"And what does she wantnow?" asks the flounder.
"Oh, she wants tovotenow," says the fisherman.
"Go home, and you shall find her with the ballot," sighs the flounder. "But has n't she Dustless-Dusters enough already?"
It would seem so. But once having got Adam, who can blame her for wanting an apple tree besides, or the ballot?
'T is no use to forbid her. Yes, she has you, but—but Eve had Adam, too, another perfect man! Don't forbid her, for she will have it anyhow. It may not turn out to be all that she thinks it is. But did you turn out to be all that she thought you were? She will have a bite of this new apple if she has to disobey, and die for it, because such disobedience and death are in answer to a higher command, and to a larger life from within. Eve's discovery that Adam was cheese-cloth, and her reaching out for something better, did not, as Satan promised, make us as God; but it did make us different from all the other animals in the Garden, placing us even above the angels,—so far above, as to bring us, apparently, by a new and divine descent, into Eden.
The hope of the race is in Eve,—in her making the best she can of Adam; in her clear understanding of his lame logic,—that herimperfections added to his perfections make the perfect Perfection; and in her reaching out beyond Adam for something more—for the ballot now.
If there is growth, if there is hope, if there is continuance, if there is immortality for the race and for the soul, it is to be found in this sure faith in the Ultimate, the Perfect, in this certain disappointment every time we think we have it; and in this abiding conviction that we are about to bring it home. But let a man settle down on perfection as a present possession, and that man is as good as dead already—even religiously dead, if he has possession of a perfect Salvation.
Now, "Sister Smith" claimed to possess Perfection—a perfect infallible book of revelations in her King James Version of the Scriptures, and she claimed to have lived by it, too, for eighty years. I was fresh from the theological school, and this was my first "charge." This was my first meal, too, in this new charge, at the home of one of the official brethren, with whom Sister Smith lived.
There was an ominous silence at the table for which I could hardly account—unless it had to do with the one empty chair. Then Sister Smith appeared and took the chair. The silence deepened. Then Sister Smith began to speak and everybody stopped eating. Brother Jones laid down his knife, Sister Jones dropped her hands into her lap until the thing should be over. Leaning far forward toward me across the table, her steady gray eyes boring through me, her long bony finger pointing beyond me into eternity, Sister Smith began with spaced and measured words:—
"My young Brother—what—do—you—think—of—Jonah?"
I reached for a doughnut, broke it, slowly, dipped it up and down in the cup of mustard and tried for time. Not a soul stirred. Not a word or sound broke the tense silence about the operating-table.
"What—do—you—think—of—Jonah?"
"Well, Sister Smith, I—"
"Never mind. Don't commit yourself. You needn't tell me what you think of Jonah. You—are—too—young—to—know—what—you—think—of—Jonah. But I will tell you whatIthink of Jonah: if the Scriptures had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, it would be just as easy to believe as it is that the whale swallowed Jonah."
"So it would, Sister Smith," I answered weakly, "just as easy."
"And now, my young Brother, you preach the Scriptures—the old genuine inspired Authorized Version, word for word, just as God spoke it!"
Sister Smith has gone to Heaven, but in spite of her theology. Dear old soul, she sent me many a loaf of her salt-rising bread after that, for she had as warm a heart as ever beat its brave way past eighty.
But she had neither a perfect Book, nor a perfect Creed, nor a perfect Salvation. She did not need them; nor could she have used them; for they would have posited a divine command to be perfect—a too difficult accomplishment for any of us, even for Sister Smith.
There is no such divine command laid upon us; but only such a divinely human need springing up within us, and reaching out for everything, in its deep desire, from dust-cloths dyed black to creeds of every color.
This is a life of imperfections, a world made of cheese-cloth, merely dyed black, and stamped in red letters—The Dustless-Duster. Yet a cheese-cloth world so dyed and stamped is better than a cloth-of-gold world, for the cloth-of-gold you would not want to dye nor to stamp with burning letters.
We have never found it,—this perfect thing,—and perhaps we never shall. But the desire, the search, the faith, must not fail us, as at times they seem to do. At times the very tides of the ocean seem to fail,—when the currents cease to run. Yet when they are at slack here, they are at flood on the other side of the world, turning already to pour back—
". . . lo, out of his plenty the seaPours fast; full soon the time of the flood-tide shall be--"
The faith cannot fail us—for long. Full soon the ebb-tide turns,
"And Belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know"
that there is perfection; that the desire for it is the breath of life; that the search for it is the hope of immortality.
