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Nature Essays
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"Autumnal Tints," published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862 (posthumously)
[read the whole essay]
I think that the change to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a late and perfect maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits.
But I am more interested in the rosy cheek than I am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on. The very forest and herbage, the pellicle of the earth, must acquire a bright color, an evidence of its ripeness, -- as if the globe itself were a fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the sun.
Flowers are but colored leaves, fruits but ripe ones.
Our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its phenomena, color, mellowness, and perfectness, to the fruits which we eat, and we are wont to forget that an immense harvest which we do not eat, hardly use at all, is annually ripened by Nature.
October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world.
We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be seen at this season of the year.
What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the Poke! I confess that it excites me to behold them.
To walk amid these upright, branching casks of purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a privilege! For Nature's vintage is not confined to the vine.
A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have cut many tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to his cattle for years. Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he may be overcome by their beauty.
Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it stands in vain!
Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised. Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid.
Who can doubt that these grasses, which the farmers says are of no account to him, find some compensation in your appreciation of them?
How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape?
A single tree becomes thus the crowning beauty of some meadowy vale, and the expression of the whole surrounding forest is at oncec more spirited for it.
One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing.
I do not see what the Puritans did at this season, when the Maples blaze out in scarlet. They certainly could not have worshipped in groves then. Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round with horse-sheds for.
[The elm] leaves are perfectly ripe. I wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them.
On causeways I go by trees here and there all bare and smoke-like, having lost their brilliant clothing; but there it lies, nearly as bright as ever, on the ground on one side, and making nearly as regular a figure as lately on the tree.
A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant trees have spread their bright cloaks in the mud. I see wagons roll over them as a shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just as little as they did their shadows before.
I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with the leaves of the Golden Willow under which it is moored, and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I empty it, it will be full again to-morrow.
How they are mixed up, of all species, Oak and Maple and Chestnut and Birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all.
The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf's thickness to the depth of the soil.
I am more interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens. It keeps our homestead in good heart.
They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decary at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.
One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe, -- with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.
When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs.
Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October spendor; though I doubt whether this is ever considered by the "Tree Society."
What School of Design can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these autumnal colors.
The stationer's envelopes may be of very various tints, yet, not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree.
If you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have only to look farther within or without the tree or the wood. These leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they are dyed in light of intinitely various degrees of strength, and left to set and dry there.
I do not see why, since America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors; and indeed, I believe that in course of time the names of some of our trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular chromatic nomenclature.
This October festival costs no powder, nor ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags are waving.
Nature herself holds her annual fair in October, not only in the streets, but in every hollow and on every hill-side.
No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October.
We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery, -- flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read, -- while we walk under the triumphal arches of the Elms.
A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town-clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.
Of course, there is not a picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as is the western view at sunset under the Elms of our main street. They are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them.
A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering prospects to keep off melanchoy and superstition.
Show me two villages, one empowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers.
Verily these Maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which preach their half-century, and century, ay, and century-and-a-half sermons, with constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering to many generations of men; and the least we can do is to supply them with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm.
If I were a drawing master, I would set my pupils to copying these [oak] leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully.
[T]his [oak] leaf reminds me of some fair wild island in the ocean, whose extensive coast, alternate rounded bays with smooth strands, and sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habituation of man, and destined to become a centre of civilization at last.
Indeed, without the evergreens for contrast, the autumnal tints would lose much of their effect.
We have only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole forest as a garden.
Why not take more elevated and broader views, walk in the great garden, not skulk in a little "debauched" nook of it? Consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few impounded herbs?
Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills.
Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly.
There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, -- not a grain more.
We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, -- and then we can hardly see anything else.
A man sees only what concerns him.
How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!
When you come to observe faithfully the changes of each humblest plant, you find that each has, sooner or later, its peculiar autumnal tint; and if you undertake to make a complete list of the bright tints, it will be nearly as long as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.
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"Natural History of Massachusetts," published in The Dial in July 1842
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Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading.
In society you will not find health, but in nature. … Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so.
Surely joy is the condition of life.
Science is always brave; for to know is to know good; doubt and danger quail before her eye.
Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
At length the summer's eternity is ushered in by the cackle of the flicker among the oaks on the hillside, and a new dynasty begins with calm security.
I have seen it suggested somewhere that the crow was brought to this country by the white man; but I shall as soon believe that the white man planted these pines and hemlocks.
I am affected by the sight of the cabins of the muskrat, made of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet along the river, as when I read of the barrows of Asia.
The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have disappeared; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than formerly.
I tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps I have started, with a tiptoe of expectation as if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood …
I am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook.
Next to nature, it seems as if a man's actions were the most natural, they so gently accord with her.
