there never was a bigger, fatter, flabbier woodchuck than old tubby—among wild animals that i alone have known. tubby is a fixture of the farm. he was here when we came, or else it was his father or his grandfather. he is fat and flabby and as broad as he is long, and broader when full of beans. he is very much of a tub. when he sits in the garden, he sits like a tub. when he runs, he runs like a tub. and he holds beans like a tub.
it is worth a few beans to see him run—a medley in motions: up and down and round and round, the spinning of a top and the hop of a saucepan on a hot stove with amazing progress forward. he knows which end of him is head and which tail; but from a distance i can see neither head nor tail, only sides, bulging, tubby sides spilling down the garden. one seldom does see the ends of a thing from a distance. tubby has a head-end; and he has wits[72] in that end. he also has a tail-end; and the disturbing conclusion one reaches with close study is that tubby has wits also in this end. he is a beautifully capable thing in his way. a cutworm is not more capable—if there is anything so capable as a cutworm! both are poems; old tubby an epic poem—were i as capable as tubby, and a homer—
a full-sized woodchuck is twenty-two inches long; and i presume that tubby is not more than twenty-two inches wide, though i have seen him wobbling out of the garden and carrying off as mere ballast a cabbage or two, and a watermelon, and a peck or two of beans, and all of the swiss chard in the three rows. there are several bushels of chard in three such rows.
the way he can run with his load! his little black heels twinkling through the vines, his shapeless carcass flopping into his hole with me on top of him! then i will hear a chuckling deep down among the hickory roots, a peculiar vegetarian chuckle quite unlike a carnivorous growl. and then i will sit down on the hole and chuckle, having lost for the moment my carnivorous growl. he is so bold, so impudent, so[73] canny. the old scamp rather likes me. and i am a fairly good gardener, if i do say it myself.
when i place a trap in one entrance to his burrow, he uses the other opening; if i put another trap here, he promptly digs a passage around it; if i block this with chunks of rock, he undermines the stones and patiently moves to a new house farther along the ridge; and, if i set traps for him here, he changes house again. it is a wide wooded ridge around the garden, and honeycombed with woodchuck holes. by and by he is back in his favorite house under the hickory—when the spiders have hung the doors with signs that the traps are gone.
but it happened once that i forgot the traps. wood-earth and bits of bark and dead leaves washed down till the wicked gins were covered, and tubby, coming back after weeks off on the ridge, tumbled into one of the traps and got his thick fat fist fast. i heard him making a dreadful racket, and rushed up with a club in my thick fat fist.
old tubby stopped kicking and grunting, and looked at me. i don’t believe that i was[74] ever looked at by a woodchuck before. stolid, sullen, defiant, there was much more of the puzzled, of the world-old wonder in the eyes gazing steadily into mine, as to what this situation and this moment meant. the snarled body was all fight and fear, but the blinking eyes sought mine for an answer to the riddle that i have asked of god. and all that i could answer was, “you fat-head!” and he said, “fat-head yourself!” if ever a woodchuck spoke, and spoke the truth. “fat-head, to set this rotten thing here and forget it!”
it was a rotten thing to do. somehow he made me feel as if i had trapped one of my neighbors. he saw how i was feeling, and took advantage of me.
“whose woods are these, anyway?” he asked. “whose ancestors were here first, yours or mine? you didn’t even come over in the mayflower. but i came here in noah’s ark.”
“i know it. but keep quiet,” i begged him, “and stop looking at me that way.”
“what way?” he asked.
“why, so much like my brother!” i exclaimed.
[75]“but i am your brother,” he retorted, “though i am ashamed to say it.”
“don’t say it, then,” i begged.
but he was wound up.
