Primary Source Workshop III:
Questions
1) What are the attitudes toward nature in each of these documents (be sure to recognize complexity)? In
what ways are the ideas/values/attitudes in these sources different from those of the previous workshops?
In what ways is there continuity? Be able to point to specific passages in each to support your answers.
2) How does each of these sources characterize the relationship between humans and non-human nature?
3) Does the response of the villagers to the pigeons in the excerpt from Cooper make sense to you? Why
or why not?
4) What sounds intrude on Thoreau‘s little world? Does he consider them an ―intrusion‖? Why or why
not? What is his attitude toward the railroad (it is not as straightforward as you might expect)? What
does his description of the railroad suggest about the changes in the economy and lifestyle of New
England by the 1840‘s?
5) Is Thoreau a misanthrope (look this word up if you don‘t know it)? Be prepared to support your
answer with evidence.
6) What does Cole‘s discussion of American landscapes reveal about the evolution of American
environmental thought since 1600?
7) Whitman‘s poem captures something important about the tension in American culture in the mid 19th
century (and now) regarding nature. What is that tension?
8) How much do these writings reveal about mid-nineteenth century American attitudes toward nature (be
sure to think about the historical context developed in the secondary source readings—Steinberg, Price,
Taylor, Bender)?
Source 1—“Thanatopsis” (1821)
William Cullen Bryant, 1794-1878, American poet and newspaper editor, b. Cummington, Mass. The son
of a learned and highly respected physician, Bryant was exposed to English poetry in his father's vast library. As a
boy he became devoted to the New England countryside and was a keen observer of nature. In his early poems such
as "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," and "The Yellow Violet," all written
before he was 21, he celebrated the majesty of nature in a style that was influenced by the English romantics but
also reflected a personal simplicity and dignity. Admitted to the bar in 1815 after a year at Williams and private
study, Bryant practiced law in Great Barrington, Mass., until 1825, when he went to New York City. By that time he
was already known as a poet and critic. He became associate editor of the New York Evening Post in 1826, and
from 1829 to his death he was part owner and editor in chief. An industrious and forthright editor of a highly
literate paper, he was a defender of human rights and an advocate of free trade, abolition of slavery, and other
reforms. He also holds an important place in literature as the earliest American theorist of poetry. In his Lectures
on Poetry (delivered 1825; published 1884) and other critical essays he stressed the values of simplicity, original
imagination, and morality. During his later career Bryant traveled widely, made many public speeches, and
continued to write a few poems (e.g., "The Death of the Flowers," "To the Fringed Gentian," and "The BattleField"). His blank verse translation of the Iliad appeared in 1870, that of the Odyssey in 1872. (Adapted from
Columbia Encyclopedia)
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“Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant
To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty; and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy that steals away
Their sharpness ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;-Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around-Earth and her waters, and the depths of air-Comes a still voice. Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold.
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world -- with kings,
The powerful of the earth -- the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun, -- the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods -- rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
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That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,-Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. -- Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings -- yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep -- the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest -- and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glides away, the sons of men-The youth in life's fresh spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man-Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those, who in their turn, shall follow them.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
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Source 2—From James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823)
For biographical information on Cooper, see the overview Alan Taylor provides in ―Wasty Ways‖
CHAPTER XXII
. . . ―See, Cousin Bess! see, ‗Duke, the pigeon-roosts of the south have broken up! They are
growing more thick every instant, Here is a flock that the eye cannot see the end of. There is
food enough in it to keep the army of Xerxes for a month, and feathers enough to make beds for
the whole country. Xerxes, Mr. Edwards, was a Grecian king, who— no, he was a Turk, or a
Persian, who wanted to conquer Greece, just the same as these rascals will overrun our wheat
fields, when they come back in the fall. Away! away! Bess; I long to pepper them. . . .‖
If the heavens were alive with pigeons, the whole village seemed equally in motion with men,
women, and children. Every species of firearm, from the French ducking gun, with a barrel near
six feet in length, to the common horseman's pistol, was to be seen in the hands of the men and
boys; while bows and arrows, some made of the simple stick of walnut sapling and others in a
rude imitation of the ancient cross-bows, were carried by many of the latter. . . .
Among the sportsmen was the tall, gaunt form of Leather-Stocking, walking over the field, with
his rifle hanging on his arm, his dogs at his heels; the latter now scenting the dead or wounded
birds that were beginning to tumble from the flocks, and then crouching under the legs of their
master, as if they participated in his feelings at this wasteful and unsportsmanlike execution. . . .
So prodigious was the number of the birds that the scattering fire of the guns, with the hurling of
missiles and the cries of the boys, had no other effect than to break off small flocks from the
immense masses that continued to dart along the valley, as if the whole of the feathered tribe
were pouring through that one pass. None pretended to collect the game, which lay scattered
over the fields in such profusion as to cover the very ground with fluttering victims.
Leather-Stocking was a silent but uneasy spectator of all these proceedings, but was able to keep
his sentiments to himself until he saw the introduction of the swivel into the sports.
―This comes of settling a country!‖ he said. ―Here have I known the pigeon to fly for forty long
years, and, till you made your clearings, there was nobody to skeart or to hurt them, I loved to
see them come into the woods, for they were company to a body, hurting nothing —being, as it
was, as harmless as a garter-snake. But now it gives me sore thoughts when I hear the frighty
things whizzing through the air, for I know it‘s only a motion to bring out all the brats of the
village. Well, the Lord won‘t see the waste of his creatures for nothing, and right will be done to
the pigeons, as well as others, by and by. There‘s Mr. Oliver as bad as the rest of them, firing
into the flocks as if he was shooting down nothing but Mingo warriors.‖ Among the sportsmen
was Billy Kirby, who, armed with an old musket, was loading, and, without even looking into
the air, was firing and shouting as his victims fell even on his own person. He heard the speech
of Natty, and took upon himself to reply:
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―What! old Leather-Stocking,‖ he cried, ―grumbling at the loss of a few pigeons! If you had to
sow your wheat twice, and three times, as I have done, you wouldn‘t be so massyfully feeling
toward the divils. Hurrah, boys! scatter the feathers! This is better than shooting at a turkey‘s
head and neck, old fellow.‖
―It‘s better for you, maybe, Billy Kirby,‖ replied the indignant old hunter, ―and all them that
don‘t know how to put a ball down a rifle- barrel, or how to bring it up again with a true aim; but
it‘s wicked to be shooting into flocks in this wasty manner, and none to do it who know how to
knock over a single bird. If a body has a craving for pigeon‘s flesh, why, it‘s made the same as
all other creatures, for man‘s eating; but not to kill twenty and eat one. When I want such a thing
I go into the woods till I find one to my liking, and then I shoot him off the branches, without
touching the feather of another, though there might be a hundred on the same tree. You couldn‘t
do such a thing, Billy Kirby—you couldn‘t do it if you tried.‖
―What‘s that, old corn-stalk! you sapless stub!‖ cried the wood- chopper. ―You have grown
wordy, since the affair of the turkey; but if you are for a single shot, here goes at that bird which
comes on by himself.‖
The fire from the distant part of the field had driven a single pigeon below the flock to which it
belonged, and, frightened with the constant reports of the muskets, it was approaching the spot
where the disputants stood, darting first from One side and then to the other, cutting the air with
the swiftness of lightning, and making a noise with its wings not unlike the rushing of a bullet.
Unfortunately for the wood-chopper, notwithstanding his vaunt, he did not see this bird until it
was too late to fire as it approached, and he pulled the trigger at the unlucky moment when it was
darting immediately over his head. The bird continued its course with the usual velocity.
Natty lowered his rifle from his arm when the challenge was made, and waiting a moment, until
the terrified victim had got in a line with his eye, and had dropped near the bank of the lake, he
raised it again with uncommon rapidity, and fired. It might have been chance, or it might have
been skill, that produced the result; it was probably a union of both; but the pigeon whirled over
in the air, and fell into the lake with a broken wing At the sound of his rifle, both his dogs started
from his feet, and in a few minutes the ―slut‖ brought out the bird, still alive.
The wonderful exploit of Leather-Stocking was noised through the field with great rapidity, and
the sportsmen gathered in, to learn the truth of the report.
―What‖ said young Edwards,‖ have you really killed a pigeon on the wing, Natty, with a single
ball?‖
―Haven‘t I killed loons before now, lad, that dive at the flash?‖ returned the hunter. ―It‘s much
better to kill only such as you want, without wasting your powder and lead, than to be firing into
God‘s creatures in this wicked manner. But I came out for a bird, and you know the reason why I
like small game, Mr. Oliver, and now I have got one Twill go home, for I don‘t relish to see
these wasty ways that you are all practysing, as if the least thing wasn‘t made for use, and not to
destroy.‖
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―Thou sayest well, Leather-Stocking,‖ cried Marmaduke, ―and I begin to think it time to put an
end to this work of destruction.‖
―Put an ind, Judge, to your clearings. Ain‘t the woods His work as well as the pigeons? Use, but
don‘t waste. Wasn‘t the woods made for the beasts and birds to harbor in? and when man wanted
their flesh, their skins, or their feathers, there‘s the place to seek them. But I‘ll go to the hut with
my own game, for I wouldn‘t touch one of the harmless things that cover the ground here,
looking up with their eyes on me, as if they only wanted tongues to say their thoughts.‖ With this
sentiment in his month, Leather-Stocking threw his rifle over his arm, and, followed by his dogs,
stepped across the clearing with great caution, taking care not to tread on one of the wounded
birds in his path. He soon entered the bushes on the margin of the lake and was hid from view.
