Having revisited Bradford Torrey, it seemed only proper (and fair) that I do the same for Dallas Lore Sharp, another fairly renowned (relatively speaking) of the nature essayists of natural history’s golden age. Sharp is probably most known (again, in a relative sense) for his essay, “Turtle Eggs for Agassiz” (in another volume of his, still waiting on the shelf), in which he collects turtle eggs to send to the renowned biologist, Louis Agassiz. While Torrey (and so many others) were actively writing in the 1880s and 1890s, Sharp (1870-1929) was a “late bloomer” who published his first nature book in 1901. As such, he was positioned at the height of the Nature-Study Movement and was able to survey its origins, expression, and impacts on American culture. Indeed, some of his finest essays in The Lay of the Land explore this theme. (Most of the rest of the essays offer themes relating to the various seasons of the year, from “Christmas in the Woods” to “High Noon” (late summer). Although I naturally associate Sharp with Torrey, they are dramatically different as authors. Torrey rambles through the woods and fields, making discoveries along the way; the reader often joins him on his adventures without knowing where he might end up. Sharp has a central theme about which the essay is tightly constructed; though many animals and plants may appear along the way, the central image or idea is never far from view. The prose is composed of refreshingly simple sentences, the kind that would have been to Hemmingway’s liking. There are no thickets of convoluted text here. Each essay has a refreshing clarity that goes down like a dipperful of cool water from a mountain stream. Here, for instance, is Sharp’s closing paragraph from his opening essay, “The Muskrats Are Building”:
The muskrats are building; the last of the migrating geese have gone over; the wild mice have harvested their acorns; the bees have clustered; the woodchucks are asleep; and the sap in the big hickory by the side of the house has crept down out of reach of the fingers of the frost. I will put on the storm-doors and the double windows. Even now the logs are blazing cheerily on the wide, warm hearth.
There is no affectation here, no mystery as to the intended meaning. But there is still plenty of room left for wonder, joy, and poetry. “As I watch the changing seasons…across the changeless years,” Sharp observes in that same essay, “I seem to find a scheme, a plan, a purpose, and there are weeds and winters in it, and it seems divine.” Through observing and celebrating everyday events and phenomena, Sharp finds “something close akin to religion,” that
…is a inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with the out-of-doors. It doen’t come from books, from laboratories, not even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.
As may already be evident to the reader, Sharp’s vision of nature study combines two elements: biological knowledge (science) and inspiration for the spirit (poetry). Both are essential to engaging meaningfully with the natural world. ” A botanist who is never a poet misses as much in the out-of-doors as a poet who is never botanist.” Elsewhere, Sharp declares that “Nature study is the out-of-door side of natural history, the unmeasured, unprinted side of poetry. It is joy in breathing the air of the fields; joy in seeing, hearing, living the life of the fields; joy in knowing and loving all that lives with you in your out-of-doors. The best nature-study books, therefore, “appeal to sentiment as well as to sense” and are “very unlike the earlier desiccated, unimaginative treatises.”
How does one become a student of nature? The pathway into nature study begins with close observation over time in a particular place. “Let us learn to see and name first. The inexperienced, the unknowing, the unthinking cannot love. One must live until tired, think until baffled, before he can know his need of Nature.”
The first necessity for interesting nature study is an intimate acquaintance with some locality. It does not matter how small, how commonplace, how near the city, — the nearer the better, provided there are trees, water, fences, and some seclusion. If your own roof-tree stands in the midst of it, then that is ideal.
The true nature student is literally at home in nature, cognizant of its many moods and aware of the comings and goings of all the creatures — neighbors — who share that space with him. He observes the daily development of seedlings and flower buds, watches birds building their nests, and notices the muskrats constructing their winter lodges. With close inspection of and engagement with nature over the long years, a beautiful pattern emerges, “and there are weeds and winters in it, and it seems divine.”
