Read Ebook: This Then is Upland Pastures Being some out-door essays dealing with the beautiful things that the spring and summer bring by Knapp Adeline

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THIS THEN IS UPLAND PASTURES

BEING SOME OUT-DOOR ESSAYS DEALING WITH THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT THE SPRING AND SUMMER BRING ? ? ?

Done into a book at the Roycroft Printing Shop in East Aurora, New York

Copyrighted by The Roycroft Printing Shop 1897

When the warm rains succeed winter's driving downpours, and the young grass begins to mantle the meadows ? with tender green, is the time, of all the year, to be out of doors ? All the woodsy places are cool and dripping and dim and delicious. A month later they will be not less beautiful, perhaps, but less approachable. The things of Nature grow sophisticated as the season advances. In the early springtime they are frank and confiding, and willingly tell the secrets of their growth to him who asks ? They have time, in these first beginnings of things, for friendly sociability: to show their tiny roots and bulbs, and let us study the delicate, gracious unfoldings of leaf and bud and blossom. In a few weeks they will all be too busy, keeping up with the season's swift march, to stop and visit with the lovingest of human friends.

Do we forget, from springtime to springtime, how lovely will be the year's awakening? Each winter of our discontent I think that I remember, as my longing imagination looks forward, the tender charm of the springtime wonder, yet with each recurring year it comes to me as a new and unknown joy ?

The whole world seems to welcome the new year-child. Even before the first growths appear there is a hushed awareness throughout Nature that moves the heart to thankfulness and remembered expectation ? The hope of springtime comes without stint, and without fail, bringing each one of us the message his heart is prepared to receive, and quickening our purest, least sordid impulses. The best that is in us seems possible, in the springtime. Who of us does not then dream that this best will yet gain strength to withstand the heat and drouth of summer's fierce searching? We turn to Mother Nature like children who long to be good. The worshipping instinct that lies deep within each soul goes out to her, vesting her in that personality which we have long since pronounced unthinkable when applied to God. There is a suggestion in the situation that is not without a certain saving humor to relieve it from grotesqueness. We are not far from a personal god when we send our souls out in loving contemplation of personified Nature, yet we still go on asking if God is, and if He is Truth. Whom do we ask, and why does the question rise? If God is Truth, He must be universal; and to be perceived by each soul for himself ? If, then, I perceive him not, either He is not the truth or else I am simple and sincere in desiring the truth. If He is not the truth, do I then desire human persuasion that He is? Or, if I am not simple and sincere, who can make me so?

Nature will help us if we turn to her. We have filled our lives so full of complexities and problems that it is well for us to have her annual reminder that even without our taking thought about it the real world, that will be here when we, with all our busyness, shall have passed from sight, has renewed itself, and stands bidding us come and find peace.

For Nature keeps open house for us, and even when we visit her and leave a trail of dust and desolation behind us, like the stupid, untidy children we are, she only sets herself, with the silent, persistent patience of her age-wise motherhood, to cover and remove it. Down in the canyon, this morning, among the trillium and loosestrife and wild potato, I found the inevitable tin can left by some picnicker to mar and desecrate the landscape, but now completely filled with soft brown mold, and growing in it a mass of happy green wood-sorrel ?

This is better than going at things with a broom, gathering them up and removing them from one place to another, which is about as far as we humans have progressed in our science of cleaning up ? I was glad to welcome the trillium. How one loves its quaint old name of wake-robin, fitting title for this first harbinger of spring, that comes to us even before the robin's note is heard. Many of our common wild-flowers have several names, but there is none with such invariably pretty ones as all ages have united in bestowing upon wake-robin. Birth-root, our forefathers called it, seeing the birth of the new year in its early blossoming, and how many generations have known it as the trinity-flower! But 'tis best known, I think, as wake-robin, and the very breath of spring is in the name.