“any man who is brute enough to set this sort of thing for his brother has no soul. and any man who can’t share his beans with his brother doesn’t deserve a soul. if i were as low-down and as lazy as you, i would go over to the north side of this hill and dig a deep hole, and crawl into it, and pull it in on top of me, i would.” and all the time i was pressing down on the spring with my club, trying to free him. suddenly there was a flop in the hole, and away in the sub-cellar, among the hickory roots, there was talk of me which i should have heard, had i been able to understand.
but i have much to learn. and so has pup, our scotch-irish terrier. time and time again pup has sent the old woodchuck tumbling over himself for his hole. once or twice they have come to blows at the mouth of the burrow, and pup has come off with a limp or a hurt ear, but with only a mouthful of coarse reddish hair to growl over. he came off with a deep experience[76] lately, and a greatly enhanced respect for woodchucks. but he is of stubborn stock. so is tubby of stubborn stock. pup knows that here is an enemy of the people, and that he must get him. he knows that tubby is all hair and hide and bowels. he now knows that tubby is deeper than he is broad, which makes him pretty deep.
the new light began to dawn on pup when tubby moved up from the woods to a corner of the ice-house near the barn. the impudence, the audacity of the thing stood pup’s hair on end, and he took to the blackberry-vines at the other corner of the ice-house to see what would happen.
tubby’s raiding hour was about five in the afternoon. at that hour the shadows of the ice-house and the barn lay wide across the mowing-field—the proper time and color for things to happen. and there in the close-cut field, as if he had come up out of a burrow, sat old tubby, looking as big as a bear!
pup stole softly out to meet him, moving over till he was between the chuck and the ice-house hole. it was a deliberate act and one of[77] complete abandon. things must this time be finished. and what a perfect bit of strategy it was! hugging the ground when the chuck rose high on his haunches to reconnoiter, pup would “freeze” till tubby dropped down and went to feeding, then, gliding like a snake forward, he would flatten behind a stone or a tuft of grass, and work forward and wait.
the ground rose slightly to pup’s disadvantage, and he was maneuvering to avoid the uphill rush when tubby heard something off in the woods and turned with a dash for his hole. it was head-on and terrific! and the utter shock of it, the moral shock, was more terrific! neither knew for an instant just what had happened; the suddenness, the precision, the amazing boldness and quality of the attack putting pup almost out of action. but it was precisely the jar old tubby needed. every flabby fiber of him was fight. the stub feet snapped into action; the chunk of a body shot forward, ramming pup amidships, sending him to the bottom of the slope, tubby slashing like a pirate with his terrible incisors.
but the touch of those long teeth brought[78] pup short about. he likes the taste of pain. he is a son of battle. and in a moment like this he is possessed of more than common powers of body and soul. the fur flew; the grass flew; but there was scarcely a sound as the two fighters tumbled and tossed a single black-brown body like a ball of pain. they sprang apart and together again, whirled and dived and dodged as they closed, each trying for a hold which neither dared allow. but pup got plenty of hair, choking, slippery hair, and leathery hide by the mouthful, while the twisting, snapping woodchuck cut holes in pup’s thin skin with teeth which would punch holes in sheet steel.
and tubby was fighting with his head as well as with teeth and toes. he was cooler than pup. he had a single-track mind, and it ran straight to his burrow. the head-work was perfectly clear; the whole powerful play going forward with the nicest calculation, mad as it appeared to be in the wild rough-and-tumble. there was method in tubby’s madness. he was fighting true to plan. but pup was fighting to kill, and he lost his head. it was to win his[79] hole, and life, and the pursuit of happiness on these ancestral acres that the woodchuck was fighting; and, as the two laid about them and rolled over and over, they kept rolling nearer and nearer to the ice-house and a burrow under the corner.
over and over, right and left, they lunged when the woodchuck, sent spinning from pup’s foreleg, came up with the dog chopping at his stub nose, but, giving him all four of his mailed feet instead, he bounded from the face of the dog, and, with a lightning somersault, landed plop in his burrow, pup raking the hair from the vanishing haunch.
and now pup knows that there is no bottom to a woodchuck’s burrow. but do i fully realize that there is no bottom to the woodchuck? i have been almost fatally slow over this lesson. yet this is the writer’s first and most important lesson, no matter what his theme.
“i have been studying the woodchuck all my life,” said my old friend burroughs to me, “and there is no getting to the bottom of him!” he made that great discovery early; eighty-four years of study confirmed it; and from early to[80] late burroughs never lacked for things to write about or failed of his urge to write. there was no bottom to his woodchuck.
others have made this discovery concerning other things: the philosophers, of truth; the poets, of men and flowers; the prophets, of god. but the writer must find it true of all things, of all his own things, from woodchucks to god. there is nothing new in this discovery. it simply makes all things new to the discoverer. the skeptical, the shallow, the fool who says in his heart there is nothing but bowels to a woodchuck—what would he at four-and-eighty find at woodchuck lodge to write about? he might have all knowledge and a pen with which he could remove mountains, but, lacking wonder, that power to invest things with new and infinite significance, he would see no use in removing the mountains and turning them into steppes and pampas and peopled plains.
all creative work, whether by brush or pen or hoe, is somehow making mountains into men, out of the dust an image, in our own likeness created, in the likeness of god. it may be woodchuck dust, or dandelion dust, or the shining[81] dust of stars; touched with a creative, interpreting pen the dust takes human shape and breathes a breath divine. a woodchuck pelt makes an excellent fur for a winter coat; the rest of him makes an excellent roast for a dinner; but it is what still remains, the wonder of him, which makes for sermon and for song.
how hard a lesson that has been for me to learn! and so slow have i been learning it that little time is left for me to preach or sing. if only i had known early that mullein hill was as good as helicon; that the people of hingham were as interesting as the people of cranford; that hingham has a natural history as rich and as varied as selborne! my very friends have helped to mislead and hinder me: “i don’t see what you find to write about up here!” they exclaim, looking out with commiseration over the landscape, as if wellfleet or washington or wausau were better for books than hingham! hanover may be better for ducks than scituate; but hingham is as good as hanover or heaven for books.
one of my friends started for hanover once for a day of hunting—but i will let him tell the story:
[82]“we were on our way to hanover, duck hunting,” he said, “and at assinippi took the left fork of the road and kept going. but was this left fork the right road? [an ancient doubt which had brought many a traveler before them to confusion and a halt.] it was early morning, raw and dark and damp. no one was stirring in the farmhouses straggling along the road, and we were turning to go back to the forks when the kitchen door of the near-by house opened and a gray-bearded man appeared with a milk-pail on his elbow.
“‘is this the road to hanover?’ we called.
“the man backed into the kitchen door, put down his milk-pail, came out again, carefully closing the door behind him, and started down the walk toward the front gate. he opened the gate, turned and latched it behind him as carefully as he had latched the kitchen door, and, stepping out into the road, approached our carryall. looking up, then down the road intently, he hitched his right foot to the hub of our front wheel, spat precisely into the dust, and, fixing his face steadfastly toward cape cod, answered:
[83]“‘no.’
“‘say it with flowers!’ snapped our driver, wheeling about for the other fork.
“at the turn i looked back. there stood our guide in the road, his right foot still in the air, i think; and there—though it is several years since, he may still be standing—one foot planted on the road to scituate, the other foot resting on the hub of the wheel that should have been on the road to hanover.”
the man in the road knew that this road ran to scituate. he lived on it. had they asked him: “master, which is the great commandment?” he had answered: “take this road for scituate.” for were they not duck hunting in hanover? then what profounder error could they have been in than on the road to scituate!
but most people go that way for hanover. every young writer i know hankers to get his hanover ducks out of scituate, as if, failing to get ducks, he might get scituate; novelty, the mere novelty of gunning in scituate when the ducks are in hanover, making the best sort of “copy.”
is it some new thing that we should search[84] out, or some deeper, truer thing? must we travel, or may we stay at home? locomotion is certainly a curse to literature. no one nowadays stays long enough in his own place to know it and himself in it, which is about all that he can know well enough to express. let the writer stay at home. drummers, actors, circus-men, and satan are free to go up and down the earth. and these seem to be writing most of our books.