My copy of The Lay of the Land is nearly pristine; there are no marks of past ownership. There is a small bookseller stamp on the flyleaf’s lower left. This book was originally sold in Boston, by a company owned and operated by Charles Emelius Lauriat (1842-1920). HIs son (Charles Emelius Lauriat, Jr. — 1874-1937) was among the survivors of the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, seven years after this book was published.
I return to Torrey as an old friend of long acquaintance. The inspiration behind the blog was the discovery of an early compilation of nature writers, which included extensive work by Thoreau, several essays of Burroughs, and a few pieces each by Bradford Torrey, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Olive Thorne Miller. All three were fairly renowned in their day, publishing extensively in the nature essay genre, particularly ornithological pieces. And all three are nearly forgotten today — so they join the inevitable company of a host of other obscure authors who never managed to achieve much fame. Was I to read all the books the three together wrote, that would take me the better part of a year. Still, I have decided to explore several works by each to gain a richer sense of how they encountered the natural world.
According to the scanty lines on him in Wikipedia, Torrey lived from 1843 until 1912. He is known today mainly as an ornithologist. He frequently contributed to periodicals, compiling his published essays into nine books. The Foot-Path Way was his third work. The first half of the book is given over to travel essays — works where Torrey ventures afield and reports on all the birds he has seen (or not seen). His ramblings take him to Cape Cod, northern New Hampshire, and Mount Mansfield, Massachusetts. His descriptions are fairly dry, a point to which he alludes upon occasion. Here, Torrey laments how rare it is that he truly rhapsodizes on the beauty of nature:
So it is with our appreciation of natural beauty. We are always in its presence, but only on rare occasions are our eyes annointed to see it. Such ecstasies, it seems, are not for every day. Sometimes I fear they grow less frequent as we grow older.
We will hope for better things; but, should the gloomy prognostication fall true, we will but betake ourselves the more assiduously to lesser pleasures, — to warbers and willows, roses and strawberries. Science will never fail us. If worse comes to worst, we will not despise the moths.
In a later essay in the volume, on the passing of birds overhead during the autumn migration, Torrey remarks upon a screech-owl he has frequently observed sitting atop a tall tree: “More than half the time he is there, and always with his eye on me. What an air he has! — like a judge on the bench! If I were half as wise as he looks, these essays of mine would never more be dull.”
The second half of the book is predominantly bird studies: essays where Torrey seeks answers to questions about bird behavior through his detailed observations and occasional anecdotes from others. For example, he explores whether or not male ruby-throated hummingbirds assist the females with incubating the eggs or raising their young. (He concludes that he suspects not, but that he is not convinced one way or the other; scientists now know that males only remain with the females for courtship and mating.) He also explores roosting behavior among American robins (which appears to be limited to young birds and unmated males). He notes the seasonal passage of long numbers of songbirds overhead, many too high up to see with the naked eye — much larger numbers than we would likely experience today. He freely confesses his fascination with birds: “A happy man is the bird-lover; always another species to look for, another mystery to solve.” That said, Torrey attributes personhood to birds, asserting that “Birds and men are alike parts of nature, having many things in common not only with each other, but with every form of animate existence.” Studying birds, therefore, can ultimately teach us about ourselves: “To become acquainted with the peculiarities of plants or birds is to increase one’s knowledge of beings of his own sort.”
More, still, might be gleaned from plants if we only knew how to interpret them. In one essay, Torrey considered similarities between plants and people; alas, he restricted himself to analogous ones, such as how roses with thorns mirror lovely people with a few uncommendable qualities. If only he had wondered more about plant behavior, he might have been far ahead of his time. The last essay is a brief paean to the white pine (which Torrey prefers to call the Weymouth pine). In one of his most poetic passages in the book, he writes about the pine’s mysterious communications:
…the pine is a priest of the true religion. It speaks never of itself, never its own words. Silent it stands till the Spirit breathes upon it. Then all its innumerable leaves awake and speak as they are moved… …the pine tree, under the visitation of the heavenly influence, utters things incommunicable; it whispers to us of things we have never said and never can say, — things that lie deeper than words, deeper than thought. Blessed are our ears if we hear, for the message is not to be understood by every comer, nor, indeed, by any, except at happy moments. In this temple all hearing is given by inspiration, for which reason the pine-tree’s language is inarticulate, as Jesus spake in parables.