A member of the great lily family is wake-robin ? It loves damp, shady places and moist, rich valleys. On the Pacific Coast we do not find the typical Eastern variety, but we have a variety of our own, tho' unmistakably wake-robin. Its color varies from rich madder-red to pale-pink, sometimes almost white. It grows from a thick, tuber-like root, and the calyx has, surrounding its three red petals and three green sepals, three broad, mottled-green leaves which, for some unaccountable reason, our florists remove when they offer the flower for sale. A strange whimsy, this. The poor blossoms, thus denuded, have a bewildered, self-conscious air, such as may have been worn by the little egg-selling woman of old, who awoke from her nap by the king's highway to find her petticoats shorn. Well may wake-robin thus question its own identity. It is no longer the trillium of the forest: it is only the trillium of commerce, a sad, unlovely object ?

A bank where wake-robin lifts its bonny head is always fair to see. The plant has certain boon companions always sure to be close at hand. The Solomon's seal is one of these, its roots bearing to this day the round marks imagined by the early foresters to be none other than the seal of Solomon, the son of David, ? There is no more exquisite green than the beautiful, shining leaves of this plant, with its tiny white bells of flowers. It has a near relative almost always growing near it, that, with singular paucity of imagination, our botanists have called "False Solomon's Seal."

Now we reveal our mental habits through this trick we have of falsifying plants. We say "false" asphodel, "false" rice, "false" hellebore, "false" spikenard and mitrewort, but the falsity is in our own vain imaginings. The plants are as true as the earth that bears them, or the rain and the sunshine that bring them to perfection. The Solomon's seal is one lily, the "false" Solomon's seal another. Man may be false, "perilous Godheads of choosing" are his, but the wild things of the woods are true, each in the order of its nature ? There are no complexities or subtilities about wake-robin, here by the streamside. You may see it at a glance, for its principles are brief and fundamental, as wise old Marcus Aurelius bids us let our own be, and yet, the plant has had its vicissitudes; has met and solved its problems. Reasoning from analogies, time must have been when, like others of its great family, it grew in the water, floating out its broad leaves, lolling at ease on the surface of swampy, watery places and still ponds. Times changed. Lands rose and waters subsided, and wake-robin found itself in the midst of new conditions. The problem of self-support confronted it, and the plant solved it by divesting from its broad, sustaining sepals nutriment to enable the long, swaying stem to meet the new demands upon it. It still loves water and seeks cool, damp woods and deep canyons, growing beside little streams where it lifts its face to greet the springtime. It is probably not so big as when it rested luxuriously upon the water, but it is wake-robin, still, and it does more than summon the birds: it calls each of us back to Nature, bidding us keep our hearts and souls alive to see, with each renewing of springtime, and to love afresh, the miracles of Nature's redemptive force.

The beauty of springtime, like the beauty of childhood, is always new. All about me the things of Nature are still in the mystical, subtile tenderness of their young, green growth. The golden days of autumn are full of their own beauty. The grey days of winter's mist and fog have theirs, but there is something in the tender blue days of the rainy springtime that sets the heart apraise, and ? brings out as nothing else can, the meanings of leaf and bud, of flower and tree. It is raining, now. Up above me, on the road, several picnickers who have been caught in this April shower are hurrying to shelter ? They look down curiously at me, here under the willow, and I have some misgiving as to whether they are not setting an example that I should follow ? But I am sure that it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains. One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness. There is, after all, a certain selective wisdom that sees the desirability of taking the showers as they come.

There is something peculiarly tender and loving about an April shower. One is so fully conscious, even while the drops are falling, that the sun is shining behind the light clouds. And the drops themselves come down so gently, tentatively offering themselves, as it were, to the welcoming earth--pattering lightly on the leaves, and softly rippling the surface of the little pool under the willows. That is a wonderful sort of comparison the Hebrew poet gives us when he likens the teaching of truth to the small rain upon the tender herb: the showers upon the green grass ?

The young colt in the stall, yonder, thrusts an eager head over the half-door, and with soft black muzzle in the air, stands with open mouth to catch the delicious trickle. The cattle on the hills seem glad of the wetting. Even the birds have not sought shelter, and why should I? ? I love to watch the leaves of the trees and plants, in the rain. They tell us so many secrets about the life of which they are a part. Why, for instance, does this pond lily spread out its broad, pleasant leaves upon the water's surface, while its cousin the brodeia has long, narrow, grass-like leaves? Why do the leaves of the pungent wormwood, here, stand rigidly pointing upwards, while those of this big oak are spread out before the descending rain?

