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THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON (1823-1911)

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, four years after Lowell, and lived to be the Nestor of the New England group of writers. He was a son of the Treasurer of Harvard College, was youngest of a family of fifteen and then youngest member of his college class, though second in order of scholarship. Unlike others of the so-called 'Cambridge group of writers. Holmes, Lowell, Dana, and the others, he chose divinity as his profession. He was pastor at Newburyport and at Worcester, was very active in all the abolitionist movements of the period, and during the Civil War was Captain in the 51st regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers. and later from 1862 to 1864 was Colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment made up of former slaves.

His writings before the war concerned themselves with humanitarian subjects, with the broader aspects of nature study, and with the education of women. In many respects he was a pioneer. His Out-Door Papers, collected from the Atlantic Monthly, 1863, were with Thoreau's writings among the leading forces that set in motion the out-of-doors school which later was headed by John Burroughs. He wrote a romance, Malbone, 1869, and in the same year issued Army Life in a Black Regiment, a graphic account of his war experiences. He wrote several valuable biographies, notably of Longfellow and Whittier and many graceful essays, but perhaps the most significant part of his later work is to be found in his volumes of autobiographical reminiscence. Cheerful Yesterdays, 1898, Contemporaries, 1899, and Part of a Man's Life, 1905, delightful glimpses of that older New England which has passed away as completely as has the group of men who were his contemporaries.

MY OUT-DOOR STUDY 1

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The noontide of the summer day is past, when all Nature slumbers, and when the ancients feared to sing, lest the great god Pan should be awakened. Soft changes, the gradual shifting of every shadow on every leaf, begin to show the waning hours. Ineffectual thunderstorms have gathered and gone by, hope- 10 lessly defeated. The floating bridge is trembling and resounding beneath the pressure of one heavy wagon, and the quiet fishermen change their places to avoid the tiny ripple that glides stealthily 15 to their feet above the half-submerged planks. Down the glimmering lake there are miles of silence and still waters and green shores, overhung with a multitudinous and scattered fleet of purple and 20 golden clouds, now furling their idle sails and drifting away into the vast harbor of the South. Voices of birds, hushed first by noon and then by possibilities of tempest, cautiously begin once more, leading 25 on the infinite melodies of the June afternoon. As the freshened air invites them 1 Copyright by Houghton Mifflin & Co.

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forth, so the smooth and stainless water summons us. Put your hand upon the oar,' says Charon in the old play to Bacchus, and you shall hear the sweetest songs.' The doors of the boat-house swing softly open, and the slender wherry, like a water-snake, steals silently in the wake of the dispersing clouds.

The woods are hazy, as if the warm sunbeams had melted in among the interstices of the foliage and spread a soft film throughout the whole. The sky seems to reflect the water, and the water the sky both are roseate with color, both are darkened with clouds, and between them both, as the boat recedes, the floating bridge hangs suspended, with its motionless fishermen and its moving team. The wooded islands are poised upon the lake, each belted with a paler tint of softer wave. The air seems fine and palpitating; the drop of an oar in a distant rowlock, the sound of a hammer on a dismantled boat, pass into some region of mist and shadows, and form a metronome for delicious dreams.

Every summer I launch my boat to seek some realm of enchantment beyond all

freedom of the woods, a whiff of oxygen for the anxious money-changers. How agreeably sounds the news to all but his creditors that the lawyer or the mer5 chant has locked his office-door and gone fishing! The American temperament needs at this moment nothing so much as that wholesome training of semi-rural life which reared Hampden and Crom10 well to assume at one grasp the sovereignty of England, and which has ever since served as the foundation of England's greatest ability. The best thoughts and purposes seem ordained to come to human beings beneath the open sky, as the ancients fabled that Pan found the goddess Ceres when he was engaged in the chase, whom no other of the gods could find when seeking seriously. The little I have gained from colleges and libraries has certainly not worn so well as the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and insect. That weight and sanity of thought,' which Coleridge so finely makes the crowning attribute of Wordsworth, is in no way so well matured and cultivated as in the society of Nature.

