snakeroot, violets, Solomon’s seal, clematis, sweet balm, bloodroot
mint, (great plenty,) swamp magnolia, wild geranium, milk-weed, wild heliotrope, wild daisy, (plenty,) burdock, wild chrysanthemum.
A CIVILITY TOO LONG NEGLECTED
The foregoing reminds me of something.
As the individualities I would mainly portray have certainly been slighted by folks who make pictures, volumes, poems, out of them–as a faint testimonial of my own gratitude for many hours of peace and comfort in half-sickness, (and not by any means sure but they will somehow get wind of the compliment,) I hereby dedicate the last half of these Specimen Days to the
bees, glow-worms, (swarming millions black-birds, of them indescribably dragon-flies, strange and beautiful at night pond-turtles, over the pond and creek,) mulleins, tansy, peppermint, water-snakes, moths, (great and little, some crows, splendid fellows,) millers,
mosquitoes, cedars,
butterflies, tulip-trees, (and all other trees,) wasps and hornets, and to the spots and memories cat-birds, (and all other birds,) of those days, and the creek.
DELAWARE RIVER–DAYS AND NIGHTS
_April 5, 1879_.-With the return of spring to the skies, airs, waters of the Delaware, return the sea-gulls. I never tire of watching their broad and easy flight, in spirals, or as they oscillate with slow unflapping wings, or look down with curved beak, or dipping to the water after food. The crows, plenty enough all through the winter, have vanish’d with the ice. Not one of them now to be seen. The steamboats have again come forth–bustling up, handsome, freshly painted, for summer work–the Columbia, the Edwin Forrest, (the Republic not yet out,) the Reybold, Nelly White, the Twilight, the Ariel, the Warner, the Perry, the Taggart, the Jersey Blue–even the hulky old Trenton–not forgetting those saucy little bull-pups of the current, the steamtugs.
But let me bunch and catalogue the affair–the river itself, all the way from the sea–Cape island on one side and Henlopen light on the other–up the broad bay north, and so to Philadelphia, and on further to Trenton;–the sights I am most familiar with, (as I live a good part of the time in Camden, I view matters from that outlook)–the great arrogant, black, full-freighted ocean steamers, inward or outward bound–the ample width here between the two cities, intersected by Windmill island–an occasional man-of-war, sometimes a foreigner, at anchor, with her guns and port-holes, and the boats, and the brown-faced sailors, and the regular oar-strokes, and the gay crowds of “visiting day”–the frequent large and handsome three-masted schooners, (a favorite style of marine build, hereabout of late years,) some of them new and very jaunty, with their white-gray sails and yellow pine spars–the sloops dashing along in a fair wind–(I see one now, coming up, under broad canvas, her gaff-topsail shining in the sun, high and picturesque–what a thing of beauty amid the sky and waters!)–the crowded wharf-slips along the city–the flags of different nationalities, the sturdy English cross on its ground of blood, the French tricolor, the banner of the great North German empire, and the Italian and the Spanish colors–sometimes, of an afternoon, the whole scene enliven’d by a fleet of yachts, in a half calm, lazily returning from a race down at Gloucester;–the neat, rakish, revenue steamer “Hamilton” in mid-stream, with her perpendicular stripes flaunting aft–and, turning the eyes north, the long ribands of fleecy-white steam, or dingy-black smoke, stretching far, fan-shaped, slanting diagonally across from the Kensington or Richmond shores, in the west-by-south-west wind.
SCENES ON FERRY AND RIVER–LAST WINTER’S NIGHTS
Then the Camden ferry. What exhilaration, change, people, business, by day. What soothing, silent, wondrous hours, at night, crossing on the boat, most all to myself–pacing the deck, alone, forward or aft. What communion with the waters, the air, the exquisite _chiaroscuro_–the sky and stars, that speak no word, nothing to the intellect, yet so eloquent, so communicative to the soul. And the ferry men–little they know how much they have been to me, day and night–how many spells of listlessness, ennui, debility, they and their hardy ways have dispell’d. And the pilots–captains Hand, Walton, and Giberson by day, and captain Olive at night; Eugene Crosby, with his strong young arm so often supporting, circling, convoying me over the gaps of the bridge, through impediments, safely aboard. Indeed all my ferry friends–captain Frazee the superintendent, Lindell, Hiskey, Fred Rauch, Price, Watson, and a dozen more. And the ferry itself, with its queer scenes–sometimes children suddenly born in the waiting-houses (an actual fact–and more than once)–sometimes a masquerade party, going over at night, with a band of music, dancing and whirling like mad on the broad deck, in their fantastic dresses; sometimes the astronomer, Mr. Whitall, (who posts me up in points about the stars by a living lesson there and then, and answering every question) –sometimes a prolific family group, eight, nine, ten, even twelve! (Yesterday, as I cross’d, a mother, father, and eight children, waiting in the ferry-house, bound westward somewhere.)
I have mention’d the crows. I always watch them from the boats. They play quite a part in the winter scenes on the river, by day. Their black splatches are seen in relief against the snow and ice everywhere at that season–sometimes flying and flapping–sometimes on little or larger cakes, sailing up or down the stream. One day the river was mostly clear–only a single long ridge of broken ice making a narrow stripe by itself, running along down the current for over a mile, quite rapidly. On this white stripe the crows were congregated, hundreds of them–a funny procession–(“half mourning” was the comment of some one.)
Then the reception room, for passengers waiting–life illustrated thoroughly. Take a March picture I jotted there two or three weeks since. Afternoon, about 3-1/2 o’clock, it begins to snow. There has been a matinee performance at the theater–from 4-1/2 to 5 comes a stream of homeward bound ladies. I never knew the spacious room to present a gayer, more lively scene–handsome, well-drest Jersey women and girls, scores of them, streaming in for nearly an hour–the bright eyes and glowing faces, coming in from the air–a sprinkling of snow on bonnets or dresses as they enter–the five or ten minutes’ waiting–the chatting and laughing–(women can have capital times among themselves, with plenty of wit, lunches, jovial abandon)–Lizzie, the pleasant-manner’d waiting-room woman–for sound, the bell-taps and steam-signals of the departing boats with their rhythmic break and undertone–the domestic pictures, mothers with bevies of daughters, (a charming sight)–children, countrymen–the railroad men in their blue clothes and caps–all the various characters of city and country represented or suggested. Then outside some belated passenger frantically running, jumping after the boat. Towards six o’ clock the human stream gradually thickening–now a pressure of vehicles, drays, piled railroad crates–now a drove of cattle, making quite an excitement, the drovers with heavy sticks, belaboring the steaming sides of the frighten’d brutes. Inside the reception room, business bargains, flirting, love-making, _eclaircissements_, proposals–pleasant, sober-faced Phil coming in with his burden of afternoon papers–or Jo, or Charley (who jump’d in the dock last week, and saved a stout lady from drowning,) to replenish the stove, and clearing it with long crow-bar poker.
Besides all this “comedy human,” the river affords nutriment of a higher order. Here are some of my memoranda of the past winter, just as pencill’d down on the spot.
_A January Night_.–Fine trips across the wide Delaware to-night. Tide pretty high, and a strong ebb. River, a little after 8, full of ice, mostly broken, but some large cakes making our strong-timber’d steamboat hum and quiver as she strikes them. In the clear moonlight they spread, strange, unearthly, silvery, faintly glistening, as far as I can see. Bumping, trembling, sometimes hissing like a thousand snakes, the tide-procession, as we wend with or through it, affording a grand undertone, in keeping with the scene. Overhead, the splendor indescribable; yet something haughty, almost supercilious, in the night. Never did I realize more latent sentiment, almost _passion_, in those silent interminable stars up there. One can understand, such a night, why, from the days of the Pharaohs or Job, the dome of heaven, sprinkled with planets, has supplied the subtlest, deepest criticism on human pride, glory, ambition.
_Another Winter Night_.–I don’t know anything more _filling_ than to be on the wide firm deck of a powerful boat, a clear, cool, extra-moonlight night, crushing proudly and resistlessly through this thick, marbly, glistening ice. The whole river is now spread with it –some immense cakes. There is such weirdness about the scene–partly the quality of the light, with its tinge of blue, the lunar twilight –only the large stars holding their own in the radiance of the moon. Temperature sharp, comfortable for motion, dry, full of oxygen. But the sense of power–the steady, scornful, imperious urge of our strong new engine, as she ploughs her way through the big and little cakes.
_Another_.–For two hours I cross’d and recross’d, merely for pleasure–for a still excitement. Both sky and river went through several changes. The first for awhile held two vast fan-shaped echelons of light clouds, through which the moon waded, now radiating, carrying with her an aureole of tawny transparent brown, and now flooding the whole vast with clear vapory light-green, through which, as through an illuminated veil, she moved with measur’d womanly motion. Then, another trip, the heavens would be absolutely clear, and Luna in all her effulgence. The big Dipper in the north, with the double star in the handle much plainer than common. Then the sheeny track of light in the water, dancing and rippling. Such transformations; such pictures and poems, inimitable.
_Another_.–I am studying the stars, under advantages, as I cross tonight. (It is late in February, and again extra clear.) High toward the west, the Pleiades, tremulous with delicate sparkle, in the soft heavens,–Aldebaran, leading the V-shaped Hyades–and overhead Capella and her kids. Most majestic of all, in full display in the high south, Orion, vast-spread, roomy, chief historian of the stage, with his shiny yellow rosette on his shoulder, and his three kings–and a little to the east, Sirius, calmly arrogant, most wondrous single star. Going late ashore, (I couldn’t give up the beauty, and soothingness of the night,) as I staid around, or slowly wander’d I heard the echoing calls of the railroad men in the West Jersey depot yard, shifting and switching trains, engines, etc.; amid the general silence otherways, and something in the acoustic quality of the air, musical, emotional effects, never thought of before. I linger’d long and long, listening to them.
_Night of March 18, ’79_.–One of the calm, pleasantly cool, exquisitely clear and cloudless, early spring nights–the atmosphere again that rare vitreous blue-black, welcom’d by astronomers. Just at 8, evening, the scene overhead of certainly solemnest beauty, never surpass’d. Venus nearly down in the west, of a size and lustre as if trying to outshow herself, before departing. Teeming, maternal orb–I take you again to myself. I am reminded of that spring preceding Abraham Lincoln’s murder, when I, restlessly haunting the Potomac banks, around Washington city, watch’d you, off there, aloof, moody as myself:
As we walk’d up and down in the dark blue so mystic, As we walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night, As I saw you had something to tell, as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop from the sky low down, as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on,)
As we wander’d together the solemn night.
With departing Venus, large to the last, and shining even to the edge of the horizon, the vast dome presents at this moment, such a spectacle! Mercury was visible just after sunset–a rare sight. Arcturus is now risen, just north of east. In calm glory all the stars of Orion hold the place of honor, in meridian, to the south,–with the Dog-star a little to the left. And now, just rising, Spica, late, low, and slightly veil’d. Castor, Regulus and the rest, all shining unusually clear, (no Mars or Jupiter or moon till morning.) On the edge of the river, many lamps twinkling–with two or three huge chimneys, a couple of miles up, belching forth molten, steady flames, volcano-like, illuminating all around–and sometimes an electric or calcium, its Dante-Inferno gleams, in far shafts, terrible, ghastly-powerful. Of later May nights, crossing, I like to watch the fishermen’s little buoy-lights–so pretty, so dreamy–like corpse candles–undulating delicate and lonesome on the surface of the shadowy waters, floating with the current.