Watch the wormwood. See how the raindrops quiver for an instant on the tips of the pinnate leaves, then follow one another in a mad chase down the groove that traverses the center of each leaf. Notice that the leaf itself rises from three ridges on the stem of the plant, and that between these ridges lie shallow grooves down which the raindrops run to the plant's root. Now, we can tell from these signs what sort of a root the wormwood has. I never pulled one of the plants, but I am sure that if we were to do so we should find it to have a main tap-root, with no branches. All such plants have leaves pointing upwards, and grooved stems, admirably adapted to bring water to the thirsty roots. The beets and the radishes afford us capital examples of this provision ?

This alfileria has another arrangement of leaf, for this same purpose. It is a widely spreading forage-plant, with an absurdly small root. It needs a great deal of moisture, and so its stems are thickly set with soft, fuzzy hairs, that catch the water and convey it to the root ? Growing all along the bank is the little chickweed, with its tiny white star of a blossom. If it were not so common we should wax enthusiastic over its beauty, and seek it for our garden borders. It has a running, thread-like root, which receives the raindrops caught by the stem in a single row of tiny hairs along its lower side, and sprinkled gently down.

When a plant has a spreading root such as the willow, yonder, sends down, the leaves spread outward and downward, from base to tip, letting their gathered moisture down upon it. When the plant grows under water its leaves are long and thread-like; for the supply of carbon is limited, and they divide minutely, that the greatest possible surface may be exposed to absorb it. If the stem grows until the leaves reach the surface of the water they broaden and spread out, for here they get an abundant food supply which they may freely appropriate, as none of it need be diverted to build up a supporting stem. The water affords the leaves ample support ? The grasses grow in blades for the same reason that the plants growing under water put out slender, thread-like leaves. The air-supply would seem abundant, but the grass-leaves are many, and low-growing plants are numerous. So they divide and sub-divide, that greater surface may be presented to the sunlight and the air. In this form the blades are fittest to obtain their necessary food supply and thus to survive. We see this same tendency in the leaves of the wild poppy, the buttercup and all the great crowfoot family. Across the road stretches a line of locusts, just now in dainty, snowy, fragrant blossom. The individuality of a tree is a constant and delightful fact in Nature. The locust is as unlike the oak or the willow as can well be imagined, yet like them in taking on an added and characteristic loveliness in the rain. How delicately the branches pencil themselves against the blue and silver of the cloudy sky and the dark green of the orchard beyond them! The leaves have such a purely incidental air. The lines of the tree were, themselves, lovely enough in their green and mossy wetness, to delight the eye. To deck them so laceywise in an openwork of leaf and blossom was beneficent gratuity on the part of Mother Nature, for the pleasing of her children.

Down below, where the creek widens, the sycamores have grown to great size. How they help the heart, these gnarly giants, with the white patches against the greys and blacks of their rough trunks! ? How they spread their patches against the sky and beckon and point the beholder upwards. The sylvan prophet bears a promise of good, and demands of every passer-by the query of the wise old stoic: "Who is he that shall hinder thee from being good and simple?"

Over the rounded hill, stealing softly, in Indian file, through the mist, a row of eucalyptus trees climb, fringing up the slopes. These ladies of the hilltop have a fashion of growing thus, and in no other position is their delicate, suggestive beauty more apparent. The eucalyptus is an original genius among trees, never repeating itself. It stands for endless variety, for strong good cheer, for faith that seeks and reaches and goes on, never wavering ? It blesses as well as delights its friends. I love its wonderful, ever varying leaves, its up-reaching, outstretching branches, and the annual surprise of its mystic blossoming. Each tree is distinct and individual in its growth, yet every one is typical of the genus.

It is a tree of the wind and the storm. See how those in yonder group sway and courtesy, bow and beckon, advance and retreat in the light breeze! And the rain does such marvels to them in the way of color, tinting the leaves into wondrous things of glistening black-and-silver, and bringing out exquisite, evasive greens and browns, red and rose colors, tender blues and greys, from the trunks and branches ? All the things of Nature are for man's use and joy, but perhaps they serve their very highest use when we return God thanks for their beauty ?