for some years, now, i, also, have been going to and fro and up and down in the earth thinking that i might find some better place than hingham. i have just returned from wausau, wisconsin, where they have a very hard red granite, and a deep green granite, both of them the loveliest tombstone stuff that, i think, i ever saw. certainly they are superior to our seam-face hingham granite for tombstones. up to the time of my wausau visit, i had never given much thought to tombstones; but it shows how one’s thought expands with travel, and how easily wausau may surpass hingham, not alone in gravestones, but in other, even in literary, materials.
but hingham has one thing in the line of[85] gravestones not found at all in wausau: i mean the boulders, great roundish glacial boulders, gray granite boulders, old and gentle and mossy-grown, which lie strewn over our hilly pastures among the roses and the hardhack and the sweetfern, ready to be rolled to the tomb, and fit for any poet’s tomb. when that shy spirit and bird-lover, bradford torrey, native of my neighbor town of weymouth, died in far-off california, he left but a single simple request: that he be brought back to his birthplace for burial, and that a weymouth boulder be found and rolled up to mark his grave. were mine not hingham boulders i would take one out of my wall, the one which serves as a gatepost, and, with a yoke of weymouth oxen, would draw it to bradford torrey’s tomb, a tribute from hingham to weymouth, and a gift out of the heart of one who knows and loves “the foot-path way,” “a rambler’s lease,” and “a world of green hills.”
perhaps one must needs go to california in order to come by this deep desire for weymouth. then let him go early. for if he is to write “the natural history of weymouth,” or of selborne,[86] he must return early and stay a long time. thoreau has been criticized for writing of nature as if she were born and brought up in concord. so she was. can one not see all of the world out of the “window in thrums”?—that is, all of the world of thrums, which is all of the world, and just the world, one goes to thrums to see? “i have traveled a great deal in concord,” says thoreau.
this brings me back to hingham. i wish that i could write “the natural history of hingham”! a modest desire! there can never be another gilbert white—but not for lack of birds and beasts in hingham. were i a novelist i would write a “cranford”—and i could! i would call it “hingham,” not “main street,” though that is the name of perhaps the longest street in hingham. but there are many other streets in hingham, and all kinds of interesting people.
and here i am on mullein hill, hingham, with all of these streets, and all of these people, and woodchucks a plenty to write about—and planning this day a trip to california! i might have been the author of a recent book whose[87] theme and sub-title read: “in the plains and the rolling country there is room for the individual to skip and frolic, but all the peaks are pre?mpted.” come down from mullein hill; get out of hingham; go west, young writer, as far as california; you shall find room to skip and frolic on the plains out there!
it may be true in california, but the opposite of that is true in hingham. to be sure, i have tried to pre?mpt mullein hill; i now own the knoll outside my study window, and the seven-acre woodlot beyond; but there are many other peaks here among the hills of hingham, and scarcely any of them occupied. the people of hingham all crowd into the plains. so did the people of israel crowd into the plains—of moab, leaving pisgah to moses, who found it very lonesome. there is no one on pisgah now, i understand; no one on ararat; no one on popocatepetl; no one on the top of vesuvius, nor on the peak of everest, peaks as well known as white plains or the plains of abraham, but not anything like so crowded. moses sleeps on nebo, yet no man knows where he lies. have them lay you in sleepy hollow if you wish your[88] friends and neighbors to crowd in close and keep you company.
why has there been no iliad of hingham? there are helens in hingham, as there were helens of troy. hingham is short of homers. mute, inglorious miltons have we in hingham. if one of them, however, should take his pen in hand, would he dream, and if he dreamed, would he dare to cry to the heavenly muse,
“i thence
invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
that with no middle flight intends to soar
above the aonian mount, while it pursues
things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”?
which of our poets thinks any more of an adventurous song? of attempting any more the unattempted in either prose or rhyme? it is as if everything had been attempted; everything dared; everything accomplished—the peaks all pre?mpted. politics or religion or literature, it matters not: the great days are gone, the great things are done, the great men securely housed in the hall of fame. heaven offers us a league of nations and we prefer the tried and proved device of war; a famed evangelist comes[89] to town, we build him a vast tabernacle, and twenty thousand gather for the quickening message—“brighten the corner where you are!” and in the corners, and over the walls of the nation, with poster and placard the “safety-first” sign warns us not to hold our little rushlight over-high, or flare it over-far, for fear we set our brightened corner of the world on fire. but the whole world is on fire! and wherever an emperor has escaped the devouring flame, he is fiddling, as emperors do; and his poet laureate is writing free verse; and all of his faithful subjects are saying, over and over, “day by day, in every way, i am getting better and better.”