THE FIRST SPRING DAY ON CHESTNUT STREET
Winter relaxing its hold, has already allow’d us a foretaste of spring. As I write, yesterday afternoon’s softness and brightness, (after the morning fog, which gave it a better setting, by contrast,) show’d Chestnut street–say between Broad and Fourth–to more advantage in its various asides, and all its stores, and gay-dress’d crowds generally, than for three months past. I took a walk there between one and two. Doubtless, there were plenty of hard-up folks along the pavements, but nine-tenths of the myriad-moving human panorama to all appearance seem’d flush, well-fed, and fully-provided. At all events it was good to be on Chestnut street yesterday. The peddlers on the sidewalk–(“sleeve-buttons, three for five cents”)–the handsome little fellow with canary-bird whistles–the cane men, toy men, toothpick men–the old woman squatted in a heap on the cold stone flags, with her basket of matches, pins and tape–the young negro mother, sitting, begging, with her two little coffee-color’d twins on her lap–the beauty of the cramm’d conservatory of rare flowers, flaunting reds, yellows, snowy lilies, incredible orchids, at the Baldwin mansion near Twelfth street– the show of fine poultry, beef, fish, at the restaurants–the china stores, with glass and statuettes–the luscious tropical fruits–the street cars plodding along, with their tintinnabulating bells–the fat, cab-looking, rapidly driven one-horse vehicles of the post-office, squeez’d full of coming or going letter-carriers, so healthy and handsome and manly-looking, in their gray uniforms–the costly books, pictures, curiosities, in the windows–the gigantic policemen at most of the corners will all be readily remember’d and recognized as features of this principal avenue of Philadelphia. Chestnut street, I have discover’d, is not without individuality, and its own points, even when compared with the great promenade-streets of other cities. I have never been in Europe, but acquired years’ familiar experience with New York’s, (perhaps the world’s) great thoroughfare, Broadway, and possess to some extent a personal and saunterer’s knowledge of St. Charles street in New Orleans, Tremont street in Boston, and the broad trottoirs of Pennsylvania avenue in Washington. Of course it is a pity that Chestnut were not two or three times wider; but the street, any fine day, shows vividness, motion, variety, not easily to be surpass’d. (Sparkling eyes, human faces, magnetism, well-dress’d women, ambulating to and fro–with lots o fine things in the windows–are they not about the same, the civilized world over?)
How fast the flitting figures come! The mild, the fierce, the stony face; Some bright with thoughtless smiles–and some Where secret tears have left their trace.
A few days ago one of the six-story clothing stores along here had the space inside its plate-glass show-window partition’d into a little corral, and litter’d deeply with rich clover and hay, (I could smell the odor outside,) on which reposed two magnificent fat sheep, full-sized but young–the handsomest creatures of the kind I ever saw. I stop’s long and long, with the crowd, to view them–one lying down chewing the cud, and one standing up, looking out, with dense-fringed patient eyes. Their wool, of a clear tawny color, with streaks of glistening black–altogether a queer sight amidst that crowded promenade of dandies, dollars and dry-goods.
UP THE HUDSON TO ULSTER COUNTY
_April 23._–Off to New York on a little tour and visit. Leaving the hospitable, home-like quarters of my valued friends, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Johnston–took the 4 P. M. boat, bound up the Hudson, 100 miles or so. Sunset and evening fine. Especially enjoy’d the hour after we passed Cozzens’s landing–the night lit by the crescent moon and Venus, now swimming in tender glory, and now hid by the high rocks and hills of the western shore, which we hugg’d close. (Where I spend the next ten days is in Ulster county and its neighborhood, with frequent morning and evening drives, observations of the river, and short rambles.)
_April 24–Noon._–A little more and the sun would be oppressive. The bees are out gathering their bread from willows and other trees. I watch them returning, darting through the air or lighting on the hives, their thighs covered with the yellow forage. A solitary robin sings near. I sit in my shirt sleeves and gaze from an open bay-window on the indolent scene–the thin haze, the Fishkill hills in the distance–off on the river, a sloop with slanting mainsail, and two or three little shad-boats. Over on the railroad opposite, long freight trains, sometimes weighted by cylinder-tanks of petroleum, thirty, forty, fifty cars in a string, panting and rumbling along in full view, but the sound soften’d by distance.
DAYS AT J. B.’S TURF-FIRES–SPRING SONGS
_April 26_.–At sunrise, the pure clear sound of the meadow lark. An hour later, some notes, few and simple, yet delicious and perfect, from the bush-sparrow-towards noon the reedy trill of the robin. To-day is the fairest, sweetest yet–penetrating warmth–a lovely veil in the air, partly heat-vapor and partly from the turf-fires everywhere in patches on the farms. A group of soft maples near by silently bursts out in crimson tips, buzzing all day with busy bees. The white sails of sloops and schooners glide up and down the river; and long trains of cars, with ponderous roll, or faint bell notes, almost constantly on the opposite shore. The earliest wild flowers in the woods and fields, spicy arbutus, blue liverwort, frail anemone, and the pretty white blossoms of the bloodroot. I launch out in slow rambles, discovering them. As I go along the roads I like to see the farmers’ fires in patches, burning the dry brush, turf, debris. How the smoke crawls along, flat to the ground, slanting, slowly rising, reaching away, and at last dissipating. I like its acrid smell–whiffs just reaching me–welcomer than French perfume.
The birds are plenty; of any sort, or of two or three sorts, curiously, not a sign, till suddenly some warm, gushing, sunny April (or even March) day–lo! there they are, from twig to twig, or fence to fence, flirting, singing, some mating, preparing to build. But most of them _en passant_–a fortnight, a month in these parts, and then away. As in all phases, Nature keeps up her vital, copious, eternal procession. Still, plenty of the birds hang around all or most of the season–now their love-time, and era of nest-building. I find flying over the river, crows, gulls and hawks. I hear the afternoon shriek of the latter, darting about, preparing to nest. The oriole will soon be heard here, and the twanging _meoeow_ of the cat-bird; also the king-bird, cuckoo and the warblers. All along, there are three peculiarly characteristic spring songs–the meadow-lark’s, so sweet, so alert and remonstrating (as if he said, “don’t you see?” or, “can’t you understand?”)–the cheery, mellow, human tones of the robin–(I have been trying for years to get a brief term, or phrase, that would identify and describe that robin call)–and the amorous whistle of the high-hole. Insects are out plentifully at midday.
_April 29_.–As we drove lingering along the road we heard, just after sundown, the song of the wood-thrush. We stopp’d without a word, and listen’d long. The delicious notes–a sweet, artless, voluntary, simple anthem, as from the flute-stops of some organ, wafted through the twilight–echoing well to us from the perpendicular high rock, where, in some thick young trees’ recesses at the base, sat the bird –fill’d our senses, our souls.
MEETING A HERMIT
I found in one of my rambles up the hills a real hermit, living in a lonesome spot, hard to get at, rocky, the view fine, with a little patch of land two rods square. A man of youngish middle age, city born and raised, had been to school, had travel’d in Europe and California. I first met him once or twice on the road, and pass’d the time of day, with some small talk; then, the third time, he ask’d me to go along a bit and rest in his hut (an almost unprecedented compliment, as I heard from others afterwards.) He was of Quaker stock, I think; talk’d with ease and moderate freedom, but did not unbosom his life, or story, or tragedy, or whatever it was.
AN ULSTER COUNTY WATERFALL
I jot this mem, in a wild scene of woods and hills, where we have come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy–what I call weather-beaten and let-alone–a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild-flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse impetuous copious fall–the greenish- tawny, darkly transparent waters, plunging with velocity down the rocks, with patches of milk-white foam–a stream of hurrying amber, thirty feet wide, risen far back in the hills and woods, now rushing with volume–every hundred rods a fall, and sometimes three or four in that distance. A primitive forest, druidical, solitary and savage–not ten visitors a year–broken rocks everywhere–shade overhead, thick underfoot with leaves–a just palpable wild and delicate aroma.
WALTER DUMONT AND HIS MEDAL
As I saunter’d along the high road yesterday, I stopp’d to watch a man near by, ploughing a rough stony field with a yoke of oxen. Usually there is much geeing and hawing, excitement, and continual noise and expletives, about a job of this kind. But I noticed how different, how easy and wordless, yet firm and sufficient, the work of this young ploughman. His name was Walter Dumont, a farmer, and son of a farmer, working for their living. Three years ago, when the steamer “Sunnyside” was wreck’d of a bitter icy night on the west bank here, Walter went out in his boat–was the first man on hand with assistance–made a way through the ice to shore, connected a line, perform’d work of first-class readiness, daring, danger, and saved numerous lives. Some weeks after, one evening when he was up at Esopus, among the usual loafing crowd at the country store and post-office, there arrived the gift of an unexpected official gold medal for the quiet hero. The impromptu presentation was made to him on the spot, but he blush’d, hesitated as he took it, and had nothing to say.
HUDSON RIVER SIGHTS
It was a happy thought to build the Hudson river railroad right along the shore. The grade is already made by nature; you are sure of ventilation one side–and you are in nobody’s way. I see, hear, the locomotives and cars, rumbling, roaring, flaming, smoking, constantly, away off there, night and day–less than a mile distant, and in full view by day. I like both sight and sound. Express trains thunder and lighten along; of freight trains, most of them very long, there cannot be less than a hundred a day. At night far down you see the headlight approaching, coming steadily on like a meteor. The river at night has its special character-beauties. The shad fishermen go forth in their boats and pay out their nets–one sitting forward, rowing, and one standing up aft dropping it properly-marking the line with little floats bearing candles, conveying, as they glide over the water, an indescribable sentiment and doubled brightness. I like to watch the tows at night, too, with their twinkling lamps, and hear the husky panting of the steamers; or catch the sloops’ and schooners’ shadowy forms, like phantoms, white, silent, indefinite, out there. Then the Hudson of a clear moonlight night.
But there is one sight the very grandest. Sometimes in the fiercest driving storm of wind, rain, hail or snow, a great eagle will appear over the river, now soaring with steady and now overbended wings –always confronting the gale, or perhaps cleaving into, or at times literally _sitting_ upon it. It is like reading some first-class natural tragedy or epic, or hearing martial trumpets. The splendid bird enjoys the hubbub–is adjusted and equal to it–finishes it so artistically. His pinions just oscillating–the position of his head and neck–his resistless, occasionally varied flight–now a swirl, now an upward movement–the black clouds driving–the angry wash below–the hiss of rain, the wind’s piping (perhaps the ice colliding, grunting)–he tacking or jibing–now, as it were, for a change, abandoning himself to the gale, moving with it with such velocity–and now, resuming control, he comes up against it, lord of the situation and the storm–lord, amid it, of power and savage joy.
Sometimes (as at present writing,) middle of sunny afternoon, the old “Vanderbilt” steamer stalking ahead–I plainly hear her rhythmic, slushing paddles–drawing by long hawsers an immense and varied following string, (“an old sow and pigs,” the river folks call it.) First comes a big barge, with a house built on it, and spars towering over the roof; then canal boats, a lengthen’d, clustering train, fasten’d and link’d together–the one in the middle, with high staff, flaunting a broad and gaudy flag–others with the almost invariable lines of new-wash’d clothes, drying; two sloops and a schooner aside the tow–little wind, and that adverse–with three long, dark, empty barges bringing up the rear. People are on the boats: men lounging, women in sun-bonnets, children, stovepipes with streaming smoke.