But I know only in part. I see through a glass darkly, and I may be no nearer it now than when I started, yet the search has carried me far from that start. And if I never arrive, then, at least, I shall keep going on, which, in itself maybe the thing—the Perfect Thing that I am seeking.
Spring ploughing
Spring ploughing
"See-Saw, Margery Daw!Sold her bed and lay upon straw"
—the very worst thing, I used to think, that ever happened in Mother Goose. I might steal a pig, perhaps, like Tom the Piper's Son, but never would I do such a thing as Margery did; the dreadful picture of her nose and of that bottle in her hand made me sure of that. And yet—snore on, Margery!—I sold myploughand bought an automobile! As if an automobile would carry me
"To the island-valley of Avilion,"
where I should no longer need the touch of the soil and the slow simple task to heal me of my grievous wound!
Speed, distance, change—are these the cure for that old hurt we call living, the long dull ache of winter, the throbbing bitter-sweet pain of spring? We seek for something different, something not different but faster and still faster, to fill our eyes with flying, our ears with rushing, our skins with scurrying, our diaphragms, which are our souls, with the thrill of curves, and straight stretches, of lifts, and drops, and sudden halts—as of elevators, merry-go-rounds, chutes, scenic railways, aeroplanes, and heavy low-hung cars.
To go—up or down, or straight away—anyway, but round and round, and slowly—as if one could speed away from being, or ever travel beyond one's self! How pathetic to sell all that one has and buy an automobile! to shift one's grip from the handles of life to the wheel of change! to forsake the furrow for the highway, the rooted soil for the flying dust, the here for the there; imagining that somehow a car is more than a plough, that going is the last word in living—demountable rims and non-skid tires, the great gift of the God Mechanic, being the 1916 model of the wings of the soul!
But women must weep in spite of modern mechanics, and men must plough. Petroleum, with all of its by-products, cannot be served for bread. I have tried many substitutes for ploughing; and as for the automobile, I have driven that thousands of miles, driven it almost daily, summer and winter; but let the blackbirds return, let the chickweed start in the garden, then the very stones of the walls cry out—"Plough! plough!"
It is not the stones I hear, but the entombed voices of earlier primitive selves far back in my dim past; those, and the call of the boy I was yesterday, whose landside toes still turn in, perhaps, from walking in the furrow. When that call comes, no
"Towered cities please us thenAnd the busy hum of men,"
or of automobiles. I must plough. It is the April wind that wakes the call—
"Zephirus eek, with his sweetë breeth"--
and many hearing it long to "goon on pilgrimages," or to the Maine woods to fish, or, waiting until the 19th, to leave Boston by boat and go up and down the shore to see how fared their summer cottages during the winter storms; some even imagine they have malaria and long for bitters—as many men as many minds when
"The time of the singing of birds is comeAnd the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."
But as for me it is neither bitters, nor cottages, nor trout, nor
"ferne halwes couth in sondry landës"
that I long for: but simply for the soil, for the warming, stirring earth, for my mother. It is back to her breast I would go, back to the wide sweet fields, to the slow-moving team and the lines about my shoulder, to the even furrow rolling from the mould-board, to the taste of the soil, the sight of the sky, the sound of the robins and bluebirds and blackbirds, and the ringing notes of Highhole over the sunny fields.
I hold the plough as my only hold upon the earth, and as I follow through the fresh and fragrant furrow I am planted with every footstep, growing, budding, blooming into a spirit of the spring. I can catch the blackbirds ploughing, I can turn under with my furrow the laughter of the flowers, the very joy of the skies. But if I so much as turn in my tracks, the blackbirds scatter; if I shout, Highhole is silent; if I chase the breeze, it runs away; I might climb into the humming maples, might fill my hands with arbutus and bloodroot, might run and laugh aloud with the light; as if with feet I could overtake it, could catch it in my hands, and in my heart could hold it all—this living earth, shining sky, flowers, buds, voices, colors, odors—this spring!
But I can plough—while the blackbirds come close behind me in the furrow; and I can be the spring.
I could plough, I mean, when I had a plough. But I sold it for five dollars and bought a second-hand automobile for fifteen hundred—as everybody else has. So now I do as everybody else does,—borrow my neighbor's plough, or still worse, get my neighbor to do my ploughing, being still blessed with a neighbor so steadfast and simple as to possess a plough. But I must plough or my children's children will never live to have children,—they will have motor cars instead. The man who pulls down his barns and builds a garage is not planning for posterity. But perhaps it does not matter; for while we are purring cityward over the sleek and tarry roads, big hairy Finns are following the plough round and round our ancestral fields, planting children in the furrows, so that there shall be some one here when we have motored off to possess the land.