I am particularly atttracted by the motions of the serpent tribe. They make our hands and feet, the wings of the bird, and the fins of the fish seem very superfluous, as if Nature had only indulged her fancy in making them.
Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children.
When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.
Bring a spray from the wood, or a crystal from the brook, and place it on your mantel, and your household ornaments will seem plebian beside its nobler fashion and bearing.
Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and extravagance of genius.
Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.
The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.
Wisdom does not inspect, but behold.
We must look a long time before we can see.
Slow are the beginnings of philosophy.
We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
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"Night and Moonlight," published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1863 (posthumously)
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I shall be a benefactor, if I conquer some realms from the night, if I report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season worthy of their attention, -- if I can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep, -- if I add to the domains of poetry.
Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.
What if one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions, -- so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have not used her?
But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends to us, but also by her influence on the earth and its inhabitants.
Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a very different season.
In the night the eyes are partly closed, or retire into the head. Other senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell.
The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show.
It does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very important to the traveler, whether the moon shines brightly or is obscured.
How insupportable would be the days, if the night, with its dews and darkness, did not come to restore the drooping world!
Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!
Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn? -- to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.
Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue, and not black; for we see through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day, where the sunbeams are reveling.
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"The Succession of Forest Trees," published in The New-York Weekly Tribune, 1860
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But I think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler.
Let me lead you back into your wood-lots again.
When, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a forest springs up naturally where none of its kind grew before, I do not hesitate to say, though in some quarters it still may sound paradoxical, that it came from a seed.
The lighter seeds, as those of pine and maples, are transported chiefly by wind and water; the heavier, as acorns and nuts, by animals.
There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.
Eating cherries is a bird-like employment, and unless we disperse the seeds occasionally, as they do, I shall think that the birds have the best right to them.
…Nature can persuade us to do almost anything when she would compass her ends.
I have no time to go into details, but will say, in a word, that while the wind is conveying the seeds of pines into hard woods and open lands, the squirrels and other animals are conveying the seeds of oaks and walnuts into the pine woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept up.
[Nature] is all the while planting the oaks amid the pines without our knowledge, and at last, instead of government officers, we send a party of woodchoppers to cut down the pines, and so rescue an oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped from the skies.
Nature knows how to pack [chestnuts] best.
In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know it.
So, when we experiment in planting forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does. Would it not be well to consult with Nature in the outset? For she is the most extensive and experienced planter of us all, not excepting the Dukes of Athol.
In short, they who have not attended particularly to this subject are but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed, especially in the fall, in collecting, and so disseminating and planting, the seeds of trees.
The ground looks like a platform before a grocery, where the gossips of the village sit to crack nuts and less savory jokes. You have come, you would say, after the feast was over, and are presented with the shells only.
…in all these cases, as I have said, the consumer is compelled to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and this is the tax which he pays to Nature. I think it is Linnaeus who says that while the swine is rooting for acorns he is planting acorns.
Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed, -- a, to me, equally mysterious origin for it. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
You have but little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these American days.
Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents …
Yet farmers' sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love darkness rather than light.
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"A Walk to Wachusett," published in The Boston Miscellany, 1843
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But special I remember thee, Wachusett, who like me Standest alone without society.
It was solitude with light; which is better than darkness.
So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.
Their tongues had a more generous accent than ours, as if breath was cheaper where they wagged.
[W]e read Virgil mainly to be reminded of the identity of human nature in all ages, and, by the poet's own account, we are both the children of a late age, and live equally under the reign of Jupiter.
The old world stands serenely behind the new, as one mountain yonder towers behind another, more dim and distant.
The air lay lifeless between the hills, as in a seething caldron, with no leaf stirring, and instead of the fresh odor of grass and clover, with which we had before been regaled, the dry scent of every herb seemed merely medicinal.
When the first inroad has been made, a few acres leveled, and a few houses erected, the forest looks wilder than ever.
Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had conceled with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.
Let [the town] recline on its own everlasting hills, and not be looking out from their summits for some petty Boston or New York in the horizon.
It is but nineteen hundred feet above the village of Princeton, and three thousand above the level of the sea; but by this slight elevation it is inifinitely removed from the plain, and when we reached it we felt a sense of remoteness, as if we had traveled into distant regions, to Arabia Petraea, or the farthest East.
Our eyes rested on no painted ceiling nor carpeted hall, but on skies of Nature's painting, and hills and forests of her embroidery.
It was a place where gods might wander, so solemn and solitary, and removed from all contagion with the plain.
[T]here was the moon still above us, with Jupiter and Saturn on either hand, looking down on Wachusett, and it was a satisfaction to know that they were our fellow-travelers still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny.
