No More Learning

And canst expand thee there,
And breathe enough of air?
Upholding heaven, holding down earth,
Thy pastime from thy birth,
Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other;
May I approve myself thy worthy brother!

[Illustration: _Mount Wachusett from the Wayland Hills_]

At length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we
resolved to scale the blue wall which bounded the western horizon,
though not without misgivings that thereafter no visible fairyland
would exist for us. But we will not leap at once to our journey's end,
though near, but imitate Homer, who conducts his reader over the
plain, and along the resounding sea, though it be but to the tent of
Achilles. In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water,
where men go and come. The landscape lies far and fair within, and the
deepest thinker is the farthest traveled.

At a cool and early hour on a pleasant morning in July, my companion
and I passed rapidly through Acton and Stow, stopping to rest and
refresh us on the bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Assabet,
in the latter town. As we traversed the cool woods of Acton, with
stout staves in our hands, we were cheered by the song of the red-eye,
the thrushes, the phoebe, and the cuckoo; and as we passed through
the open country, we inhaled the fresh scent of every field, and all
nature lay passive, to be viewed and traveled. Every rail, every
farmhouse, seen dimly in the twilight, every tinkling sound told of
peace and purity, and we moved happily along the dank roads, enjoying
not such privacy as the day leaves when it withdraws, but such as it
has not profaned. It was solitude with light; which is better than
darkness. But anon, the sound of the mower's rifle was heard in the
fields, and this, too, mingled with the lowing of kine.

This part of our route lay through the country of hops, which plant
perhaps supplies the want of the vine in American scenery, and may
remind the traveler of Italy and the South of France, whether he
traverses the country when the hop-fields, as then, present solid and
regular masses of verdure, hanging in graceful festoons from pole to
pole, the cool coverts where lurk the gales which refresh the
wayfarer; or in September, when the women and children, and the
neighbors from far and near, are gathered to pick the hops into long
troughs; or later still, when the poles stand piled in vast pyramids
in the yards, or lie in heaps by the roadside.

The culture of the hop, with the processes of picking, drying in the
kiln, and packing for the market, as well as the uses to which it is
applied, so analogous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford
a theme for future poets.

The mower in the adjacent meadow could not tell us the name of the
brook on whose banks we had rested, or whether it had any, but his
younger companion, perhaps his brother, knew that it was Great Brook.
Though they stood very near together in the field, the things they
knew were very far apart; nor did they suspect each other's reserved
knowledge, till the stranger came by.
In Bolton, while we rested on
the rails of a cottage fence, the strains of music which issued from
within, probably in compliment to us, sojourners, reminded us that
thus far men were fed by the accustomed pleasures. So soon did we,
wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few
facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel
to find it new. The flowers grow more various ways than he. But coming
soon to higher land, which afforded a prospect of the mountains, we
thought we had not traveled in vain, if it were only to hear a truer
and wilder pronunciation of their names from the lips of the
inhabitants; not _Way_-tatic, _Way_-chusett, but _Wor_-tatic,
_Wor_-chusett. It made us ashamed of our tame and civil pronunciation,
and we looked upon them as born and bred farther west than we. Their
tongues had a more generous accent than ours, as if breath was cheaper
where they wagged. A countryman, who speaks but seldom, talks
copiously, as it were, as his wife sets cream and cheese before you
without stint. Before noon we had reached the highlands overlooking
the valley of Lancaster (affording the first fair and open prospect
into the west), and there, on the top of a hill, in the shade of some
oaks, near to where a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we rested
during the heat of the day, reading Virgil and enjoying the scenery.
It was such a place as one feels to be on the outside of the earth;
for from it we could, in some measure, see the form and structure of
the globe. There lay Wachusett, the object of our journey, lowering
upon us with unchanged proportions, though with a less ethereal aspect
than had greeted our morning gaze, while further north, in successive
order, slumbered its sister mountains along the horizon.

We could get no further into the AEneid than

-- atque altae moenia Romae,
-- and the wall of high Rome,

before we were constrained to reflect by what myriad tests a work of
genius has to be tried; that Virgil, away in Rome, two thousand years
off, should have to unfold his meaning, the inspiration of Italian
vales, to the pilgrim on New England hills. This life so raw and
modern, that so civil and ancient; and yet we read Virgil mainly to be
reminded of the identity of human nature in all ages, and, by the
poet's own account, we are both the children of a late age, and live
equally under the reign of Jupiter.

"He shook honey from the leaves, and removed fire,
And stayed the wine, everywhere flowing in rivers;
That experience, by meditating, might invent various arts
By degrees, and seek the blade of corn in furrows,
And strike out hidden fire from the veins of the flint. "

The old world stands serenely behind the new, as one mountain yonder
towers behind another, more dim and distant. Rome imposes her story
still upon this late generation. The very children in the school we
had that morning passed had gone through her wars, and recited her
alarms, ere they had heard of the wars of neighboring Lancaster.