TWO CITY AREAS, CERTAIN HOURS
NEW YORK, _May 24, ’79_.–Perhaps no quarters of this city (I have return’d again for awhile,) make more brilliant, animated, crowded, spectacular human presentations these fine May afternoons than the two I am now going to describe from personal observation. First: that area comprising Fourteenth street (especially the short range between Broadway and Fifth avenue) with Union square, its adjacencies, and so retrostretching down Broadway for half a mile. All the walks here are wide, and the spaces ample and free–now flooded with liquid gold from the last two hours of powerful sunshine. The whole area at 5 o’clock, the days of my observations, must have contain’d from thirty to forty thousand finely-dress’d people, all in motion, plenty of them good-looking, many beautiful women, often youths and children, the latter in groups with their nurses–the trottoirs everywhere close-spread, thick-tangled, (yet no collision, no trouble,) with masses of bright color, action, and tasty toilets; (surely the women dress better than ever before, and the men do too.) As if New York would show these afternoons what it can do in its humanity, its choicest physique and physiognomy, and its countless prodigality of locomotion, dry goods, glitter, magnetism, and happiness.
Second: also from 5 to 7 P.M. the stretch of Fifth avenue, all the way from the Central Park exits at Fifty-ninth street, down to Fourteenth, especially along the high grade by Fortieth street, and down the hill. A Mississippi of horses and rich vehicles, not by dozens and scores, but hundreds and thousands–the broad avenue filled and cramm’d with them–a moving, sparkling, hurrying crush, for more than two miles. (I wonder they don’t get block’d, but I believe they never do.) Altogether it is to me the marvel sight of New York. I like to get in one of the Fifth avenue stages and ride up, stemming the swift-moving procession. I doubt if London or Paris or any city in the world can show such a carriage carnival as I have seen here five or six times these beautiful May afternoons.
CENTRAL PARK WALKS AND TALKS
_May 16 to 22_.–I visit Central Park now almost every day, sitting, or slowly rambling, or riding around. The whole place presents its very best appearance this current month–the full flush of the trees, the plentiful white and pink of the flowering shrubs, the emerald green of the grass spreading everywhere, yellow dotted still with dandelions –the specialty of the plentiful gray rocks, peculiar to these grounds, cropping out, miles and miles–and over all the beauty and purity, three days out of four, of our summer skies. As I sit, placidly, early afternoon, off against Ninetieth street, the policeman, C. C., a well-form’d sandy-complexion’d young fellow, comes over and stands near me. We grow quite friendly and chatty forth-with. He is a New Yorker born and raised, and in answer to my questions tells me about the life of a New York Park policeman, (while he talks keeping his eyes and ears vigilantly open, occasionally pausing and moving where he can get full views of the vistas of the road, up and down, and the spaces around.) The pay is $2.40 a day (seven days to a week)–the men come on and work eight hours straight ahead, which is all that is required of them out of the twenty-four. The position has more risks than one might suppose–for instance if a team or horse runs away (which happens daily) each man is expected not only to be prompt, but to waive safety and stop wildest nag or nags–(_do it_, and don’t be thinking of your bones or face)–give the alarm-whistle too, so that other guards may repeat, and the vehicles up and down the tracks be warn’d. Injuries to the men are continually happening. There is much alertness and quiet strength. (Few appreciate, I have often thought, the Ulyssean capacity, derring do, quick readiness in emergencies, practicality, unwitting devotion and heroism, among our American young men and working-people–the firemen, the railroad employes, the steamer and ferry men, the police, the conductors and drivers–the whole splendid average of native stock, city and country.) It is good work, though; and upon the whole, the Park force members like it. They see life, and the excitement keeps them up. There is not so much difficulty as might be supposed from tramps, roughs, or in keeping people “off the grass.” The worst trouble of the regular Park employe is from malarial fever, chills, and the like.
A FINE AFTERNOON, 4 TO 6
Ten thousand vehicles careering through the Park this perfect afternoon. Such a show! and I have seen all–watch’d it narrowly, and at my leisure. Private barouches, cabs and coupes, some fine horseflesh–lapdogs, footmen, fashions, foreigners, cockades on hats, crests on panels–the full oceanic tide of New York’s wealth and “gentility.” It was an impressive, rich, interminable circus on a grand scale, full of action and color in the beauty of the day, under the clear sun and moderate breeze. Family groups, couples, single drivers–of course dresses generally elegant–much “style,” (yet perhaps little or nothing, even in that direction, that fully justified itself.) Through the windows of two or three of the richest carriages I saw faces almost corpse-like, so ashy and listless. Indeed the whole affair exhibited less of sterling America, either in spirit or countenance, than I had counted on from such a select mass-spectacle. I suppose, as a proof of limitless wealth, leisure, and the aforesaid “gentility,” it was tremendous. Yet what I saw those hours (I took two other occasions, two other afternoons to watch the same scene,) confirms a thought that haunts me every additional glimpse I get of our top-loftical general or rather exceptional phases of wealth and fashion in this country–namely, that they are ill at ease, much too conscious, cased in too many cerements, and far from happy–that there is nothing in them which we who are poor and plain need at all envy, and that instead of the perennial smell of the grass and woods and shores, their typical redolence is of soaps and essences, very rare may be, but suggesting the barber shop–something that turns stale and musty in a few hours anyhow.
Perhaps the show on the horseback road was prettiest. Many groups (threes a favorite number,) some couples, some singly–many ladies–frequently horses or parties dashing along on a full run–fine riding the rule–a few really first-class animals. As the afternoon waned, the wheel’d carriages grew less, but the saddle-riders seemed to increase. They linger’d long–and I saw some charming forms and faces.
DEPARTING OF THE BIG STEAMERS
_May 25._–A three hours’ bay-trip from 12 to 3 this afternoon, accompanying “the City of Brussels” down as far as the Narrows, in behoof of some Europe-bound friends, to give them a good send off. Our spirited little tug, the “Seth Low,” kept close to the great black “Brussels,” sometimes one side, sometimes the other, always up to her, or even pressing ahead, (like the blooded pony accompanying the royal elephant.) The whole affair, from the first, was an animated, quick-passing, characteristic New York scene; the large, good-looking, well-dress’d crowd on the wharf-end–men and women come to see their friends depart, and bid them God-speed–the ship’s sides swarming with passengers–groups of bronze-faced sailors, with uniform’ d officers at their posts–the quiet directions, as she quickly unfastens and moves out, prompt to a minute–the emotional faces, adieus and fluttering handkerchiefs, and many smiles and some tears on the wharf–the answering faces, smiles, tears and fluttering handkerchiefs, from the ship–(what can be subtler and finer than this play of faces on such occasions in these responding crowds?–what go more to one’s heart?)–the proud, steady, noiseless cleaving of the grand oceaner down the bay–we speeding by her side a few miles, and then turning, wheeling,–amid a babel of wild hurrahs, shouted partings, ear-splitting steam whistles, kissing of hands and waving of handkerchiefs.
This departing of the big steamers, noons or afternoons–there is no better medicine when one is listless or vapory. I am fond of going down Wednesdays and Saturdays–their more special days–to watch them and the crowds on the wharves, the arriving passengers, the general bustle and activity, the eager looks from the faces, the clear-toned voices, (a travel’d foreigner, a musician, told me the other day she thinks an American crowd has the finest voices in the world,) the whole look of the great, shapely black ships themselves, and their groups and lined sides–in the setting of our bay with the blue sky overhead. Two days after the above I saw the “Britannic,” the “Donau,” the “Helvetia” and the “Schiedam” steam out, all off for Europe–a magnificent sight.
TWO HOURS ON THE MINNESOTA
From 7 to 9, aboard the United States school-ship Minnesota, lying up the North river. Captain Luce sent his gig for us about sundown, to the foot of Twenty-third street, and receiv’d us aboard with officer-like hospitality and sailor heartiness. There are several hundred youths on the Minnesota to be train’d for efficiently manning the government navy. I like the idea much; and, so far as I have seen to-night, I like the way it is carried out on this huge vessel. Below, on the gun-deck, were gather’d nearly a hundred of the boys, to give us some of their singing exercises, with a melodeon accompaniment, play’d by one of their number. They sang with a will. The best part, however, was the sight of the young fellows themselves. I went over among them before the singing began, and talk’d a few minutes informally. They are from all the States; I asked for the Southerners, but could only find one, a lad from Baltimore. In age, apparently, they range from about fourteen years to nineteen or twenty. They are all of American birth, and have to pass a rigid medical examination; well-grown youths, good flesh, bright eyes, looking straight at you, healthy, intelligent, not a slouch among them, nor a menial–in every one the promise of a man. I have been to many public aggregations of young and old, and of schools and colleges, in my day, but I confess I have never been so near satisfied, so comforted, (both from the fact of the school itself, and the splendid proof of our country, our composite race, and the sample-promises of its good average capacities, its future,) as in the collection from all parts of the United States on this navy training ship. (“Are there going to be _any men_ there?” was the dry and pregnant reply of Emerson to one who had been crowding him with the rich material statistics and possibilities of some western or Pacific region.)
_May 26_.–Aboard the Minnesota again. Lieut. Murphy kindly came for me in his boat. Enjoy’d specially those brief trips to and fro–the sailors, tann’d, strong, so bright and able-looking, pulling their oars in long side-swing, man-of-war style, as they row’d me across. I saw the boys in companies drilling with small arms; had a talk with Chaplain Rawson. At 11 o’clock all of us gathered to breakfast around a long table in the great ward room–I among the rest–a genial, plentiful, hospitable affair every way–plenty to eat, and of the best; became acquainted with several new officers. This second visit, with its observations, talks, (two or three at random with the boys,) confirm’d my first impressions.
MATURE SUMMER DAYS AND NIGHTS
_Aug. 4_.–Forenoon–as I sit under the willow shade, (have retreated down in the country again,) a little bird is leisurely dousing and flirting himself amid the brook almost within reach of me. He evidently fears me not–takes me for some concomitant of the neighboring earthy banks, free bushery and wild weeds. _6 p.m._–The last three days have been perfect ones for the season, (four nights ago copious rains, with vehement thunder and lightning.) I write this sitting by the creek watching my two kingfishers at their sundown sport. The strong, beautiful, joyous creatures! Their wings glisten in the slanted sunbeams as they circle and circle around, occasionally dipping and dashing the water, and making long stretches up and down the creek. Wherever I go over fields, through lanes, in by-places, blooms the white-flowering wild-carrot, its delicate pat of snow-flakes crowning its slender stem, gracefully oscillating in the breeze,
EXPOSITION BUILDING–NEW CITY HALL–RIVER TRIP
PHILADELPHIA, _Aug. 26_.–Last night and to-night of unsurpass’d clearness, after two days’ rain; moon splendor and star splendor. Being out toward the great Exposition building, West Philadelphia, I saw it lit up, and thought I would go in. There was a ball, democratic but nice; plenty of young couples waltzing and quadrilling–music by a good string-band. To the sight and hearing of these–to moderate strolls up and down the roomy spaces–to getting off aside, resting in an arm-chair and looking up a long while at the grand high roof with its graceful and multitudinous work of iron rods, angles, gray colors, plays of light and shade, receding into dim outlines–to absorbing (in the intervals of the string band,) some capital voluntaries and rolling caprices from the big organ at the other end of the building–to sighting a shadow’d figure or group or couple of lovers every now and then passing some near or farther aisle–I abandon’d myself for over an hour.
