Now, A Girl Will Some
Times; But Even Then It's Instantaneous, - Comes An Goes Like The
Sunset.
As for me," still speaking of scenery, "these mountains
about here, that I see every day, are no more to me, in one sense,
than a man's farm is to him.
What mostly interests me now is when I
see some new freak or shape in the face of Nature."
In literature it may be said that Old Phelps prefers the best in the
very limited range that has been open to him. Tennyson is his
favorite among poets an affinity explained by the fact that they are
both lotos-eaters. Speaking of a lecture-room talk of Mr. Beecher's
which he had read, he said, "It filled my cup about as full as I
callerlate to have it: there was a good deal of truth in it, and some
poetry; waal, and a little spice, too. We've got to have the spice,
you know." He admired, for different reasons, a lecture by Greeley
that he once heard, into which so much knowledge of various kinds was
crowded that he said he "made a reg'lar gobble of it." He was not
without discrimination, which he exercised upon the local preaching
when nothing better offered. Of one sermon he said, "The man began
way back at the creation, and just preached right along down; and he
didn't say nothing, after all. It just seemed to me as if he was
tryin' to git up a kind of a fix-up."
Old Phelps used words sometimes like algebraic signs, and had a habit
of making one do duty for a season together for all occasions.
"Speckerlation" and "callerlation" and "fix-up" are specimens of
words that were prolific in expression. An unusual expression, or an
unusual article, would be charactcrized as a "kind of a scientific
literary git-up."
"What is the program for tomorrow?" I once asked him. "Waal, I
callerlate, if they rig up the callerlation they callerlate on, we'll
go to the Boreas." Starting out for a day's tramp in the woods, he
would ask whether we wanted to take a "reg'lar walk, or a random
scoot," - the latter being a plunge into the pathless forest. When he
was on such an expedition, and became entangled in dense brush, and
maybe a network of "slash" and swamp, he was like an old wizard, as
he looked here and there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or
withdrawing from a thicket, and muttering to himself, "There ain't no
speckerlation there." And when the way became altogether
inscrutable, - "Waal, this is a reg'lar random scoot of a rigmarole."
As some one remarked, "The dictionary in his hands is like clay in
the hands of the potter." "A petrifaction was a kind of a hard-wood
chemical git-up."
There is no conceit, we are apt to say, like that born of isolation
from the world, and there are no such conceited people as those who
have lived all their lives in the woods. Phelps was, however,
unsophisticated in his until the advent of strangers into his life,
who brought in literature and various other disturbing influences. I
am sorry to say that the effect has been to take off something of the
bloom of his simplicity, and to elevate him into an oracle. I
suppose this is inevitable as soon as one goes into print; and Phelps
has gone into print in the local papers. He has been bitten with the
literary "git up." Justly regarding most of the Adirondack
literature as a "perfect fizzle," he has himself projected a work,
and written much on the natural history of his region. Long ago he
made a large map of the mountain country; and, until recent surveys,
it was the only one that could lay any claim to accuracy. His
history is no doubt original in form, and unconventional in
expression. Like most of the writers of the seventeenth century, and
the court ladies and gentlemen of the eighteenth century, he is an
independent speller. Writing of his work on the Adirondacks, he
says, "If I should ever live to get this wonderful thing written, I
expect it will show one thing, if no more; and that is, that every
thing has an opposite. I expect to show in this that literature has
an opposite, if I do not show any thing els. We could not enjoy the
blessings and happiness of riteousness if we did not know innicuty
was in the world: in fact, there would be no riteousness without
innicuty." Writing also of his great enjoyment of being in the
woods, especially since he has had the society there of some people
he names, he adds, "And since I have Literature, Siance, and Art all
spread about on the green moss of the mountain woods or the gravell
banks of a cristle stream, it seems like finding roses, honeysuckels,
and violets on a crisp brown cliff in December. You know I don't
believe much in the religion of seramony; but any riteous thing that
has life and spirit in it is food for me." I must not neglect to
mention an essay, continued in several numbers of his local paper, on
"The Growth of the Tree," in which he demolishes the theory of Mr.
Greeley, whom he calls "one of the best vegetable philosophers,"
about "growth without seed." He treats of the office of sap: "All
trees have some kind of sap and some kind of operation of sap flowing
in their season," the dissemination of seeds, the processes of
growth, the power of healing wounds, the proportion of roots to
branches, &c. Speaking of the latter, he says, "I have thought it
would be one of the greatest curiosities on earth to see a thrifty
growing maple or elm, that had grown on a deep soil interval to be
two feet in diameter, to be raised clear into the air with every root
and fibre down to the minutest thread, all entirely cleared of soil,
so that every particle could be seen in its natural position.
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