Whatever impression the morality of Natty made on the Judge, it was utterly lost on Richard. He
availed himself of the gathering of the sportsmen, to lay a plan for one ―fell swoop‖ of
destruction. The musket-men were drawn up in battle array, in a line extending on each side of
his artillery, with orders to await the signal of firing from himself. . . .
Some millions of pigeons were supposed to have already passed, that morning, over the valley of
Templeton; but nothing like the flock that was now approaching had been seen before. It
extended from mountain to mountain in one solid blue mass, and the eye looked in vain, over the
southern hills, to find its termination. The front of this living column was distinctly marked by a
line but very slightly indented, so regular and even was the flight. Even Marmaduke forgot the
morality of Leather-Stocking as it approached, and, in common with the rest, brought his musket
to a poise.
―Fire!‖ cried the sheriff, clapping a coal to the priming of the cannon. As half of Benjamin‘s
charge escaped through the touch-hole, the whole volley of the musketry preceded the report of
the swivel. On receiving this united discharge of small-arms, the front of the flock darted
upward, while, at the same instant, myriads of those in the rear rushed with amazing rapidity into
their places, so that, when the column of white smoke gushed from the mouth of the little
cannon, an accumulated mass of objects was gliding over its point of direction. The roar of the
gun echoed along the mountains, and died away to the north, like distant thunder, while the
whole flock of alarmed birds seemed, for a moment, thrown into one disorderly and agitated
mass. The air was filled with their irregular flight, layer rising above layer, far above the tops of
the highest pines, none daring to advance beyond the dangerous pass; when, suddenly, some of
the headers of the feathered tribes shot across the valley, taking their flight directly over the
village, and hundreds of thousands in their rear followed the example, deserting the eastern side
of the plain to their persecutors and the slain.
―Victory!‖ shouted Richard, ―victory! we have driven the enemy from the field.‖
―Not so, Dickon,‖ said Marmaduke; ―the field is covered with them; and, like the LeatherStocking, I see nothing but eyes, in every direction, as the innocent sufferers turn their heads in
terror. Full one-half of those that have fallen are yet alive; and I think it is time to end the sport,
if sport it be.‖
6
―Sport!‖ cried the sheriff; ―it is princely sport! There are some thousands of the blue-coated boys
on the ground, so that every old woman in the village may have a pot-pie for the asking.‖
―Well, we have happily frightened the birds from this side of the valley,‖ said Marmaduke, ―and
the carnage must of necessity end for the present. Boys, I will give you sixpence a hundred for
the pigeons‘ heads only; so go to work, and bring them into the village.‖
This expedient produced the desired effect, for every urchin on the ground went industriously to
work to wring the necks of the wounded birds. Judge Temple retired toward his dwelling with
that kind of feeling that many a man has experienced before him, who discovers, after the
excitement of the moment has passed, that he has purchased pleasure at the price of misery to
others. Horses were loaded with the dead; and, after this first burst of sporting, the shooting of
pigeons became a business, with a few idlers, for the remainder of the season, Richard, however,
boasted for many a year of his shot with the ―cricket;‖ and Benjamin gravely asserted that he
thought they had killed nearly as many pigeons on that day as there were Frenchmen destroyed
on the memorable occasion of Rodney‘s victory.
Source 3--Henry David Thoreau,
from Walden (1852)
Biography
Henry David Thoreau was a complex man of many
talents who worked hard to shape his craft and his life,
seeing little difference between them. Born in 1817, one of
his first memories was of staying awake at night "looking
through the stars to see if I could see God behind them."
One might say he never stopped looking into nature for
ultimate Truth.
Henry grew up very close to his older brother John, who
taught school to help pay for Henry's tuition at Harvard.
While there, Henry read a small book by his Concord
neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, and in a sense
he never finished exploring its ideas -- although always
definitely on his own terms, just as he explored
everything! He and his brother taught school for a while
but in 1842, John cut himself while shaving and died of
lockjaw in his brother's arms, an untimely death which
traumatized the 25 year old Henry. He worked for several
years as a surveyor and making pencils with his father,
but at the age of 28 in 1845, wanting to write his first
book, he went to Walden pond and built his cabin on land
owned by Emerson
While at Walden, Thoreau did an incredible amount of
reading and writing, yet he also spent much time
"sauntering" in nature. He gave a lecture and was
imprisoned briefly for not paying his poll tax, but mostly
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"...it represents Henry
just as he was
in that summer...",
said Eben J. Loomis
of this 1854 portrait of Thoreau
(by Samuel Worcester Rowse)
he wrote a book as a memorial to a river trip he had taken with his brother, A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers.
After two years (and two months), Thoreau returned to Concord -- a bare two miles away which he had
visited frequently during his stay at the pond, having completed his experiment in living and his book.
Unfortunately, few people were interested in purchasing his book, so he spent the next nine years,
surveying and making pencils at times but primarily writing and rewriting (creating seven full drafts)
Walden before trying to publish it. He supported himself by surveying and making a few lectures, often
on his experience at Walden pond.