Returning home, riding down Market street in an open summer car, something detain’d us between Fifteenth and Broad, and I got out to view better the new, three-fifths-built marble edifice, the City Hall, of magnificent proportions–a majestic and lovely show there in the moonlight–flooded all over, facades, myriad silver-white lines and carv’d heads and mouldings, with the soft dazzle–silent, weird, beautiful–well, I know that never when finish’d will that magnificent pile impress one as it impress’d me those fifteen minutes.
To-night, since, I have been long on the river. I watch the C-shaped Northern Crown, (with the star Alshacca that blazed out so suddenly, alarmingly, one night a few years ago.) The moon in her third quarter, and up nearly all night. And there, as I look eastward, my long-absent Pleiades, welcome again to sight. For an hour I enjoy the soothing and vital scene to the low splash of waves–new stars steadily, noiselessly rising in the east.
As I cross the Delaware, one of the deck-hands, F. R., tells me how a woman jump’d overboard and was drown’d a couple of hours since. It happen’d in mid-channel–she leap’d from the forward part of the boat, which went over her. He saw her rise on the other side in the swift running water, throw her arms and closed hands high up, (white hands and bare forearms in the moonlight like a flash,) and then she sank. (I found out afterwards that this young fellow had promptly jump’d in, swam after the poor creature, and made, though unsuccessfully, the bravest efforts to rescue her; but he didn’t mention that part at all in telling me the story.)
SWALLOWS ON THE RIVER
_Sept. 3_–Cloudy and wet, and wind due east; air without palpable fog, but very heavy with moisture–welcome for a change. Forenoon, crossing the Delaware, I noticed unusual numbers of swallows in flight, circling, darting, graceful beyond description, close to the water. Thick, around the bows of the ferry-boat as she lay tied in her slip, they flew; and as we went out I watch’d beyond the pier-heads, and across the broad stream, their swift-winding loop-ribands of motion, down close to it, cutting and intersecting. Though I had seen swallows all my life, seem’d as though I never before realized their peculiar beauty and character in the landscape. (Some time ago, for an hour, in a huge old country barn, watching these birds flying, recall’d the 22d book of the Odyssey, where Ulysses slays the suitors, bringing things to _eclaircissement_, and Minerva, swallow-bodied, darts up through the spaces of the hall, sits high on a beam, looks complacently on the show of slaughter, and feels in her element, exulting, joyous.)
BEGIN A LONG JAUNT WEST
The following three or four months (Sept. to Dec. ’79) I made quite a western journey, fetching up at Denver, Colorado, and penetrating the Rocky Mountain region enough to get a good notion of it all. Left West Philadelphia after 9 o’clock one night, middle of September, in a comfortable sleeper. Oblivious of the two or three hundred miles across Pennsylvania; at Pittsburgh in the morning to breakfast. Pretty good view of the city and Birmingham–fog and damp, smoke, coke-furnaces, flames, discolor’d wooden houses, and vast collections of coal-barges. Presently a bit of fine region, West Virginia, the Panhandle, and crossing the river, the Ohio. By day through the latter State–then Indiana–and so rock’d to slumber for a second night, flying like lightning through Illinois.
IN THE SLEEPER
What a fierce weird pleasure to lie in my berth at night in the luxurious palace-car, drawn by the mighty Baldwin–embodying, and filling me, too, full of the swiftest motion, and most resistless strength! It is late, perhaps midnight or after–distances join’d like magic–as we speed through Harrisburg, Columbus, Indianapolis. The element of danger adds zest to it all. On we go, rumbling and flashing, with our loud whinnies thrown out from time to time, or trumpet-blasts, into the darkness. Passing the homes of men, the farms, barns, cattle–the silent villages. And the car itself, the sleeper, with curtains drawn and lights turn’d down–in the berths the slumberers, many of them women and children–as on, on, on, we fly like lightning through the night–how strangely sound and sweet they sleep! (They say the French Voltaire in his time designated the grand opera and a ship of war the most signal illustrations of the growth of humanity’s and art’s advance beyond primitive barbarism. Perhaps if the witty philosopher were here these days, and went in the same car with perfect bedding and feed from New York to San Francisco, he would shift his type and sample to one of our American sleepers.)
MISSOURI STATE
We should have made the run of 960 miles from Philadelphia to St. Louis in thirty-six hours, but we had a collision and bad locomotive smash about two-thirds of the way, which set us back. So merely stopping over night that time in St. Louis, I sped on westward. As I cross’d Missouri State the whole distance by the St. Louis and Kansas City Northern Railroad, a fine early autumn day, I thought my eyes had never looked on scenes of greater pastoral beauty. For over two hundred miles successive rolling prairies, agriculturally perfect view’d by Pennsylvania and New Jersey eyes, and dotted here and there with fine timber. Yet fine as the land is, it isn’t the finest portion; (there is a bed of impervious clay and hard-pan beneath this section that holds water too firmly, “drowns the land in wet weather, and bakes it in dry,” as a cynical farmer told me.) South are some richer tracts, though perhaps the beauty-spots of the State are the northwestern counties. Altogether, I am clear, (now, and from what I have seen and learn’d since,) that Missouri, in climate, soil, relative situation, wheat, grass, mines, railroads, and every important materialistic respect, stands in the front rank of the Union. Of Missouri averaged politically and socially I have heard all sorts of talk, some pretty severe–but I should have no fear myself of getting along safely and comfortably anywhere among the Missourians. They raise a good deal of tobacco. You see at this time quantities of the light greenish-gray leaves pulled and hanging out to dry on temporary frameworks or rows of sticks. Looks much like the mullein familiar to eastern eyes.
LAWRENCE AND TOPEKA, KANSAS
We thought of stopping in Kansas City, but when we got there we found a train ready and a crowd of hospitable Kansians to take us on to Lawrence, to which I proceeded. I shall not soon forget my good days in L., in company with Judge Usher and his sons, (especially John and Linton,) true westerners of the noblest type. Nor the similar days in Topeka. Nor the brotherly kindness of my RR. friends there, and the city and State officials. Lawrence and Topeka are large, bustling, half-rural, handsome cities. I took two or three long drives about the latter, drawn by a spirited team over smooth roads.
THE PRAIRIES (_and an Undeliver’d Speech_)
At a large popular meeting at Topeka–the Kansas State Silver Wedding, fifteen or twenty thousand people–I had been erroneously bill’d to deliver a poem. As I seem’d to be made much of, and wanted to be good-natured, I hastily pencill’d out the following little speech. Unfortunately, (or fortunately,) I had such a good time and rest, and talk and dinner, with the U. boys, that I let the hours slip away and didn’t drive over to the meeting and speak my piece. But here it is just the same:
“My friends, your bills announce me as giving a poem; but I have no poem–have composed none for this occasion. And I can honestly say I am now glad of it. Under these skies resplendent in September beauty–amid the peculiar landscape you are used to, but which is new to me–these interminable and stately prairies–in the freedom and vigor and sane enthusiasm of this perfect western air and autumn sunshine–it seems to me a poem would be almost an impertinence. But if you care to have a word from me, I should speak it about these very prairies; they impress me most, of all the objective shows I see or have seen on this, my first real visit to the West. As I have roll’d rapidly hither for more than a thousand miles, through fair Ohio, through bread-raising Indiana and Illinois–through ample Missouri, that contains and raises everything; as I have partially explor’d your charming city during the last two days, and, standing on Oread hill, by the university, have launch’d my view across broad expanses of living green, in every direction–I have again been most impress’d, I say, and shall remain for the rest of my life most impress’d, with that feature of the topography of your western central world–that vast Something, stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined, which there is in these prairies, combining the real and ideal, and beautiful as dreams.
“I wonder indeed if the people of this continental inland West know how much of first-class _art_ they have in these prairies–how original and all your own–how much of the influences of a character for your future humanity, broad, patriotic, heroic and new? how entirely they tally on land the grandeur and superb monotony of the skies of heaven, and the ocean with its waters? how freeing, soothing, nourishing they are to the soul?
“Then is it not subtly they who have given us our leading modern Americans, Lincoln and Grant?–vast-spread, average men–their foregrounds of character altogether practical and real, yet (to those who have eyes to see) with finest backgrounds of the ideal, towering high as any. And do we not see, in them, foreshadowings of the future races that shall fill these prairies?
“Not but what the Yankee and Atlantic States, and every other part–Texas, and the States flanking the south-east and the Gulf of Mexico–the Pacific shore empire–the Territories and Lakes, and the Canada line (the day is not yet, but it will come, including Canada entire)–are equally and integrally and indissolubly this Nation, the _sine qua non_ of the human, political and commercial New World. But this favor’d central area of (in round numbers) two thousand miles square seems fated to be the home both of what I would call America’s distinctive ideas and distinctive realities.”
ON TO DENVER–A FRONTIER INCIDENT
The jaunt of five or six hundred miles from Topeka to Denver took me through a variety of country, but all unmistakably prolific, western, American, and on the largest scale. For a long distance we follow the line of the Kansas river, (I like better the old name, Kaw,) a stretch of very rich, dark soil, famed for its wheat, and call’d the Golden Belt–then plains and plains, hour after hour–Ellsworth county, the centre of the State–where I must stop a moment to tell a characteristic story of early days–scene the very spot where I am passing–time 1868. In a scrimmage at some public gathering in the town, A. had shot B. quite badly, but had not kill’d him. The sober men of Ellsworth conferr’d with one another and decided that A. deserv’d punishment. As they wished to set a good example and establish their reputation the reverse of a Lynching town, they open an informal court and bring both men before them for deliberate trial. Soon as this trial begins the wounded man is led forward to give his testimony. Seeing his enemy in durance and unarm’d, B. walks suddenly up in a fury and shoots A. through the head–shoots him dead. The court is instantly adjourn’d, and its unanimous members, without a word of debate, walk the murderer B. out, wounded as he is, and hang him.
In due time we reach Denver, which city I fall in love with from the first, and have that feeling confirm’d, the longer I stay there. One of my pleasantest days was a jaunt, via Platte canon, to Leadville.
AN HOUR ON KENOSHA SUMMIT
Jottings from the Rocky Mountains, mostly pencill’d during a day’s trip over the South Park RR., returning from Leadville, and especially the hour we were detain’d, (much to my satisfaction,) at Kenosha summit. As afternoon advances, novelties, far-reaching splendors, accumulate under the bright sun in this pure air. But I had better commence with the day.
The confronting of Platte canon just at dawn, after a ten miles’ ride in early darkness on the rail from Denver–the seasonable stoppage at the entrance of the canon, and good breakfast of eggs, trout, and nice griddle-cakes–then as we travel on, and get well in the gorge, all the wonders, beauty, savage power of the scene–the wild stream of water, from sources of snows, brawling continually in sight one side–the dazzling sun, and the morning lights on the rocks–such turns and grades in the track, squirming around corners, or up and down hills–far glimpses of a hundred peaks, titanic necklaces, stretching north and south–the huge rightly-named Dome-rock–and as we dash along, others similar, simple, monolithic, elephantine.
AN EGOTISTICAL “FIND”
“I have found the law of my own poems,” was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass’d, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon–this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel’d play of primitive Nature–the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles–the broad handling and absolute uncrampedness–the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high–at their tops now and then huge masses pois’d, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible. (“In Nature’s grandest shows,” says an old Dutch writer, an ecclesiastic, “amid the ocean’s depth, if so might be, or countless worlds rolling above at night, a man thinks of them, weighs all, not for themselves or the abstract, but with reference to his own personality, and how they may affect him or color his destinies.”)
NEW SENSES: NEW JOYS
We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed, with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the canon we fly–mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us–every rood a new view flashing, and each flash defying description–on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass–but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New senses, new joys, seem develop’d. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain canon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element-emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen–all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music, probably never can.
