The Summit of the Years
I
THE longer I live the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and the wonder of the world. I hardly know which feeling leads, wonderment or admiration. After a man has passed the psalmist’s dead line of seventy years, as Dr. Holmes called it, if he is of a certain temperament, he becomes more and more detached from the noise and turmoil of the times in which he lives. The passing hubbub in the street attracts him less and less; more and more he turns to the permanent, the fundamental, the everlasting. More and more is he impressed with life and nature in themselves, and the beauty and the grandeur of the voyage ive are making on this planet. The burning questions and issues of the hour are for the new generations, in whom life burns intensely also.
My life has always been more or less detached from the life about me. I have not been a hermit, but my temperament and love of solitude, and a certain constitutional timidity and shrinking from all kinds of strife, have kept me in the by-paths rather than on the great highways of life. My talent, such as it is, is distinctly a by-path talent, or at most, a talent for green lanes and sequestered roadsides; but that which has most interested me in life, Nature, can be seen from lanes and bypaths better even than from the turnpike, where the dust and noise and the fast driving obscure the view or distract the attention. I have loved the feel of the grass under my feet,.and the sound of the running streams by my side. The hum of the wind in the treetops has always been good music to me, and the face of the fields has often comforted me more than the faces of men.
I am in love with this world; by my constitution I have nestled lovingly in it. It has been home. It has been my point of outlook into the universe. I have not bruised myself against it, nor tried to use it ignobly. I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvests, I have waited upon its seasons, and always have I reaped what I have sown. While I delved I did not lose sight of the sky overhead. While I gathered its bread and meat for my body, I did not neglect to gather its bread and meat for my soul. I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.
I have kept apart from the strife and fever of the world, and the maelstrom of business and political life, and have sought the paths by the still waters, and in the quiet fields, and life has been sweet and wholesome to me. In my tranquil seclusion I am often on the point of upbraiding myself because I keep so aloof from the struggles and contentions and acrimonious debates of the political, the social, and the industrial world about me. I do not join any of the noisy processions, I do not howl with the reformers, or cry Fire! with the alarmists. I say to myself, What is all this noisy civilization and all this rattling machinery of government for, but that men may all have just the sane and contented life that I am living, and on the same terms that I do. They can find it in the next field, beyond the next hill, in the town or in the country — a land of peace and plenty, if one has peace in his heart and the spirit of fair play in bis blood.
Business, politics, government, are but the scaffoldings of our house of life; they are there that I may have a good roof over my head, and a warm and safe outlook into the beauty and glory of the universe, and let them not absorb more time and energy than the home itself. They have absorbed very little of mine, and I fancy that my house of life would have had just as staunch walls, and just as many windows and doors, had they not absorbed so much of other men’s. Let those who love turmoil arm for turmoil: their very arming will bring it; and let those who love peace disarm for peace: the disarming will hasten it. Those also serve who mind their own business and let others mind theirs.
I know that all this clamor and competition, all this heat and friction and turmoil of the world, are only the result of the fury with which we play the game of our civilization. It is like our college football, which is brutal and killing, and more like war than like sport. Why should I be more than an amused or a pained spectator?
I was never a fighter; I fear that at times I may have been a shirker, but I have shirked one thing or one duty that I might the more heartily give myself to another. He also serves who sometimes runs away.
From the summit of the years I look back over my life, and see what I have escaped and what I have missed, as a traveler might look back over his course from a mountain-top, and see where he had escaped a jungle or a wilderness or a desert, and where he had missed a fair field or a fountain, or pleasant habitations. I have escaped the soul-killing and body-wrecking occupations that are the fate of so many men in my time. I have escaped the greed of wealth, the ‘mania of owning things,’ as Whitman called it. I have escaped the disappointment of political ambition, of business ambition, of social ambition; I have never been a cog in anybody’s wheel, or an attachment to the tail of anybody’s kite. I have never lost myself in the procession of parties, or trained with any sect or clique. I have been fortunate in being allowed to go my own way in the world. I was fortunate in my youth in having escaped the daily paper, and especially the Sunday paper and the comic supplement, and the flood of cheap fiction that now submerges the reading public.
It is a question whether in escaping a college education I made a hit or a miss. I am inclined to the opinion that a little systematic training, especially in science, would have been a gain, though the systematic grind in literature which the college puts its students through, I am glad to have escaped. I thank heaven that in literature I have never had to dissect Shakespeare or Milton, or any other great poet, in the class-room, and that I have never had to dissect any animal in the laboratory.