Yes, I am sure that there is a wisdom wiser than the prudence which sends us in out of the rain. The flowers and the grasses teach us more than has ever been put between the covers of books. The trees bring us the real news of the real world long before they are crushed into pulp and made into the paper on which is printed our morning service from the scandal monger and the stock broker. It was heralded as a marvelous triumph of modern ingenuity when, the other day, a forest tree was cut down and made into paper on which the news of the world was printed and hawked along the streets within four and one-half hours from the moment when the axe was laid at the root of the tree. Marvelously clever, that, but shall we ever be wise enough to bring the trees themselves to the city, instead? If we were but able to read the message they bear, the newspaper might go away into outer darkness, whence it sprang.

There is a fearful moment of reckoning before us should it ever chance that when all our trees shall have been sacrificed on the altar of the patron-fiend of news, the newspaper supply shall suddenly be cut off and we find ourselves some fine morning minus our tidbits of shame and failure and disaster, left to the companionship of our own thoughts ? Dante never imagined a terror like this ?

But the sun has come out again. The rain is over and gone. Only the last treasured drops chase one another along the leaves and down the stems of the plants. Our picnickers are venturing forth ? The wet blades of grass sparkle in the sunlight. Over on the bank a ruby-throated hummer is flying back and forth across a tiny stream that patters and splashes against a rock. These morsels of birds love a shower-bath and this fellow now has one exactly to his mind. The clouds have drifted down the sky and everything seems glad and grateful for "the useful trouble of the rain."

Once upon a time man conceived the belief that this universe, with its many worlds swinging through space, was created for him. He fancied that the sun shone by day to warm and vivify him; that the stars of night were none other than lamps to his feet; that the other animals existed to afford him food and clothing--and sport; that the very flowers of the field blossomed and fruited and were beautiful for his gratification. In fact, man conceived the belief that instead of being the wise brother and helper of this creation amidst which he moves, he was the great central pivot upon which all revolves ?

A sorry lesson, surely, for man to read into the broad, open page of Nature's great book. Small wonder that to him in his meanness its message came as "the painful riddle of the earth." But it was the best he could do: it is the best any of us can do until we have learned the great lesson which the ancient Wise One has written out for us--which she will teach us, in time, through death, if we will not let her teach it through life: the lesson that use is not appropriation; that appropriation sets use to groan and sweat under fardels of evil ?

We are learning this lesson, with a bad grace, like blundering school boys, fumbling at our hornbook, stuttering and stammering over the alphabet of life, the while our minds wander stupidly off to the playthings of our unholy civilization. Perhaps some day we shall spell out something of this riddle which we have made so painful, and with the lesson get somewhat of the humility that comes with knowing ?

But now man does not read the book of Nature to much better purpose than he reads those other volumes, written by himself, and bought by himself, in bulk, to adorn his libraries: portly tomes to which he may point with pride as evidence that at least his shelves hold wisdom, tho' his head may never.

I use no figure of speech when I say that we may now buy our books in bulk. I saw, only this morning, the advertisement of a large dry goods "emporium" wherein is announced for sale the bound volumes of a popular magazine. "Over eight pounds of the choicest reading, bound in the usual style--olive green." ?

Nature has olive greens, too, in styles usual and unusual, and she has marvelous messages for her lovers, but she cannot be bought in bulk, nor put upon shelves, nor even carried in the head until she first be received into the heart ? A little flaxen haired girl brought me, this morning, a pure white buttercup on the stem with three yellow ones.

"See," she said, "Here is one buttercup they forgot to paint." ?

I took the flower from her hand. I could not tell her just how it happened that this one perianth was white, but I explained to her something of how the others came to be yellow ? What we call a flower is not, usually, the flower at all, but merely its petals. The real flower is the cluster, in the center of the calyx, of pistils and their surrounding pollen-bearing stamens. Away back in the ages when man had not yet developed his aesthetic sense, perhaps even before he had learned to make fire, the primitive flower bore only these pistils and stamens, with a little outer protective whorl of green petals. It was fertilized by the pollen falling upon the pistils.

