University of Virginia Library

1. LETTER I.

My Dear Doctor: Twice in the year, they say,
the farmer may sleep late in the morning — between
hoeing and haying, and between harvest and thrashing.
If I have not written to you since the frost was
out of the ground, my apology lies distributed over
the “spring-work,” in due proportions among ploughing,
harrowing, sowing, plastering, and hoeing. We
have finished the last — some thanks to the crows, who
saved us the labor of one acre of corn, by eating it in
the blade. Think what times we live in, when even
the crows are obliged to anticipate their income!

When I had made up my mind to write to you, I
cast about for a cool place in the shade — for, besides
the changes which farming works upon my epidermis,
I find some in the inner man, one of which is a vegetable
necessity for living out-of-doors. Between five
in the morning and “flower-shut,” I feel as if four
walls and a ceiling would stop my breath. Very
much to the disgust of William (who begins to think
it was infra dig. to have followed such a hob-nail
from London), I showed the first symptom of this
chair-and-carpet asthma, by ordering my breakfast
under a balsam-fir. Dinner and tea soon followed;
and now, if I go in-doors by daylight, it is a sort of
fireman's visit — in and out with a long breath. I have
worn quite a dial on the grass, working my chair
around with the sun.

“If ever you observed,” (a phrase with which a
neighbor of mine ludicrously prefaces every possible
remark), a single tree will do very well to sit, or dine,
or be buried under, but you can not write in the shade
of it. Beside the sun-flecks and the light all around
you, there is a want of that privacy, which is necessary
to a perfect abandonment to pen and ink. I dis
covered this on getting as far as “dear Doctor,” and,
pocketing my tools, strolled away up the glen to borrow
“stool and desk” of Nature. Half open, like a
broad-leafed book (green margin and silver type), the
brook-hollow of Glenmary spreads wide as it drops
upon the meadow, but above, like a book that deserves
its fair margent, it deepens as you proceed. Not far
from the road, its little rivulet steals forth from a
shadowy ravine, narrow as you enter, then widening
back to a mimic cataract; and here, a child would
say, is fairy parlor. A small platform (an island
when the stream is swollen) lies at the foot of the fall,
carpeted with the fine silky grass which thrives with
shade and spray. The two walls of the ravine are
mossy, and trickling with springs; the trees overhead
interlace, to keep out the sun; and down comes
the brook, over a flight of precipitous steps, like children
bursting out of school, and after a laugh at its
own tumble, it falls again into a decorous ripple, and
trips murmuring away. The light is green, the
leaves of the overhanging trees look translucent above,
and the wild blue grape, with its emerald rings, has
wove all over it a basket-lattice so fine, that you
would think it were done to order — warranted to keep
out the hawk, and let in the humming-bird. With a
yellow pine at my back, a moss cushion beneath, and
a ledge of flat stone at my elbow, you will allow I had
a secretary's outfit. I spread my paper, and mended
my pen; and then (you will pardon me, dear Doctor)
I forgot you altogether. The truth is, these fanciful
garnishings spoil work. Silvio Pellico had a better
place to write in. If it had been a room with a Chinese
paper (a bird standing for ever on one leg, and a
tree ruffled by the summer wind, and fixed with its
leaves on edge, as if petrified with the varlet's impudence),
the eye might get accustomed to it. But first

came a gold-robin, twittering out his surprise to find
strange company in his parlor, yet never frighted from
his twig by pen and ink. By the time I had sucked a
lesson out of that, a squirrel tripped in without knocking,
and sat nibbling at a last-year's nut, as if nobody
but he took thought for the morrow. Then came an
enterprising ant, climbing my knee like a discoverer;
and I wondered whether Fernando Cortes would have
mounted so boldly, had the peak of Darien been as
new-dropped between the Americas, as my leg by his
ant-hill. By this time, a small dripping from a moss-fringe
at my elbow betrayed the lip of a spring; and,
dislodging a stone, I uncovered a brace of lizards
lying snug in the ooze. We flatter ourselves, thought
I, that we drink first of the spring. We do not know
always whose lips were before us.

Much as you see of insect life, and hear of bird-music,
as you walk abroad, you should lie perdu in a
nook, to know how much is frighted from sight, and
hushed from singing, by your approach. What
worms creep out when they think you gone, and what
chatterers go on with their story! So among friends,
thought I, as I fished for the moral. We should be
wiser, if we knew what our coming hides and silences,
but should we walk so undisturbed on our way?

You will see with half a glance, dear Doctor, that
here was too much company for writing. I screwed
up my inkstand once more, and kept up the bed of
the stream till it enters the forest, remembering a still
place by a pool. The tall pines hold up the roof high
as an umbrella of Brobdignag, and neither water
brawls, nor small birds sing, in the gloom of it. Here,
thought I, as far as they go, the circumstances are
congenial. But, as Jean Paul says, there is a period
of life when the real gains ground upon the ideal;
and to be honest, dear Doctor, I sat leaning on the
shingle across my knees, counting my sky-kissing
pines, and reckoning what they would bring in saw-logs
— so much standing — so much drawn to the mill.
Then there would be wear and tear of bob-sled,
teamster's wages, and your dead-pull springs — the
horses' knees. I had nearly settled the per and contra,
when my eye lit once more on “my dear Doctor,”
staring from the unfilled sheet, like the ghost of a
murdered resolution. “Since when,” I asked, looking
myself sternly in the face, “is it so difficult to be
virtuous! Shall I not write when I have a mind?
Shall I reckon pelf whether I will or no? Shall butterfly
imagination thrust iron-heart to the wall? No!”

I took a straight cut through my ruta-baga patch
and cornfield, bent on finding some locality (out of
doors it must be) with the average attractions of a
sentry-box, or a church-pew. I reached the highroad,
making insensibly for a brush dam, where I
should sit upon a log, with my face abutted upon a
wall of chopped saplings. I have not mentioned my
dog, who had followed me cheerfully thus far, putting
up now and then a partridge, to keep his nose in; but,
on coming to the bridge over the brook, he made up
his mind. “My master,” he said (or looked), “will
neither follow the game, nor sit in the cool. Chacun
à son gout. I'm tired of this bobbing about for nothing
in a hot sun.” So, dousing his tail (which, “if
you ever observed,” a dog hoists, as a flag-ship does
her pennant, only when the commodore is aboard), he
sprung the railing, and spread himself for a snooze
under the bridge. “Ben trovato!” said I, as I seated
myself by his side. He wagged his tail half round to
acknowledge the compliment, and I took to work like
a hay-maker.

I have taken some pains to describe these difficulties
to you, dear Doctor, partly because I hold it to be fair,
in this give-and-take world, that a man should know
what it costs his fellow to fulfil obligations, but more
especially, to apprize you of the metempsychose that is
raking place in myself. You will have divined, ere
this, that, in my out-of-doors life, I am approaching a
degree nearer to Arcadian perfectability, and that, if I
but manage to get a bark on and live by sap (spare
your wit, sir), I shall be rid of much that is troublesome,
not to say expensive, in the matters of drink and
integument. What most surprises me in the past, is,
that I ever should have confined my free soul and body,
in the very many narrow places and usages I have
known in towns. I can only assimilate myself to a
squirrel, brought up in a school-boy's pocket, and let
out some June morning on a snake fence.

The spring has been damp for corn, but I had
planted on a warm hill-side, and have done better than
my neighbors. The Owaga[1] creek, which makes a
bend round my meadow before it drops into the Susquehannah
(a swift, bright river the Owaga, with as
much water as the Arno at Florence), overflowed my
cabbages and onions, in the May freshet; but that
touches neither me nor my horse. The winter wheat
looks like “velvet of three-pile,” and everything is
out of the ground, including, in my case, the buckwheat,
which is not yet put in. This is to be an old-fashioned
hot summer, and I shall sow late. The
peas are podded. Did it ever strike you, by the way
that the pious æneas, famous through all ages for
carrying old Anchises a mile, should, after all, yield
glory to a bean. Perhaps you never observed, that
this filial esculent grows up with his father on his
back.

In my “new light,” a farmer's life seems to me
what a manufacturer's might resemble, if his factory
were an indigenous plant — machinery, girls, and all.
What spindles and fingers it would take to make an
orchard, if nature found nothing but the raw seed,
and rain-water and sunshine were brought as far as a
cotton bale! Your despised cabbage would be a
prime article — if you had to weave it. Pumpkins, if
they ripened with a hair-spring and patent lever,
would be, “by'r lady,” a curious invention. Yet
these, which Aladdin nature produces if we but
“rub the lamp,” are more necessary to life than
clothes or watches. In planting a tree (I write it
reverently), it seems to me working immediately with
the divine faculty. Here are two hundred forest trees
set out with my own hand. Yet how little is my part
in the glorious creatures they become!

This reminds me of a liberty I have lately taken
with nature, which I ventured upon with proper diffidence,
though the dame, as will happen with dames,
proved less coy than was predicted. The brook at my
feet, from its birth in the hills till it dropped into the
meadow's lap, tripped down like a mountain-maid
with a song, bright and unsullied. So it flowed by
my door. At the foot of the bank, its song and
sparkle ceased suddenly, and, turning under the hill,
its waters disappeared among sedge and rushes. It
was more a pity, because you looked across the
meadow to the stately Owaga, and saw that its unfulfilled
destiny was to have poured its brightness into
his. The author of Ernest Maltravers has set the
fashion of charity to such fallings away. I made a
new channel over the meadow, gravelled its bed, and
grassed its banks, and (last and best charity of all)
protected its recovered course with overshadowy trees.
Not quite with so gay a sparkle, but with a placid and
tranquil beauty, the lost stream glides over the
meadow, and, Maltravers-like, the Owaga takes her
lovingly to his bosom. The sedge and rushes are
turned into a garden, and if you drop a flower into the
brook at my door, it scarce loses a breath of its perfume
before it is flung on the Owaga, and the Susquehannah
robs him of it but with his life.

I have scribbled away the hours till near noon, and

it is time to see that the oxen get their potatoes.
Faith! it's a cool place under a bridge. Knock out
the two ends of the Astor-house, and turn the Hudson
through the long passage, and you will get an idea of it.
The breeze draws through here deftly, the stone wall
is cool to my back, and this floor of running water, besides
what the air steals from it, sounds and looks refreshingly.
My letter has run on, till I am inclined
to think the industry of running water “breeds i'the
brain.” Like the tin-pot at the cur's tail, it seems to
overtake one with an admonition, if he but slack to
breathe. Be not alarmed, dear Doctor, for, sans potatoes,
my oxen will loll in the furrow, and though the
brook run till doomsday, I must stop here. Amen.