STEAM-POWER, TELEGRAPHS, ETC
I get out on a ten minutes’ stoppage at Deer creek, to enjoy the unequal’d combination of hill, stone and wood. As we speed again, the yellow granite in the sunshine, with natural spires, minarets, castellated perches far aloft–then long stretches of straight-upright palisades, rhinoceros color–then gamboge and tinted chromos. Ever the best of my pleasures the cool-fresh Colorado atmosphere, yet sufficiently warm. Signs of man’s restless advent and pioneerage, hard as Nature’s face is–deserted dug-outs by dozens in the side-hills–the scantling-hut, the telegraph-pole, the smoke of some impromptu chimney or outdoor fire–at intervals little settlements of log-houses, or parties of surveyors or telegraph builders, with their comfortable tents. Once, a canvas office where you could send a message by electricity anywhere around the world! Yes, pronounc’d signs of the man of latest dates, dauntlessly grappling with these grisliest shows of the old kosmos. At several places steam saw-mills, with their piles of logs and boards, and the pipes puffing. Occasionally Platte canon expanding into a grassy flat of a few acres. At one such place, toward the end, where we stop, and I get out to stretch my legs, as I look skyward, or rather mountain-topward, a huge hawk or eagle (a rare sight here) is idly soaring, balancing along the ether, now sinking low and coming quite near, and then up again in stately-languid circles–then higher, higher, slanting to the north, and gradually out of sight.
AMERICA’S BACK-BONE
I jot these lines literally at Kenosha summit, where we return, afternoon, and take a long rest, 10,000 feet above sea-level. At this immense height the South Park stretches fifty miles before me. Mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective, every hue of vista, fringe the view, in nearer, or middle, or far-dim distance, or fade on the horizon. We have now reach’d, penetrated the Rockies, (Hayden calls it the Front Range,) for a hundred miles or so; and though these chains spread away in every direction, specially north and south, thousands and thousands farther, I have seen specimens of the utmost of them, and know henceforth at least what they are, and what they look like. Not themselves alone, for they typify stretches and areas of half the globe–are, in fact, the vertebrae or back-bone of our hemisphere. As the anatomists say a man is only a spine, topp’d, footed, breasted and radiated, so the whole Western world is, in a sense, but an expansion of these mountains. In South America they are the Andes, in Central America and Mexico the Cordilleras, and in our States they go under different names–in California the Coast and Cascade ranges–thence more eastwardly the Sierra Nevadas–but mainly and more centrally here the Rocky Mountains proper, with many an elevation such as Lincoln’s, Grey’s, Harvard’s, Yale’s, Long’s and Pike’s peaks, all over 14,000 feet high. (East, the highest peaks of the Alleghanies, the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and the White Mountains, range from 2000 to 5500 feet-only Mount Washington, in the latter, 6300 feet.)
THE PARKS
In the midst of all here, lie such beautiful contrasts as the sunken basins of the North, Middle, and South Parks, (the latter I am now on one side of, and overlooking,) each the size of a large, level, almost quandrangular, grassy, western county, wall’d in by walls of hills, and each park the source of a river. The ones I specify are the largest in Colorado, but the whole of that State, and of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and western California, through their sierras and ravines, are copiously mark’d by similar spreads and openings, many of the small ones of paradisiac loveliness and perfection, with their offsets of mountains, streams, atmosphere and hues beyond compare.
ART FEATURES
Talk, I say again, of going to Europe, of visiting the ruins of feudal castles, or Coliseum remains, or kings’ palaces–when you can come _here_. The alternations one gets, too; after the Illinois and Kansas prairies of a thousand miles–smooth and easy areas of the corn and wheat of ten million democratic farms in the future—-here start up in every conceivable presentation of shape, these non-utilitarian piles, coping the skies, emanating a beauty, terror, power, more than Dante or Angelo ever knew. Yes, I think the chyle of not only poetry and painting, but oratory, and even the metaphysics and music fit for the New World, before being finally assimilated, need first and feeding visits here.
_Mountain streams._–The spiritual contrast and etheriality of the whole region consist largely to me in its never-absent peculiar streams–the snows of inaccessible upper areas melting and running down through the gorges continually. Nothing like the water of pastoral plains, or creeks with wooded banks and turf, or anything of the kind elsewhere. The shapes that element takes in the shows of the globe cannot be fully understood by an artist until he has studied these unique rivulets.
_Aerial effects._–But perhaps as I gaze around me the rarest sight of all is in atmospheric hues. The prairies–as I cross’d them in my journey hither–and these mountains and parks, seem to me to afford new lights and shades. Everywhere the aerial gradations and sky-effects inimitable; nowhere else such perspectives, such transparent lilacs and grays. I can conceive of some superior landscape painter, some fine colorist, after sketching awhile out here, discarding all his previous work, delightful to stock exhibition amateurs, as muddy, raw and artificial. Near one’s eye ranges an infinite variety; high up, the bare whitey-brown, above timber line; in certain spots afar patches of snow any time of year; (no trees, no flowers, no birds, at those chilling altitudes.) As I write I see the Snowy Range through the blue mist, beautiful and far off, I plainly see the patches of snow.
DENVER IMPRESSIONS
Through the long-lingering half-light of the most superb of evenings we return’d to Denver, where I staid several days leisurely exploring, receiving impressions, with which I may as well taper off this memorandum, itemizing what I saw there. The best was the men, three-fourths of them large, able, calm, alert, American. And cash! why they create it here. Out in the smelting works, (the biggest and most improv’d ones, for the precious metals, in the world,) I saw long rows of vats, pans, cover’d by bubbling-boiling water, and fill’d with pure silver, four or five inches thick, many thousand dollars’ worth in a pan. The foreman who was showing me shovel’d it carelessly up with a little wooden shovel, as one might toss beans. Then large silver bricks, worth $2000 a brick, dozens of piles, twenty in a pile. In one place in the mountains, at a mining camp, I had a few days before seen rough bullion on the ground in the open air, like the confectioner’s pyramids at some swell dinner in New York. (Such a sweet morsel to roll over with a poor author’s pen and ink–and appropriate to slip in here–that the silver product of Colorado and Utah, with the gold product of California, New Mexico, Nevada and Dakota, foots up an addition to the world’s coin of considerably over a hundred millions every year.)
A city, this Denver, well-laid out–Laramie street, and 15th and 16th and Champa streets, with others, particularly fine–some with tall storehouses of stone or iron, and windows of plate-glass–all the streets with little canals of mountain water running along the sides–plenty of people, “business,” modernness–yet not without a certain racy wild smack, all its own. A place of fast horses, (many mares with their colts,) and I saw lots of big greyhounds for antelope hunting. Now and then groups of miners, some just come in, some starting out, very picturesque.
One of the papers here interview’d me, and reported me as saying off-hand: “I have lived in or visited all the great cities on the Atlantic third of the republic–Boston, Brooklyn with its hills, New Orleans, Baltimore, stately Washington, broad Philadelphia, teeming Cincinnati and Chicago, and for thirty years in that wonder, wash’d by hurried and glittering tides, my own New York, not only the New World’s but the world’s city–but, newcomer to Denver as I am, and threading its streets, breathing its air, warm’d by its sunshine, and having what there is of its human as well as aerial ozone flash’d upon me now for only three or four days, I am very much like a man feels sometimes toward certain people he meets with, and warms to, and hardly knows why. I, too, can hardly tell why, but as I enter’d the city in the slight haze of a late September afternoon, and have breath’d its air, and slept well o’ nights, and have roam’d or rode leisurely, and watch’d the comers and goers at the hotels, and absorb’d the climatic magnetism of this curiously attractive region, there has steadily grown upon me a feeling of affection for the spot, which, sudden as it is, has become so definite and strong that I must put it on record.”
So much for my feeling toward the Queen city of the plains and peaks, where she sits in her delicious rare atmosphere, over 5000 feet above sea-level, irrigated by mountain streams, one way looking east over the prairies for a thousand miles, and having the other, westward, in constant view by day, draped in their violet haze, mountain tops innumerable. Yes, I fell in love with Denver, and even felt a wish to spend my declining and dying days there.
I TURN SOUTH AND THEN EAST AGAIN
Leave Denver at 8 A.M. by the Rio Grande RR. going south. Mountains constantly in sight in the apparently near distance, veil’d slightly, but still clear and very grand–their cones, colors, sides, distinct against the sky–hundreds, it seem’d thousands, interminable necklaces of them, their tops and slopes hazed more or less slightly in that blue-gray, under the autumn sun, for over a hundred miles–the most spiritual show of objective Nature I ever beheld, or ever thought possible. Occasionally the light strengthens, making a contrast of yellow-tinged silver on one side, with dark and shaded gray on the other. I took a long look at Pike’s peak, and was a little disappointed. (I suppose I had expected something stunning.) Our view over plains to the left stretches amply, with corrals here and there, the frequent cactus and wild sage, and herds of cattle feeding. Thus about 120 miles to Pueblo. At that town we board the comfortable and well-equipt Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe RR., now striking east.
UNFULFILLED WANTS–THE ARKANSAS RIVER
I had wanted to go to the Yellowstone river region–wanted specially to see the National Park, and the geysers and the “hoodoo” or goblin land of that country; indeed, hesitated a little at Pueblo, the turning point–wanted to thread the Veta pass–wanted to go over the Santa Fe trail away southwestward to New Mexico–but turn’d and set my face eastward–leaving behind me whetting glimpse-tastes of southeastern Colorado, Pueblo, Bald mountain, the Spanish peaks, Sangre de Christos, Mile-Shoe-curve (which my veteran friend on the locomotive told me was “the boss railroad curve of the universe,”) fort Garland on the plains, Veta, and the three great peaks of the Sierra Blancas. The Arkansas river plays quite a part in the whole of this region–I see it, or its high-cut rocky northern shore, for miles, and cross and recross it frequently, as it winds and squirms like a snake. The plains vary here even more than usual–sometimes a long sterile stretch of scores of miles–then green, fertile and grassy, an equal length. Some very large herds of sheep. (One wants new words in writing about these plains, and all the inland American West–the terms, _far, large, vast_, &c., are insufficient.)
A SILENT LITTLE FOLLOWER-THE COREOPSIS
Here I must say a word about a little follower, present even now before my eyes. I have been accompanied on my whole journey from Barnegat to Pike’s peak by a pleasant floricultural friend, or rather millions of friends–nothing more or less than a hardy little yellow five-petal’d September and October wild-flower, growing I think everywhere in the middle and northern United States. I had seen it on the Hudson and over Long Island, and along the banks of the Delaware and through New Jersey, (as years ago up the Connecticut, and one fall by Lake Champlain.) This trip it follow’d me regularly, with its slender stem and eyes of gold, from Cape May to the Kaw valley, and so through the canons and to these plains. In Missouri I saw immense fields all bright with it. Toward western Illinois I woke up one morning in the sleeper and the first thing when I drew the curtain of my berth and look’d out was its pretty countenance and bending neck.
_Sept. 25th_.–Early morning–still going east after we leave Sterling, Kansas, where I stopp’d a day and night. The sun up about half an hour; nothing can be fresher or more beautiful than this time, this region. I see quite a field of my yellow flower in full bloom. At intervals dots of nice two-story houses, as we ride swiftly by. Over the immense area, flat as a floor, visible for twenty miles in every direction in the clear air, a prevalence of autumn-drab and reddish-tawny herbage–sparse stacks of hay and enclosures, breaking the landscape–as we rumble by, flocks of prairie-hens starting up. Between Sterling and Florence a fine country. (Remembrances to E. L., my old-young soldier friend of war times, and his wife and boy at S.)