Many readers mistake Henry's tone in Walden and other works, thinking he was a cranky hermit. That
was far from the case, as one of his young neighbors and Edward Emerson attest. He found greater joy
in his daily life than most people ever would.
He traveled often, to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod several times, and was particularly interested in
the frontier and Indians. He opposed the government for waging the Mexican war (to extend slavery)
eloquently in Resistance to Civil Government, based on his brief experience in jail; he lectured against
slavery in an abolitionist lecture, Slavery in Massachusetts. He even supported John Brown's efforts to
end slavery after meeting him in Concord, as in A Plea for Captain John Brown.
Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862, at the age of 44. His last words were said to be "Moose" and
"Indian." Not only did he leave his two books and numerous essays, but he also left a huge Journal,
published later in 20 volumes, which may have been his major work-in-progress. Many memorials were
penned by his friends, including Emerson's eulogy and Louisa May Alcott's poem, "Thoreau's Flute."
Over the years, Thoreau's reputation has been strong, although he is often cast into roles -- the hermit in
the wilderness, the prophet of passive resistance (so dear to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King)
-- that he would have surely seen as somewhat alien. His work is so rich, and so full of the complex
contradictions that he explored, that his readers keep reshaping his image to fit their own needs.
Perhaps he would have appreciated that, for he seems to have wanted most to use words to force his
readers to rethink their own lives creatively, different though they may be, even as he spent his life
rethinking his, always asking questions, always looking to nature for greater intensity and meaning for
his life.
Ann Woodlief http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/
4. Sounds
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A passenger train of Thoreau's time, Currier & Ives Lithograph, 1855
[2] I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There
were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work,
whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer
morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon,
rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and
stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun
falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I
was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were
far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my
life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by
contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went.
The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening,
and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my
incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had
I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days
of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted
by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday,
today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by
pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day."(1)
This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried
me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in
himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. . . .
[5] As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the
tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the
white pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy
surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and
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seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither
and thither; and for the last half-hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and
then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the country. For I
did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part
of the town, but ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick.
He had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off; why, you
couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is such a place in Massachusetts now:—
"In truth, our village has become a butt
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is—Concord."(3)
[6] The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods (4) south of where I dwell. I
usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link.
The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old
acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I
too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.
[7] The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the
scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city
merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the
other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the
other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries, country;
your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them
nay. And here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like long batteringrams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary
and heavy-laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country
hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows
are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk,
down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.
[8] When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion—or, rather,
like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever
revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve—with its steam cloud like
a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have
seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light—as if this traveling demigod, this
cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the
iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and
breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will
put into the new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to
inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! If the
cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that
which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully
accompany men on their errands and be their escort.
10
[9] I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun,
which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and
higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and
casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which
hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter
morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too,
was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as
innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant
plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drillbarrow,(5) sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day
the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened
by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the
elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start
once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his
stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his
liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding
as it is protracted and unwearied!
[10] Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter
penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of their
inhabitants; this moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social
crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp,(6) scaring the owl and fox. The startings and
arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with such regularity
and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and
thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men improved
somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the
depot than they did in the stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the
former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of my neighbors,
who, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a
conveyance, were on hand when the bell rang. To do things "railroad fashion" is now the
byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off
its track. There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this
case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos,(7) that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of
your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot toward
particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to
school on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of
Tell.(8) The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on
your own track, then.
[11] What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its
hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go about their business with more or less
courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than
they could have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an
hour in the front line at Buena Vista,(9) than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who
inhabit the snowplow for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock-in-themorning courage, which Bonaparte (10) thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to
11
rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are
frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's
blood, I bear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath,
which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a
New England northeast snow-storm, and I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime,
their heads peering, above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the
nests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the
universe.
[12] Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is
very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental
experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train
rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long
Wharf to Lake Champlain,(11) reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans,
and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight
of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer, the
Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This
carload of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into
paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have
weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes
lumber from the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars
on the thousand because of what did go out or was split up; pine, spruce, cedar—first, second,
third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and
caribou. Next rolls Thomaston (12) lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills before it
gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton
and linen descend, the final result of dress—of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless
it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams,
muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of
one color or a few shades only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life, high and
low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New England and
commercial scent, reminding me of the Grand Banks (13) and the fisheries. Who has not seen a
salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting, the
perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split
your kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind
it—and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he
commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal,
vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and
boiled, will come out an excellent dun-fish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the
tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them
were careering over the pampas of the Spanish Main—a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how
almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess, that practically speaking,
when I have learned a man's real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or
worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed,
and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will
retain its natural form." The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to
make glue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with them, and then they will stay put
12
and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville,
Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his
clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast,
how they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this moment, as he has told them
twenty times before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime quality. It is
advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.
