The Ripples Curled Away In Our Wake, Like Ringlets From
The Head Of A Child, While We Steadily Held On Our Course, And
Under The Bows We Watched
"The swaying soft,
Made by the delicate wave parted in front,
As through the gentle element we move
Like shadows gliding through untroubled dreams."
The forms of beauty fall naturally around the path of him who is
in the performance of his proper work; as the curled shavings
drop from the plane, and borings cluster round the auger.
Undulation is the gentlest and most ideal of motions, produced by
one fluid falling on another. Rippling is a more graceful
flight. From a hill-top you may detect in it the wings of birds
endlessly repeated. The two _waving_ lines which represent the
flight of birds appear to have been copied from the ripple.
The trees made an admirable fence to the landscape, skirting the
horizon on every side. The single trees and the groves left
standing on the interval appeared naturally disposed, though the
farmer had consulted only his convenience, for he too falls into
the scheme of Nature. Art can never match the luxury and
superfluity of Nature. In the former all is seen; it cannot
afford concealed wealth, and is niggardly in comparison; but
Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us
still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots. In
swamps, where there is only here and there an ever-green tree
amid the quaking moss and cranberry beds, the bareness does not
suggest poverty. The single-spruce, which I had hardly noticed
in gardens, attracts me in such places, and now first I
understand why men try to make them grow about their houses. But
though there may be very perfect specimens in front-yard plots,
their beauty is for the most part ineffectual there, for there is
no such assurance of kindred wealth beneath and around them, to
make them show to advantage. As we have said, Nature is a
greater and more perfect art, the art of God; though, referred to
herself, she is genius; and there is a similarity between her
operations and man's art even in the details and trifles. When
the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the sun and water,
and the wind rubbing it against the shore, its boughs are worn
into fantastic shapes, and white and smooth, as if turned in a
lathe. Man's art has wisely imitated those forms into which all
matter is most inclined to run, as foliage and fruit. A hammock
swung in a grove assumes the exact form of a canoe, broader or
narrower, and higher or lower at the ends, as more or fewer
persons are in it, and it rolls in the air with the motion of the
body, like a canoe in the water. Our art leaves its shavings and
its dust about; her art exhibits itself even in the shavings and
the dust which we make.
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