THE PRAIRIES AND GREAT PLAINS IN POETRY
(_After traveling Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Colorado_) Grand as is the thought that doubtless the child is already born who will see a hundred millions of people, the most prosperous and advanc’d of the world, inhabiting these Prairies, the great Plains, and the valley of the Mississippi, I could not help thinking it would be grander still to see all those inimitable American areas fused in the alembic of a perfect poem, or other esthetic work, entirely western, fresh and limitless–altogether our own, without a trace or taste of Europe’s soil, reminiscence, technical letter or spirit. My days and nights, as I travel here–what an exhilaration!–not the air alone, and the sense of vastness, but every local sight and feature. Everywhere something characteristic–the cactuses, pinks, buffalo grass, wild sage–the receding perspective, and the far circle-line of the horizon all times of day, especially forenoon–the clear, pure, cool, rarefied nutriment for the lungs, previously quite unknown–the black patches and streaks left by surface-conflagrations–the deep-plough’d furrow of the “fire-guard”–the slanting snow-racks built all along to shield the railroad from winter drifts–the prairie-dogs and the herds of antelope–the curious “dry rivers”–occasionally a “dug-out” or corral–Fort Riley and Fort Wallace–those towns of the northern plains, (like ships on the sea,) Eagle-Tail, Coyote, Cheyenne, Agate, Monotony, Kit Carson–with ever the ant-hill and the buffalo-wallow–ever the herds of cattle and the cow-boys (“cow-punchers”) to me a strangely interesting class, bright-eyed as hawks, with their swarthy complexions and their broad-brimm’d hats–apparently always on horseback, with loose arms slightly raised and swinging as they ride.
THE SPANISH PEAKS–EVENING ON THE PLAINS
Between Pueblo and Bent’s fort, southward, in a clear afternoon sun-spell I catch exceptionally good glimpses of the Spanish peaks. We are in southeastern Colorado–pass immense herds of cattle as our first-class locomotive rushes us along–two or three times crossing the Arkansas, which we follow many miles, and of which river I get fine views, sometimes for quite a distance, its stony, upright, not very high, palisade banks, and then its muddy flats. We pass Fort Lyon–lots of adobie houses–limitless pasturage, appropriately fleck’d with those herds of cattle–in due time the declining sun in the west–a sky of limpid pearl over all–and so evening on the great plains. A calm, pensive, boundless landscape–the perpendicular rocks of the north Arkansas, hued in twilight–a thin line of violet on the southwestern horizon–the palpable coolness and slight aroma–a belated cow-boy with some unruly member of his herd–an emigrant wagon toiling yet a little further, the horses slow and tired–two men, apparently father and son, jogging along on foot–and around all the indescribable _chiaroscuro_ and sentiment, (profounder than anything at sea,) athwart these endless wilds.
AMERICA’S CHARACTERISTIC LANDSCAPE
Speaking generally as to the capacity and sure future destiny of that plain and prairie area (larger than any European kingdom) it is the inexhaustible land of wheat, maize, wool, flax, coal, iron, beef and pork, butter and cheese, apples and grapes–land of ten million virgin farms–to the eye at present wild and unproductive–yet experts say that upon it when irrigated may easily be grown enough wheat to feed the world. Then as to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling,) while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara falls, the upper Yellowstone and the like, afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the Prairies and the Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape.
Indeed through the whole of this journey, with all its shows and varieties, what most impress’d me, and will longest remain with me, are these same prairies. Day after day, and night after night, to my eyes, to all my senses–the esthetic one most of all–they silently and broadly unfolded. Even their simplest statistics are sublime.
EARTH’S MOST IMPORTANT STREAM
The valley of the Mississippi river and its tributaries, (this stream and its adjuncts involve a big part of the question,) comprehends more than twelve hundred thousand square miles, the greater part prairies. It is by far the most important stream on the globe, and would seem to have been marked out by design, slow-flowing from north to south, through a dozen climates, all fitted for man’s healthy occupancy, its outlet unfrozen all the year, and its line forming a safe, cheap continental avenue for commerce and passage from the north temperate to the torrid zone. Not even the mighty Amazon (though larger in volume) on its line of east and west–not the Nile in Africa, nor the Danube in Europe, nor the three great rivers of China, compare with it. Only the Mediterranean sea has play’d some such part in history, and all through the past, as the Mississippi is destined to play in the future. By its demesnes, water’d and welded by its branches, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Red, the Yazoo, the St. Francis and others, it already compacts twenty-five millions of people, not merely the most peaceful and money-making, but the most restless and warlike on earth. Its valley, or reach, is rapidly concentrating the political power of the American Union. One almost thinks it _is_ the Union–or soon will be. Take it out, with its radiations, and what would be left? From the car windows through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, or stopping some days along the Topeka and Santa Fe road, in southern Kansas, and indeed wherever I went, hundreds and thousands of miles through this region, my eyes feasted on primitive and rich meadows, some of them partially inhabited, but far, immensely far more untouch’d, unbroken–and much of it more lovely and fertile in its unplough’d innocence than the fair and valuable fields of New York’s, Pennsylvania’s, Maryland’s or Virginia’s richest farms.
PRAIRIE ANALOGIES–THE TREE QUESTION
The word Prairie is French, and means literally meadow. The cosmical analogies of our North American plains are the Steppes of Asia, the Pampas and Llanos of South America, and perhaps the Saharas of Africa. Some think the plains have been originally lake-beds; others attribute the absence of forests to the fires that almost annually sweep over them–(the cause, in vulgar estimation, of Indian summer.) The tree question will soon become a grave one. Although the Atlantic slope, the Rocky mountain region, and the southern portion of the Mississippi valley, are well wooded, there are here stretches of hundreds and thousands of miles where either not a tree grows, or often useless destruction has prevail’d; and the matter of the cultivation and spread of forests may well be press’d upon thinkers who look to the coming generations of the prairie States.
MISSISSIPPI VALLEY LITERATURE
Lying by one rainy day in Missouri to rest after quite a long exploration–first trying a big volume I found there of “Milton, Young, Gray, Beattie and Collins,” but giving it up for a bad job–enjoying however for awhile, as often before, the reading of Walter Scott’s poems, “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” “Marmion,” and so on–I stopp’d and laid down the book, and ponder’d the thought of a poetry that should in due time express and supply the teeming region I was in the midst of, and have briefly touch’d upon. One’s mind needs but a moment’s deliberation anywhere in the United States to see clearly enough that all the prevalent book and library poets, either as imported from Great Britain, or follow’d and _doppel-gang’d_ here, are foreign to our States, copiously as they are read by us all. But to fully understand not only how absolutely in opposition to our times and lands, and how little and cramp’d, and what anachronisms and absurdities many of their pages are, for American purposes, one must dwell or travel awhile in Missouri, Kansas and Colorado, and get rapport with their people and country.
Will the day ever come–no matter how long deferr’d–when those models and lay-figures from the British islands–and even the precious traditions of the classics–will be reminiscences, studies only? The pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude, strange mixture of delicacy and power, of continence, of real and ideal, and of all original and first-class elements, of these prairies, the Rocky mountains, and of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers–will they ever appear in, and in some sort form a standard for our poetry and art? (I sometimes think that even the ambition of my friend Joaquin Miller to put them in, and illustrate them, places him ahead of the whole crowd.)
Not long ago I was down New York bay, on a steamer, watching the sunset over the dark green heights of Navesink, and viewing all that inimitable spread of shore, shipping and sea, around Sandy Hook. But an intervening week or two, and my eyes catch the shadowy outlines of the Spanish peaks. In the more than two thousand miles between, though of infinite and paradoxical variety, a curious and absolute fusion is doubtless steadily annealing, compacting, identifying all. But subtler and wider and more solid, (to produce such compaction,) than the laws of the States, or the common ground of Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the grim welding of our national wars, or the steel ties of railroads, or all the kneading and fusing processes of our material and business history, past or present, would in my opinion be a great throbbing, vital, imaginative work, or series of works, or literature, in constructing which the Plains, the Prairies, and the Mississippi river, with the demesnes of its varied and ample valley, should be the concrete background, and America’s humanity, passions, struggles, hopes, there and now–an _eclaircissement_ as it is and is to be, on the stage of the New World, of all Time’s hitherto drama of war, romance and evolution–should furnish the lambent fire, the ideal.
AN INTERVIEWER’S ITEM
Oct. 17, ’79_.–To-day one of the newspapers of St. Louis prints the following informal remarks of mine on American, especially Western literature: “We called on Mr. Whitman yesterday and after a somewhat desultory conversation abruptly asked him: ‘Do you think we are to have a distinctively American literature?’ ‘It seems to me,’ said he,’that our work at present is to lay the foundations of a great nation in products, in agriculture, in commerce, in networks of intercommunication, and in all that relates to the comforts of vast masses of men and families, with freedom of speech, ecclesiasticism, &c. These we have founded and are carrying out on a grander scale than ever hitherto, and Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas and Colorado, seem to me to be the seat and field of these very facts and ideas. Materialistic prosperity in all its varied forms, with those other points that I mentioned, intercommunication and freedom, are first to be attended to. When those have their results and get settled, then a literature worthy of us will begin to be defined. Our American superiority and vitality are in the bulk of our people, not in a gentry like the old world. The greatness of our army during the secession war, was in the rank and file, and so with the nation. Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of the people. Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.'”
THE WOMEN OF THE WEST
_Kansas City_.–I am not so well satisfied with what I see of the women of the prairie cities. I am writing this where I sit leisurely in a store in Main street, Kansas City, a streaming crowd on the sidewalks flowing by. The ladies (and the same in Denver) are all fashionably drest, and have the look of “gentility” in face, manner and action, but they do _not_ have, either in physique or the mentality appropriate to them, any high native originality of spirit or body, (as the men certainly have, appropriate to them.) They are “intellectual” and fashionable, but dyspeptic-looking and generally doll-like; their ambition evidently is to copy their eastern sisters. Something far different and in advance must appear, to tally and complete the superb masculinity of the west, and maintain and continue it.
THE SILENT GENERAL
_Sept. 28, ’79_.–So General Grant, after circumambiating the world, has arrived home again, landed in San Francisco yesterday, from the ship City of Tokio from Japan. What a man he is! what a history! what an illustration–his life–of the capacities of that American individuality common to us all. Cynical critics are wondering “what the people can see in Grant” to make such a hubbub about. They aver (and it is no doubt true) that he has hardly the average of our day’s literary and scholastic culture, and absolutely no pronounc’d genius or conventional eminence of any sort. Correct: but he proves how an average western farmer, mechanic, boatman, carried by tides of circumstances, perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military or civic responsibilities, (history has presented none more trying, no born monarch’s, no mark more shining for attack or envy,) may steer his way fitly and steadily through them all, carrying the country and himself with credit year after year–command over a million armed men–fight more than fifty pitch’d battles–rule for eight years a land larger than all the kingdoms of Europe combined–and then, retiring, quietly (with a cigar in his mouth) make the promenade of the whole world, through its courts and coteries, and kings and czars and mikados, and splendidest glitters and etiquettes, as phlegmatically as he ever walk’d the portico of a Missouri hotel after dinner. I say all this is what people like–and I am sure I like it. Seems to me it transcends Plutarch. How those old Greeks, indeed, would have seized on him! A mere plain man–no art, no poetry–only practical sense, ability to do, or try his best to do, what devolv’d upon him. A common trader, money-maker, tanner, farmer of Illinois–general for the republic, in its terrific struggle with itself, in the war of attempted secession–President following, (a task of peace, more difficult than the war itself)–nothing heroic, as the authorities put it–and yet the greatest hero. The gods, the destinies, seem to have concentrated upon him.