[13] While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzing sound, I look
up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its way
over the Green Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within
ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going
"be the mast
Of some great ammiral."(14)
And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables,
and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks,
all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by the
September gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen,
as if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old bell-wether (15) at the head rattles his bell,
the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A carload of drovers, too,
in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their
useless sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them;
they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them barking behind the
Peterboro' Hills,(16) or panting up the western slope of the Green Mountains.(17) They will not
be in at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now.
They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league with
the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must
get off the track and let the cars go by;—
What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,
but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by
its smoke and steam and hissing.
[14] Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the
pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon,
perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the
distant highway.
13
[18] When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their
ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian.(18) Wise midnight hags! It is no
honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty,
the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal
love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along
the woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and
tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low
spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the
earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or
threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and
capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-rr-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new
perch on the gray oaks. Then—that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther
side with tremulous sincerity, and—bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods.
[19] I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy it the most
melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her
choir the dying moans of a human being—some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope
behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more
awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness—I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try
to imitate it—expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous, mildewy stage in the
mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and
insane howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by
distance—Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing
associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter.
[20] I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a
sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast
and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and
unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage
swamp, where the double spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate
above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath;
but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express
the meaning of Nature there.
Notes
1. Ida Pfeiffer (1797-1858) Austrian traveler and writer - back
2. six rods is 99 feet, or 33 yards (somewhat less than the actual distance) - back
3. Ellery Channing (1818-1901), from Walden Spring - back
4. 100 rods is 1,650 feet, or 530 yards, or .31 miles - back
5. seed planting machine - back
6. Virginia and North Carolina coastal swamp - back
7. in Greek mythology, one of the three Fates, who cuts the thread of life - back
8. legendary Swiss hero who shot an apple off his son's head - back
9. Mexican War battle of 1847 - back
14
10. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) French general & emperor - back
11. from the port of Boston to the western border of Vermont - back
12. town in Maine known for lime deposits - back
13. North Atlantic fishing ground off the coast of Newfoundland - back
14. John Milton (1608-1674) English poet, from Paradise Lost - back
15. the lead sheep in a flock, who wears a bell - back
16. hills in southern New Hampshire - back
17. mountain range in Vermont - back
18. Ben Jonson (1573?-1637) English dramatist - back
19. dark and gloomy, reminiscent of the River Styx in hell - back
20. a rooster - "My lungs began to crow like chanticleer", Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II,
Scene VII - back
5. Solitude
THIS IS A delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through
every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the
stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I
see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs
trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from
over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my
breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the
evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark,
the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest
with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their
prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are
Nature's watchmen—links which connect the days of animated life.
[3] There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows. The
thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and
worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason
have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy,
abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from
any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods
all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the
fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I
live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own
sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there was never a traveller
passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were
in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts—they plainly
fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with
darkness—but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the world to darkness and
to me," and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood. I
believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and
Christianity and candles have been introduced.
15
[17] The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature—of sun and wind and rain, of
summer and winter—such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they
ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds
would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on
mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have
intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?
[18] What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy greatgrandfather's, but our great-grandmother Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by
which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs (9) in her day, and fed her
health with their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a
mixture dipped from Acheron (10) and the Dead Sea,(11) which come out of those long shallow
black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a
draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead
of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of
those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, it will
not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and
follow westward the steps of Aurora.(12)I am no worshipper of Hygeia,(13) who was the
daughter of that old herb-doctor Æsculapius,(14) and who is represented on monuments holding
a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but
rather of Hebe,(15) cup-bearer to Jupiter,(16)who was the daughter of Juno (17) and wild lettuce,
and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the
only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe,
and wherever she came it was spring.
Notes
1. in Greek mythology, the Aeolian harp was the instrument of Æolus, god of wind. The ancient
Greeks made Aeolian harps that were played by moving air - back
2. James Macpherson (1736–1796) from Croma, poetry of "Ossian", supposed 3rd cent. Gaelic
poet, later established as a forgery by Macpherson - back
3. fashionable section of Boston - back
4. former disreputable section of New York City, located between the current NY City Hall and
Chinatown - back
5. Conficius (1551-1479 B.C.) Chinese philosopher, three paragraphs in quotes are from
Doctrine of the Mean - back
6. Confucian Analects - back
7. in Hinduism, chief of the Vedic gods, god of thunder, & rain - back
8. William Goffe, Edward Whalley, indicted for killing Charles I of England, later lived in
hiding in America - back
9. Thomas Parr was an Englishman said to have lived 152 years - back
10. in Greek mythology, a river in Hades - back
11. large salt lake bordering Israel & Jordan - back
12. in Roman mythology, goddess of the dawn - back
13. in Greek mythology, goddess of health - back
16
14. in Greek mythology, god of medicine, father of Hygeia - back
15. in Greek mythology, goddess of youth - back
16. in Roman mythology, chief of the gods - back
17. in Roman mythology, queen of heaven - back
Source 4--Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass (1866)
Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) was born on May 31, 1819, on the West Hills of Long Island, New York. His mother,
Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch descent and Quaker faith, whom he adored, was barely literate. She never read his
poetry, but gave him unconditional love. His father of English lineage, was a carpenter and builder of houses, and a
stern disciplinarian. His main claim to fame was his friendship with Tom Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense
(1776), urging the colonists to throw off English domination was in his sparse library. It is doubtful that his father
read any of his son's poetry, or would have understood it if he had. The senior Walt was too burdened with the
struggle to support his ever-growing family of nine children, four of whom were handicapped.
Young Walt, the second of nine, was withdrawn from public school at the age of eleven to help support the family. At
the age of twelve he started to learn the printer's trade, and fell in love with the written and printed word. He was
mainly self-taught. He read voraciously, and became acquainted with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Scott early in
life. He knew the Bible thoroughly, and as a God-intoxicated poet, desired to inaugurate a religion uniting all of
humanity in bonds of friendship.
In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as an innovative teacher in the one-room school houses of Long
Island. He permitted his students to call him by his first name, and devised learning games for them in arithmetic
and spelling. He continued to teach school until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He soon
became editor for a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. From 1846 to 1847 Whitman was the editor of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Whitman went to New Orleans in 1848, where he was editor for a brief time of the "New
Orleans Crescent". In that city he had become fascinated with the French language. Many of his poems contain
words of French derivation. It was in New Orleans that he experienced at first hand the viciousness of slavery in the
slave markets of that city.
On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a "free soil" newspaper, the "Brooklyn Freeman". Between
1848 and 1855 he developed the style of poetry that so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson. When the poet's Leaves Of
Grass reached him as a gift in July, 1855, the Dean of American Letters thanked him for "the wonderful gift" and
said that he rubbed his eyes a little "to see if the sunbeam was no illusion." Walt Whitman had been unknown to
Emerson prior to that occasion. The "sunbeam" that illuminated a great deal of Whitman's poetry was Music. It was
one of the major sources of his inspiration. Many of his four hundred poems contain musical terms, names of
instruments, and names of composers. He insisted that music was "greater than wealth, greater than buildings,
ships, religions, paintings." In his final essay written one year before his death in 1891, he sums up his struggles of
thirty years to write Leaves of Grass. The opening paragraph of his self-evaluation "A Backward Glance O'er
Travel'd Road," begins with his reminiscences of "the best of songs heard." His concluding comments again return
to thoughts about music, saying that "the strongest and sweetest songs remain yet to be sung."
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" and "O Captain! My Captain!" (1866) are two of his more famous
poems. A poet who was ardently singing on life and himself, Whitman is today claimed as one of the few truly great
American men of letters. (Adapted from americanpoets.com)
“Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun”
17
1
GIVE me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,
Give me autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
Give me a field where the unmow'd grass grows,
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis'd grape,
Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching
content,
Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the
Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can
walk undisturb'd,
Give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never
tire,
Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the
world a rural domestic life,
Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own
ears only,
Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal
sanities!
These demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and
rack'd by the war-strife,)
These to procure incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart,
While yet incessantly asking still I adhere to my city,
Day upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets,
Where you hold me enchain'd a certain time refusing to give me up,
Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich'd of soul, you give me forever
faces;
(O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries,
see my own soul trampling down what it ask'd for.)
2
Keep your splendid silent sun,
Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods,
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and
orchards,
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees
hum;
Give me faces and streets - give me these phantoms incessant and
endless along the trottoirs!
Give me interminable eyes - give me women - give me comrades and
lovers by the thousand!
Let me see new ones every day - let me hold new ones by the hand
every day!
Give me such shows - give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching-give me the sound of
18
the trumpets and drums!
(The soldiers in companies or regiments - some starting away, flush'd
and reckless,
Some, their time up, returning with thinn'd ranks, young, yet very
old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)
Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships!
O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!
The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the
torchlight procession!
The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons
following;
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants,
Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as
now,
The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even
the sight of the wounded,)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.
________________________________________________________
Source 5— from “Essay on American Scenery”
American Monthly Magazine 1 (January 1836)
by Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole, (born February 1, 1801, Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England—died February 11, 1848, Catskill,
New York, U.S.), American Romantic landscape painter who was a founder of the Hudson River school. Cole’s
family immigrated first to Philadelphia and then settled in Steubenville, Ohio. He was trained by an itinerant
portrait painter named Stein and then spent two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1825 some
of Cole’s landscapes in a New York shop window attracted the attention of Colonel John Trumbull and the painter
Asher B. Durand. They bought his works and found him patrons, assuring his future success.
