 | Mosses from an old manse |  |
BUDS AND BIRD-VOICES.
Balmy Spring—weeks later than we expected, and months later
than we longed for her—comes at last, to revive the moss on the
roof and walls of our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my
study-window, inviting me to throw it open, and create a summer
atmosphere by the intermixture of her genial breath with the
black and cheerless comfort of the stove. As the casement
ascends, forth into infinite space fly the innumerable forms of
thought or fancy that have kept me company in the retirement of
this little chamber, during the sluggish lapse of wintry weather;—
visions, gay, grotesque, and sad; pictures of real life, tinted with
nature's homely grey and russet; scenes in dream-land, bedizened
with rainbow hues, which faded before they were well laid
on;—all these may vanish now, and leave me to mould a fresh
existence out of sunshine. Brooding meditation may flap her
dusky wings, and take her owl-like flight, blinking amid the
cheerfulness of noontide. Such companions befit the season of
frosted window-panes and crackling fires, when the blast howls
through the black ash-trees of our avenue, and the drifting snow-storm
chokes up the wood-paths, and fills the highway from stone-wall
to stone-wall. In the spring and summer time, all sombre
thoughts should follow the winter northward, with the sombre and
thoughtful crows. The old paradisiacal economy of life is again
in force; we live, not to think, nor to labor, but for the simple
end of being happy; nothing, for the present hour, is worthy of
and sympathize with the reviving earth.
The present spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps, because
winter lingered so unconscionably long, that with her best
diligence she can hardly retrieve half the allotted period of her
reign. It is but a fortnight since I stood on the brink of our
swollen river, and beheld the accumulated ice of four frozen
months go down the stream. Except in streaks here and there
upon the hill-sides, the whole visible universe was then covered
with deep snow, the nethermost layer of which had been deposited
by an early December storm. It was a sight to make the beholder
torpid, in the impossibility of imagining how this vast white
napkin was to be removed from the face of the corpse-like world,
in less time than had been required to spread it there. But who
can estimate the power of gentle influences, whether amid material
desolation, or the moral winter of man's heart! There have
been no tempestuous rains—even no sultry days—hut a constant
breath of southern winds, with now a day of kindly sunshine, and
now a no less kindly mist, or a soft descent of showers, in which
a smile and a blessing seemed to have been steeped. The snow
has vanished as if by magic; whatever heaps may be hidden in
the woods and deep gorges of the hills, only two solitary specks
remain in the landscape; and those I shall almost regret to miss,
when, to-marrow, I look for them in vain. Never before, methinks,
has spring pressed so closely on the footsteps of retreating
winter. Along the road-side, the green blades of grass have
sprouted on the very edge of the snow-drifts. The pastures and
mowing fields have not yet assumed a general aspect of verdure;
but neither have they the cheerless brown tint which they wear
in latter autumn, when vegetation has entirely ceased; there is
now a faint shadow of life, gradually brightening into the warm
reality. Some tracts, in a happy exposure—as, for instance,
yonder south-western slope of an orchard, in front of that old red
a beautiful and tender green, to which no future luxuriance can
add a charm. It looks unreal—a prophecy—a hope—a transitory
effect of some peculiar light, which will vanish with the
slightest motion of the eye. But beauty is never a delusion; not
these verdant tracts, but the dark and barren landscape, all around
them, is a shadow and a dream. Each moment wins some portion
of the earth from death to life; a sudden gleam of verdure
brightens along the sunny slope of a bank, which, an instant ago,
was brown and bare. You look again, and behold an apparition
of green grass!
The trees, in our orchard and elsewhere, are as yet naked,
but already appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as
if, by one magic touch, they might instantaneously burst into full
foliage, and that the wind, which now sighs through their naked
branches, might make sudden music amid innumerable leaves.