My well-worn copy of Torrey’s book has had quite a history. It appears to have been given to Mary Cornelia Dodd by Ella in 1894. I managed to locate information on several Mary C. Dodds, living and deceased, but none whose life trajectories quite fit this one. There was a Mary C. Dodd who was born in Arkansas in 1973, and would have been 21 in 1894; however, she married John Archie Fain in 1891 and would likely have taken his last name, in keeping with traditions at the time.
The book found its way into the possession of Clark L. Thayer of Amherst, Massachusetts, in September 1936. Here, I was surprised to find a likely owner: Clark Leonard Thayer, who graduated from UMass Amherst in 1913, with a degree in Floriculture. In World War I, Thayer served in the Infantry and Ammunition Train. After the war, he became an instructor in Floriculture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1928, he published Spring Flowering Bulbs: Hardy and Desirable Materials for Use in the Home Garden. At some point before 1936, Thayer relocated to Amherst, probably to teach there. He died in 1982 at the age of 91 in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and is buried in Quabbin Park Cemetery in Ware, Massachusetts.
The final “signature” is an herbal tea stain visible on Mary Dodd’s signature. That was the work of Evil Kitten, our mischievous black cat. By jumping at precisely the right angle onto a low bookshelf at the foot of the bed, he managed to knock a half-glass of tea onto the bed itself, where this book conveniently happened to be sitting a the time.
“Our soul opens to the soul of Nature, and we discover anew that we are one.”
Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846-1916) published over two dozen volumes in his lifetime, many of which were compilations of legends, myths, and fairytales for children. He also wrote fiction and essays on nature and culture. Mabie stands apart from other writers I have read throughout this project in that he was clearly not a scientific naturalist; his inspiration came not from Thoreau, Burroughs, or even Muir, but rather, from Emerson. A transcendental tone infuses his fascinating volume, Under the Trees. Midway through, Mabie reminisces about his first encounter with Emerson’s writing:
As I write, the memory of a summer afternoon long ago comes back to me. The old orchard sleeps in the dreamy air, the birds are silent, a tranquil spirit broods over the whole earth. Under the wide-spreading braches a by is intently reading. He has fallen upon a bit of transcendental writing in a magazine, and for the first time has lerned that t some men the great silent world about him, that seems so real and changeless, is immaterial and unsubstantial — a vision projected by the soul upon illimitable space. On the instant that all things are written with unreality, the solid earth shrinks beneath him. He cannot understand, but he feels what Emerson meant when he said, “The Supreme Being does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves.” That which was fixed, stable, cast in permanent forms was suddenly annihilated by a revelation which spoke to the heart rather than the intellect, and laid bare at a glance the unseen spiritual foundations upon which all things rest at last. From that moment the boy saw with other eyes, and lived henceforth in things not made with hands.
The result of that experience is a book that is difficult to capture in words. On the one hand, it contains the dreamy utterings of an upper-class American male in the Gilded Age, extolling the virtues of an all-benevolent Nature deity that seems to collaborate with and smile upon Western civilization: “Face to face through all his history man has stood with Nature, and to each generation she has opened some new page of her inexhaustible story.” Missing from this worldview is any condemnation of the costs of progress, already becoming apparent in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. There is a passing reference or two to cities, which cannot compare to the bucolic countryside. But the sufferings of the urban poor and the subjugation of Native Americans have no space here. Nor does the book — unlike a handful of other works at the time — mention the wanton killing of birds and buffalo underway back then. This is a pastoral idyll in the manner of Virgil’s Georgics. Every glass is full (with wine, no doubt), and the writer spends many hours enraptured with visions of paradise. There is a naivete here that is at once both compelling and somewhat reprehensible.