I see no way but to keep the automobile and buy another plough, not for my children's sake any more than for my own. There was an old man living in this house when I bought it who moved back into the city and took with him, among other things, a big grindstone and two long-handled hayforks—for crutches, did he think? and to keep a cutting edge on the scythe of his spirit as he mowed the cobblestones? When I am old and my children compel me to move back near the asylums and hospitals, I shall carry into the city with me a plough; and I shall pray the police to let me go every springtime to the Garden or the Common and there turn a few furrows as one whom still his mother comforteth.
It is only a few furrows that I now turn. A half-day and it is all over, all the land ploughed that I own,—all that the Lord intended should be tilled. A half-day—but every fallow field and patch of stubble within me has been turned up in that time, given over for the rain and sunshine to mellow and put into tender tilth.
No other labor, no other contact with the earth is like ploughing. You may play upon it, travel over it, delve into it, build your house down on it; but when you strike into the bosom of the fields with your ploughshare, wounding and healing as your feet follow deep in the long fresh cut, you feel the throbbing of the heart of life through the oaken handles as you never felt it before; you are conscious of a closer union,—dust with dust,—of a more mystical union,—spirit with spirit,—than any other approach, work, or rite, or ceremony, can give you. You move, but your feet seem to reach through and beyond the furrow like the roots of the oak tree; sun and air and soil are yours as if the blood in your veins were the flow of all sweet saps, oak and maple and willow, and your breath their bloom of green and garnet and gold.
And so, until I get a new plough and a horse to pull it, I shall hire my neighbor—hire him to drive the horses, while I hold in the plough! This is what I have come to!Hiringanother to skim my cream and share it! Let me handle both team and plough, a plough that guides itself, and a deep rich piece of bottom land, and a furrow,—a long straight furrow that curls and crests like a narrow wave and breaks evenly into the trough of the wave before.
But even with the hired plough, I am taking part in the making of spring; and more: I am planting me again as a tree, a bush, a mat of chickweed,—lowly, tiny, starry-flowered chickweed,—in the earth, whence, so long ago it sometimes seems, I was pulled up.
But the ploughing does more—more than root me as a weed. Ploughing is walking not by sight. A man believes, trusts, worships something he cannot see when he ploughs. It is an act of faith. In all time men have known andfearedGod; but there must have been a new and higher consciousness when they began to plough. They hunted and feared God and remained savage; they ploughed, trusted, and loved God—and became civilized.
Nothing more primitive than the plough have we brought with us out of our civilized past. In the furrow was civilization cradled, and there, if anywhere, shall it be interred.
You go forth unto your day's work, if you have land enough, until the Lord's appointed close; then homeward plod your weary way, leaving the world to the poets. Not yours
"The hairy gown, the mossy cell."
You have no need of them.
What more
"Of every star that Heaven doth shewAnd every hearb that sips the dew"
can the poet spell than all day long you havefelt? Has ever poet handled more of life than you? Has he ever gone deeper than the bottom of your furrow, or asked any larger faith than you of your field? Has he ever found anything sweeter or more satisfying than the wholesome toilsome round of the plough?
Mere beans
Mere beans
"God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it; he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited."—Isaiah.
"A farmer," said my neighbor, Joel Moore, with considerable finality, "has got to get all he can, and keep all he gets, or die."
"Yes," I replied with a fine platitude; "but he's got to give if he's going to get."
"Just so," he answered, his eye a-glitter with wrath as it traveled the trail of the fox across the dooryard; "just so, and I 'll go halves with the soil; but I never signed a lease to run this farm on shares with the varmints."
"Well," said I, "I 've come out from the city to run my farm on shares with the whole universe—fox and hawk, dry weather and wet, summer and winter. I believe there is a great deal more to farming than mere beans. I 'm going to raise birds and beasts as well. I 'm going to cultivate everything, from my stone-piles up to the stars."
He looked me over. I had not been long out from the city. Then he said, thinking doubtless of my stone-piles:—
"Professor, you 've bought a mighty rich piece of land. And it's just as you say; there's more to farmin' than beans. But, as I see it, beans are beans anyway you cook 'em; and I think, if I was you, I would hang on a while yet to my talkin' job in the city."
