My Garden Acquaintance
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James Russell Lowell >> My Garden Acquaintance
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Anthony J. Adam
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My Garden Acquaintance
James Russell Lowell
ONE of the most delightful books in my father's library was
White's "Natural History of Selborne." For me it has rather gained
in charm with years. I used to read it without knowing the secret of
the pleasure I found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some
of the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the book
where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July
weather one can walk out with this genially garrulous Fellow of
Oriel and find refreshment instead of fatigue. You have no trouble
in keeping abreast of him as he ambles along on his hobby-horse,
now pointing to a pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions
of a bird or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honorable
Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of taste and
natural refinement he reminds one of Walton; in tenderness toward
what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not
know whether his descriptions of scenery are good or not, but they
have made me familiar with his neighborhood. Since I first read
him, I have walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I still see
them through his eyes rather than by any recollection of actual and
personal vision. The book has also the delightfulness of absolute
leisure. Mr. White seems never to have had any harder work to do
than to study the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to
watch the ripening of his peaches on the wall. His volumes are the
journal of Adam in Paradise,
"Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade."
It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his. It is vastly
better than to
"See great Diocletian walk
In the Salonian garden's noble shade,"
for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the noises of
Rome, while here the world has no entrance. No rumor of the
revolt of the American Colonies seems to have reached him. "The
natural term of an hog's life" has more interest for him than that of
an empire. Burgoyne may surrender and welcome; of what
consequence is *that* compared with the fact that we can explain
the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over "to
scratch themselves with one claw"? All the couriers in Europe
spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. White's little
Chartreuse;(1) but the arrival of the house-martin a day earlier or
later than last year is a piece of news worth sending express to all
his correspondents.
(1) *La Grande Chartreuse* was the original Carthusian monastery
in France, where the most austere privacy was maintained.
Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent humor, so
much the more delicious because unsuspected by the author. How
pleasant is his innocent vanity in adding to the list of the British,
and still more of the Selbornian, *fauna!* I believe he would gladly
have consented to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that
means the occasional presence within the parish limits of either of
these anthropophagous brutes could have been established. He
brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by "having
considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl." Most of us
have known our share of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a
feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that
disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think
of his hands having actually been though worthy (as neither
Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, the
*Charadrius himaniopus,* with no back toe, and therefore "liable,
in speculation, to perpetual vacillations"! I wonder, by the way, if
metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the
acquaintance in Sussex of "an old family tortoise," which had then
been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he fell in love
with it at first sight. We have no means of tracing the growth of his
passion; but in 1780 we find him eloping with its object in a post-
chaise. "The rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it
that, when I turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the
bottom of my garden." It reads like a Court Journal: "Yesterday
morning H.R.H. the Princess Alice took an airing of half an hour on
the terrace of Windsor Castle." This tortoise might have been a
member of the Royal Society, if he could have condescended to so
ignoble an ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface
inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon took more
of the sun's rays. The tortoise had always known this (though he
unostentatiously made no parade of it), and used accordingly to tilt
himself up against the garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have
been more of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for
nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, or the sun
was too hot, and to bury himself alive before frost,--a four-footed
Diogenes, who carried his tub on his back.
There are moods in which this kind of history is infinitely
refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to look down upon as
the drudges of instinct are members of a commonwealth whose
constitution rests on immovable bases. never any need of
reconstruction there! *They* never dream of settling it by vote that
eight hours are equal to ten, or that one creature is as clever as
another and no more. *They* do not use their poor wits in
regulating God's clocks, nor think they cannot go astray so long as
they carry their guide-board about with them,--a delusion we often
practise upon ourselves with our high and mighty reason, that
admirable finger-post which points every way and always right. It
is good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr.
White's, where Man is the least important of animals. But one who,
like me, has always lived in the country and always on the same
spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sympathies. Do we not
share his indignation at that stupid Martin who had graduated his
thermometer no lower than 4o above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in
the coldest weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into
the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our fingers, just
as they were closing upon it? No man, I suspect, ever lived long in
the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions.