The moss-grown willow-tree, which for forty years past has overshadowed
these western windows, will be among the first to put
on its green attire. There are some objections to the willow; it
is not a dry and cleanly tree, and impresses the beholder with an
association of sliminess. No trees, I think, are perfectly agreeable
as companions, unless they have glossy leaves, dry bark, and
a firm and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow
is almost the earliest to gladden us with the promise and reality
of beauty, in its graceful and delicate foliage, and the last to scatter
its yellow yet scarcely withered leaves upon the ground. All
through the winter, too, its yellow twigs give it a sunny aspect,
which is not without a cheering influence, even in the greyest and
gloomiest day. Beneath a clouded sky, it faithfully remembers
the sunshine. Our old house would lose a charm, were the
willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over the snow-covered
roof, and its heap of summer verdure.
The lilac-shrubs, under my study-windows, are likewise almost
and pluck the topmost bough in its freshest green. These lilacs
are very aged, and have lost the luxuriant foliage of their prime.
The heart, or the judgment, or the moral sense, or the taste, is
dissatisfied with their present aspect. Old age is not venerable,
when it embodies itself in lilacs, rose-bushes, or any other ornamental
shrubs; it seems as if such plants, as they grow only for
beauty, ought to flourish only in immortal youth, or, at least, to
die before their and decrepitude. Trees of beauty are trees of
Paradise, and therefore not subject to decay, by their original
nature, though they have lost that precious birth-right by being
transplanted to an earthly soil. There is a kind of ludicrous
unfitness in the idea of a time-stricken and grandfatherly lilac-bush.
The analogy holds good in human life. Persons who can
only be graceful and ornamental—who can give the world nothing
but flowers—should die young, and never be seen with grey
hair and wrinkles, any more than the flower-shrubs with mossy
bark and blighted foliage, like the lilacs under my window. Not
that beauty is worthy of less than immortality,—no, the beautiful
should live for ever,—and thence, perhaps, the sense of impropriety,
when we see it triumphed over by time. Apple-trees, on
the other hand, grow old without reproach. Let them live as
long as they may, and contort themselves into whatever perversity
of shape they please, and deck their withered limbs with a springtime
gaudiness of pink-blossoms, still they are respectable, even
if they afford us only an apple or two in a season. Those few
apples—or, at all events, the remembrance of apples in by-gone
years—are the atonement which utilitarianism inexorably demands,
for the privilege of lengthened life. Human flower-shrubs,
if they will grow old on earth, should, beside their lovely
blossoms, bear some kind of fruit that will satisfy earthly appetites;
else neither man, nor the decorum of nature, will deem it fit that
the moss should gather on them.
One of the first things that strikes the attention, when the white
sheet of winter is withdrawn, is the neglect and disarray that
lay hidden beneath it. Nature is not cleanly, according to our
prejudices. The beauty of preceding years, now transformed to
brown and blighted deformity, obstructs the brightening loveliness
of the present hour. Our avenue is strewn with the whole
crop of autumn's withered leaves. There are quantities of
decayed branches, which one tempest after another has flung
down, black and rotten; and one or two with the ruin of a bird's
nest clinging to them. In the garden are the dried bean-vines,
the brown stalks of the asparagus-bed, and melancholy old cabbages
which were frozen into the soil before their unthrifty
cultivator could find time to gather them. How invariably,
throughout all the forms of life, do we find these intermingled
memorials of death! On the soil of thought, and in the garden
of the heart, as well as in the sensual world, lie withered leaves;
the ideas and feelings that we have done with. There is no wind
strong enough to sweep them away; infinite space will not garner
them from our sight. What mean they? Why may we not be permitted
to live and enjoy, as if this were the first life, and our own
the primal enjoyment, instead of treading always on these dry
bones and mouldering relics, from the aged accumulation of which
springs all that now appears so young and new? Sweet must
have been the spring-time of Eden, when no earlier year had
strewn its decay upon the virgin turf, and no former experience
had ripened into summer, and faded into autumn, in the hearts of
its inhabitants! That was a world worth living in! Oh, thou
murmurer, it is out of the very wantonness of such a life, that
thou feignest these idle lamentations! There is no decay. Each
human soul is the first created inhabitant of its own Eden. We
dwell in an old moss-covered mansion, and tread in the worn footprints
of the past, and have a grey clergyman's ghost for our
daily and nightly inmate; yet all these outward circumstances
Should the spirit ever lose this power—should the withered leaves,
and the rotten branches, and the moss-covered house, and the
ghost of the grey past, ever become its realities, and the verdure
and the freshness merely its faint dream—then let it pray to be
released from earth. It will need the air of heaven, to revive
its pristine energies!
