No More Learning

In a clear day stand
thus on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and
every one within range of your vision, excepting in the west, will be
revealed. You might live to the age of Methuselah and never find a
tithe of them, otherwise. Yet sometimes even in a dark day I have
thought them as bright as I ever saw them. Looking westward, their
colors are lost in a blaze of light; but in other directions the whole
forest is a flower-garden, in which these late roses burn, alternating
with green, while the so-called "gardeners," walking here and there,
perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, see only a few little
asters amid withered leaves.

These are _my_ China-asters, _my_ late garden-flowers. It costs me
nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are
protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen,
and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your
yard. We have only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole
forest as a garden. The blossoming of the scarlet oak,--the
forest-flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)!
I do not know but they interest me more than the maples, they are so
widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy,
a nobler tree on the whole; our chief November flower, abiding the
approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to early November
prospects. It is remarkable that the latest bright color that is
general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, the intensest of
colors. The ripest fruit of the year; like the cheek of a hard, glossy
red apple, from the cold Isle of Orleans, which will not be mellow for
eating till next spring! When I rise to a hilltop, a thousand of these
great oak roses, distributed on every side, as far as the horizon! I
admire them four or five miles off!
This my unfailing prospect for a
fortnight past! This late forest-flower surpasses all that spring or
summer could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty specks
comparatively (created for the near-sighted, who walk amid the
humblest herbs and underwoods), and made no impression on a distant
eye. Now it is an extended forest or a mountain-side, through or along
which we journey from day to day, that bursts into bloom.
Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale,--the gardener still
nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters
and roses which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his
care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up
against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views,
walk in the great garden; not skulk in a little "debauched" nook of
it? consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few
impounded herbs?

Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If,
about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our
town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may
see--well, what I have endeavored to describe. All this you surely
_will_ see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,--if you
_look_ for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is,
whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, you will think for
threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sere
and brown. Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because
they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not
bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see
in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize
how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The
greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed
from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden.