| 1876, ’77.—I
FIND the woods in mid-May and
early June my best places for composition. 1 Seated
on logs or stumps there, or resting on rails, nearly all the following
memoranda have been jotted down. Wherever I go, indeed, winter or
summer, city or country, alone at home or traveling, I must take
notes—(the ruling passion strong in age and disablement, and even the
approach of—but I must not say it yet.) Then underneath the following
excerpta—crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of certain
moderate movements of late years—I am fain to fancy the foundations of
quite a lesson learn’d.
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics,
conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally
satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out
from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the
open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and
the stars of heaven by night. We will begin from these convictions.
Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem
hardly more than breaths of common air, or draughts of water to drink.
But that is part of our lesson. |
1 |
| Dear, soothing, healthy, restoration-hours—after
three confining years of paralysis—after the long strain of the war, and
its wounds and death. |
2 |
|
Note 1. Without apology
for the abrupt change of field and atmosphere—after what I have put in
the preceding fifty or sixty pages—temporary episodes, thank heaven!—I
restore my book to the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete
outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human
life. |
| Who knows, (I have it in my fancy, my ambition,)
but the pages now ensuing may carry ray of sun, or smell of grass or
corn, or call of bird, or gleam of stars by night, or snow-flakes
falling fresh and mystic, to denizen of heated city house, or tired
workman or workwoman?—or may-be in sick-room or prison—to serve as
cooling breeze, or Nature’s aroma, to some fever’d mouth or latent
pulse. |
|