What an unlooked-for flight was this, from our shadowy avenue
of black-ash and Balm of Gilead trees, into the infinite! Now
we have our feet again upon the turf. Nowhere does the grass
spring up so industriously as in this homely yard, along the base
of the stone-wall, and in the sheltered nooks of the buildings, and
especially around the southern door-step; a locality which seems
particularly favorable to its growth, for it is already tall enough
to bend over, and wave in the wind. I observe, that several
weeds—and, most frequently, a plant that stains the fingers with
its yellow juice—have survived, and retained their freshness and
sap throughout the winter. One knows not how they have
deserved such an exception from the common lot of their race.
They are now the patriarchs of the departed year, and may
preach mortality to the present generation of flowers and weeds.
Among the delights of spring, how is it possible to forget the
birds! Even the crows were welcome, as the sable harbingers
of a brighter and livelier race. They visited us before the snow
was off, but seem mostly to have betaken themselves to remote
depths of the woods, which they haunt all summer long. Many a
time shall I disturb them there, and feel as if I had intruded
among a company of silent worshippers, as they sit in sabbath-stillness
among the tree-tops. Their voices, when they speak,
are in admirable accordance with the tranquil solitude of a summer
afternoon; and, resounding so far above the head, their loud
clamor increases the religious quiet of the scene, instead of breaking
it. A crow, however, has no real pretensions to religion, in
a thief, and probably an infidel. The gulls are far more
respectable, in a moral point of view. These denizens of
sea-beaten rocks, and haunters of the lonely beach, come up our
inland river, at this season, and soar high overhead, flapping their
broad wings in the upper sunshine. They are among the most
picturesque of birds, because they so float and rest upon the air,
as to become almost stationary parts of the landscape. The imagination
has time to grow acquainted with them; they have not
flitted away in a moment. You go up among the clouds, and
greet these lofty-flighted gulls, and repose confidently with them
upon the sustaining atmosphere. Ducks have their haunts along
the solitary places of the river, and alight in flocks upon the broad
bosom of the overflowed meadows. Their flight is too rapid and
determined for the eye to catch enjoyment from it, although it
never fails to stir up the heart with the sportsman's ineradicable
instinct. They have now gone further northward, but will visit
us again in autumn.
The smaller birds—the little songsters of the woods, and those
that haunt man's dwellings, and claim human friendship by building
their nests under the sheltering eaves, or among the orchard
trees—these require a touch more delicate, and a gentler heart
than mine, to do them justice. Their outburst of melody is like
a brook let loose from wintry chains. We need not deem it a too
high and solemn word, to call it a hymn of praise to the Creator;
since Nature, who pictures the reviving year in so many sights
of beauty, has expressed the sentiment of renewed life in no other
sound, save the notes of these blessed birds. Their music, however,
just now, seems to be incidental, and not the result of a set
purpose. They are discussing the economy of life and love, and
the site and architecture of their summer residences, and have no
time to sit on a twig, and pour forth solemn hymns, or overtures,
operas, symphonies, and waltzes. Anxious questions are asked;
only by occasional accident, as from pure ecstasy, does a rich
warble roll its tiny waves of golden sound through the atmosphere.
Their little bodies are as busy as their voices; they are
in a constant flutter and restlessness. Even when two or three
retreat to a tree-top, to hold council, they wag their tails and
heads all the time, with the irrepressible activity of their nature,
which perhaps renders their brief span of life in reality as long
as the patriarchal age of sluggish man. The blackbirds, three
species of which consort together, are the noisiest of all our
feathered citizens. Great companies of them—more than the
famous “four-and-twenty” whom Mother Goose has immortalized
—congregate in contiguous tree-tops, and vociferate with all the
clamor and confusion of a turbulent political meeting. Politics,
certainly, must be the occasion of such tumultuous debates; but
still—unlike all other politicians—they instil melody into their
individual utterances, and produce harmony as a general effect.