PRESIDENT HAYES’S SPEECHES
_Sept. 30_.–I see President Hayes has come out West, passing quite informally from point to point, with his wife and a small cortege of big officers, receiving ovations, and making daily and sometimes double-daily addresses to the people. To these addresses–all impromptu, and some would call them ephemeral–I feel to devote a memorandum. They are shrewd, good-natur’d, face-to-face speeches, on easy topics not too deep; but they give me some revised ideas of oratory–of a new, opportune theory and practice of that art, quite changed from the classic rules, and adapted to our days, our occasions, to American democracy, and to the swarming populations of the West. I hear them criticised as wanting in dignity, but to me they are just what they should be, considering all the circumstances, who they come from, and who they are address’d to. Underneath, his objects are to compact and fraternize the States, encourage their materialistic and industrial development, soothe and expand their self-poise, and tie all and each with resistless double ties not only of inter-trade barter, but human comradeship.
From Kansas City I went on to St. Louis, where I remain’d nearly three months, with my brother T.J.W., and my dear nieces.
ST. LOUIS MEMORANDA
_Oct., Nov., and Dec., ’79_.–The points of St. Louis are its position, its absolute wealth, (the long accumulations of time and trade, solid riches, probably a higher average thereof than any city,) the unrivall’d amplitude of its well-laid-out environage of broad plateaus, for future expansion–and the great State of which it is the head. It fuses northern and southern qualities, perhaps native and foreign ones, to perfection, rendezvous the whole stretch of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and its American electricity goes well with its German phlegm. Fourth, Fifth and Third streets are store-streets, showy, modern, metropolitan, with hurrying crowds, vehicles, horse-cars, hubbub, plenty of people, rich goods, plate-glass windows, iron fronts often five or six stories high. You can purchase anything in St. Louis (in most of the big western cities for the matter of that) just as readily and cheaply as in the Atlantic marts. Often in going about the town you see reminders of old, even decay’d civilization. The water of the west, in some places, is not good, but they make it up here by plenty of very fair wine, and inexhaustible quantities of the best beer in the world. There are immense establishments for slaughtering beef and pork–and I saw flocks of sheep, 5000 in a flock. (In Kansas City I had visited a packing establishment that kills and packs an average of 2500 hogs a day the whole year round, for export. Another in Atchison, Kansas, same extent; others nearly equal elsewhere. And just as big ones here.)
NIGHTS ON THE MISSISSIPPI
_Oct. 29th, 30th, and 31st_.–Wonderfully fine, with the full harvest moon, dazzling and silvery. I have haunted the river every night lately, where I could get a look at the bridge by moonlight. It is indeed a structure of perfection and beauty unsurpassable, and I never tire of it. The river at present is very low; I noticed to-day it had much more of a blue-clear look than usual. I hear the slight ripples, the air is fresh and cool, and the view, up or down, wonderfully clear, in the moonlight. I am out pretty late: it is so fascinating, dreamy. The cool night-air, all the influences, the silence, with those far-off eternal stars, do me good. I have been quite ill of late. And so, well-near the centre of our national demesne, these night views of the Mississippi.
UPON OUR OWN LAND
“Always, after supper, take a walk half a mile long,” says an old proverb, dryly adding, “and if convenient let it be upon your own land.” I wonder does any other nation but ours afford opportunity for such a jaunt as this? Indeed has any previous period afforded it? No one, I discover, begins to know the real geographic, democratic, indissoluble American Union in the present, or suspect it in the future, until he explores these Central States, and dwells awhile observantly on their prairies, or amid their busy towns, and the mighty father of waters. A ride of two or three thousand miles, “on one’s own land,” with hardly a disconnection, could certainly be had in no other place than the United States, and at no period before this. If you want to see what the railroad is, and how civilization and progress date from it–how it is the conqueror of crude nature, which it turns to man’s use, both on small scales and on the largest–come hither to inland America.
I return’d home, east, Jan. 5, 1880, having travers’d, to and fro and across, 10,000 miles and more. I soon resumed my seclusions down in the woods, or by the creek, or gaddings about cities, and an occasional disquisition, as will be seen following.
EDGAR POE’S SIGNIFICANCE
_Jan. 1, ’80_.–In diagnosing this disease called humanity–to assume for the nonce what seems a chief mood of the personality and writings of my subject–I have thought that poets, somewhere or other on the list, present the most mark’d indications. Comprehending artists in a mass, musicians, painters, actors, and so on, and considering each and all of them as radiations or flanges of that furious whirling wheel, poetry, the centre and axis of the whole, where else indeed may we so well investigate the causes, growths, tally-marks of the time–the age’s matter and malady?
By common consent there is nothing better for man or woman than a perfect and noble life, morally without flaw, happily balanced in activity, physically sound and pure, giving its due proportion, and no more, to the sympathetic, the human emotional element–a life, in all these, unhasting, unresting, untiring to the end. And yet there is another shape of personality dearer far to the artist-sense, (which likes the play of strongest lights and shades,) where the perfect character, the good, the heroic, although never attain’d, is never lost sight of, but through failures, sorrows, temporary downfalls, is return’d to again and again, and while often violated, is passionately adhered to as long as mind, muscles, voice, obey the power we call volition. This sort of personality we see more or less in Burns, Byron, Schiller, and George Sand. But we do not see it in Edgar Poe. (All this is the result of reading at intervals the last three days a new volume of his poems–I took it on my rambles down by the pond, and by degrees read it all through there.) While to the character first outlined the service Poe renders is certainly that entire contrast and contradiction which is next best to fully exemplifying it.
Almost without the first sign of moral principle, or of the concrete or its heroisms, or the simpler affections of the heart, Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page–and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat. There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems. To one who could work out their subtle retracing and retrospect, the latter would make a close tally no doubt between the author’s birth and antecedents, his childhood and youth, his physique, his so-call’d education, his studies and associates, the literary and social Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia and New York, of those times–not only the places and circumstances in themselves, but often, very often, in a strange spurning of, and reaction from them all.
The following from a report in the Washington “Star” of November 16, 1875, may afford those who care for it something further of my point of view toward this interesting figure and influence of our era. There occurr’d about that date in Baltimore a public reburial of Poe’s remains, and dedication of a monument over the grave:
“Being in Washington on a visit at the time, ‘the old gray’ went over to Baltimore, and though ill from paralysis, consented to hobble up and silently take a seat on the platform, but refused to make any speech, saying, ‘I have felt a strong impulse to come over and be here to-day myself in memory of Poe, which I have obey’d, but not the slightest impulse to make a speech, which, my dear friends, must also be obeyed.’ In an informal circle, however, in conversation after the ceremonies, Whitman said: ‘For a long while, and until lately, I had a distaste for Poe’s writings. I wanted, and still want for poetry, the clear sun shining, and fresh air blowing–the strength and power of health, not of delirium, even amid the stormiest passions–with always the background of the eternal moralities. Non-complying with these requirements, Poe’s genius has yet conquer’d a special recognition for itself, and I too have come to fully admit it, and appreciate it and him.
“‘In a dream I once had, I saw a vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm. It was no great full-rigg’d ship, nor majestic steamer, steering firmly through the gale, but seem’d one of those superb little schooner yachts I had often seen lying anchor’d, rocking so jauntily, in the waters around New York, or up Long Island sound–now flying uncontroll’d with torn sails and broken spars through the wild sleet and winds and waves of the night. On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems–themselves all lurid dreams.'”
Much more may be said, but I most desired to exploit the idea put at the beginning. By its popular poets the calibres of an age, the weak spots of its embankments, its sub-currents, (often more significant than the biggest surface ones,) are unerringly indicated. The lush and the weird that have taken such extraordinary possession of Nineteenth century verse-lovers–what mean they? The inevitable tendency of poetic culture to morbidity, abnormal beauty–the sickliness of all technical thought or refinement in itself–the abnegation of the perennial and democratic concretes at first hand, the body, the earth and sea, sex and the like–and the substitution of something for them at second or third hand–what bearings have they on current pathological study?
BEETHOVEN’S SEPTETTE
_Feb. 11, ’80_.–At a good concert to-night in the foyer of the opera house, Philadelphia–the band a small but first-rate one. Never did music more sink into and soothe and fill me–never so prove its soul-rousing power, its impossibility of statement. Especially in the rendering of one of Beethoven’s master septettes by the well-chosen and perfectly-combined instruments (violins, viola, clarionet, horn, ‘cello and contrabass,) was I carried away, seeing, absorbing many wonders. Dainty abandon, sometimes as if Nature laughing on a hillside in the sunshine; serious and firm monotonies, as of winds; a horn sounding through the tangle of the forest, and the dying echoes; soothing floating of waves, but presently rising in surges, angrily lashing, muttering, heavy; piercing peals of laughter, for interstices; now and then weird, as Nature herself is in certain moods–but mainly spontaneous, easy, careless–often the sentiment of the postures of naked children playing or sleeping. It did me good even to watch the violinists drawing their bows so masterly–every motion a study. I allow’d myself, as I sometimes do, to wander out of myself. The conceit came to me of a copious grove of singing birds, and in their midst a simple harmonic duo, two human souls, steadily asserting their own pensiveness, joyousness.
A HINT OF WILD NATURE
_Feb. 13_.–As I was crossing the Delaware to-day, saw a large flock of wild geese, right overhead, not very high up, ranged in V-shape, in relief against the noon clouds of light smoke-color. Had a capital though momentary view of them, and then of their course on and on southeast, till gradually fading–(my eyesight yet first rate for the open air and its distances, but I use glasses for reading.) Queer thoughts melted into me the two or three minutes, or less, seeing these creatures cleaving the sky–the spacious, airy realm–even the prevailing smoke-gray color everywhere, (no sun shining)–the waters below–the rapid flight of the birds, appearing just for a minute–flashing to me such a hint of the whole spread of Nature, with her eternal unsophisticated freshness, her never-visited recesses of sea, sky, shore–and then disappearing in the distance.
LOAFING IN THE WOODS
_March 8_.–I write this down in the country again, but in a new spot, seated on a log in the woods, warm, sunny, midday. Have been loafing here deep among the trees, shafts of tall pines, oak, hickory, with a thick undergrowth of laurels and grapevines–the ground cover’d everywhere by debris, dead leaves, breakage, moss–everything solitary, ancient, grim. Paths (such as they are) leading hither and yon–(how made I know not, for nobody seems to come here, nor man nor cattle-kind.) Temperature to-day about 60, the wind through the pine-tops; I sit and listen to its hoarse sighing above (and to the _stillness_) long and long, varied by aimless rambles in the old roads and paths, and by exercise-pulls at the young saplings, to keep my joints from getting stiff. Blue-birds, robins, meadow-larks begin to appear.
_Next day, 9th_.–A snowstorm in the morning, and continuing most of the day. But I took a walk over two hours, the same woods and paths, amid the falling flakes. No wind, yet the musical low murmur through the pines, quite pronounced, curious, like waterfalls, now still’d, now pouring again. All the senses, sight, sound, smell, delicately gratified. Every snowflake lay where it fell on the evergreens, holly-trees, laurels, &c., the multitudinous leaves and branches piled, bulging-white, defined by edge-lines of emerald–the tall straight columns of the plentiful bronze-topt pines–a slight resinous odor blending with that of the snow. (For there is a scent to everything, even the snow, if you can only detect it–no two places, hardly any two hours, anywhere, exactly alike. How different the odor of noon from midnight, or winter from summer, or a windy spell from a still one.)