I have had the poets in their beautiful and stimulating unity and wholeness, and I have had the animals in the fields and woods in the joy of their natural activities. In my literary career I have escaped trying to write for the public or for editors; I have written for myself. I have not asked, ' What does the public want?’ I have only asked, ‘ What do I want to say? What is there in my heart craving for expression? What have I lived or felt or thought that is my own, and has its root in my inmost being?’
I have few of the aptitudes of the scholar, and fewer yet of the methodical habits and industry of the man of business. I live in books a certain part of each day, but less as a student of books than as a student of life. I go to books and to nature as a bee goes to the flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey. My memory for the facts and the arguments of books is poor, but my absorptive power is great. What I meet in life, in my walks, or in my travels, which is akin to me, or in the line of my interest and sympathies, that sticks to me like a burr, or, better than that, like the food I cat. So with books: what I get from them I do not carry in my memory, but it is absorbed as the air I breathe or the water I drink. It is rarely ready on my tongue or my pen, but makes itself felt in a much more subtle and indirect way.
There is no one, I suppose, who does not miss some good fortune in his life. We all miss congenial people, people who are going our way, and whose companionship would make life sweeter for us. Often we are a day too early, or a day too late, at the point where our paths cross. How many such congenial souls we miss we know not, but for my part, considering the number I have met, I think it may be many.
I have missed certain domestic good fortunes, such as a family of many children (I have only one), which might have made the struggle of life harder, but which would surely have brought its compensations. Those lives are, indeed, narrow and confined which are not blessed with several children. Every branch the tree puts out lays it open more to the storms and tempests of life; it lays it open also to the light and the sunshine, and to the singing and the mating birds. A childless life is a tree without branches, a house without windows.
I missed being a soldier in the armies of the Union during the Civil War, which was probably the greatest miss of my life. I think I had in me many of the qualities that go to the making of a good soldier — love of adventure, keenness of eye and ear, love of camp-life, ability to shift for myself, skill with the gun, and a sound constitution. But the rigidity of the military system, the iron rules, the mechanical unity and precision, the loss of the one in the many — all would have galled me terribly, though better men than I willingly, joyously, made themselves a part of the great military machine. I would have made a good scout and skirmisher, but a poor fighter in the ranks. I am a poor fighter, anyhow.
My grandfather was a soldier of the Revolution, and he seems to have used up about all the fighting blood there was in the family, as little of it has showed itself since. When one of his sons was drafted in the War of 1812, he went in his stead, but did not get face to face with the enemy.
I got near enough to the firing line during our Civil War, — when Early made his demonstration against the Capital in 1864, and I was a clerk in the Treasury Department, — to know that I much prefer the singing of the birds to the singing of hostile bullets. Maybe it was a nudge from the Old Continental within me that prompted me to make my way out Seventh St reet, flanking and eluding the guards and sentinels of the sixth Corps just up from Petersburg, taking a roundabout course through fields and woods, till just before dark I found myself amid the rifle-pits in front of one of the forts, fraternizing with the warworn veterans who had been hurried up from Grant’s army.
I had really made myself believe that if there was to be a battle I would have a hand in it and see what it was like. I was unarmed, but the soldiers assured me that they could quickly put a gun in my hand when the enemy appeared. There was some firing in front on a hill a mile away, and now and then I heard the ping of a rifle bullet overhead, and a few times the ‘thud’ it makes when it strikes the ground. They were ugly sounds to me, and to the amusement of Grant ’s veterans who layabout on the ground, as if they were on a picnic, I presently took to the shelter of the rifle-pits and remained there. Later, when I saw a company of soldiers being hurried off into the darkness toward the line of rifle flashes along the horizon in front, I had a sudden and vivid conviction that the stuff of a good soldier was not in me, — not at that moment, at any rate.
If I had been ordered to join those soldiers and face that unseen and unknown danger out there in the night, I am sure my legs would have refused to move, and would have collapsed beneath me. What a coward I was at that instant! The Old Continental would have disowned me. But darkness makes cowards of us all. I suppose my imagination ran away with me as it so often had done in my boyhood in regard to ‘spooks’ and hobgoblins.
As the night wore on and no attack on our hill seemed imminent, I wandered toward the rear in search of new adventure. Passing a long low building that was being used as a hospital, where the wounded were being cared for, I went in and offered my services to the surgeons. The operating tables were full and a long line of the wounded sat crouched against the wall waiting their turns. Some were groaning and some were joking.
The sight of human blood had always made me faint, but now I seemed unusually stout of heart and proceeded to hold instruments and pass vessels with a coolness that quite surprised me. By force of will I must have steeled myself against the gory spectacle, for after about half an hour my composure broke. I grew suddenly faint and came near falling to the floor. The surgeon whom I was assisting, seeing at a glance what had happened to me, said, ‘Get out of here, get out of here!’ and almost shoved me into the open air.