He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed
up, to have more trees and larger blow down than his neighbors.
With us descendants of the Puritans especially, these weather-
competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course.
Men learn to value thermometers of the true imaginative
termperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding
dejections. The other day (5th July) I marked 98o in the shade, my
high water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen it
before. I happened to meet a neighbor; as we mopped our brows at
each other, he told me that he had just cleared 100o, and I went
home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a
beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; but now it oppressed me with
the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity
became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his
thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think
ill of any graduation but our own); but it was a poor consolation.
The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a tiptoe, could
look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar
weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these mercurial
triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that he had a true country-
gentleman's interest in the weather-cock; that his first question on
coming down of a morning was, like Barabas's,
"Into what quarter peers my halcyon's bill?"
It is an innocent and healthful employment of the mind,
distracting one from too continual study of himself, and leading him
to dwell rather upon the indigestions of the elements than his own.
"Did the wind back round, or go about with the sun?" is a rational
question that bears not remotely on the making of hay and the
prosperity of crops. I have little doubt that the regulated
observation of the vane in many different places, and the
interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it
were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to
give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial
than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the
wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are
doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there
is no kind of accurate observation, whatever its object, that has not
its final use and value for some one or other. It is even to be hoped
that the speculations of our newspaper editors and their myriad
correspondence upon the signs of the political atmosphere may also
fill their appointed place in a well-regulated universe, if it be only
that of supplying so many more jack-o'-lanterns to the future
historian. Nay, the observations on finance of an M.C. whose sole
knowledge of the subject has been derived from a life-long success
in getting a living out of the public without paying any equivalent
therefor, will perhaps be of interest hereafter to some explorer of
our *cloaca maxima,* whenever it is cleansed.
For many years I have been in the habit of noting down some of
the leading events of my embowered solitude, such as the coming
of certain birds and the like,--a kind of *memoires pour servir,*
after the fashion of White, rather than properly digested natural
history. I thought it not impossible that a few simple stories of my
winged acquaintances might be found entertaining by persons of
kindred taste.
There is a common notion that animals are better meteorologists
than men, and I have little doubt that in immediate weather-wisdom
they have the advantage of our sophisticated senses (though I
suspect a sailor or shepherd would be their match), but I have seen
nothing that leads me to believe their minds capable of erecting the
horoscope of a whole season, and letting us know beforehand
whether the winter will be severe or the summer rainless. I more
than suspect that the clerk of the weather himself does not always
know very long in advance whether he is to draw an order for hot
or cold, dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce likely to be wiser.
I have noted but two days' difference in the coming of the song-
sparrow between a very early and a very backward spring. This
very year I saw the linnets at work thatching, just before a snow-
storm which covered the ground several inches deep for a number
of days. They struck work and left us for a while, no doubt in
search of food. Birds frequently perish from sudden changes in our
whimsical spring weather of which they had no foreboding. More
than thirty years ago, a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my
window, was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of
mingled rain and snow, which probably killed many of them. It
should seem that their coming was dated by the height of the sun,
which betrays them into unthrifty matrimony;
"So priketh hem Nature in hir corages;"(1)
but their going is another matter. The chimney swallows leave us
early, for example, apparently so soon as their latest fledglings are
firm enough of wing to attempt the long rowing-match that is
before them. On the other hand the wild-geese probably do not
leave the North till they are frozen out, for I have heard their bugles
sounding southward so late as the middle of December. What may
be called local migrations are doubtless dictated by the chances of
food. I have once been visited by large flights of cross-bills; and
whenever the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of
cedar-birds comes in mid-winter to eat the berries on my
hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the local, or
rather geographical partialities of birds. never before this summer
(1870) have the king-birds, handsomest of flycatchers, built in my
orchard; though I always know where to find them within half a
mile. The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird in
Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here till last July,
when I found a female busy among my raspberries and surprisingly
bold. I hope she was *prospecting* with a view to settlement in
our garden. She seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit,
and I would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win over so
delightful a neighbor.