A CONTRALTO VOICE
_May 9, Sunday_.–Visit this evening to my friends the J.’s–good supper, to which I did justice–lively chat with Mrs. J. and I. and J. As I sat out front on the walk afterward, in the evening air, the church-choir and organ on the corner opposite gave Luther’s hymn, _Ein feste berg_, very finely. The air was borne by a rich contralto. For nearly half an hour there in the dark (there was a good string of English stanzas,) came the music, firm and unhurried, with long pauses. The full silver star-beams of Lyra rose silently over the church’s dim roof-ridge. Vari-color’d lights from the stain’d glass windows broke through the tree-shadows. And under all–under the Northern Crown up there, and in the fresh breeze below, and the _chiaroscuro_ of the night, that liquid-full contralto.
SEEING NIAGARA TO ADVANTAGE
_June 4, ’80_.–For really seizing a great picture or book, or piece of music, or architecture, or grand scenery–or perhaps for the first time even the common sunshine, or landscape, or may-be even the mystery of identity, most curious mystery of all–there comes some lucky five minutes of a man’s life, set amid a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances, and bringing in a brief flash the culmination of years of reading and travel and thought. The present case about two o’clock this afternoon, gave me Niagara, its superb severity of action and color and majestic grouping, in one short, indescribable show. We were very slowly crossing the Suspension bridge-not a full stop anywhere, but next to it–the day clear, sunny, still–and I out on the platform. The falls were in plain view about a mile off, but very distinct, and no roar–hardly a murmur. The river tumbling green and white, far below me; the dark high banks, the plentiful umbrage, many bronze cedars, in shadow; and tempering and arching all the immense materiality, a clear sky overhead, with a few white clouds, limpid, spiritual, silent. Brief, and as quiet as brief, that picture–a remembrance always afterwards. Such are the things, indeed, I lay away with my life’s rare and blessed bits of hours, reminiscent, past–the wild sea-storm I once saw one winter day, off Fire island–the elder Booth in Richard, that famous night forty years ago in the old Bowery–or Alboni in the children’s scene in Norma–or night-views, I remember, on the field, after battles in Virginia–or the peculiar sentiment of moonlight and stars over the great Plains, western Kansas–or scooting up New York bay, with a stiff breeze and a good yacht, off Navesink. With these, I say, I henceforth place that view, that afternoon, that combination complete, that five minutes’ perfect absorption of Niagara–not the great majestic gem alone by itself, but set complete in all its varied, full, indispensable surroundings.
JAUNTING TO CANADA
To go back a little, I left Philadelphia, 9th and Green streets, at 8 o’clock P.M., June 3, on a first-class sleeper, by the Lehigh Valley (North Pennsylvania) route, through Bethlehem, Wilkesbarre, Waverly, and so (by Erie) on through Corning to Hornellsville, where we arrived at 8, morning, and had a bounteous breakfast. I must say I never put in such a good night on any railroad track–smooth, firm, the minimum of jolting, and all the swiftness compatible with safety. So without change to Buffalo, and thence to Clifton, where we arrived early afternoon; then on to London, Ontario, Canada, in four more–less than twenty-two hours altogether. I am domiciled at the hospitable house of my friends Dr. and Mrs. Bucke, in the ample and charming garden and lawns of the asylum.
SUNDAY WITH THE INSANE
_June 6_.–Went over to the religious services (Episcopal) main Insane asylum, held in a lofty, good-sized hall, third story. Plain boards, whitewash, plenty of cheap chairs, no ornament or color, yet all scrupulously clean and sweet. Some three hundred persons present, mostly patients. Everything, the prayers, a short sermon, the firm, orotund voice of the minister, and most of all, beyond any portraying, or suggesting, _that audience_, deeply impress’d me. I was furnish’d with an arm-chair near the pulpit, and sat facing the motley, yet perfectly well-behaved and orderly congregation. The quaint dresses and bonnets of some of the women, several very old and gray, here and there like the heads in old pictures. O the looks that came from those faces! There were two or three I shall probably never forget. Nothing at all markedly repulsive or hideous–strange enough I did not see one such. Our common humanity, mine and yours, everywhere:
“The same old blood–the same red, running blood;”
yet behind most, an inferr’d arriere of such storms, such wrecks, such mysteries, fires, love, wrong, greed for wealth, religious problems, crosses–mirror’d from those crazed faces (yet now temporarily so calm, like still waters,) all the woes and sad happenings of life and death–now from every one the devotional element radiating–was it not, indeed, _the peace of God that passeth all understanding_, strange as it may sound? I can only say that I took long and searching eyesweeps as I sat there, and it seem’d so, rousing unprecedented thoughts, problems unanswerable. A very fair choir, and melodeon accompaniment. They sang “Lead, kindly light,” after the sermon. Many join’d in the beautiful hymn, to which the minister read the introductory text, _In the daytime also He led them with a cloud, and all the night with a light of fire_. Then the words:
Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead thou me on.
The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead thou me on.
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me.
I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that thou Should’st lead me on;
I lov’d to choose and see my path; but now Lead thou me on.
I loved the garish day, and spite of fears Pride ruled my will; remember not past years.
A couple of days after, I went to the “Refractory building,” under special charge of Dr. Beemer, and through the wards pretty thoroughly, both the men’s and women’s. I have since made many other visits of the kind through the asylum, and around among the detach’d cottages. As far as I could see, this is among the most advanced, perfected, and kindly and rationally carried on, of all its kind in America. It is a town in itself, with many buildings and a thousand inhabitants.
I learn that Canada, and especially this ample and populous province, Ontario, has the very best and plentiest benevolent institutions in all departments.
REMINISCENCE OF ELIAS HICKS
_June 8_.–To-day a letter from Mrs. E. S. L., Detroit, accompanied in a little post-office roll by a rare old engraved head of Elias Hicks, (from a portrait in oil by Henry Inman, painted for J. V. S., must have been 60 years or more ago, in New York)–among the rest the following excerpt about E. H. in the letter:
“I have listen’d to his preaching so often when a child, and sat with my mother at social gatherings where he was the centre, and every one so pleas’d and stirr’d by his conversation. I hear that you contemplate writing or speaking about him, and I wonder’d whether you had a picture of him. As I am the owner of two, I send you one.”
GRAND NATIVE GROWTH
In a few days I go to lake Huron, and may have something to say of that region and people. From what I already see, I should say the young native population of Canada was growing up, forming a hardy, democratic, intelligent, radically sound, and just as American, good-natured and _individualistic_ race, as the average range of best specimens among us. As among us, too, I please myself by considering that this element, though it may not be the majority, promises to be the leaven which must eventually leaven the whole lump.
A ZOLLVEREIN BETWEEN THE U.S. AND CANADA
Some of the more liberal of the presses here are discussing the question of a zollverein between the United States and Canada. It is proposed to form a union for commercial purposes–to altogether abolish the frontier tariff line, with its double sets of custom house officials now existing between the two countries, and to agree upon one tariff for both, the proceeds of this tariff to be divided between the two governments on the basis of population. It is said that a large proportion of the merchants of Canada are in favor of this step, as they believe it would materially add to the business of the country, by removing the restrictions that now exist on trade between Canada and the States. Those persons who are opposed to the measure believe that it would increase the material welfare or the country, but it would loosen the bonds between Canada and England; and this sentiment overrides the desire for commercial prosperity. Whether the sentiment can continue to bear the strain put upon it is a question. It is thought by many that commercial considerations must in the end prevail. It seems also to be generally agreed that such a zollverein, or common customs union, would bring practically more benefits to the Canadian provinces than to the United States. (It seems to me a certainty of time, sooner or later, that Canada shall form two or three grand States, equal and independent, with the rest of the American Union. The St. Lawrence and lakes are not for a frontier line, but a grand interior or mid-channel.)
THE ST. LAWRENCE LINE
_August 20_.–Premising that my three or four months in Canada were intended, among the rest, as an exploration of the line of the St. Lawrence, from lake Superior to the sea, (the engineers here insist upon considering it as one stream, over 2000 miles long, including lakes and Niagara and all)–that I have only partially carried out my programme; but for the seven or eight hundred miles so far fulfill’d, I find that the _Canada question_ is absolutely control’d by this vast water line, with its first-class features and points of trade, humanity, and many more–here I am writing this nearly a thousand miles north of my Philadelphia starting-point (by way of Montreal and Quebec) in the midst of regions that go to a further extreme of grimness, wildness of beauty, and a sort of still and pagan _scaredness_, while yet Christian, inhabitable, and partially fertile, than perhaps any other on earth. The weather remains perfect; some might call it a little cool, but I wear my old gray overcoat and find it just right. The days are full of sunbeams and oxygen. Most of the forenoons and afternoons I am on the forward deck of the steamer.
THE SAVAGE SAGUENAY
Up these black waters, over a hundred miles–always strong, deep, (hundreds of feet, sometimes thousands,) ever with high, rocky hills for banks, green and gray–at times a little like some parts of the Hudson, but much more pronounc’d and defiant. The hills rise higher–keep their ranks more unbroken. The river is straighter and of more resolute flow, and its hue, though dark as ink, exquisitely polish’d and sheeny under the August sun. Different, indeed, this Saguenay from all other rivers–different effects–a bolder, more vehement play of lights and shades. Of a rare charm of singleness and simplicity. (Like the organ-chant at midnight from the old Spanish convent, in “Favorita”–one strain only, simple and monotonous and unornamented–but indescribably penetrating and grand and masterful.) Great place for echoes: while our steamer was tied at the wharf at Tadousac (taj-oo-sac) waiting, the escape-pipe letting off steam, I was sure I heard a band at the hotel up in the rocks–could even make out some of the tunes. Only when our pipe stopp’d, I knew what caused it. Then at cape Eternity and Trinity rock, the pilot with his whistle producing similar marvellous results, echoes indescribably weird, as we lay off in the still bay under their shadows.
CAPES ETERNITY AND TRINITY
But the great, haughty, silent capes themselves; I doubt if any crack points, or hills, or historic places of note, or anything of the kind elsewhere in the world, outvies these objects–(I write while I am before them face to face.) They are very simple, they do not startle–at least they did not me–but they linger in one’s memory forever. They are placed very near each other, side by side, each a mountain rising flush out of the Saguenay. A good thrower could throw a stone on each in passing–at least it seems so. Then they are as distinct in form as a perfect physical man or a perfect physical woman. Cape Eternity is bare, rising, as just said, sheer out of the water, rugged and grim (yet with an indescribable beauty) nearly two thousand feet high. Trinity rock, even a little higher, also rising flush, top-rounded like a great head with close-cut verdure of hair. I consider myself well repaid for coming my thousand miles to get the sight and memory of the unrivall’d duo. They have stirr’d me more profoundly than anything of the kind I have yet seen. If Europe or Asia had them, we should certainly hear of them in all sorts of sent-back poems, rhapsodies, &c., a dozen times a year through our papers and magazines.
CHICOUTIMI AND HA-HA BAY
No indeed–life and travel and memory have offer’d and will preserve to me no deeper-cut incidents, panorama, or sights to cheer my soul, than these at Chicoutimi and Ha-ha bay, and my days and nights up and down this fascinating savage river–the rounded mountains, some bare and gray, some dull red, some draped close all over with matted green