No More Learning

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. 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.