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. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem,
few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the
grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold to feed unnecessary fires of
ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to
perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial
season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind,
cast by the _wings_ of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration,
but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought
itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar,
and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those
_gra-a-ate thoughts_, those _gra-a-ate men_ you hear of!
* * * * *
We hug the earth,--how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate
ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my
account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a
hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I
discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,--so
much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot
of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never
have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me,--it was near the
end of June,--on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and
delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine
looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost
spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets,--for it
was court-week,--and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and
hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as
at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works
on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible
parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the
forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved by them.
We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.