The air presently restored me, but I had had enough of war, and went and crept in among some bales of hay near by and tried to sleep away the remainder of the night. But sleep did not come. All night I heard the clattering of hoofs and sabres as regiments of arriving cavalry filed slowly by me. In the morning I made my way back to the city, satisfied that military glory was not in the line of my ambition.
War is a terrible business, but I never see a veteran of our Civil War that I do not envy him that experience — an experience which maybe I would have had, had not grandfather so nearly emptied the family powderhorn in his soldiering with Washington.
II
From youth to age I have lived with nature more than with men. In youth I saw nature as a standing invitation to come forth and give play to myself; the streams were for fishing and swimming, the woods were for hunting and exploring, and for all kinds of sylvan adventure; the fields were for berries and birds’ nests, and color, and the delight of the world of grasses; the mountains were for climbing and the prospects and the triumphs of their summits.
The world was good; it tasted good, it delighted all my senses. The seasons came and went, each with its own charms and enticements. I was ready for each and contented with each. The spring was for the delights of sugarmaking, and the returning birds — the naked maple woods flooded with the warm creative sunshine, the brown fields slipping off their covering of snow, the loosened rills, the first robin, the first phoebe, the first song sparrow — how all these things thrilled one! The summer was for bare feet., light clothes, freedom from school, strawberries, trout, hay-making, and the Fourth of July. Autumn was for apples, nuts, wild pigeons, gray squirrels, and the great dreamy tranquil days; winter for the fireside, school, games, coasting, and the tonic of frost and snow. How the stars twinkled in winter! how the ice sang, and whooped on the ponds! how the snow sculpturing decked all the farm fences! how the sheeted winds stalked across the hills!
Oh, the eagerness and freshness of youth! How the boy enjoys his food, his sleep, his sports, his companions, his truant days! His life is an adventure, he is widening his outlook, he is extending his dominion, he is conquering his kingdom. How cheap are his pleasures, how ready his enthusiasms! In boyhood I have had more delight on a haymow with two companions and a big dog—delight that came nearer intoxication — than I have ever had in all the subsequent holidays of my life. When youth goes, much goes with it. When manhood comes, much comes with it. We exchange a world of delightful sensations and impressions for a world of duties and studies and meditations. The youth enjoys what the man tries to understand. Lucky is he who can get his grapes to market and keep the bloom upon them, who can carry some of the freshness and eagerness and simplicity of youth into his later years, who can have a boy’s heart below a man’s head.
The birds have always meant much to me; as a farm-boy they were like a golden thread that knit the seasons together. In early manhood I turned to them with the fondness of youth, reinforced with an impetus obtained from literature. Books, especially the poets, may do this for a man; they may consecrate a subject, give it the atmosphere of the ideal, and lift it up in the field of universal interest. They seem to have done something like that for me in relation to birds. I did not go to books for my knowledge of the birds, except for some technical knowledge, but I think literature helped to endow them with a human interest to me, and relate them to the deeper and purer currents of my life. What joy they have brought me! How they have given me wings to escape the tedious and the deadening! I have not studied them so much as I have loved them; at least, my studies have been inspired by love.
How much more easily and surely knowledge comes through sympathy than through the knowing faculties! It is as if I had imbibed my knowledge of the birds through the pores of my skin, through the air I have breathed, through the soles of my feet, through the twinkle of the leaves, and the glint of the waters. I have gone a-fishing, and read their secrets out of the corners of my eyes. I have lounged under a tree, and the book of their lives has been opened to me. I have hoed in my garden, and read the histories they write in the air. Studied the birds? No, I have played with them, camped with them, gone berrying with them, summered and wintered with them, and my knowledge of them has filtered into my mind almost unconsciously.
The bird as a piece of living nature is what interests me, having vital relations to all out-of-doors, and capable of linking my mind to itself and its surroundings with threads of delightful associations. The live bird is a fellow passenger; we are making the voyage together, and there is a sympathy between us that quickly leads to knowledge. If I looked upon it as something to be measured and weighed and tabulated, or as a subject for laboratory experimentation, my ornithology would turn to ashes in my hands.
The whole of nature, directly or indirectly, goes with him who gives his mind to objects in the open air. The observer of bird-life in the open has heaven and earth thrown in. Well, I need not harp on this string. All lovers of life in the open know what I would say. The book of living nature is unlike other books in this respect: one can read it over and over, and always find new passages and new meanings. It is a book that goes to press new every night, and comes forth fresh every morning, and yet it is not like the newspaper, except that it is up-to-date. Its news is always vital, you see it in the making, and you are not blinded or deafened with the dust and noise of the vulgar newspaper world.
