Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). The Complete Works. 1904.
Vol. I. Nature, Addresses and Lectures

IV. Concord Walks

WHEN I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks and thrushes, which were not charged in the bill; as little did I guess what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying—what reaches of landscape, and what fields and lanes for a tramp. Neither did I fully consider what and indescribable luxury is our Indian river, the Musketaquid,—which runs parallel with the village street and to which every house on that long street has a back door, which leads down through the garden to the river-bank, when a skiff, or a dory, give you, all summer, access to enchantments, new every day, and all winter, to miles of ice for the skater. And because our river is no Hudson or Mississippi I have a problem long waiting for an engineer,—this,—to what height I must build a tower in my garden that shall show me the Atlantic Ocean from its top—the ocean twenty miles away.

Still less did I know what good and true neighbors I was buying, men of thought and virtue, some of them now known the country through for their learning, or subtlety, or active or patriotic power, but whom I had the pleasure of knowing long before the Country did; and of other men not known widely but known at home, farmers,—not doctors of laws but doctors of land, skilled in turning a swamp or a sand-bank into a fruitful field, and, when witch-grass and nettles grew, causing a forest of apple-trees miles of corn and rye to thrive.

I did not know what groups of interesting school-boys and fair school-girls were to greet me in the highway, and to take hold of one’s heart at the School Exhibitions.

“Little joy has he who has no garden,” said Saadi. Montaigne took much pains to be made a citizen of Rome; and our people are vain, when abroad, of having the freedom of foreign cities presented to them in a gold box. I much prefer to have the freedom of a garden presented me. When I go into a good garden, I think, if it were mine, I should never go out of it. It requires some geometry in the head to lay it out rightly, and there are many who can enjoy to one that can create it.

Linnæus, who was professor of the Royal Garden at Upsala, took the occasion of a public ceremony to say, “I thank God, who has ordered my fate, that I live in this time, and so ordered it that I live happier than the king of the Persians. You know, father, and citizens, that I live entirely in the Academy Garden; here is my Vale of Tempe, say rather my Elysium. I possess here all that I desire of the spoils of the East and the West, and unless I am very much mistaken, what is far more beautiful than Babylonian robes, or vases of the Chinese. Here I learn what I teach. Here I admire the wisdom of the Supreme Artist, disclosing Himself by proofs of every kind, and show them to others.” Our people are learning that lesson year by year. As you know, nothing in Europe is more elaborately luxurious than the costly gardens,—as the Boboli at Florence, the Borghese, the Orsini at Rome, the Villa d’ Este at Tivoli; with their greenhouses, conservatories, palm-houses, fishponds, sculptured summer-houses and grottoes; but without going into the proud niceties of an European garden, there is happiness all the year round to be had from the square fruit-gardens which we plant in the front or rear of every farmhouse. In the orchard, we build monuments to Van Mons annually.

The place where a thoughtful man in the country feels the joy of eminent domain is in his wood-lot. If he suffer from accident or low spirits, his spirits rise when the enters it. He can spend the entire day therein, with hatchet or pruning-shears, making paths, without remorse of wasting time. He can fancy that the birds know him and trust him, and even the trees make little speeches or hint them. Then he remembers that Allah in his allotment of life “does not count the time which the Arab spends in the chase.”

If you can add to the garden a noble luxury, let it be an arboretum. In the arboretum you should have things which are of a solitary excellence, and which people who read of them are hungry to see. Thus plant the sequoia Gigantea, give it room, and set it on its way of ten or fifteen centuries. Bayard Taylor planted two—one died, but I saw the other looking well. Plant the Banian, the Sandal-tree, the Lotus, the Upas, Ebony, Century Aloes, the Soma of the Vedas—Asclepias Viminalis, the Mandrake and Papyrus, Dittany, Asphodel, Nepenthe, Hæmony, Moly, Spikenard, Amomum. Make a calendar—your own—of the year, that you may never miss your favorites in their month. As Linnæus made a dial of plants, so shall you of all the objects that guide your walks.

Learn to know the conspicuous planets in the heavens, and the chief constellations. Thus do not forget the 14th of November, when the meteors come, and on some years drop into your house-yard like sky-rockets. And ’t is worth remarking, what a man may go through life without knowing, that a common spy-glass, which you carry in your pocket, will show the satellites of Jupiter, and turned on the Pleiades, or Seven Stars, in which most eyes can only count six,—will show many more,—a telescope in an observatory will show two hundred. How many poems have been written, or, at least attempted, on the lost Pleiad! for though that pretty constellation is called for thousands of years the “Seven Stars,” most eyes can only count six.

Horses and carriage are costly toys, but the word park always charms me. I could not find it in my heart to chide the citizen who should ruin himself to buy a patch of heavy oak timber. I admire the taste which makes the avenue to the house—were the house never so small—through a wood;—as it disposes the mind of the inhabitant and of his guest to the deference due to each.

There are two companions, with one or other of whom ’t is desirable to go out on a tramp. One is an artist, that is, who has an eye for beauty. If you use a good and skilful companion, you shall see through his eyes; and, if they be of great discernment, you will learn wonderful secrets. In walking with Allston, you shall see what was never before shown to the eye of man. And as the perception of beauty always exhilarates, if one is so happy as to find the company of a true artist, he is a perpetual holiday and benefactor, and ought only to be used like an oriflamme or a garland, for feasts and May-days, and parliaments of wit and love.

The other is a naturalist, for the reason that it is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, of ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book. There is so much, too, which a book cannot teach which an old friend can. A man should carry Nature in his head—should know the hour of the day or night, and the time of the year, by the sun and stars; should know the solstice and the equinox, the quarter of the moon and the daily tides.

This is my ideal of the powers of wealth. Find out what lake or sea Agassiz wishes to explore, and offer to carry him there, and he will make you acquainted with all its fishes: or what district Dr. Gray has not found the plants of,—carry him; or when Dr. Wyman wishes to find new anatomic structures or fossil remains; or when Dr. Charles Jackson or Mr. Hall would study chemistry or mines; and you secure the best company and the best teaching with every advantage.

But the countryman, as I said, has more than he paid for; the landscape is his. I am sorry to say the farmers seldom walk for pleasure. It is a fine art;—there are degrees of proficiency, and we distinguish the professors of that science from the apprentices. But there is a manifest increase in the taste for it. ’T is the consolation of mortal men. It is an old saying that physicians or naturalists are the only professional men who continue their tasks out of study-hours; and the naturalist has no barren places, no winter, and no night, pursuing his researches in the sea, in the ground, in barren moors, in the night even, because the woods exhibit a whole new world of nocturnal animals; in winter, because, remove the snow a little, a multitude of plants live and grow, and there is a perpetual push of buds, so that it is impossible to say when vegetation begins. I think no pursuit has more breath of immortality in it.

I admire in trees the creation of property so clean of tears, or crime, or even care. No lesson of chemistry is more impressive to me than this chemical fact that “Nineteen twentieths of the timber are drawn from the atmosphere.” We knew the root was sucking juices from the ground. But the top of the tree is also a taproot thrust into the public pocket of the atmosphere. This is a highwayman, to be sure. And I am always glad to remember that in proportion to the foliation is the addition of wood. Then they grow, when you wake and when you sleep, at nobody’s cost, and for everybody’s comfort. Lord Abercorn, when some one praised the rapid growth of his trees, replied, “Sir, they have nothing else to do!”

That uncorrupted behavior which we admire in the animals, and in young children, belongs also to the farmer, the hunter, the sailor, the man who lives in the presence of Nature. Cities force the growth and make him talkative and entertaining, but they make him artificial. What alone possesses interest for us is the naturel of each, that which is constitutional to him only. This is forever a surprise, and engaging, and lovely; we can’t be satiated with knowing it, and about it, and this is that which the conversation with Nature goes to cherish and to guard.

The man finds himself expressed in Nature. Yet when the sees this annual reappearance of beautiful forms, the lovely carpet, the lovely tapestry of June, he may well ask himself the special meaning of the hieroglyphic, as well as the sense and scope of the whole—and there is a general sense which the best knowledge of the particular alphabet leaves unexplained.