“we are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it,” says emerson. “every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. it is his, if he will. he may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.” i have not spoken lately with a man who seemed to think he was entitled to the world. that grand old faith has[90] passed away. but i talk with no man lately who does not think he is entitled to an automobile. great is tin lizzie of the americans! greater than diana of the ephesians. but except for our worship of the ford we are not over-religious. the ford is a useful little deity; she meets our needs to the last mile. the individual can skip and frolic with her, for she is distinctly the goddess of the plains and rolling country. admirable to her winking tail-light, she is one hundred per cent american, the work of one of the supreme inventive geniuses of our time. she is the greatest thing in america, chugging everywhere but up parnassus. fool-proof, the universal car, she is the very sign and symbol of our antlike industry, the motor-minded expression of our internal-combustion age.
even my quiet old friend burroughs had his ford. it was her creator himself who gave her to him. the creature would climb around the slopes and over the walls about woodchuck lodge like a side-hill gouger, burroughs in his long white beard driving her, as father time might drive a merry-go-round. he nearly lost his life in her, too. but everybody nearly loses[91] his life so nowadays; and nearly everybody had rather lose his life in a ford than to drag out an endless existence in a buggy or on foot or in a wooden swing at home, watching the fords go by. what is life, anyway? the ford is cheap; the service station is everywhere; so, pile into the little old “bug”—on the hood and running-boards! “let’s go!”
perhaps our machines are taking us—we wish to believe so—to some new arden, some far-off avalon, where we shall heal us of our motor-minds, our movie-nerves, our corner-light religion; where “safety first” shall give place to “derring-do” as a national motto; where we shall ascend the empty peaks, and out of the thunder and smoke of shaking sinai bring down some daring commandment, done by the finger of god on new tables of stone.
we are not lacking courage. it is imagination that we lack. we dare. but we do not think it worth while. we are shallow, skeptical, conventional, out of tune with the infinite, and out of touch with spiritual things. if we do not try the unattempted, it is because we believe it has already been tried. it is because homer has[92] pre?mpted helicon that we tunnel it. only milton, among us moderns (and how ancient milton seems!), only milton in his blindness has seen that there is room and verge enough on helicon, and deeps within the abyss of hades where dante would be lost. no, milton is not the only modern to leave the plains, and, like a star, to dwell apart. thoreau did it at walden; lanier did it on the marshes of glynn; burroughs did it at woodchuck lodge; and hudson did it on the plains of patagonia—proof enough that ponds and plains and the low-lying marsh may be as high as helicon for poetry, if only the poet have the vision to see that
“like to the greatness of god is the greatness within
the range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of glynn.”
but here we fail. we no longer see the greatness of god in things. we have covered god with an atom. we ask for bread, and science gives us a stone; for god, and science gives us an electron. it was a super-electron that created the heavens and the earth when it saw that all of the other electrons were without form and void. atomism has taken the place of theism in our religion, if it is religion. man is only a[93] bunch of willful atoms, or parts of atoms, not any longer the crowning work of creation, its center and circumference, its dominion and destiny and glory, its divine expression, interpretation, and immortal soul. are we to be robbed of god? inhibited forever from faith by the lensed eyes of science?