It was sound advice. I have a rich farm. I have raised beans that were beans, and I have raised birds, besides, and beasts,—a perfectly enormous crop of woodchucks; I have cultivated everything up to the stars; but I find it necessary to hang on a while yet to my talkin' job in the city.
Nevertheless, Joel is fundamentally wrong about the beans, for beans are not necessarily beans any way you cook them, nor are beans mere beans any way you grow them—not if I remember Thoreau and my extensive ministerial experience with bean suppers.
As for growing mere beans—listen to Thoreau. He is out in his patch at Walden.
"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans."
Who was it, do you suppose, that hoed? And, if not beans, what was it that he hoed? Well, poems for one thing, prose poems. If there is a more delightful chapter in American literature than that one in Walden on the bean-patch, I don't know which chapter it is. That patch was made to yield more than beans. The very stones were made to tinkle till their music sounded on the sky.
"AsIsee it, beans are beans," said Joel. And so they are, as he sees them.
Is not the commonplaceness, the humdrumness, the dead-levelness, of life largely a matter of individual vision, "as I see it"?
Take farm life, for instance, and how it is typified in my neighbor! how it is epitomized, too, and really explained in his "beans are beans"! He raises beans; she cooks beans; they eat beans. Life is pretty much all beans. If "beans are beans," why, how much more is life?
He runs his farm on halves with the soil, and there the sharing stops, and consequently there the returns stop. He gives to the soil and the soil gives back, thirty, sixty, an hundredfold. What if he should give to the skies as well?—to the wild life that dwells with him on his land?—to the wild flowers that bank his meadow brook?—to the trees that cover his pasture slopes? Would they, like the soil, give anything back?
Off against the sky to the south a succession of his rounded slopes shoulder their way from the woods out to where the road and the brook wind through. They cannot be tilled; the soil is too scant and gravelly; but they are lovely in their gentle forms, and still lovelier in their clumps of mingled cedars and gray birches, scattered dark and sharply pointed on the blue of the sky, and diffuse, and soft, and gleaming white against the hillside's green. I cannot help seeing them from my windows, cannot help lingering over them—could not, rather; for recently my neighbor (and there never was a better neighbor) sent a man over those hills with an axe, and piled the birches into cords of snowy firewood.
It was done. I could not help it, but in my grief I went over and spoke to him about it. He was sorry, and explained the case by saying,—
"Well, if there's one kind of tree I hate more than another, it's a gray birch."
We certainly need a rural uplift. We need an urban uplift, too, no doubt, for I suppose "beans are beans" in Boston, just as they are here in Hingham. But it does seem the more astonishing that in the country, where the very environment is poetry, where companionship with living things is constant, where even the labor of one's hands is coöperation with the divine forces of nature—the more astonishing, I say, that under these conditions life should so often be but bare existence, mere beans.
There are many causes for this, one of them being an unwillingness to share largely with the whole of nature. "I 'll go halves with the soil," said my neighbor; but he did not sign a lease to run his farm on shares with the "varmints," the fox, which stole his fine rooster, on this particular occasion.
But such a contract is absolutely necessary if one is to get out of farm life—out of any life—its flowers and fragrance, as well as its pods and beans. And, first, one must be convinced, must acknowledge to one's self, that the flower and fragrance are needed in life, are as useful as pods and beans. A row of sweet peas is as necessary on the farm as a patch of the best wrinkled variety in the garden.
But to come back to the fox.
Now, I have lived long enough, and I have had that fox steal roosters enough, to understand, even feel, my neighbor's wrath perfectly. I fully sympathize with him. What, then, you ask, of my sympathy for the fox?
At times, I must admit, the strain has been very great. More than once (three times, to be exact) I have fired at that same fox to kill. I have lost many a rooster, but those I have not lost are many, many more. Browned to a turn, and garnished with parsley, a rooster is almost a poem. So was that wild fox, the other morning, almost a poem, standing on the bare knoll here near the house, his form half-shrouded in the early mist, his keen ears pricked, his pointed nose turned toward the yard where the hens were waking up.
Something primitive, something wild and free and stirring, something furtive, crafty, cunning—the shadow of the dark primeval forest, at sight of him, fell across the glaring common-placeness of that whole tame day.
