No More Learning

One with the cricket in the ground,
And fagot on the hearth,
Resounds the rare domestic sound
Along the forest path.

Before night we will take a journey on skates along the course of this
meandering river, as full of novelty to one who sits by the cottage
fire all the winter's day, as if it were over the polar ice, with
Captain Parry or Franklin; following the winding of the stream, now
flowing amid hills, now spreading out into fair meadows, and forming a
myriad coves and bays where the pine and hemlock overarch. The river
flows in the rear of the towns, and we see all things from a new and
wilder side. The fields and gardens come down to it with a frankness,
and freedom from pretension, which they do not wear on the highway. It
is the outside and edge of the earth. Our eyes are not offended by
violent contrasts. The last rail of the farmer's fence is some swaying
willow bough, which still preserves its freshness, and here at length
all fences stop, and we no longer cross any road. We may go far up
within the country now by the most retired and level road, never
climbing a hill, but by broad levels ascending to the upland meadows.
It is a beautiful illustration of the law of obedience, the flow of a
river; the path for a sick man, a highway down which an acorn cup may
float secure with its freight. Its slight occasional falls, whose
precipices would not diversify the landscape, are celebrated by mist
and spray, and attract the traveler from far and near. From the remote
interior, its current conducts him by broad and easy steps, or by one
gentler inclined plane, to the sea. Thus by an early and constant
yielding to the inequalities of the ground it secures itself the
easiest passage.

No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times, and now we
draw near to the empire of the fishes. Our feet glide swiftly over
unfathomed depths, where in summer our line tempted the pout and
perch, and where the stately pickerel lurked in the long corridors
formed by the bulrushes. The deep, impenetrable marsh, where the heron
waded and bittern squatted, is made pervious to our swift shoes, as if
a thousand railroads had been made into it.
With one impulse we are
carried to the cabin of the muskrat, that earliest settler, and see
him dart away under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to his
hole in the bank; and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately "the
mower whet his scythe," through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with
meadow-grass. We skate near to where the blackbird, the pewee, and the
kingbird hung their nests over the water, and the hornets builded from
the maple in the swamp. How many gay warblers, following the sun, have
radiated from this nest of silver birch and thistle-down! On the
swamp's outer edge was hung the supermarine village, where no foot
penetrated. In this hollow tree the wood duck reared her brood, and
slid away each day to forage in yonder fen.

In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried
specimens, in their natural order and position. The meadows and
forests are a _hortus siccus_. The leaves and grasses stand perfectly
pressed by the air without screw or gum, and the birds' nests are not
hung on an artificial twig, but where they builded them. We go about
dry-shod to inspect the summer's work in the rank swamp, and see what
a growth have got the alders, the willows, and the maples; testifying
to how many warm suns, and fertilizing dews and showers. See what
strides their boughs took in the luxuriant summer,--and anon these
dormant buds will carry them onward and upward another span into the
heavens.

Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the
river is lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left,
where we least expected; still holding on its way underneath, with a
faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot,
it too had hibernated, and we had followed its faint summer trail to
where it earthed itself in snow and ice. At first we should have
thought that rivers would be empty and dry in midwinter, or else
frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but their volume is not
diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surfaces.
The thousand springs which feed the lakes and streams are flowing
still. The issues of a few surface springs only are closed, and they
go to swell the deep reservoirs. Nature's wells are below the frost.
The summer brooks are not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower
quench his thirst with that alone.