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the sordidness and sorrow of earth, and never yet did I fail to ripple with my prow at least the outskirts of those magic waters. What spell has fame or wealth to enrich this midday blessedness with a joy the more? Yonder barefoot boy, as he drifts silently in his punt beneath the drooping branches of yonder vine-clad bank, has a bliss which no Astor can buy with money, no Seward conquer with votes, which yet is no monopoly of his, and to which time and experience only add a more subtile and conscious charm. The rich years were given us to increase, not to impair, these cheap felicities. Sad or sinful is the life of that man who finds not the heavens bluer and the waves more musical in maturity than in childhood. Time is a severe alembic of youthful joys, no doubt; we exhaust book after book, and leave Shakespeare unopened; we grow fastidious in men and women; all the rhetoric, all the logic, we fancy we have heard before; we have seen the pictures, we have listened to the sym-25 phonies: but what has been done by all the art and literature of the world towards describing one summer day? The most exhausting effort brings us no nearer to it than to the blue sky which is its dome; 30 our words are shot up against it like arrows, and fall back helpless. Literary amateurs go the tour of the globe to renew their stock of materials, when they do not yet know a bird or a bee or a 35 blossom beside their homestead-door; and in the hour of their greatest success they have not an horizon to their life so large as that of yon boy in his punt. All that is purchasable in the capitals of the world 40 is not to be weighed in comparison with the simple enjoyment that may be crowded into one hour of sunshine. What can place or power do here? Who could be before me, though the palace of Cæsar 45 cracked and split with emperors, while I, sitting in silence on a cliff of Rhodes, watched the sun as he swung his golden censer athwart the heavens?

It is pleasant to observe a sort of con- 50 fused and latent recognition of all this in the instinctive sympathy which is always rendered to any indication of outdoor pursuits. How cordially one sees the eyes of all travelers turn to the man who 55 enters the railroad-station with a fowlingpiece in hand, or the boy with water-lilies! There is a momentary sensation of the

There may be extremes and affectations, and Mary Lamb declared that Wordsworth held it doubtful if dwellers in towns had a soul to be saved. During the various phases of transcendental idealism among ourselves, in the last twenty years, the love of Nature has at times assumed an exaggerated and even a pathetic aspect, in the morbid attempts of youths and maidens to make it a substitute for vigorous thought and action,- a lion endeavoring to dine on grass and green leaves. In some cases this mental chlorosis reached such a height as almost to nauseate one with Nature, when in the society of the victims; and surfeited companions felt inclined to rush to the treadmill immediately, or get chosen on the Board of Selectmen, or plunge into any conceivable drudgery, in order to feel that there was still work enough in the universe to keep it sound and healthy. But this, after all, was exceptional and transitory, and our American life still needs, beyond all things else, the more habitual cultivation of out-door habits.

Probably the direct ethical influence of natural objects may be overrated. Nature is not didactic, but simply healthy. She helps everything in its legitimate de

velopment, but applies no goads, and forces on us no sharp distinctions. Her wonderful calmness, refreshing the whole soul, must aid both conscience and intellect in the end, but sometimes lulls both temporarily, when immediate issues are pending. The waterfall cheers and purifies infinitely, but it marks no moments, has no reproaches for indolence, forces to no immediate decision, offers unbounded to-morrows, and the man of action must tear himself away, when the time comes, since the work will not be done for him. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove our in- 15 dolence.'

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And yet the more bent any man is upon action, the more profoundly he needs this very calmness of Nature to preserve his equilibrium. The radical himself needs 20 nothing so much as fresh air. The world is called conservative; but it is far easier to impress a plausible thought on the complaisance of others, than to retain an unfaltering faith in it for ourselves. The 25 most dogged reformer distrusts himself every little while, and says inwardly, like Luther, Art thou alone wise?' So he is compelled to exaggerate, in the effort to hold his own. The community is bored 30 by the conceit and egotism of the innovators; so it is by that of poets and artists, orators and statesmen; but if we knew how heavily ballasted all these poor fellows need to be, to keep an even keel 35 amid so many conflicting tempests of blame and praise, we should hardly reproach them. But the simple enjoyments of out-door life, costing next to nothing, tend to equalize all vexations. What mat- 40 ter, if the Governor removes you from office? he cannot remove you from the lake; and if readers or customers will not bite, the pickerel will. We must keep busy, of course; yet we cannot transform 45 the world except very slowly, and we can best preserve our patience in the society of Nature, who does her work almost as imperceptibly as we.

could be for one moment compared, for the simplicity and grace of its structure, with this green spray of wild woodbine or yonder white wreath of blossoming 5 clematis? A finely organized sentence should throb and palpitate like the most delicate vibrations of the summer air. We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies in the future; tried by the out-door standard, there is as yet no literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional sentence, that fresh and perfect charm. If by the training of a lifetime one could succeed in producing one continuous page of perfect cadence, it would be a life well spent, and such a literary artist would fall far short of Nature's standard in quantity. only, not in quality.