But this was not good for the plant. Those flowers that in some way became fertilized by pollen from other plants of the same variety, by cross-fertilization, in fact, were healthier and stronger than those fertilized by their own pollen. In such plants as wind-blown pollen reached this cross-fertilization was an easy matter, but the buttercup is not one of these. It is forced to rely upon insects for fertilization. So the plant began to secrete a sweet drop at the base of each green petal. Such insects as discovered this nectar and stopped to sip were dusted with the pollen of the plant and carried it to other flowers, where it fertilized the pistils, the insect gathering from every blossom a fresh burden of pollen to be carried along on his nectar-seeking round. This was very good, so far as it went, but the flowers were pale and inconspicuous, and many of them, overlooked by the insects, were never visited. Certain ones, however, owing to accidents or conditions of soil and moisture, had the calyx a little larger, or brighter colored than their fellows, and these the insects found. It happened, therefore, if anything ever does merely happen, that the flowers with bright petals were fertilized, and their descendants were even brighter colored. Thus, in time, the buttercup, by the process which, for lack of a better name, we call natural selection, came to have bright yellow petals, because these attract the insect best adapted to fertilize it ? If man's aesthetic sense is gratified by the flower's beauty, why man is by so much the better off, but that man is pleased by the bright color is not half so important to the buttercup as is the pleasure of a certain little winged beetle which sees the shining golden cup and knows that it means honey ? In the same way the lupin, yonder, with its pretty blue and white blossoms, has developed its blue petals because it is fertilized by the bees. They seek it as they do other blossoms, not only for honey, but for the pollen itself, which stands them in place of bread ? The very shape of the flower is due to the visits of countless generations of this insect. The bee is the insect best adapted to fertilize the lupin, and when he alights upon the threshold of a blossom his weight draws the lower petal down, and entering to suck the sweets he gets his head dusted with pollen. If a fly were to gain entrance to the flower, he would carry away no pollen. He is smaller than the bee, and his head could not reach it. So honey-seeking flies alight in vain; their weight is not enough to press the calyx open, so they may not enter and drink of its sweets. Yonder on a blossom of the mimulus, the odd-looking monkey-plant, a honeybee just had this same experience. The bumblebee is the only insect that is large enough to reach the pollen in this blossom, and so its doors will open only to him. Botanists tell us that all this great family, to which belong the various peas blossoms and their cousins, were once five-petaled plants, but natural selection has brought about their present shape, which is an admirable protection against the depredations of small insects that could only rob but could not fertilize the flowers ?

Blue is the favorite color of the honeybee, and next to blue he prefers red. So bee blossoms are blue or red.

Most of our small white flowers are fertilized by insects that fly at night. This is the reason why white blossoms are more fragrant than their bright-hued sisters. Bright colors could not be seen at night, but the fragrance of the white flowers, always more noticeable by night than by day, serves the same end--to attract the useful insects. This is an essential part of Nature's wonderful plan. The flower lives by giving ?

There is an endless fascination in this page which Nature opens out before us, in her upland pastures. A wise teacher once told me his experience with a restless, unmanageable boy ? "I could do nothing with him," the teacher said, "until I got him interested in field life." One day this boy went off on a holiday tramp, returning the day following. His teacher asked him what he had seen, and this is what he remembered of his outing: "I camped in a field for the night," said he, "and I saw a bee light on a poppy and crawl in. The poppy shut up and caught him. Next morning I woke up early and watched, and by and by the poppy opened and the bee came out." ? There are those who might have missed the sacred significance of such a narrative, but that teacher was a very wise man and he knew that the reading lesson given him then was a page from his rough boy's soul-life, and he conned it with reverent delight. Life together was more real for them both after that day.

The keener our realization of the human love that is in the flowers, in the trees, in all the wild life about us, the richer is our humanity, the fuller our reception of life and love, the more thoughtful our use of all the things of Nature becomes ? Once I saw an oriole weaving some bits of string into his nest. He hung head downwards, by one string, from a projecting branch, and worked, for nearly an hour, with beak and claws. Then he flew away, triumphant. Later I saw his nest and understood his action. He tied two pieces of string together in a very respectable sort of knot: had wound the long cord thus obtained in and out among the meshes of his nest and then, giving it a half-hitch about a twig, had brought the free end up and tied it securely to another small branch ?