III
I began by saying how much the beauty and wonder of the world occupies me these later years. How these things come home to me as life draws near the end. I am like a man who makes a voyage and falls so much in love with the ship and the sea that he thinks of little else and is not curious about the new lands before him. I suppose if my mind had dwelt much upon the other world toward which we are headed, and which is the main concern with so many passengers, I should have found less to absorb and instruct me in this. In fact, the hypothetical other world has scarcely occupied me at all, and when it has, I have thought of it as a projection from this, a kind of Brocken shadow cast by our love of life upon futurity. My whole being is so well, so exquisitely attuned to this world, that I have instinctively felt that it was for this world that I was made.
I have never been able to see how I could be adjusted to two worlds unless they were much alike. A better world I have never wanted. I could not begin to exhaust the knowledge and the delights of this one. I have found in it deep beneath deep, worlds within a world — an endless series of beautiful and wonderful forms forever flowing out of itself. From the highest heavens of the telescope, to the minutest organisms of the microscope, all is beautiful and wonderful, and passeth understanding.
Oh, how much the world holds that it would be a joy to know! How wonderful my own origin, running back through the geologic ages, to the first pulse of life in the primordial seas, and embracing all between that eternity and this moment. I love to dwell upon it, and to try to picture to myself the long road I have traveled, the forms of lowly life in which I have tarried, the vicissitudes I have lived through, the contingencies upon which my wellbeing has hung.
How wonderful that all these countless ages are beneath my feet, in the soil I tread upon, and out of which I sprang!
The thought that I or my race had been arbitrarily placed here, and that I was not the inevitable outcome of the visible and invisible system of things, would not move me. I like to think I am not an interloper, or an accident in the universe, and that the whole of the unthinkable past has contributed to you and me. I will not say, is summed up in you and me, except in the sense that the highest results of evolution culminate in us. There have been other lines of evolution than ours, and it would take all the forms of life on the globe to sum up the past.
How wonderful that the globe itself should have been born out of the nebular mist — the cosmic world-stuff in the womb of the great sidereal mother; that it should have had its fiery and turbulent youth; that it should have sobered and ripened with age; that its mantle of fertile soil should have been wrought out of the crude igneous and stratified rocks; that it falls forever around the sun, and never falls into it; that it is so huge that we cannot span it, even in imagination, but can picture it to ourselves only by piecemeal, as with a globe of our own making; and yet that it is only as a globule of blood in the veins of the Infinite; that it is moving with such incredible speed, and yet to our senses seems forever at rest; that the heavens are always above us wherever we are upon its surface, and never under us, as the image of a globe might lead us to infer would be the case at times — all this, I say, and more, fills me with perpetual wonder.
More and more I think of the globe as a whole, though I can only do so by figuring it to myself as I see it. upon the map, or as a larger moon. My mind’s eye cannot follow the sweep of its curve and take in more than a small arc at a time. More and more I think of it as a huge organism pulsing with life, real and potential.
When I come from the vast to the minute, I find equal cause for wonder and admiration. If I look at the body of a fly with my pocket-glass, or at the speck of an insect that crawls upon the page of my book as I read, I marvel at its exquisite structure and delicate adjustment of parts, the elaboration, the complexity, the ingenuity, the strange mechanism of it all. When I crush it, I feel what a consummation of creative workmanship, what a delicate and exquisite product of the long ages of evolution, I have brought to naught. When I see the marvelous intelligence of ants and bees with their communities and coöperations and complex economies, I cannot help but wonder what might have been the result had evolution continued on the same line, and mounted step by step, as it has in the vertebrates. Would some being with more intellect than man has, have been the result ? Maybe it was so on Mars, or on some other world in the depths of space.
It is hard for us to conceive of mental gifts differing in kind from our own, but it is certain that the wisdom that the insect world possesses is not like our own, and comes to it in a way we know not of. The ants and bees do things that seem to imply what we call second-sight, or a gift akin to clairvoyance. Take the case of one of the solitary wasps of which Sir John Lubbock tells us. When this wasp lays an egg, she acts as if she knew whether the egg would produce a male or a female; she puts five insects by the male egg, and ten by the female, because the female needs twice as much food as the male. There are many cases like that, of seeing behind the veil of things in the insect world, and one can but marvel at it. It sometimes seems as if human beings possess this gift in a tentative, rudimentary kind of way.