In 1826 Cole made his home in the village of Catskill, New York, on the western bank of the Hudson River. From
there he frequently journeyed through the Northeast, primarily on foot, making pencil studies of the landscape. He
used these sketches to compose paintings in his studio during the winter. One of Cole’s most effective landscape
paintings, The Ox-Bow (1846), was the result of pencil studies that he made in Massachusetts. Cole’s scenes of the
Hudson River valley, reverently recorded, echo the loneliness and mystery of the North American forests. Cole could
paint direct and factual landscapes recorded in minute detail, but he was also capable of producing grandiose and
dramatic imaginary vistas using bold effects of light and chiaroscuro. When the human figure appears in his works,
it is always subordinate to the majesty of the surrounding landscape.
Cole spent the years 1829–32 and 1841–42 abroad, mainly in Italy. He lived in Florence with the American sculptor
Horatio Greenough. When Cole returned to the United States, he painted five huge canvases for a series titled The
Course of Empire (1836). These paintings are allegories on the progress of mankind based on the count de Volney’s
Ruines; ou, méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791). A second series, called The Voyage of Life (begun
1839), depicts a symbolic journey from infancy to old age in four scenes. Shortly before he died, Cole began still
another series, The Cross of the World, which was of a religious nature.
19
Durand’s well-known painting Kindred Spirits (1849), painted in Cole’s memory the year after his death, paid
tribute to Cole’s close friendship with the poet William Cullen Bryant. Encyclopedia Brittanica
[I. Introduction]
The essay, which is here offered, is a mere sketch of an almost illimitable subject--American Scenery; and
in selecting the theme the writer placed more confidence in its overflowing richness, than in his own
capacity for treating it in a manner worthy of its vastness and importance.
It is a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest; for, whether he beholds the
Hudson mingling waters with the Atlantic--explores the central wilds of this vast continent, or stands on
the margin of the distant Oregon, he is still in the midst of American scenery--it is his own land; its
beauty, its magnificence, its sublimity--all are his; and how undeserving of such a birthright, if he can turn
towards it an unobserving eye, an unaffected heart!
Before entering into the proposed subject, in which I shall treat more particularly of the scenery of the
Northern and Eastern States, I shall be excused for saying a few words on the advantages of cultivating a
taste for scenery, and for exclaiming against the apathy with which the beauties of external nature are
regarded by the great mass, even of our refined community.
[1. The Contemplation of Scenery as a Source of Delight and Improvement]
. . . It would seem unnecessary to those who can see and feel, for me to expatiate on the loveliness of
verdant fields, the sublimity of lofty mountains, or the varied magnificence of the sky; but that the
number of those who seek enjoyment in such sources is comparatively small. From the indifference with
which the multitude regard the beauties of nature, it might be inferred that she had been unnecessarily
lavish in adorning this world for beings who take no pleasure in its adornment. Who in grovelling pursuits
forget their glorious heritage. Why was the earth made so beautiful, or the sun so clad in glory at his
rising and setting, when all might be unrobed of beauty without affecting the insensate multitude, so they
can be "lighted to their purposes?"
It has not been in vain--the good, the enlightened of all ages and nations, have found pleasure and
consolation in the beauty of the rural earth. Prophets of old retired into the solitudes of nature to wait the
inspiration of heaven. It was on Mount Horeb that Elijah witnessed the mighty wind, the earthquake, and
the fire; and heard the "still small voice"--that voice is YET heard among the mountains! St. John
preached in the desert;--the wilderness is YET a fitting place to speak of God. The solitary Anchorites of
Syria and Egypt, though ignorant that the busy world is man's noblest sphere of usefulness, well knew
how congenial to religious musings are the pathless solitudes.
He who looks on nature with a "loving eye," cannot move from his dwelling without the salutation of
beauty; even in the city the deep blue sky and the drifting clouds appeal to him. And if to escape its
turmoil--if only to obtain a free horizon, land and water in the play of light and shadow yields delight--let
him be transported to those favored regions, where the features of the earth are more varied, or yet add the
sunset, that wreath of glory daily bound around the world, and he, indeed, drinks from pleasure's purest
cup. The delight such a man experiences is not merely sensual, or selfish, that passes with the occasion
leaving no trace behind; but in gazing on the pure creations of the Almighty, he feels a calm religious tone
steal through his mind, and when he has turned to mingle with his fellow men, the chords which have
been struck in that sweet communion cease not to vibrate. . . .
[II. The Elements of American Scenery]
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[1. Wildness]
A very few generations have passed away since this vast tract of the American continent, now the United
States, rested in the shadow of primeval forests, whose gloom was peopled by savage beasts, and scarcely
less savage men; or lay in those wide grassy plains called prairies-The Gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful.
And, although an enlightened and increasing people have broken in upon the solitude, and with activity
and power wrought changes that seem magical, yet the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive,
characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.
It is the most distinctive, because in civilized Europe the primitive features of scenery have long since
been destroyed or modified--the extensive forests that once overshadowed a great part of it have been
felled--rugged mountains have been smoothed, and impetuous rivers turned from their courses to
accommodate the tastes and necessities of a dense population--the once tangled wood is now a grassy
lawn; the turbulent brook a navigable stream--crags that could not be removed have been crowned with
towers, and the rudest valleys tamed by the plough.
