put together by any of the cohesive arts of our time. It is appointed for some men to go through the world, club in hand, and to break much of the world's crockery as they go. We may not altogether like them. ”

“ If he is not reconstructed in his inmost soul, he will always be wanting his neighbor's vineyard. The new purchase met all æsthetic requirements. It was on the edge of the town, and hardly more than a mile from the sea. It had a grove in the foreground, a trout stream on either side, with a fringe of tall redwoods, a backing of mountains, and a water view comprising the whole of Monterey Bay, and as much of the ocean as the eye could reduce to constructive possession. Not a fence to mark a boundary; but the two-room shanty, with its great stone chimney on the outside, loomed up like a palace. ”

“ There are more wonders on a square mile of the Coast Range than most of us know anything about.
No vacation is worth having which does not, abruptly if need be, turn one away from all familiar sights and sounds—all the jarring, creaking and abrasion of city life. The opening vista in the redwood forest, where the path is flecked with tremulous shadows and gleams of sunlight, will lead near enough to Paradise, provided one does not take a book or a newspaper along, and never blasphemes against nature by inquiring the price of stocks. ”

“ Every spring bursting from the hill-side is a fountain of youth, although none have yet smoothed out certain crow tracks. The madrono, the most brilliant of the forest trees, sheds its outer bark [30] every season; when the outer rind curls up and falls off, the renewed tree has a shaft polished like jasper or emerald. When humanity begins to wilt, what a pity that the cuticle does not peel as a sign of rejuvenation! ”

“ What inspiration does one get from this human concussion? Are there any sparks of divine fire struck off, or struck into a man by it? In all this jostling crowd is there any prophet who knows certainly what his dinner shall be on the morrow? The struggle is mainly one for beef and pudding, with some show of fine raiment, and possibly a clapboard house in which there is no end to stucco. The smallest fraction may yet be used to express the value of that element of civilization which teaches society how much it needs rather than how little will suffice. ”

“ You see that ambitious wooden palace down the valley. What does it symbolize more than pretence, weakness and barrenness of all æsthetic culture? Some day nature will feel the affront, and this blot in the foreground of a noble picture will be gone. Is it because this type of civilization is but for a day, that the habitations of men are built for a day also? Where do our architects get their inspiration, that they cut such fantastic capers in wood? ”

“ It is a way of pronouncing a benediction for the good received—not in empty words, but by a thoughtful and beneficent act. One has eaten of the fruit that another has planted, and he is glad; he will also plant that another may eat. Were that custom perpetuated the world over, evermore there would be fruit by the wayside. The highways and byways would not be cursed with barrenness and dust, but fringed with the mulberry and apple, with silent salutations for every weary traveler who would put forth his hand and eat. ”

“ The hills are brought nigh; all the houses seem to rise out of the desert, and along the water front the spars of shipping look like a forest which has been blasted by some devouring flame. It is certain that these forests will never sprout again; and there is such a dead look that, were it not for the little tugs going back and forth, one might imagine that all men had hastened away, and left the city to silence and the desert. But after nightfall the thousand lamps glorify the city; the blackened forest along the water front has faded out ”

“ The unclothed land going so near to barrenness shall surely be clothed upon in the coming spring-time. It is well now if one may lie down and dream that the heavens were studded for him alone; and that the west wind of autumn, bearing the perfume of a hundred orchards, comes to him from a land of eternal fruitage. Even now the young leaves are starting on the rose bushes; the period of second growth has already begun. The pear begins to blush under the rays of a September sun ”

“ Here the affluents of the Novarro River are drawn together like threads of lace; and the first trout stream leaps and eddies in the deep defiles on its way to the ocean. There is no use of fumbling in an outside pocket for fish-hooks. The stream has a fishy look; but that band of rancheria Indians, who have gone into summer camp on a sand-bar, will settle the trout question for the next ten miles. They pop their heads out of a round hole in one of the wigwams like prairie dogs, and seem to stand on their hind legs, with the others pendent, as if just going to bark. ”

“ The palm tree lifting up its fronded head in the desert, the great fir tree set against the ineffable azure of the heavens, the vine-clad hills, the serrated mountains which the frosts have canonized with their sealed and unsealed fountains, and all the gold and purple which touch the hills at even-tide—these are the rich ministries of nature. It may take art a thousand years to ripen even here. ”

“ There are dormant seasons—periods of infertility—when the chemistry of heaven and earth is needed to overcome this barrenness. The artist dreams and touches not the fresh canvas on his easel. The poet wanders aimlessly in wider pastures, content to see the bees come and go, and the lupins and wild poppies nod to each other on the hillside. It is the ruminant season, when it is needful that one should digest what has been stored up within. Doth not the land lying in summer fallow gain new fertility? ”

“ Teach him to love and cultivate a garden, and he is no longer a savage. The best thought and the best inspiration may come to one when all the gentler ministries of his garden wait upon him—when the soul of things is concurrent with his own, and bee and almond blossom, the rose, and the smallest song-sparrow in the tree-top, are revelators and instructors. ”

“ Later still, orioles, thrushes, robins, linnets, and a wild mockingbird without any name, go down not only to drink, but to lave in the waters. You may watch for days and months, but you will never see the hawk or the crow, or any unclean bird do this thing. But birds of song, which have neither hooked beaks nor talons, sprinkle themselves with purifying waters, and are innocent of all violence and blood. The spring is not only a tonic, but it serves to take the conceit out of a ponderous man who has been putting on the airs of Wisdom in the woods. ”