I will not ask, Was it worth the rooster? For that is too gross, too cheap a price to pay for a glimpse of wild life that set the dead nerves of the cave man in me thrilling with new life. Rather I would ask, Are such sights and thrills worth the deliberate purpose to have a woodlot, as well as a beanpatch and a henyard, on the farm?
Our American farm life needs new and better machinery, better methods, better buildings, better roads, better schools, better stock; but given all of these, and farm life must still continue to be earthy, material, mere beans—only more of them—until the farm is run on shares with all the universe around, until the farmer learns not only to reap the sunshine, but also to harvest the snow; learns to get a real and rich crop out of his landscape, his shy, wild neighbors, his independence and liberty, his various, difficult, yet strangely poetical, tasks.
But, if farm life tends constantly to become earthy, so does business life, and professional life—beans, all of it.
The farmers educated for mere efficiency, the merchants, the preachers, doctors, lawyers, educated for mere efficiency, are educated for mere beans? A great fortune, a great congregation, a great practice, a great farm crop, are one and all mere beans? Efficiency is not a whole education, nor meat a whole living, nor the worker the whole man.
And I said as much to Joel.
"Beans," I said, "must be raised. Much of life must be spent hoeing the beans. But I am going to ask myself: 'Is itmerebeans that I am hoeing? And is it thewholeof me that is hoeing the beans?'"
"Well," he replied, "you settle down on that farm of yours as I settled on mine, and I 'll tell you what answer you 'll get to them questions. There ain't no po'try about farmin'. God did n't intend there should be—as I see it."
"Now, that is n't the way I see it at all. This is God's earth,—and there could n't be a better one."
"Of course there could n't, but there was one once."
"When?" I asked, astonished.
"In the beginning."
"You mean the Garden of Eden?"
"Just that."
"Why, man, this earth, this farm of yours, is the Garden of Eden."
"But it says God drove him out of the Garden and, what's more, it says He made him farm for a livin', don't it?"
"That's what it says," I replied.
"Well, then, as I see it, that settles it, don't it? God puts a man on a farm when he ain't fit for anything else. 'Least, that's the way I see it. That's how I got here, I s'pose, and I s'pose that's why I stay here."
"But," said I, "there's another version of that farm story."
"Not in the Bible?" he asked, now beginning to edge away, for it was not often that I could get him so near to books as this. Let me talk books with Joel Moore and the talk lags. Farming and neighboring are Joel's strong points, not books. He is a general farmer and a kind of universal neighbor (that being his specialty); on neighborhood and farm topics his mind is admirably full and clear.
"That other version is in the Bible, right along with the one you've been citing—just before it in Genesis."
He faced me squarely, a light of confidence in his eye, a ring of certainty, not to say triumph, in his tones:—
"You 're sure of that, Professor?"
"Reasonably."
"Well, I 'm not a college man, but I 've read the Bible. Let's go in and take a look at Holy Writ on farmin',"—leading the way with alacrity into the house.
"My father was a great Bible man down in Maine," he went on. "Let me raise a curtain. This was his," pointing to an immense family Bible, with hand-wrought clasps, that lay beneath the plush family album, also clasped, on a frail little table in the middle of the parlor floor.
The daylight came darkly through the thick muslin draperies at the window and fell in a faint line across the floor. An oval frame of hair-flowers hung on the wall opposite me—a somber wreath of immortelles for the departed—ofthe departed—black, brown, auburn, and grizzled-gray, with one touch (a calla lily, I think) of the reddest hair I ever beheld. In one corner of the room stood a closed cabinet organ; behind me, a tall base-burner, polished till it seemed to light the dimmest corners of the room. There was no fire in the stove; there was no air in the room, only the mingled breath of soot and the hair-flowers and the plush album and the stuffed blue jay under the bell-jar on the mantelpiece, and the heavy brass-clasped Bible. There was no coffin in the room; but Joel took up the Bible and handed it to me as if we were having a funeral.
"Read me that other account of Adam's farm," he said; "I can't see without my specs."
In spite of a certain restraint of manner and evident uneasiness at the situation, he had something of boldness, even the condescension of the victor toward me. He was standing and looking down at me; yet he stood ill at ease by the table.
"Sit down, Joel," I said, assuming an authority in his house that I saw he could not quite feel.
"I can't; I 've got my overhalls on."
"Let us do all things decently and in order, Joel," I continued, touching the great Book reverently.
"But I never set in this room. My chair's out there in the kitchen."
I moved over to the window to get what light I could, Joel following me with furtive, sidelong glances, as if he saw ghosts in the dark corners.