Of all bird-voices, none are more sweet and cheerful to my ear
than those of swallows, in the dim, sun-streaked interior of a lofty
barn; they address the heart with even a closer sympathy than
Robin Red-breast. But, indeed, all these winged people, that
dwell in the vicinity of homesteads, seem to partake of human
nature, and possess the germ, if not the development, of immortal
souls. We hear them saying their melodious prayers, at morning's
blush and eventide. A little while ago, in the deep of night,
there came the lively thrill of a bird's note from a neighboring
tree; a real song, such as greets the purple dawn, or mingles
with the yellow sunshine. What could the little bird mean, by
pouring it forth at midnight? Probably the music gushed out of
the midst of a dream, in which he fancied himself in Paradise
with his mate, but suddenly awoke on a cold, leafless bough, with
a New England mist penetrating through his features. That was
a sad exchange of imagination for reality!
Insects are among the earliest births of spring. Multitudes, of
I know not what species, appeared long ago, on the surface of the
snow. Clouds of them, almost too minute for sight, hover in a
beam of sunshine, and vanish, as if annihilated, when they pass
into the shade. A musquito has already been heard to sound the
small horror of his bugle-horn. Wasps infest the sunny windows
of the house. A bee entered one of the chambers, with a prophecy
of flowers. Rare butterflies came before the snow was off,
flaunting in the chill breeze, and looking forlorn and all astray,
in spite of the magnificence of their dark velvet cloaks, with
golden borders.
The fields and wood-paths have as yet few charms to entice the
wanderer. In a walk, the other day, I found no violets, nor anemones,
nor anything in the likeness of a flower. It was worth
while, however, to ascend our opposite hill, for the sake of gaining
a general idea of the advance of spring, which I had hitherto
been studying in its minute developments. The river lay around
me in a semicircle, overflowing all the meadows which give it its
Indian name, and offering a noble breadth to sparkle in the sunbeams.
Along the hither shore, a row of trees stood up to their
knees in water; and afar off, on the surface of the stream, tufts
of bushes thrust up their heads, as it were, to breathe. The most
striking objects were great solitary trees, here and there, with a
mile-wide waste of water all around them. The curtailment of
the trunk, by its immersion in the river, quite destroys the fair
proportions of the tree, and thus makes us sensible of a regularity
and propriety in the usual forms of nature. The flood of the
present season—though it never amounts to a freshet, on our quiet
stream—has encroached further upon the land than any previous
one, for at least a score of years. It has overflowed stone-fences,
and even rendered a portion of the highway navigable for boats.
The waters, however, are now gradually subsiding; islands
become annexed to the mainland; and other islands emerge, like
admirable image of the receding of the Nile—except that there
is no deposit of black slime;—or of Noah's flood—only that there
is a freshness and novelty in these recovered portions of the continent,
which give the impression of a world just made, rather
than of one so polluted that a deluge had been requisite to purify
it. These up-springing islands are the greenest spots in the landscape;
the first gleam of sunlight suffices to cover them with
verdure.
Thank Providence for Spring! The earth—and man himself,
by sympathy with his birth-place—would be far other than we
find them, if life toiled wearily onward, without this periodical
infusion of the primal spirit. Will the world ever be so decayed,
that spring may not renew its greenness? Can man be so dismally
age-stricken, that no faintest sunshine of his youth may
revisit him once a year? It is impossible. The moss on our
time-worn mansion brightens into beauty; the good old pastor,
who once dwelt here, renewed his prime, regained his boyhood, in
the genial breezes of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and
heavy soul, if, whether in youth or age, it have outlived its privilege
of spring-time sprightliness! From such a soul, the world
must hope no reformation of its evil—no sympathy with the lofty
faith and gallant struggles of those who contend in its behalf.
Summer works in the present, and thinks not of the future;
Autumn is a rich conservative; Winter has utterly lost its faith,
and clings tremulously to the remembrance of what has been;
but Spring, with its outgushing life, is the true type of the Movement!
| Mosses from an old manse | |