And to this cultivated state our western world is fast approaching; but nature is still predominant, and
there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness
should pass away: for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect
the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the
consequent associations are of God the creator--they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the
contemplation of eternal things.
[2. Mountains]
As mountains are the most conspicuous objects in landscape, they will take the precedence in what I may
say on the elements of American scenery.
It is true that in the eastern part of this continent there are no mountains that vie in altitude with the snowcrowned Alps--that the Alleghanies and the Catskills are in no point higher than five thousand feet; but
this is no inconsiderable height; Snowdon in Wales, and Ben-Nevis in Scotland, are not more lofty; and in
New Hampshire, which has been called the Switzerland of the United States, the White Mountains almost
pierce the region of perpetual snow. The Alleghanies are in general heavy in form; but the Catskills,
although not broken into abrupt angles like the most picturesque mountains of Italy, have varied,
undulating, and exceedingly beautiful outlines--they heave from the valley of the Hudson like the
subsiding billows of the ocean after a storm.
…
But in the mountains of New Hampshire there is a union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the
magnificent; there the bare peaks of granite, broken and desolate, cradle the clouds; while the vallies and
broad bases of the mountains rest under the shadow of noble and varied forests; and the traveller who
passes the Sandwich range on his way to the White Mountains, of which it is a spur, cannot but
acknowledge, that although in some regions of the globe nature has wrought on a more stupendous scale,
yet she has nowhere so completely married together grandeur and loveliness--there he sees the sublime
melting into the beautiful, the savage tempered by the magnificent.
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[4. Forests]
In the Forest scenery of the United States we have that which occupies the greatest space, and is not the
least remarkable; being primitive, it differs widely from the European. In the American forest we find
trees in every stage of vegetable life and decay--the slender sapling rises in the shadow of the lofty tree,
and the giant in his prime stands by the hoary patriarch of the wood--on the ground lie prostrate decaying
ranks that once waved their verdant heads in the sun and wind. These are circumstances productive of
great variety and picturesqueness--green umbrageous masses--lofty and scathed trunks--contorted
branches thrust athwart the sky--the mouldering dead below, shrouded in moss of every hue and texture,
from richer combinations than can be found in the trimmed and planted grove. It is true that the thinned
and cultivated wood offers less obstruction to the feet, and the trees throw out their branches more
horizontally, and are consequently more umbrageous when taken singly; but the true lover of the
picturesque is seldom fatigued--and trees that grow widely apart are often heavy in form, and resemble
each other too much for picturesqueness. Trees are like men, differing widely in character; in sheltered
spots, or under the influence of culture, they show few contrasting points; peculiarities are pruned and
trained away, until there is a general resemblance. But in exposed situations, wild and uncultivated,
battling with the elements and with one another for the possession of a morsel of soil, or a favoring rock
to which they may cling--they exhibit striking peculiarities, and sometimes grand originality.
For variety, the American forest is unrivalled: in some districts are found oaks, elms, birches, beeches,
planes, pines, hemlocks, and many other kinds of trees, commingled--clothing the hills with every tint of
green, and every variety of light and shade.
There is one season when the American forest surpasses all the world in gorgeousness--that is the
autumnal;--then every hill and dale is riant in the luxury of color--every hue is there, from the liveliest
green to deepest purple from the most golden yellow to the intensest crimson. The artist looks
despairingly upon the glowing landscape, and in the old world his truest imitations of the American
forest, at this season, are called falsely bright, and scenes in Fairy Land.
. . . American scenes are not destitute of historical and legendary associations--the great struggle for
freedom has sanctified many a spot, and many a mountain, stream, and rock has its legend, worthy of
poet's pen or the painter's pencil. But American associations are not so much of the past as of the present
and the future. Seated on a pleasant knoll, look down into the bosom of that secluded valley, begin with
wooded hills--through those enamelled meadows and wide waving fields of grain, a silver stream winds
lingeringly along--here, seeking the green shade of trees--there, glancing in the sunshine: on its banks are
rural dwellings shaded by elms and garlanded by flowers--from yonder dark mass of foliage the village
spire beams like a star. You see no ruined tower to tell of outrage--no gorgeous temple to speak of
ostentation; but freedom's offspring--peace, security, and happiness, dwell there, the spirits of the scene.
On the margin of that gentle river the village girls may ramble unmolested--and the glad school-boy, with
hook and line, pass his bright holiday--those neat dwellings, unpretending to magnificence, are the abodes
of plenty, virtue, and refinement. And in looking over the yet uncultivated scene, the mind's eye may see
far into futurity. Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and
tower--mighty deeds shall be done in the now pathless wilderness; and poets yet unborn shall sanctify the
soil.
Source 6 (see course website)--Frederick Edwin Church ―Twilight in the
Wilderness‖ (1860)
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