No More Learning

"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveler of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon? "

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few
are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men
appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than
the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of
the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape
there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world
? ? ? ? ? ? , Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and
we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border
life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and
transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state
into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.
Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a
will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon
nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality
so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.
The
walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town
sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their
owners' deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the
actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the
word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have
myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still
as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade
from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter
painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are
commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

* * * * *

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the
setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its
golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble
hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and
shining family had settled there in that part of the land called
Concord, unknown to me,--to whom the sun was servant,--who had not
gone into society in the village,--who had not been called on. I saw
their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in
Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as
they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew
through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed
hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have
sons and daughters. They are quite well. 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.