“what is man?” i ask, and science laughs and answers, “electrons.” that is its latest guess. but does man look like them? does he feel like them? does he behave like them? does he believe like them? in the laboratory he may. but out here in the hills of hingham, where i am returned to the earth and the sky and to my own soul, i know that i am, and that i still hold to all of those first things which science would shame me out of, offering me electrons instead!
i accept the electrons. capering little deities, they are the sons of god. but so are you and i the sons of god—and we are electrons, trillions of electrons, if you like.
gods and atoms, we can dwell and think and feel as either, the two realms distinct and far apart, the roads between in a continual state[94] of construction, dangerous but passable. the anatomist, laying down his scalpel, cries, “such knowledge is too wonderful for me. i am fearfully and wonderfully made!”—his science passing into poetry, and from poetry to religion, but not easily in our present frame and mood.
science clears the sight and widens its range; but science can never clear up the shadows at the bottom of a woodchuck. only vision can do that, and science lacks vision, using a microtome instead, paring its woodchuck till he is thinner than sliced sunlight before it can see through so much as a single stained cell of him. science turns aside from shadows, walking by sight or else standing still. it deals with the flesh, not the spirit; and is as impotent in literature and art as in life and society. the potent thing among men and nations is love. love never faileth. yet never were we so afraid of love as we are to-day; and never did art and literature seem so fearful of the imagination, of vision, of the eternal, the divine.
“go get me a bird,” the old scientist said to me; “i will give you a lesson in skinning and mounting.” i was a young boy. hurrying out[95] to the woods, i was soon back with a cuckoo. the face of the old scientist darkened. “you should not have killed this bird, it is the friend of man. see when i open this gizzard.” and with a dexterous twist of his fingers turned inside out the gizzard, and showed it, like a piece of plush, its fleshy walls penetrated with millions of caterpillar hairs.
to this day i feel the wonder of that knowledge, and i thrill at the meaning of that bird’s gizzard. here was science and charity and poetry and religion. what untold good to man! what greater possible good to man? that was before i knew or understood the cuckoo’s song. and neither the old scientist, nor yet his book, “sixteen weeks in zo?logy,” dealt with the song. science is sure and beautiful with a gizzard. poetry is sure and beautiful with both gizzard and song. and i wonder if the grinding gizzard or the singing throat is the better part of the cuckoo, even in this world of worms?
“though babbling only to the vale,
of sunshine and of flowers,
thou bringest unto me a tale
of visionary hours.
[96]
“thrice welcome, darling of the spring!
even yet thou art to me
no bird, but an invisible thing,
a voice, a mystery;
“and i can listen to thee yet;
can lie upon the plain
and listen, till i do beget
that golden time again.
“o blessed bird! the earth we pace
again appears to be
an unsubstantial fa?ry place,
that is fit home for thee!”
i have a great book, published by the government, devoted entirely to birds’ gizzards, mills of the gods, and their grindings. it is not a dull book, though the mills grind slowly and grind exceeding small. it is a book of bones, of broken beetles, seeds, hairs, feathers, and fragments. it is a great work of science. one might not like to lay it down unfinished; but, having finished it, one could hardly say:
“and i can listen to thee yet;
can lie upon the plain
and listen, till i do beget
that golden time again.
“o blessed bird! the earth we pace
again appears to be
[97]
an unsubstantial fa?ry place,
that is fit home for thee!”
nature will not do, nor all the truth of nature, for stuff of song and story. as life is more than meat, so is literature more than life. nature conforms to art; and in fiction “the only real people are those who never existed.”
at good-will farm, maine, there is a rock marked with a copper plate. it had been marked for drill and dynamite, until, one day, my car swung up and over a sharp turn in the road before the schoolhouse, skidding rather horribly on the smooth outcropping ledge which had been uncovered and left as part of the roadbed.
“you ought to blast that thing out,” i said, somewhat testily, to the supervisor who came out to greet me, my nerves, strung a bit too tight on the long day’s drive, snapping with the skid here at the very end of the trip.
“i’ll do it,” he replied, apologetically. “i had intended to do it from the first.”
the next day we were climbing this road on foot, and, standing on the ledge to take in the wide landscape of the kennebec below us, i chanced to look down at my feet and saw, cut[98] deep in the smooth surface of the stone, several parallel lines.
“don’t blast out this rock!” i exclaimed. “tear down your schoolhouse rather. build a new road through the grounds, but leave this stone. this is part of a great book.”
