No More Learning

The farmer's cart-path, which
leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,
as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected
skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their
neighbor,--notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team
through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives.
Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines
and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no
politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they
were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and
hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of
a distant hive in May,--which perchance was the sound of their
thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see
their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences
embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of
my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and
recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to
recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I
should move out of Concord.
* * * * *

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.