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. She has perfected herself by an eternity
of practice. The world is well kept; no rubbish accumulates; the
morning air is clear even at this day, and no dust has settled on
the grass. Behold how the evening now steals over the fields,
the shadows of the trees creeping farther and farther into the
meadow, and erelong the stars will come to bathe in these retired
waters. Her undertakings are secure and never fail. If I were
awakened from a deep sleep, I should know which side of the
meridian the sun might be by the aspect of nature, and by the
chirp of the crickets, and yet no painter can paint this
difference. The landscape contains a thousand dials which
indicate the natural divisions of time, the shadows of a thousand
styles point to the hour.
"Not only o'er the dial's face,
This silent phantom day by day,
With slow, unseen, unceasing pace
Steals moments, months, and years away;
From hoary rock and aged tree,
From proud Palmyra's mouldering walls,
From Teneriffe, towering o'er the sea,
From every blade of grass it falls."
It is almost the only game which the trees play at, this
tit-for-tat, now this side in the sun, now that, the drama of the
day. In deep ravines under the eastern sides of cliffs, Night
forwardly plants her foot even at noonday, and as Day retreats
she steps into his trenches, skulking from tree to tree, from
fence to fence, until at last she sits in his citadel and draws
out her forces into the plain. It may be that the forenoon is
brighter than the afternoon, not only because of the greater
transparency of its atmosphere, but because we naturally look
most into the west, as forward into the day, and so in the
forenoon see the sunny side of things, but in the afternoon the
shadow of every tree.
The afternoon is now far advanced, and a fresh and leisurely wind
is blowing over the river, making long reaches of bright ripples.
The river has done its stint, and appears not to flow, but lie at
its length reflecting the light, and the haze over the woods is
like the inaudible panting, or rather the gentle perspiration of
resting nature, rising from a myriad of pores into the attenuated
atmosphere.
On the thirty-first day of March, one hundred and forty-two years
before this, probably about this time in the afternoon, there
were hurriedly paddling down this part of the river, between the
pine woods which then fringed these banks, two white women and a
boy, who had left an island at the mouth of the Contoocook before
daybreak. They were slightly clad for the season, in the English
fashion, and handled their paddles unskilfully, but with nervous
energy and determination, and at the bottom of their canoe lay
the still bleeding scalps of ten of the aborigines. They were
Hannah Dustan, and her nurse, Mary Neff, both of Haverhill,
eighteen miles from the mouth of this river, and an English boy,
named Samuel Lennardson, escaping from captivity among the
Indians. On the 15th of March previous, Hannah Dustan had been
compelled to rise from child-bed, and half dressed, with one foot
bare, accompanied by her nurse, commence an uncertain march, in
still inclement weather, through the snow and the wilderness.
She had seen her seven elder children flee with their father, but
knew not of their fate. She had seen her infant's brains dashed
out against an apple-tree, and had left her own and her
neighbors' dwellings in ashes. When she reached the wigwam of
her captor, situated on an island in the Merrimack, more than
twenty miles above where we now are, she had been told that she
and her nurse were soon to be taken to a distant Indian
settlement, and there made to run the gauntlet naked.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 92 of 113
Words from 93878 to 94891
of 116321
