The American Scene | Page 8

were
preoccupied with the human history of places, into a mood in which
appreciation became a positive wantonness and the sense of quality,
plucking up unexpectedly a spirit, fairly threatened to take the game
into its hands. You discovered, when once it was stirred, an elegance in
the commonest objects, and a mystery even in accidents that really
represented, perhaps, mere plainness unashamed. Why otherwise, for
instance, the inveterate charm of the silver-grey rock cropping through
thinly-grassed acres with a placed and "composed" felicity that
suggested the furniture of a drawing-room? The great boulders in the
woods, the pulpit-stones, the couchant and rampant beasts, the isolated
cliffs and lichened cathedrals, had all, seen, as one passed, through their
drizzle of forest light, a special New Hampshire beauty; but I never
tired of finding myself of a sudden in some lonely confined place, that
was yet at the same time both wide and bright, where I could recognize,
after the fashion of the old New Hampshire sociability, every facility
for spending the day. There was the oddity--the place was furnished by
its own good taste; its bosky ring shut it in, the two or three gaps of the
old forgotten enclosure made symmetrical doors, the sweet old stones
had the surface of grey velvet, and the scattered wild apples were like
figures in the carpet.

It might be an ado about trifles--and half the poetry, roundabout, the
poetry in solution in the air, was doubtless but the alertness of the touch
of autumn, the imprisoned painter, the Bohemian with a rusty jacket,
who had already broken out with palette and brush; yet the way the
colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a
start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls
nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a
fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before
she goes. One speaks, at the same time, of the orchards; but there are
properly no orchards where half the countryside shows, all September,
the easiest, most familiar sacrifice to Pomona. The apple-tree, in New
England, plays the part of the olive in Italy, charges itself with the
effect of detail, for the most part otherwise too scantly produced, and,
engaged in this charming care, becomes infinitely decorative and
delicate. What it must do for the too under-dressed land in May and
June is easily supposable; but its office in the early autumn is to scatter
coral and gold. The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old
clearing, an orchard; they have "run down" from neglect and shrunken
from cheapness--you pick them up from under your feet but to bite into
them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their
young brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of
strange-coloured pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you note their
manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gaiety, they seem to ask to
be praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe. The
question of the encircled waters too, larger and smaller--that again was
perhaps an ado about trifles; but you can't, in such conditions, and
especially at first, resist the appeal of their extraordinarily mild faces
and wooded brims, with the various choice spots where the great
straight pines, interspaced beside them, and yielding to small strands as
finely curved as the eyebrows of beauty, make the sacred grove and the
American classic temple, the temple for the worship of the evening sky,
the cult of the Indian canoe, of Fenimore Cooper, of W. C. Bryant, of
the immortalizable water-fowl. They 1ook too much alike, the lakes
and the ponds, and this is, indeed, all over the world, too much a
reproach to lakes and ponds--to all save the pick of the family, say, like
George and Champlain; the American idea, moreover, is too
inveterately that woods shall grow thick to the water. Yet there is no

feature of grace the landscape could so ill spare--let alone one's not
knowing what other, what baser, promiscuity mightn't oppress the
banks if that of the free overgrowth didn't. Each surface of this sort is a
breathing-space in the large monotony; the rich recurrence of water
gives a polish to the manner itself, so to speak, of nature; thanks to
which, in any case, the memory of a characteristic perfection attaches, I
find, to certain hours of declining day spent, in a shallow cove, on a
fallen log, by the scarce-heard plash of the largest liquid expanse under
Chocorua; a situation interfused with every properest item of sunset
and evening star, of darkening circle of forest, of boat that, across the
water, put noiselessly out--of analogy, in short, with every