(1) Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales, Prologue,* line 11.
The return of the robin is commonly announced by the
newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering-
place, as the first authentic notification of spring. And such his
appearance in the orchard and garden undoubtedly is. But, in spite
of his name of migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I
have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 degrees below
zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably within,(1) like Emerson's
Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The robin has a bad reputation
among people who do not value themselves less for being fond of
cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song
is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose.
His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance
which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never
has these fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird
and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle 's
a' that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came
out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly
forfeited that superiority which belongs to the children of nature.
He has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from many
successive committees of the Horticultural Society, and he eats
with a relishing gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and
freely exercises his right of eminent domain. His is the earliest mess
of green peas; his all the mulberries I had fancied mine. But if he
get also the lion's share of the raspberries, he is a great planter, and
sows those wild ones in the woods that solace the pedestrian, and
give a momentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White Hills.
he keeps a strict eye over one's fruit, and knows to a shade of
purple when your grapes have cooked long enough in the sun.
During the severe drought a few years ago the robins wholly
vanished from my garden. I neither saw nor heard one for three
weeks. meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing,
seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming, perhaps of its
sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself with a score or so of fair
bunches. I watched them from day to day till they should have
secreted sugar enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my
mind that I would celebrate my vintage the next morning. But the
robins, too, had somehow kept note of them. They must have sent
out spies, as did the Jews into the promised land, before I was
stirring. When I went with my basket at least a dozen of these
winged vintagers bustled out from among the leaves, and alighting
on the nearest trees interchanged some shrill remarks about me of a
derogatory nature. They had fairly sacked the vine. Not
Wellington's veterans made cleaner work of a Spanish town; not
Federals or Confederates were ever more impartial in the
confiscation of neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret
to surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them a
profounder secret to her than I had meant. The tattered remnant of
a single bunch was all my harvest-home. How paltry it looked at
the bottom of my basket,--as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in
an eagle's nest! I could not help laughing; and the robins seemed to
join heartily in the merriment. There was a native grape-vine close
by, blue with its less refined abundance, but my cunning thieves
preferred the foreign flavor. Could I tax them with want of taste?
(1) "For well the soul, if stout within,
Can arm impregnably the skin."
*The Titmouse,* lines 75, 76.
The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, as, like
primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return of light and warmth
to the world, is unrivalled. There are a hundred singing like one.
They are noisy enough then, and sing, as poets should, with no
afterthought. But when they come after cherries to the tree near
my window, they muffle their voices, and their faint *pip pip pop!*
sounds far away at the bottom of the garden, where they know I
shall not suspect them of robbing the great black-walnut of its
bitter-rinded store.(1) They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure,
but then how brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in the
sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green of the fringe-
tree! After they have pinched and shaken all the life of an
earthworm, as Italian cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, and
then gulped him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, expand
their red waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and
outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. "Do *I*
look like a bird that knows the flavor of raw vermin? I throw
myself upon a jury of my peers. Ask any robin if he ever ate
anything less ascetic than the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will
answer that his vow forbids him." Can such an open bosom cover
such depravity? Alas, yes! I have no doubt his breast was redder at
that very moment with the blood of my raspberries. On the whole,
he is a doubtful friend in the garden. He makes his dessert of all
kinds of berries, and is not averse from early pears. But when we
remember how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in an
incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaustless in her
invention of new insects hostile to vegetation, perhaps we may
reckon that he does more good than harm. For my own part, I
would rather have his cheerfulness and kind neighborhood than
many berries.
(1) The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one o the
sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with
the most beguiling mockery of distance. J.R.L.
For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer regard. Always a
good singer, he sometimes nearly equals the brown thrush, and has
the merit of keeping up his music later in the evening than any bird
of my familiar acquaintance. Ever since I can remember, a pair of
them have built in a gigantic syringa near our front door, and I have
known the male to sing almost uninterruptedly during the evenings
of early summer till twilight duskened into dark. They differ greatly
in vocal talent, but all have a delightful way of crooning over, and,
as it were, rehearsing their song in an undertone, which makes their
nearness always unobtrusive. Though there is the most trustworthy
witness to the imitative propensity of this bird, I have only once,
during an intimacy of more than forty years, heard him indulge it.