I felt grateful for what that bird had accomplished. All human achievements seemed to me worthier after seeing him do this thing. Nature teaches us so much if we will but keep still long enough to let her: if we will only empty ourselves of conceit and knowingness, and get rid of the notion that all things, Nature included, are made for us. We are not the lords of creation. We are only a small part, albeit the highest part, of it all, and the better we learn this lesson the better men and women we shall become.

I was sitting here beside the stream, watching the bees swarm in and out at the entrance to their hive, when Hercules passed by. "Come and watch the bees," I called as he passed. "They are interesting." ?

He stood and studied the busy workers, intent upon the business of their miniature society ?

"I wonder," he said at last, "if our human reason shall ever evolve a system half so perfect as the one that mere instinct has taught these feeble insects." As I was silent he continued:

"Well, at all events, I can learn one lesson from the bees, and be about my business. If society is ever to be freed from its burdens every soul must do its full duty. One life wasted means a whole world hindered just that much." And Hercules was gone to his labors ?

How fearful we all are of wasting our lives, yet so rarely fearful for the results of the ceaseless activity with which we crowd them ? But Hercules' words are full of suggestiveness. Is our boasted human reason really less adequate to the needs of our life than is what we call the instinct, this thing that looks so much more reasonable than our reason, of the lower orders? What if, after all, we are making a desperate mistake in supposing that it is this faculty which we call reason that distinguishes us from the brute creation?

It is because the bees and the other dumb creatures have nothing more than this measure of reason which we call instinct, that it serves them perfectly. Man has something else, that draws him higher; that prompts him further. But alas for us! With the destiny to live perfectly as human beings, we yet long for the restrictions through which we may live perfectly as the beasts. We seek our lessons from the brutes while the Eternal waits to teach us. We cannot live like the beasts. The divine human spark within us will not let us. We must live higher than they or we shall live lower, for our perfection of order is infinitely higher than theirs, and our failure immeasurably lower than they can sink ?

But we go on, we modern Athenians, seeking to ameliorate the conditions we have brought upon society by our own stupid disobedience and inhumanity, and only now and then do we have a faint suspicion that our newest thoughts are but mere rephrasings of ideas old as thought itself ?

Men get these new sets of phrases and dress therein the ideas that underlie the universe. We apply the terms of science to the old faiths and think we have invented a new religion. We find new names for God Himself, and believe ourselves to have discovered a new life-principle ? Loving the neighbor becomes enlightened altruism, and lo, faith is born anew, with a subtiler power to redeem the world.

Hercules is a Socialist. He always spells society with a great S, and he declares in the present state of Society we can take no thought for individuals ? "The individual may perish," he says, in moments of eloquence, "but the integrity of Society must be jealously maintained." ?

I wonder, as I sit here watching the bees, whether Society might not, after all, find easement from its ails if each individual of us, myself and Hercules included, should pay strict attention to our individual business of growing, or becoming humanized? ?

Just here at my hand a bee has alighted and is burying its nose in a clover blossom. Here is an example of a life that is lived only for Society, yet so important is the individual in the opinion of this highly perfected body social, that I have seen half a dozen bees, when a laden worker has arrived at the hive opening, weighted down, too exhausted to do other than drop, helpless, upon the threshold, rush to its assistance, relieve it of its heavy load and help it to pass within to gather strength for further effort. The strict individualist complains, in turn, of the bees because they have no individual life; no existence separate from the hive. This is true, but what higher individuality can any creature desire than is comprised and summed up in the divine opportunity to bring his individual gift to the common store?

I have picked the clover blossom that the bee just left. Beside it are growing other blossoms, and I gather a couple. They are the veriest wayside weeds--dandelion and dog-fennel--but they are important because they are typical representatives of the largest order in the floral kingdom; an order which, although it was the last to appear in the vegetable world, has outstripped every other and leads them all today. Botanists call it the Composite Order. Its members are really floral socialists, just as Hercules and the rest of us who believe that government is an order of nature, and good for the race, are human socialists, whether we know it or not.

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