The Pond-Pasture

THROUGH the open farm-house window, with its old-fashioned framework, cracked by sun and time and freshened by clean thick white paint, I looked into the summer rain, falling fast and straight, and vivifying all the green of field and woodland, of tall elms and oaks, till the very moisture of the air seemed green. Across the road, with its wide irregular border of grass, the low stone walls hemmed in the different fields; the hill-pasture, the pasture where the low-bush blackberries ripened in a tangle of vines, the pond-pasture, with its row of great oaks standing beside a little circle of water, gray in the falling rain, and its mossy cart-track leading under the oaks, toward the high blueberry bushes and the background of young birch and alder.

All that was outside the window. Inside was the book, a small brown volume, one of a dun-clad set which had claimed me by their titles on my first rapid, initiatory glance over the bookshelves a week or two before. The Conduct of Life ; Nature ; how they beckoned to the thin half-grown soul which at fifteen found the conduct of life already a matter of unspeakable difficulty, and nature a beautiful radiance somewhere outside of it, hinting, in its sun rays, at a golden clue ! Between the covers of those brown volumes I had struggled and soared ever since, fiercely combatting passages which, measured by the tiny rule of previous readings and teachings, were surely untrue, clutching at others to try to wrest from them a meaning before they vanished from me forever, amazed and enchanted at the greatness, here and there, of brief, glorious, convincing truths. And more and more there came upon me the sense, such as the climber may have of his summit, of a region behind it all in which these opposites stood reconciled, from which they all came in one sense and spirit, the great open upland which was the mind of Emerson.

What was the meaning of those light, but lofty, allusions to idealism, to its possibility, its truth ? It was not for the first time that I met the word. There was another older brown book on the shelf at home, Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, in which I had browsed with much relish of its anecdotes and arguments against the idealists. I had heard of materialism too: it had loomed up mightily convincing in the account of the early unconverted state of Charnay in Picciola; his subsequent conversion was a denouement flattened to the ordinary plane of church and Sunday school, of teachings received without opposition, but with no result save in vague yearnings toward an improved conduct of life. Could a great man, — for he was great and the adjective meant everything to me in those days, — in our nineteenth-century New England, deliberately ignore the worm origin of the silk, so repugnantly convincing to Saintine’s fastidious count, and indifferently expose himself, like the ancient philosopher of Reid’s mocking anecdotes, to the ridicule of asserting the unreality of matter, yet getting out of the way of the chariot ? What did it all mean ?

The rain had ceased and the afternoon sun burst suddenly out of the clouds. I put the book away and ran out of doors, across the road and through the bars into the pond-pasture. The birds had taken up their interrupted song. The little sheet of water caught at once the blue of the sky and the glint of the sun, and danced in tiny wavelets under the fresh breeze. The bushes shook off in gusts their weight of rain, and rose again sparkling all over in iridescent drops. The sky was swept blue, and the remaining clouds hastened away, thinning at the edges, as they went, into silvery mist. Everything shone and triumphed. Its glory was a vision, the glory of a moment: in a little while it would be as if it had not been. Did it call the mind to rejoice, or did the mind, rejoicing, make it ? Might not the reality of which we believed it to be composed, be itself a more persistent vision, in my retina, in other retinas, in the gaze of some vast universal mind ? A light shone from the little brown book, akin to, but beyond the glory of the pondpasture. Up to that time I had lived in a town, with streets laid out and houses built upon the brown common surface of the earth: from that moment and henceforth I was a humble denizen of a universe.