And yet. And yet, there are some truly beautiful passages here where Mabie’s transcendental vision carries the reader away from the mundane world of the moment — a world filled with nouns that all seem so real and substantial — into a world of verbs, infused by forces of constant change. In flowing prose, Mabie makes the hydrologic cycle come alive as a Buddhist vision of cosmic transformation:
The rivers are the great channels through which the ceaseless interchange of the elements goes on; they unite the heart of the continents and the solitary places of the mountains with the universal sea which washes all shores and beats in melancholy refrain at each pole. Into their currents the hills and uplands pour their streams; to them the little rivulets come laughing and singing down from their sources in the forest depths. A drop falling from a passing shower into the lake of Delolo may be carried eastward, through the Zambezi, to the Indian Ocean, or westward, along the transcontinental course of the Congo, to the Atlantic. The mists that rise from great streams, separated by vast stretches of territory, commingle in the upper air, and are carried by vagrant winds to the wheat-fields of the far Northwest or the rice-fields of the South. The ocean ceaselessly makes the circuit of the globe, and summons its ributaris along all shores to itself. But it gives even more lavishly than it receives; day and night there rise over its vast expanse those invisible clouds of moisture which diffuse themselves through the atmosphere, and descend at last upon the earth to pour, sooner or later, into the rivers, and be returned from whence they came.
Endless flow. That is the underlying vision here. Everything we encounter is temporary- a book, a mountain, or a blooming rose. Nature is always at play, and by recognizing these transformations and how they point to one unified reality, we can transcend daily life’s mundane worries and demands and find lasting peace. Buddhism for the Gilded Age.
If I permit my thought to rest upon this fragrant flower, to touch petal and stem and root, and unite them with the vast world in which, by a universal contribution of force, they have come to maturity, I find myself face to face with the oldest and deepest questions men have ever sought to answer. Elements of earth and sea and sky are blended here in one of those forms of radiant and vanishing beauty with which the unseen life of Nature counts the years in endless and inexhaustable profusion. As it budded and opened into full flower in the garden, how complete it seemed in itself, and how isolated from all other visible things! But in reality how dependent it was, how entirely the creation of forces as far apart as earth and sky! The great tide from the Unseen cast it for a moment into my possession; for an hour it has filled a human home with its far-brought sweetness; to-morrow it will fall apart and return whence it came. As I look into its heart of passionate colour, the whole visible universe, that seems so fixed and stable, becomes immaterial, evanescent, vanishing; it is no longer a permanent order of seas and continents and rounded skies; it is a vision painted by an unseen hand against a background of mystery… It is the momentary creation of forces that stream through it in endless ebb and flow, that are to-day touching the sky with elusive splendour, and to-morrow springing in changeful loveliness from the depths of earth. The continents are transformed into the seas that encircle them; the seas rise into the skies that overarch them; the skies mingle with the arth, and send back from theuplifted faces of flowers greetings to the stars they have deserted…
In the unbroken vision of the centuries all things are plastic and in motion; a divine energy surges through all; substantial for a moment here as a rock, fragile and vanishing there as a flower; but everywhere the same, and always sweeping onward through its illimitable channel to its appointed end. It is this vital tide on which the universe gleams and floats like a mirage of immutability; ever the same for a single moment to the soul that contemplates it: a new creation every hour and to every eye that rests upon it.
The world is spinning, and I am dizzy with his prose. I pause, look down to earth (more precisely, the dust-infused carpet of my cluttered home office), and catch my breath. I think I may have reached my daily limit for cosmic rapture, and it is only 8 am.