And for literary training, especially, the so influence of natural beauty is simply priceless. Under the present educational systems, we need grammars and languages far less than a more thorough outdoor experience. On this flowery bank, on this 55 ripple-marked shore, are the true literary models. How many living authors have even attained to writing a single page that

It is one sign of our weakness, also, that we commonly assume Nature to be a rather fragile and merely ornamental thing, and suited for a model of the graces only. But her seductive softness is the last climax of magnificent strength. The same mathematical law winds the leaves around the stem and the planets round the sun. The same law of crystallization rules the slight-knit snow-fake and the hard foundations of the earth. The thistle-down floats secure upon the same summer zephyrs that are woven into the tornado. The dewdrop holds within its transparent cell the same electric fire which charges the thunder-cloud. In the softest tree or the airiest waterfall, the fundamental lines are as lithe and muscular as the crouching haunches of a leopard; and without a pencil vigorous enough to render these, no mere mass of foam or foliage, however exquisitely finished, can tell the story. Lightness of touch is the crowning test of power.

Yet Nature does not work by single spasms only. That chestnut spray is not an isolated and exhaustive effort of creative beauty look upward and see its sisters rise with pile above pile of fresh and stately verdure, till tree meets sky in a dome of glorious blossom, the whole as perfect as the parts, the least part as perfect as the whole. Studying the details, it seems as if Nature were a series

plicity which, a half-century ago, made the Lake Country an enchanted land forever! Is it worth a voyage to England to sup with Thackeray in the Pot Tavern? 5 Compare the enormity of pleasure' which De Quincey says Wordsworth derived from the simplest natural object, with the serious protest of Wilkie Collins against the affectation of caring about Nature at all. Is it not strange,' says this most unhappy man, to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amidst which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in joy and sympathy in trouble, only in books. . . . What share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends?

of costly fragments with no coherency,as if she would never encourage us to do anything systematically,- would tolerate no method but her own, and yet had none of her own, were as abrupt in her transitions from oak to maple as the heroine who went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; while yet there is no conceivable human logic so close and inexorable as her connections. 1 How rigid, how flexible are, for instance. the laws of perspective! If one could learn to make his statements as firm and unswerving as the horizon-line,- his continuity of thought as marked, yet as un- 15 broken, as yonder soft gradations by which the eye is lured upward from lake to wood, from wood to hill, from hill to heavens, what more bracing tonic could literary culture demand? As it is, Art 20. . . There is surely a reason for this want misses the parts, yet does not grasp the whole.

Literature also learns from Nature the use of materials: either to select only the choicest and rarest, or to transmute coarse 25 to fine by skill in using. How perfect is the delicacy with which the woods and fields are kept, throughout the year! All these millions of living creatures born every season, and born to die; yet where 30 are the dead bodies? We never see them. Buried beneath the earth by tiny nightly sextons, sunk beneath the waters, dissolved into the air, or distilled again and again as food for other organizations, all 35 have had their swift resurrection.

Their

existence blooms again in these violetpetals, glitters in the burnished beauty of these golden beetles, or enriches the veery's song. It is only out of doors that 40 even death and decay become beautiful. The model farm, the most luxurious house, have their regions of unsightliness; but the fine chemistry of Nature is constantly clearing away all its impurities before 45 our eyes, and yet so delicately that we never suspect the process. The most exquisite work of literary art exhibits a certain crudeness and coarseness, when we turn to it from Nature,- as the smallest 50 cambric needle appears rough and jagged, when compared through the magnifier with the tapering fineness of the insect's sting.

Once separated from Nature, literature recedes into metaphysics, or dwindles 55 into novels. How ignoble seems the current material of London literary life, for instance, compared with the noble sim

of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it.'

Leslie says of the most original landscape-painter he knew,' meaning Constable, that, whenever he sat down in the fields to sketch, he endeavored to forget that he had ever seen a picture. In literature this is easy, the descriptions are so few and so faint. When Wordsworth was fourteen, he stopped one day by the wayside to observe the dark outline of an oak against the western sky; and he says that he was at that moment struck with the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country,' so far as he was acquainted with them, and made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency.' He spent a long life in studying and telling these beautiful wonders; and yet, so vast is the sum of them, they seem almost as undescribed as before, and men to be still as content with vague or conventional representations. On this continent, especially, people fancied that all must be tame and secondhand, everything long since duly analyzed and distributed and put up in appropriate quotations, and nothing left for us poor American children but a preoccupied universe. And yet Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond, and shows us that absolutely nothing in Nature has ever yet been described, not a bird nor a berry of the woods, nor a drop of water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor winter, nor sun, nor star.