"We keep this room mostly for funerals," he volunteered, in order to stir up talk and lay what of the silence and the ghosts he could.
"I 'll read your story of Adam's farming first," I said, and began: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth"—going on with the account of the dry, rainless world, and with no man to till the soil; then to the forming of Adam out of the dust, and the planting of Eden; of the rivers, of God's mistake in trying Adam alone in the Garden, of the rib made into Eve, of the prohibited tree, the snake, the wormy apple, the fall, the curse, the thorns—and how, in order to crown the curse and make it real, God drove the sinful pair forth from the Garden and condemned them to farm for a living.
"That's it," Joel muttered with a mourner's groan. "That's Holy Writ on farmin' asIunderstand it. Now, where's the other story?"
"Here it is," I answered, "but we 've got to have some fresh air and more light on it," rising as I spoke and reaching for the bolt on the front door. With a single quick jerk I had it back, and throwing myself forward, swung the door wide to the open sky, while Joel groaned again, and the big, rusty hinges thrice groaned at the surprise and shock of it. But the thing was done.
A flood of warm, sweet sunshine poured over us; a breeze, wild-rose-and-elder-laden, swept in out of the broad meadow that stretched from the very doorstep to a distant hill of pines, and through the air, like a shower in June, fell the notes of soaring, singing bobolinks.
Joel stood looking out over his farm with the eyes of a stark stranger. He had never seen it from the front door before. It was a new prospect.
"Let's sit here on the millstone step," I said, bringing the Bible out into the fresh air, "and I 'll read you something you never heard before," and I read,—laying the emphasis so as to render a new thing of the old story,—"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.
"And the evening and the morning were the first day."
Starting each new phase of the tale with "And God said," and bringing it to a close with "And God saw that it was good," I read on through the seas and dry land, the sun and stars, and all living things, to man and woman—"male and female created he them"—and in his own likeness, blessing them and crowning the blessing with saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth andsubdueit,"—farm for a living; rounding out the whole marvelous story with the sweet refrain: "And God saweverythingthat he had made, and behold it wasverygood.
"And the evening and the morning were the sixth day."
"Thus, Joel," I concluded, glancing at him as with opened eyes he looked out for the first time over his new meadow,—"thus, according to my belief, and not as you have been reading it, were the heavens and the earth finished and all the host of them."
He took the old book in his lap and sat silent with me for a while on the step. Then he said:—
"Nobody has got to the bottom of that book yet, have they? And it's true; it's all true. It's just accordin' as you see it. Do ye know what I'm going to do? I 'm going to buy one of them double-seated red swings and put it right out here under this sassafras tree, and Hannah and I are going to set in, and swing in it, and listen a little to them bobolinks."
A pilgrim from Dubuque
A pilgrim from Dubuque
It is a long road from anywhere to Mullein Hill, and only the rural postman and myself travel it at all frequently. The postman goes by, if he can, every weekday, somewhere between dawn and dark, the absolute uncertainty of his passing quite relieving the road of its wooded loneliness. I go back and forth somewhat regularly; now and then a neighbor takes this route to the village, and at rarer intervals an automobile speeds over the "roller coaster road"; but seldom does a stranger on foot appear so far from the beaten track. One who walks to Mullein Hill deserves and receives a welcome.
I may be carting gravel when he comes, as I was the day the Pilgrim from Dubuque arrived. Swinging the horses into the yard with their staggering load, I noticed him laboring up the Hill by the road in front. He stopped in the climb for a breathing spell,—a tall, erect old man in black, with soft, high-crowned hat, and about him something, even at the distance, that was—I don't know—unusual—old-fashioned—Presbyterian.
Dropping the lines, I went down to greet the stranger, though I saw he carried a big blue book under his arm. To my knowledge no book-agent had ever been seen on the Hill. But had I never seen one anywhere I should have known this man had not come to sell me a book. "More likely," I thought, "he has come to give me a book. We shall see." Yet I could not quite make him out, for while he was surely professional, he was not exactly clerical, in spite of a certain Scotch-Covenanter-something in his appearance. He had never preached at men, I knew, as instinctively as I knew he had never persuaded them with books or stocks or corner-lots in Lhassa. He had a fine, kindly face, that was singularly clear and simple, in which blent the shadows and sorrows of years with the serene and mellow light of good thoughts.
"Is this Mullein Hill?" he began, shifting the big blue copy of the "Edinburgh Review" from under his arm.
