No More Learning

* * * * *

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons
visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it
would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to
year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold to feed
unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill,--and there is scarcely
a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with
us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across
the landscape of the mind, cast by the _wings_ of some thought in its
vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect
the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to
poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and
Cochin-China grandeur. Those _gra-a-ate thoughts_, those _gra-a-ate
men_ you hear of!

* * * * *

We hug the earth,--how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate
ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my
account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top
of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for
I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen
before,--so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have
walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and
yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I
discovered around me,--it was near the end of June,--on the ends of
the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like
blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward.
I
carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to
stranger jurymen who walked the streets,--for it was court week,--and
to farmers and lumber-dealers and woodchoppers and hunters, and not
one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star
dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the
tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts!
Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest
only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved by them. We
see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines
have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the
wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature's red
children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the
land has ever seen them.

* * * * *

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed
over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in
remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in
every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly
reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments
and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time
than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer
testament,--the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen
astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is
is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression
of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the
world,--healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the
Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no
fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many
times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all
plaintiveness.