Indeed, no person can portray Nature

from any slight or transient acquaintance.
A reporter cannot step out between the
sessions of a caucus and give a racy ab-
stract of the landscape. It may con-
sume the best hours of many days to cer-
tify for one's self the simplest out-door
fact, but every such piece of knowledge
is intellectually worth the time. Even the
driest and barest book of Natural His-
tory is good and nutritious, so far as it 10
goes, if it represents genuine acquaint-
ance; one can find summer in January by
poring over the Latin catalogues of Mas-
sachusetts plants and animals in Hitch-

grass waving on the lonely heath is the last memorial of the fading fame of Ossian. Of course Shakespeare's omniscience included all natural phenomena; 5 but the rest, great or small, associate themselves with some special aspects, and not with the daily atmosphere. Coming to our own times, one must quarrel with Ruskin as taking rather the artist's view of Nature, selecting the available bits and dealing rather patronizingly with the whole; and one is tempted to charge even Emerson, as he somewhere charges Wordsworth, with not being of a tem

cock's Report. The most commonplace 15 perament quite liquid and musical enough

out-door society has the same attraction.
Every one of those old outlaws who haunt
our New England ponds and marshes,
water-soaked and soakers of something
else, intimate with the pure fluid in that 20
familiarity which breeds contempt,- has
yet a wholesome side when you explore
his knowledge of frost and freshet, pick-
erel and musk-rat, and is exceedingly good
company while you can keep him beyond 25
scent of the tavern. Any intelligent
farmer's boy can give you some narra-
tive of out-door observation which, so far
as it goes, fulfils Milton's definition of
poetry, simple, sensuous, passionate.' 30
He may not write sonnets to the lake, but
he will walk miles to bathe in it; he may
not notice the sunsets, but he knows
where to search for the blackbird's nest.
How surprised the school-children looked, 35
to be sure, when the Doctor of Divinity
from the city tried to sentimentalize, in
addressing them, about the bobolink in
the woods! They knew that the darling
of the meadow had no more personal ac-40
quaintance with the woods than was ex-
hibited by the preacher.

But the preachers are not much worse than the authors. The prosaic Buckle, indeed, admits that the poets have in all time 45 been consummate observers, and that their observations have been as valuable as those of the men of science; and yet we look even to the poets for very casual and occasional glimpses of Nature only, 50 not for any continuous reflection of her glory. Thus, Chaucer is perfumed with early spring; Homer resounds like the sea; in the Greek Anthology the sun always shines on the fisherman's cottages 55 by the beach; we associate the Vishnu Purana with lakes and lotuses, Keats with nightingales in forest dim, while the long

to admit the full vibration of the great harmonies. The three human fosterchildren who have been taken nearest into Nature's bosom, perhaps,- an odd triad, surely, for the whimsical nursing mother to select, are Wordsworth, Bettine Brentano, and Thoreau. Is it yielding to an individual preference too far to say, that there seems almost a generic difference between these three and any others, however wide be the specific differences among themselves,- to say, that, after all, they in their several paths have attained to an habitual intimacy with Nature, and the rest have not?

Yet what wonderful achievements have some of the fragmentary artists performed! Some of Tennyson's word-pictures, for instance, bear almost as much study as the landscape. One afternoon, last spring, I had been walking through a copse of young white birches, their leaves scarce yet apparent, over a ground delicate with wood-anemones, moist and mottled with dog's-tooth-violet leaves, and spangled with the delicate clusters of that sky creature, the Claytonia or Spring Beauty. All this was floored with last year's faded foliage, giving a singular bareness and whiteness to the foreground. Suddenly, as if entering a cavern, I stepped through the edge of all this, into a dark little amphitheater beneath a hemlock-grove, where the afternoon sunlight struck broadly through the trees upon a tiny stream and a miniature swamp,- this last being intensely and luridly green, yet overlaid with the pale gray of last year's reeds, and absolutely flaming with the gayest yellow light from great clumps of cowslips. The illumination seemed perfectly weird and dazzling; the spirit of the place appeared live, wild,

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