"You're on Mullein Hill," I replied, "and welcome."
"Is—are—you Dallas Lore—"
"Sharp?" I said, finishing for him. "Yes, sir, this is Dallas Lore Sharp, but these are not his over-alls—not yet; for they have never been washed and are about three sizes too large for him."
He looked at me, a little undone, I thought, disappointed, maybe, and a bit embarrassed at having been betrayed by overalls and rolled-up sleeves and shovels. He had not expected the overalls, not new ones, anyhow. And why are new overalls so terribly new and unwashed! Only a woman, only a man's wife, is fitted to buy his overalls, for she only is capable of allowing enough for shrinkage. To-day I was in my new pair, but not of them, not being able to get near enough to them for that.
"I am getting old," he went on quickly, his face clearing; "my perceptions are not so keen, nor my memory so quick as it used to be. I should have known that 'good writing must have a pre-literary existence as lived reality; the writing must be only the necessary accident of its being lived over again in thought'"—quoting verbatim, though I was slow in discovering it, from an essay of mine, published years before.
It was now my turn to allow for shrinkage. Had he learned this passage for the visit and applied it thus by chance? My face must have showed my wonder, my incredulity, indeed, for explaining himself he said,—
"I am a literary pilgrim, sir—"
"Who has surely lost his way," I ventured.
Then with a smile that made no more allowances necessary he assured me,—
"Oh, no, sir! I am quite at home in the hills of Hingham. I have been out at Concord for a few days, and am now on the main road from Concord to Dubuque. I am Mr. Kinnier, Dr. Kinnier, of Dubuque, Iowa, and"—releasing my hand—"let me see"—pausing as we reached the top of the hill, and looking about in search of something—"Ah, yes [to himself], there on the horizon they stand, those two village spires, 'those tapering steeples where they look up to worship toward the sky, and look down to scowl across the street'"—quoting again, word for word, from another of my essays. Then to me: "They are a little farther away and a little closer together than I expected to see them—too close [to himself again] for God to tell from which side of the street the prayers and praises come, mingling as they must in the air."
He said it with such thought-out conviction, such sweet sorrow, and with such relief that I began now to fear for what he might quote next andmissfrom the landscape. The spires were indeed there (may neither one of them now be struck by lightning!); but what a terrible memory the man has! Had he come from Dubuque to prove me—
The spires, however, seemed to satisfy him; he could steer by them; and to my great relief, he did not demand a chart to each of the wonders of Mullein Hill—my thirty-six woodchuck holes, etc., etc., nor ask, as John Burroughs did, for a sight of the fox that performed in one of my books somewhat after the manner of modernliteraryfoxes. Literary foxes! One or another of us watches this Hilltop day and night with a gun for literary foxes! I want no pilgrims from Dubuque, no naturalists from Woodchuck Lodge, poking into the landscape or under the stumps for spires and foxes and boa constrictors and things that they cannot find outside the book. I had often wondered what I would do if such visitors ever came. Details, I must confess, might on many pages be difficult to verify; but for some years now I have faithfully kept my four boys here in the woods to prove the reality of my main theme.
This morning, with heaps of gravel in the yard, the hilltop looked anything but like the green and fruitful mountain of the book, still less like a way station between anywhere andConcord! And as for myself—it was no wonder he said to me,—
"Now, sir, please go on with your teaming. I ken the lay of the land about Mullein Hill
"'Whether the simmer kindly warmsWi' life and light,Or winter howls in gusty stormsThe lang, dark night.'"
But I did not go on with the teaming. Gravel is a thing that will wait. Here it lies where it was dumped by the glaciers of the Ice Age. There was no hurry about it; whereas pilgrims and poets from Dubuque must be stopped as they pass. So we sat down and talked—of books and men, of poems and places, but mostly of books,—books I had written, and other books—great books "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns." Then we walked—over the ridges, down to the meadow and the stream, and up through the orchard, still talking of books, my strange visitor, whether the books were prose or poetry, catching up the volume somewhere with a favorite passage, and going on—reading on—from memory, line after line, pausing only to repeat some exquisite turn, or to comment upon some happy thought.
Not one book was he giving me, but many. The tiny leather-bound copy of Burns that he drew from his coat pocket he did not give me, however, but fondly holding it in his hands said:—
"It was my mother's. She always read to us out of it. She knew every line of it by heart as I do.
