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 traveller from far and near. From the remote
interior, its current conducts him by broad and easy steps, or by one
gentle 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 musk-rat,
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
thistledown. 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 dryshod 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.