How can any one help but marvel when he considers the structure of his own body — several millions or billions of minute cells, working together like little people to build it up and maintain it, dividing themselves into communities or fraternities, each with its own work to do, and, so far as we can see, with none having the direction of the whole work — no head or superintendent or architect to determine what the finished structure shall be. One community of cells builds muscle, one nerves, another bones, another hair, skin, and nails, others the viscera, the brain, and so on, till the full stature of man is reached. No single cell or group of cells knows the plan or the end to which they are all working. What puts the result of all these myriad workmen together and makes the man? They are many, he is one. The microscope reveals them, it cannot reveal him. He rises from the world of minute plastic interacting forms as Venus rose from the sea, and the sea knows not the secret.
The same is true of every living thing — cell wedded to cell, communities of cells wedded to communities, and all working on a plan unknown to any group of them. Yonder oak or pine started from a similar minute germ, and became a vast coöperative community, or series of coöperative communities of associate cells, with no cell or community directing the whole.
The only analogue of these things I now think of in nature about us is afforded by a swarm of bees, wherein all the complex economies of the hive are carried on without a single or separate seat of authority in the hive. Maeterlinck aptly calls this invisible authority the ‘spirit of the hive’ — a name for something that we know not of. So one may say, the spirit of the body, or the spirit of the tree, determines and controls all its complex economies, and makes of it a unit.
The cells that are the architects of one man’s body cannot, be distinguished from the cells that build another man’s body, yet behold the difference between the two men — in size, disposition, brain-power! It looks as if there is something in the man that is not of his cells.
Indeed, the mystery of the cell has never been penetrated. A man, like every other animal, begins in a speck of nucleated protoplasm — so small that it seems to be almost at the vanishing point; yet in that microscopical entity there may slumber a Shakespeare, a Newton, a Darwin, a Lincoln, with all the complex inheritance of race and of family traits, and with all the wondrous individual endowments of mental powers.
That cell, invisible to the naked eye, is a world in itself. It divides and subdivides, and its progeny, apparently of their own motion, begin to organize the human body and to build it up, as I have said. They resolve themselves into communities, or co-fraternities, each brotherhood with its own special work to do.
IV
How can one help marveling at the voyage we are making on this planet. One has to lift one’s self up and use one’s imagination to see that it is a voyage, and that our course lies through the star-paved abysses of infinite space. Few of us ever see it or realize it in all its awful grandeur. But sometimes, as we look up at the night sky, we are surprised out of our habitual stolidity and blindness, the mind opens for a moment, and we see the Infinite face to face; the veil is withdrawn, and the rays from myriads of orbs penetrate to the soul.
Oh, the worlds and systems of worlds that the night reveals, — the outlook off into infinity which the darkness brings! When the day is done, when the night falls, how are the heavens opened! how is the universe extended! how are the glory and the sublimity of creation multiplied! Out of the deep shadow of the earth what lights we behold! what rays penetrate to us from the farthermost depths of space! When the sun is gone, myriads of other suns are born. Without this negation called darkness how little we would suspect the awful grandeurs that compass us about. The day shuts us in, the sky is a roof that confines us; the night lets us out into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We feel the infinite space, we confront the star-paved abyss, the constellations shock us out of our prose and humdrum; they reveal to us how wild and terrific and unfathomable is the sea over which we are voyaging.
What does not the imagination of man, the spirit of man owe to the night — the revelation or the apocalypse of the darkness. The night is spiritual; how it hides all things secular, how it blots out the common and the wearisome, how it stirs and stimulates our religious emotions, how it nourishes our sense of mystery, and of the profound. It adds the transcendental, the immeasurable, to our world. It uncovers the heavens, they have a new meaning when we have walked under them at night,
I would not forget the debt we owe to the day; life itself, and all that sustains it, light and warmth, cloud and sun, brought us here and keep us here. The gifts of the night are less tangible; the night does not come with fruit and flowers and bread and meat; it comes with stars and star-dust, with mystery and nirvana.
I am a creature of the day, I belong to the open, cheerful, optimistic day. Few of my habits or feelings are nocturnal. I am neither a prowler, nor a burner of midnight oil, nor a lover of the spectral or the obscure. I bring all things to the test of the sunlight; my mind works best, and my faith is strongest, when the day is waxing and not waning. Yet now I am in the mood to praise the night, the not-day, the great shadow which is a telescope through which we see the Infinite.
The night that rounds the day of life is surely near all septuagenarians; the shadows deepen around us. When the darkness falls, will the heavens indeed be unveiled — the unquenchable lights meet our gaze?