How much more, then, it requires different
intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments
of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!
Take a New-England selectman, and set him on the highest of our hills, and
tell him to look,--sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting on the
glasses that suit him best, (ay, using a spy-glass, if he likes,)--and
make a full report. What, probably, will he _spy_?--what will he _select_
to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre of himself. He will
see several meeting-houses, at least, and, perhaps, that somebody ought to
be assessed higher than he is, since he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now
take Julius Caesar, or Immanuel Swedenborg, or a Fegee-Islander, and set
him up there. Or suppose all together, and let them compare notes
afterward. Will it appear that they have enjoyed the same prospect? What
they will see will be as different as Rome was from Heaven or Hell, or the
last from the Fegee Islands. For aught we know, as strange a man as any of
these is always at our elbow.
Why, it takes a sharp-shooter to bring down even such trivial game as
snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what he
is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at random
into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so is it with
him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky falls, he will not
bag any, if he does not already know its seasons and haunts, and the color
of its wing,--if he has not dreamed of it, so that he can _anticipate_ it;
then, indeed, he flushes it at every step, shoots double and on the wing,
with both barrels, even in cornfields. The sportsman trains himself,
dresses and watches unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular
game. He prays for it, and offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. After due
and long preparation, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and
asleep, with gun and paddle and boat he goes out after meadow-hens, which
most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, and paddles for miles
against a head-wind, and wades in water up to his knees, being out all day
without his dinner, and _therefore_ he gets them. He had them half-way
into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them down. The true
sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his windows: what else
has he windows or eyes for? It comes and perches at last on the barrel of
his gun; but the rest of the world never see it _with the feathers on_.
The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and honk when they get there, and
he will keep himself supplied by firing up his chimney; twenty musquash
have the refusal of each one of his traps before it is empty. If he lives,
and his game-spirit increases, heaven and earth shall fail him sooner than
game; and when he dies, he will go to more extensive, and, perchance,
happier hunting-grounds. The fisherman, too, dreams of fish, sees a
bobbing cork in his dreams, till he can almost catch them in his
sink-spout. I knew a girl who, being sent to pick huckleberries, picked
wild gooseberries by the quart, where no one else knew that there were
any, because she was accustomed to pick them up country where she came
from. The astronomer knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one
clearly in his mind before any have seen it with a glass. The hen
scratches and finds her food right under where she stands; but such is not
the way with the hawk.
These bright leaves which I have mentioned are not the exception, but the
rule; for I believe that all leaves, even grasses and mosses, acquire
brighter colors just before their fall.
