No More Learning

It is not hard to account for elves and fairies; they
represent this light grace, this ethereal gentility. Bring a spray
from the wood, or a crystal from the brook, and place it on your
mantel, and your household ornaments will seem plebeian beside its
nobler fashion and bearing. It will wave superior there, as if used to
a more refined and polished circle. It has a salute and a response to
all your enthusiasm and heroism.

In the winter, I stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow
up without forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances. They
do not wait as man does, but now is the golden age of the sapling.
Earth, air, sun, and rain are occasion enough; they were no better in
primeval centuries. The "winter of _their_ discontent" never comes.
Witness the buds of the native poplar standing gayly out to the frost
on the sides of its bare switches. They express a naked confidence.
With cheerful heart one could be a sojourner in the wilderness, if he
were sure to find there the catkins of the willow or the alder. When I
read of them in the accounts of northern adventurers, by Baffin's Bay
or Mackenzie's River, I see how even there, too, I could dwell. They
are our little vegetable redeemers. Methinks our virtue will hold out
till they come again. They are worthy to have had a greater than
Minerva or Ceres for their inventor.
Who was the benignant goddess
that bestowed them on mankind?

Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and
extravagance of genius. She has her luxurious and florid style as well
as art. Having a pilgrim's cup to make, she gives to the whole--stem,
bowl, handle, and nose--some fantastic shape, as if it were to be the
car of some fabulous marine deity, a Nereus or Triton.

In the winter, the botanist need not confine himself to his books and
herbarium, and give over his outdoor pursuits, but may study a new
department of vegetable physiology, what may be called crystalline
botany, then. The winter of 1837 was unusually favorable for this. In
December of that year, the Genius of vegetation seemed to hover by
night over its summer haunts with unusual persistency. Such a
hoar-frost as is very uncommon here or anywhere, and whose full
effects can never be witnessed after sunrise, occurred several times.
As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked
like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled
together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which
the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along
some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies
of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow. The
river, viewed from the high bank, appeared of a yellowish-green color,
though all the landscape was white. Every tree, shrub, and spire of
grass, that could raise its head above the snow, was covered with a
dense ice-foliage, answering, as it were, leaf for leaf to its summer
dress. Even the fences had put forth leaves in the night. The centre,
diverging, and more minute fibres were perfectly distinct, and the
edges regularly indented. These leaves were on the side of the twig or
stubble opposite to the sun, meeting it for the most part at right
angles, and there were others standing out at all possible angles upon
these and upon one another, with no twig or stubble supporting them.
When the first rays of the sun slanted over the scene, the grasses
seemed hung with innumerable jewels, which jingled merrily as they
were brushed by the foot of the traveler, and reflected all the hues
of the rainbow, as he moved from side to side. It struck me that these
ghost leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were the
creatures of but one law; that in obedience to the same law the
vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one
hand, and the crystalline particles troop to their standard in the
same order, on the other.