Now it is
an extended forest or a mountain-side, through or along which we journey
from day to day, that bursts into bloom. Comparatively, our gardening is
on a petty scale,--the gardener still nursing a few asters amid dead
weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters and roses, which, as it were,
overshadow him, and ask for none of his care. It is like a little red
paint ground on a saucer, and held up against the sunset sky. Why not take
more elevated and broader views, walk in the great garden, not skulk in a
little "debauched" nook of it? consider the beauty of the forest, and not
merely of a few impounded herbs?
Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If,
about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our
town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may see--well,
what I have endeavored to describe. All this you surely _will_ see, and
much more, if you are prepared to see it,--if you _look_ for it.
Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, whether you stand
on the hill-top or in the hollow, you will think for threescore years and
ten that all the wood is, at this season, sere and brown. Objects are
concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of
our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on
them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any
other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and
narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are
for this reason concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only
the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply
answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is
just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to
appreciate,--not a grain more. The actual objects which one man will see
from a particular hill-top are just as different from those which another
will see as the beholders are different. The Scarlet Oak must, in a sense,
be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see anything until we are
possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,--and then we can
hardly see anything else. In my botanical rambles, I find, that, first,
the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may seem
very foreign to this locality,--no nearer than Hudson's Bay,--and for some
weeks or months I go thinking of it, and expecting it, unconsciously, and
at length I surely see it. This is the history of my finding a score or
more of rare plants, which I could name. A man sees only what concerns
him. A botanist absorbed in the study of grasses does not distinguish the
grandest Pasture Oaks. He, as it were, tramples down Oaks unwittingly in
his walk, or at most sees only their shadows. I have found that it
required a different intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see
different plants, even when they were closely allied, as _Juncaceoe_ and
_Gramineoe_: when I was looking for the former, I did not see the latter
in the midst of them.