Without a doubt, my favorite essay in this collection is “The Earliest Insights” in which Mabie turns his thoughts toward the mysteries of the childhood experience with nature. Here, in his flowery way, he reaches many of the same realizations I have held for years. Specifically, as Edith Cobb noted in her Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, for young children, the border between self and other has not yet developed, enabling the child to have a consciousness infused with nature — continuous with it, fully present with it. Amazingly, Mabie’s thoughts on the quest to rediscover that childhood way of being in nature (which I have pondered all my life) seem to presage T.S. Eliot’s vision in “Little Gidding” (published 51 years later) of returning to where we started our explorations and knowing the place for the first time. Could Eliot have encountered Mabie’s work? Unlikely though that may seem, Mabie also writes of children under an apple tree, just as children in an apple tree appear in the very next lines of “Little Gidding.” And did I mention that a rose bush appears in the essay, too? First, here is the extended passage from T.S. Eliot, published in 1942:
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.
And here is Mabie’s more labored yet still inspiring prose, originally published in 1891:
When I came across the field a few moments ago, a voice called me from under the apple trees, and a little figure, with a flush of joy on her face and the fadeless light of love in her eyes, came running with uneven pace to meet me. How slight and frail was that vision of childhood to the thought which saw the awful forces of nature at work, or rather at play, about her! And yet how serene was her look upon the great world dropping its fruit at her feet; how familiar and at ease her attitude in the presence of these sublime mysteries! She is at one with the hour and the scene; she has not begun to think of herself as apart from the things which surround her; that strange and sudden sense of unreality which makes me at times alien and a stranger in the presence of nature, “moving about in the world not realised,” is still far off. For her the sun shines and the winds blow, the flowers bloom and the stars glisten, the trees hold out their protecting arms and the grass waves its soft garment, and she accepts them without a thought of what is behind them or shall follow them; the painful process of thought, which is first to separate her from Nature and then to reunite her to it in a higher and more spiritual fellowship, has hardly begun. She still walks in the soft light of faith, and drinks in the immortal beauty, as the flower at her side drinks in the dew and the light. It is she, after all, who is right as she plays, joyously and at home, on the ground which the earthquake may rock, and under the sky which storms will darken and rend. The far-brought instince of childhood accepts without a question that great truth of unity and fellowship to which knowledge comes only after long and agonising quest. Between the innocent sleep of childhood in the arms of Nature and the calm repose of the old man in the same enfolding strength there stretches the long, sleepless day of question, search, and suffering; at the end the wisest returns to the goal from which he set out.
Mabie closes his essay with a call for regaining the sense of being in Nature that we knew in our earliest years, a way that perceived the flow of natural forces and participated in it: “If we could but revive the consciousness of childhood, if we could but look out once more through its unclouded eyes, what divinity would sow the universe with light and make it radiant with fadeless visions of beauty and truth!” This same quest to see nature anew “through the eyes of a child” has infused much of my thought and work, including doctoral research on sense of place in middle childhood.
But back to Mabie. Or Mabie not. I will leave the author there, with some of his most intriguing writing on nature and children. Plenty of other sections are tedious and overwrought; I will spare the reader those. But the words are not all that comprise the book I read. I consciously sought out the 1902 edition, rather than the first edition from a decade earlier, so that I could experience a truly classic volume (in more ways than one) ornamented in the art nouveau style of turn-of-the-century America by C.L Hinton. His work graces the cover and greets you on the title page:
Every page is bordered, on three sides, by scenes of rural nature, filled with youths and satyrs playing musical instruments. The reader is immersed in Hinton’s world.
There are also several full-page images in black and white, behind protective translucent pages, depicting barefoot female figures clad in white robes:
The result is a truly immersive reading experience — a paradisal world that the reader inhabits from the moment he pulls the book off the shelf. The words coalesce with the background images and the full-page artwork and the magnificent gilt cover. The reading experience is the entire work, not just the blocks of text. The book is an Object of Wonder and Mystery, a tribute to the craftsmanship of book design in 1902 America.
