We Are Apt Enough To Be Pleased With Such Books As Evelyn's
Sylva, Acetarium, And Kalendarium Hortense, But They Imply A
Relaxed Nerve In The Reader.
Gardening is civil and social, but
it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.
There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything
else, until civilization becomes pathetic.
A highly cultivated
man, - all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are
but good manners! The young pines springing up in the cornfields
from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. We talk of
civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his
improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim
forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods,
and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society
with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our
saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius,
dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light
of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and
short-lived blaze of candles. The Society-Islanders had their
day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be "of equal
antiquity with the _atua fauau po_, or night-born gods." It is
true, there are the innocent pleasures of country life, and it is
sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her increase, and
gather the fruits in their season, but the heroic spirit will not
fail to dream of remoter retirements and more rugged paths. It
will have its garden-plots and its _parterres_ elsewhere than on
the earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its
subsistence, or orchard fruits with such heedlessness as berries.
We would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the
horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the
buffalo. The Indian's intercourse with Nature is at least such
as admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is
somewhat of a stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of
a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul in the latter's
closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in the
former's distance. In civilization, as in a southern latitude,
man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more
northern tribes,
"Some nation yet shut in
With hills of ice."
There are other, savager, and more primeval aspects of nature
than our poets have sung. It is only white man's poetry. Homer
and Ossian even can never revive in London or Boston. And yet
behold how these cities are refreshed by the mere tradition, or
the imperfectly transmitted fragrance and flavor of these wild
fruits. If we could listen but for an instant to the chant of the
Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his
savageness for civilization. Nations are not whimsical. Steel
and blankets are strong temptations; but the Indian does well to
continue Indian.
After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have
been out early on a foggy morning, and heard the cry of an owl in
a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored
by science or by literature. None of the feathered race has yet
realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. I had
seen the red Election-bird brought from their recesses on my
comrades' string, and fancied that their plumage would assume
stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in
proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude
of the forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wilderness
tints on any poet's string.
These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as
those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of
husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and
honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval
with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented.
We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though
the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and
taught. According to Gower, -
"And Iadahel, as saith the boke,
Firste made nette, and fishes toke.
Of huntyng eke he fond the chace,
Whiche nowe is knowe in many place;
A tent of clothe, with corde and stake,
He sette up first, and did it make."
Also, Lydgate says: -
"Jason first sayled, in story it is tolde,
Toward Colchos, to wynne the flees of golde,
Ceres the Goddess fond first the tilthe of londe;
* * * * *
Also, Aristeus fonde first the usage
Of mylke, and cruddis, and of honey swote;
Peryodes, for grete avauntage,
From flyntes smote fuyre, daryng in the roote."
We read that Aristeus "obtained of Jupiter and Neptune, that the
pestilential heat of the dog-days, wherein was great mortality,
should be mitigated with wind." This is one of those dateless
benefits conferred on man, which have no record in our vulgar
day, though we still find some similitude to them in our dreams,
in which we have a more liberal and juster apprehension of
things, unconstrained by habit, which is then in some measure put
off, and divested of memory, which we call history.
According to fable, when the island of AEgina was depopulated by
sickness, at the instance of AEacus, Jupiter turned the ants into
men, that is, as some think, he made men of the inhabitants who
lived meanly like ants. This is perhaps the fullest history of
those early days extant.
The fable which is naturally and truly composed, so as to satisfy
the imagination, ere it addresses the understanding, beautiful
though strange as a wild-flower, is to the wise man an apothegm,
and admits of his most generous interpretation. When we read
that Bacchus made the Tyrrhenian mariners mad, so that they leapt
into the sea, mistaking it for a meadow full of flowers, and so
became dolphins, we are not concerned about the historical truth
of this, but rather a higher poetical truth.
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