“ What ravages, too, are these new demons yet to commit upon the forests, as they go up and down the mountain sides with wheels of thunder and eyes of flame? Are all the trees of the woods to be offered up to these new idols of civilization?
All sounds are musical in the woods, and the far-off tinkling of a cow-bell is wondrously grateful to the ear. There is nothing marvelous in the sharpened senses of an Indian. ”

“ Did it ever occur to you that while women may be skillful fishers of men, and will even make them bite at the bare hook, they make the poorest trout fishers in the world? There is an awkward fling of the line, as if the first purpose was to scare every fish out of the water. There is a great doubt if any trout of the old school ever takes a bait thrown in by feminine hands; if indeed he is tempted into taking it, he makes off with it, and that is the last sign of him for that day. That last remark is uttered at some peril, if the most vehement feminine protest means anything serious. ”

“ A cow might survive; but you need not describe the fate of any man on whom such a force were expended. And seeing that so large a part of this world needs a healthy [57] kicking, more is the pity that there should have been such a needless expenditure of force. By what mental law are grand and ridiculous scenes associated together? I cannot summon the towering majesty of St. Helena, the golden ripple of the harvest fields, the receding valley, softened by the twilight, but ever in the foreground is this kicking milkmaid and that unfortunate cow. ”

“ This solitary ash by the fence is more lithe and graceful for its introduction to domestic life; and this wide-branching oak before the door, casting now its shadows aslant, made handsome obeisance to the earthquake, sweeping the ground with its lateral branches. Not a fracture of one of its elastic limbs; but that ancient stone chimney rumbled fearfully, and stood apart in moody isolation. When the dog abandons the civilized community and hears no human speech, he loses his bark. The lowest type of humanity has only a few guttural sounds. ”

“ For three months there had been a series of gentle transitions, and an undercurrent of pleasurable excitement as a door appeared in a new place, a window opened here and there, stairways were cut, and old pieces pushed off and new took their places. It seemed as if these transitions ought to be always going on, and therefore the most natural thing in the world that the carpenters should always be cutting or hammering that house. They might grow old and another set take their places, but there would always be some room to enlarge, or some want growing out of the exigencies of a new day. ”

“ The business of rejuvenation commences with lying down on the ground at night with the head due north, that the polar current may strike the weary brain first and gently charge the whole mortal system. The days of renewal may end by circumventing a two-pound trout, or with a long range rifle shooting at a running deer. But as no pilgrim ever reached the gates of Paradise with a pack on his back, so it is reasonably certain that heaven never came down to one who carried his burden into the wilderness in vacation. ”

“ If one could grasp the sweeter subtleties of Nature, he might find a gracious accord, a point of sympathetic contact, where the mellowness of the individual, the rich and generous juices of his nature, give a finer quality to the fruits of the trees which he has planted. Something may come back to him, also, in the aroma of the orchard, helping him by its fragrance to a gentler and more thoughtful life. ”

“ A symbol of evil may sometimes be the thing itself. It is a strange custom to mourn for lost friends by wearing black. What more natural interpretation than that the wearer also is dead? Whereas the "heathen" have hit upon a better symbol, wearing white for the loss of friends, signifying that they have entered into light, that the world itself is all luminous for the living.
Now that cat, the spirit and essence of darkness, the forerunner of diabolism, was true to the symbol. What did he do but leap over a high fence every morning and take from the inclosure the tenderest of spring chickens. ”

“ When the apples fall to the ground, in the still autumn day, it is as if they dropped from the opening heavens. Every one is the symbol of wisdom, and hath, in its malic acid, a subtile essence, which carries health to the morbid liver. And no individual is ever wise when that organ is in trouble, or, at least, he has an unhappy way of expressing his wisdom. From this sanitary point of view, it will accord with a healthy conscience if a little cider mill is set up under the wide-branching oak hard by. ”

“ The world is waiting for the man of condensation. Tell it in few words. If one can master this high eclecticism of thought and statement, I know of no more promising field for young men to-day than journalism. If one cannot, the potato field, in a season of blight, is quite as promising.
Without this broader culture for the journalist, there will be great danger that the exigencies of his work will make him a superficial man. The habit will grow upon him of touching merely the surface of things. He will come to think that, as his journal is only for the day, his errors are for the day also. ”

“ The wit and the poetry which ripen here are under the same sun which ripens the pomegranate and the citron. The grain and texture have always been better than that suggested by the coarser materialism without. It is little to him who is cutting his marble to the divinest form, that the whole city reeks with grime and smoke, and all its outlines are misshapen and ugly. It is little to poet or painter that sometimes the earth has only a single tint of gray, since he may also see in [246] contrast, what a transfigured glory there may be on mountain and on sea. ”

“ If the strawberries cost a dollar apiece, and the favorite horse has a trick of putting his heels up toward the stars, the chickens stagger about with the gapes, and the phylloxera browns the vineyard as if a subterranean fire had been burning at the roots, these touches of realism may chasten the expectations somewhat, and at the same time serve to plant the amateur farmer more firmly on his feet. It is a pity that the world could not be enriched by the experience of the gilt-edged farmer from the city. ”

“ But the depredations still go on, and you cannot convince the honest old house-servant that a black cat has ever been killed—and looking out into the garden just now, as that sleek black rascal lies in the grass, with a waving motion of his tail and his yellow eye fixed upon a callow brood, it is clearer than ever before that the succession of black cats is eternal. ”