Truly the stars were given for a consolation to man. We should not know but our life were fated to be always groveling, but it is permitted to behold them, and surely they are deserving of a fair destiny.
When the dawn had reached its prime, we enjoyed the view of a distinct horizon line, and could fancy ourselves at sea, and the distant hills the waves in the horizon, as seen from the deck of a vessel.
[W]e began to realize the extent of the view, and how the earth, in some degree, answered to the heavens in breadth, the white villages to the constellations in the sky.
Wachusett is, in fact, the observatory of the State. There lay Massachusetts, spread out before us in its length and breadth, like a map.
We could at length realize the place mountains occupy on the land, and how they come into the general scheme of the universe.
A mountain chain determines many things for the statesman and philosopher. The improvements of civilization rather creep along its sides than cross its summit.
We do not imagine the sun shining on hill and valley during Philip's war, nor on the war-path of Paugus, or Standish, or Church, or Lovell, with serene summer weather, but a dim twilight or night did those events transpire in. They must have fought in the shade of their own dusky deeds.
There is, however, this consolation to the most way-worn traveler, upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of human life, -- now climbing the hills, now descending into the vales.
[W]e could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume always a crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.
[T]here is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.
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"Walking," published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862 (posthumously)
[read the whole essay]
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil -- to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks -- who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering…
For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.
Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps.
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again -- if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man -- then you are ready for a walk.
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least -- and it is commonly more than that -- sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together.
How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all.
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.
In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.
In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.
Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all -- I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.
In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.
Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead.
If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.
To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.
I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me.
It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither …
… I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me.
Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness.
I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.
We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.
Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and if I were a broker, I should probably take that disturbance into account.
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him.
[The sun] is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.
If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar.
For I believe that climate does thus react on man -- as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influence?
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.
Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it.
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.
I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village.
When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum.
A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds.
To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man.
A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.
Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself -- and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past -- as it is to some extent a fiction of the present -- the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.
The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.
In short, all good things are wild and free.
Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones.
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.
It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.
We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.
Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated …
What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful -- while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.
Which is the best man to deal with -- he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.
The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.
It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories, how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we have had.
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature.
The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.
So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste -- sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill -- and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on.
Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.
So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.
~~~~~
"Wild Apples," published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862 (posthumously)
[read the whole essay]
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.
…when man migrates, he carries with him not only his birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sward, but his orchard also.
Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell in the shops.
A week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens, especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price, and without robbing anybody.
When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it.
Though he gets out from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, I see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core are going to market.
Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. That should be the "going" price of apples.
Most fruits which we prize and use depend entirely on our care. Corn and grain, potatoes, peaches, melons, etc., depend altogether on our planting; but the apple emulates man's independence and enterprise.
Nevertheless, our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock.
The cows continue to browse [young apple trees] thus for twenty years or more, keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy; for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph.
Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its hourglass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.
It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should trim young apple trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes. The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the right height, I think.
We have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more and more memorable varieties than both of them.
Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise.
What a lesson to man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit from which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, send a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth.
Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men.
Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.
All apples are good in November. Those which the farmer leaves out as unsalable and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets are choicest fruit to the walker.
But it is remarkable that the wild apple, which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste.
The Saunterer's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. The palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and demands a tamed one; for there you miss the November air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with.
But perchance, when I take [a wild apple] out of my desk and taste it in my chamber, I find it unexpectedly crude, -- sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream.
These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit. They must be eaten in season accordingly, -- this is, out-of-doors.
The outdoor air and exercise which the walker gets give a different tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh and crabbed.
What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labeled, "To be eaten in the wind."
They who are at work abroad are not cold, but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses.
Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses, papillae firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily flattened and tamed.
From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.
Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!
It is rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere.
Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair, -- apples not of Discord, but of Concord!
But like shells and pebbles on the seashore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the house.
Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the lingua vernacula flag.
Let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang.
What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid south, to this fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north?
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!
~~~~~
"A Winter Walk," published in The Dial, October 1843
[read the whole essay]
Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.
A cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it …
What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day, when the meadow mice come out by the wall-sides, and the chickadee lisps in the defiles of the wood?
[I]n the coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth.
What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?
Standing quite alone, far in the forest, while the wind is shaking down snow from the trees, and leaving the only human tracks behind us, we find our reflections of a richer variety than the life of cities.
The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions.
The river flows in the rear of the towns, and we see all things from a new and wilder side.
In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in their natural order and position.
The snow levels all things, and infolds them deeper in the bosom of nature, as, in the slow summer, vegetation creeps up to the entablature of the temple, and the turrets of the castle, and helps her to prevail over art.
In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends.
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