“i don’t understand,” said the supervisor.
“here is written a page of the greatest story ever penned. these lines were done by the hand of the glacier who came this way in the ice age. don’t blot it out. put a fence about it, and a copper plate upon it, translating the story so that your students can read it and understand.”
he did. there was no need of the fence; but he set the plate into the rock, telling of the ice age, how the glacier came down, ploughing out the valley of the kennebec, rounding and smoothing this ledge, and inditing this manuscript for good-will farm school ages later.
so much does the mere scratch of science enhance the virtue of a stone! now add to your science history. instead of the scratch of a glacier, let it be a chisel and a human hand, and let the marks be—“1620.” now read—if you can read and understand.
[99]i copy it verbatim from a freshman college theme:
plymouth rock
plymouth rock is situated in plymouth mass. it is the rock upon which the mayflower landed in 1620. but it is not now where it was then. it was moved many years ago up to the street. and when they moved it it broke. but they cemented it together. it is four or five feet long; and three or four feet wide; and it is inscribed with the famous figures 1620, to celebrate the landing of the puritans at that time. it is enclosed within a canopy of stone and an iron fence; but the gate is hardly ever closed. there are a great many famous stones in the world but this is as famous as any.
my mother was visiting me. she is a self-contained old quaker, and this was the second time in all of her eighty years that she had even seen new england! what should we do first? what did she most desire to see? “take me to see plymouth rock first,” she said; and we were off, mother as excited and as lively as a girl. as we entered plymouth, however, i noticed that mother had grown silent, and that her doctor-daughter, beside her on the back seat, always sensitive to her moods, was also silent.[100] we descended the hill to the harbor, came on in sight of the canopy over the rock, and slowed down to stop. but the car had not stopped, when mother, the back door open, her foot on the running-board, was stepping off and through the open gate, where, falling on her knees, with tears running down her face, she kissed the blessed stone, her daughter calling, “o mother, the germs! the germs!”
when science and religion thus clash, science must give way. mother knew as much about germs as her doctor-daughter. she had lived longer than her daughter; she had lost more, and had loved more—some things more than life itself.
science has marked every rock; but only those that are wet with such tears and kissed with such lips are ripe for sermon and song. these are the eyes and these the lips of those, who, passing through bacca, make it a well. knowledge alone, though it course the very heavens, will come back to earth without so much as one shining fleck of stardust in its hair.
the other day a great astronomer was delivering a lecture in boston on the stars. wonder[101] and awe held the audience as it traveled the stellar spaces with the help of the astounding pictures on the screen. the emotion was deep; the tension almost painful as the lecturer swept on and on through the unthinkable vast, when, coming to his close, he turned and asked lightly, “now, what do you think of immortality? is it anything more than the neurotic hope of a very insignificant mote in this immensity?”
the effect was terrific. the scientific smiled. the simple left the hall dazed and stunned. they lost all sense of time and space, they lost sight of the very stars in this swift, far fall. they had been carried up through the seven spheres to the very gate of heaven, then hurled to earth. the lecture failed—not of instruction, not of emotion, but of will, leaving the listeners powerless and undone. the lecturer may be right—for astronomy; and yet be quite wrong, for poetry. he may have uttered the last word—for science; but this end is only the beginning for religion.
how much greater an astronomer this college professor than that shepherd psalmist on the far-off syrian hills! ranging the same astral field as[102] our scientist, sweeping the same stellar spaces, with only a shepherd’s knowledge, the psalmist’s thought takes the same turn as the scientist’s, down to man, but on different wings,—the wings of poetry:
“when i consider thy heavens,
the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars
which thou hast ordained;
what is man, that thou art mindful of him?
and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
then, swinging upward on those mighty wings, past the reach of science, out of the range of knowledge, up, up to the divinest height ever touched by human thought, the psalmist-astronomer cries impiously, exultantly,
“for thou hast made him but little lower than god,
and crownest him with glory and honor!”
this starts where the astronomer stopped. this is religion and literature. and i have these very stars over my hilltop here in hingham!