"'Some books are lies frae end to end'—
but this is no one of them. I have carried it these many years."
Our walk brought us back to the house and into the cool living-room where a few sticks were burning on the hearth. Taking one of the rocking-chairs before the fireplace, the Pilgrim sat for a time looking into the blaze. Then he began to rock gently back and forth, his eyes fixed upon the fire, quite forgetful evidently of my presence, and while he rocked his lips moved as, half audibly, he began to speak with some one—not with me—with some one invisible to me who had come to him out of the flame. I listened as he spoke, but it was a language that I could not understand.
Then remembering where he was he turned to me and said, his eyes going back again beyond the fire,—
"She often comes to me like this; but I am very lonely since she left me,—lonely—lonely—and so I came on to Concord to visit Thoreau's grave."
And this too was language I could not understand. I watched him in silence, wondering what was behind his visit to me.
"Thoreau was a lonely man," he went on, "as most writers are, I think, but Thoreau was very lonely."
"Wild," Burroughs had called him; "irritating," I had called him; and on the table beside the Pilgrim lay even then a letter from Mr. Burroughs, in which he had taken me to task on behalf of Thoreau.
"I feel like scolding you a little," ran the letter, "for disparaging Thoreau for my benefit. Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be more human, but he is certainly more divine. His moral and ethical value I think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot approach."
There was something queer in this. Why had I not understood Thoreau? Wild he surely was, and irritating too, because of a certain strain and self-consciousness. A "counter-irritant" he called himself. Was this not true?
As if in answer to my question, as if to explain his coming out to Mullein Hill, the Pilgrim drew forth a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and without opening it or looking at it, said:—
"I wrote it the other day beside Thoreau's grave. You love your Thoreau—you will understand."
And then in a low, thrilling voice, timed as to some solemn chant, he began, the paper still folded in his hands:—
"A lonely wand'rer stands beside the stoneThat marks the grave where Thoreau's ashes lie;An object more revered than monarch's throne,Or pyramids beneath Egyptian sky.
"He turned his feet from common ways of men,And forward went, nor backward looked around;Sought truth and beauty in the forest glen,And in each opening flower glory found.
"He paced the woodland paths in rain and sun;With joyous thrill he viewed the season's sign;And in the murmur of the meadow runWith raptured ear he heard a voice divine.
"Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on.It lit his path on plain and mountain height,In wooded glade and on the flow'ry lawn--Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light.
"Close by the hoary birch and swaying pineTo Nature's voice he bent a willing ear;And there remote from men he made his shrine,Her face to see, her many tongues to hear.
"The robin piped his morning song for him;The wild crab there exhaled its rathe perfume;The loon laughed loud and by the river's brimThe water willow waved its verdant plume.
"For him the squirrels gamboled in the pines,And through the pane the morning sunbeams glanced;The zephyrs gently stirred his climbing vinesAnd on his floor the evening shadows danced.
"To him the earth was all a fruitful field.He saw no barren waste, no fallow land;The swamps and mountain tops would harvests yield;And Nature's stores he garnered on the strand.
"There the essential facts of life he found.The full ripe grain he winnowed from the chaff;And in the pine tree,--rent by lightning round,He saw God's hand and read his autograph.
"Against the fixed and complex ways of lifeHis earnest, transcendental soul rebelled;And chose the path that shunned the wasted strife,Ignored the sham, and simple life upheld.
"Men met him, looked and passed, but knew him not,And critics scoffed and deemed him not a seer.He lives, and scoff and critic are forgot;We feel his presence and his words we hear.
"He passed without regret,--oft had his breathBequeathed again to earth his mortal clay,Believing that the darkened night of deathIs but the dawning of eternal day."
The chanting voice died away and—the woods were still. The deep waters of Walden darkened in the long shadows of the trees that were reaching out across the pond. Evening was close at hand. Would the veery sing again? Or was it the faint, sweet music of the bells of Lincoln, Acton, and Concord that I heard, humming in the pine needles outside the window, as if they were the strings of a harp?
The chanting voice died away and—the room was still; but I seem to hear that voice every time I open the pages of "The Week" or "Walden." And the other day, as I stood on the shores of the pond, adding my stone to the cairn where the cabin used to stand, a woodthrush off in the trees (trees that have grown great since Thoreau last looked upon them), began to chant—or was it the Pilgrim from Dubuque?—
"Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on.It lit his path on plain and mountain height,In wooded glade and on the flow'ry lawn--Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light."