In that case, the imitation was by no means so close as to deceive,
but a free reproduction of the notes of some other birds, especially
of the oriole, as a kind of variation in his own song. The catbird is
as shy as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his nest or his
fledglings are approached does he become noisy and almost
aggressive. I have known him to station his young in a thick
cornel-bush on the edge of the raspberry-bed, after the fruit began
to ripen, and feed them there for a week or more. In such cases he
shows none of that conscious guilt which makes the robin
contemptible. On the contrary, he will maintain his post in the
thicket, and sharply scold the intruder who ventures to steal *his*
berries. After all, his claim is only for tithes, while the robin will
bag your entire crop if he get a chance.
Dr. Watts's statement that "birds in their little nests agree," like
too many others intended to form the infant mind, is very far from
being true. On the contrary, the most peaceful relation of the
different species to each other is that of armed neutrality. they are
very jealous of neighbors. A few years ago I was much interested
in the housebuilding of a pair of summer yellow-birds. They had
chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall white lilac, within
easy eye-shot of a chamber window. A very pleasant thing it was
to see their little home growing with mutual help, to watch their
industrious skill interrupted only by little flirts and snatches of
endearment, frugally cut short by the common-sense of the tiny
house-wife. They had brought their work nearly to an end, and had
already begun to line it with fern-down, the gathering of which
demanded more distant journeys and longer absences. But, alas!
the syringa, immemorial manor of the catbirds, was not more than
twenty feet away, and these "giddy neighbors" had, as it appeared,
been all along jealously watchful, though silent, witnesses of what
they deemed an intrusion of squatters. No sooner were the pretty
mates fairly gone for a new load of lining, than
"To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots
Came stealing."(1)
Silently they flew back and forth, each giving a vengeful dab at the
nest in passing. They did not fall-to and deliberately destroy it, for
they might have been caught at their mischief. As it was, whenever
the yellow-birds came back, their enemies were hidden in their own
sight-proof bush. Several times their unconscious victims repaired
damages, but at length, after counsel taken together, they gave it
up. Perhaps, like other unlettered folk, they came to the conclusion
that the Devil was in it, and yielded to the invisible persecution of
witchcraft.
(1) Shakespeare: *King Henry V.,* act i, scene 2.
The robins, by constant attacks and annoyances, have succeeded
in driving off the blue-jays who used to build in our pines, their gay
colors and quaint, noisy ways making them welcome and amusing
neighbors. I once had the chance of doing a kindness to a
household of them, which they received with very friendly
condescension. I had had my eye for some time upon a nest, and
was puzzled by a constant fluttering of what seemed full-grown
wings in it whenever I drew nigh. At last I climbed the tree, in spite
of angry protests from the old birds against my intrusion. The
mystery had a very simple solution. In building the nest, a long
piece of packthread had been somewhat loosely woven in. Three of
the young had contrived to entangle themselves in it, and had
become full-grown without being able to launch themselves upon
the air. One was unharmed; another had so tightly twisted the cord
about its shank that one foot was curled up and seemed paralyzed;
the third, in its struggles to escape, had sawn through the flesh of
the thigh and so much harmed itself that I thought it humane to put
an end to its misery. When I took out my knife to cut their hempen
bonds, the heads of the family seemed to divine my friendly intent.
Suddenly ceasing their cries and threats. they perched quietly within
reach of my hand, and watched me in my work of manumission.
This, owing to the fluttering terror of the prisoners, was an affair of
some delicacy; but ere long I was rewarded by seeing one of them
fly away to a neighboring tree, while the cripple, making a
parachute of his wings, came lightly to the ground, and hopped off
as well as he could with one leg, obsequiously waited on by his
elders. A week later I had the satisfaction of meeting him in the
pine-walk, in good spirits, and already so far recovered as to be
able to balance himself with the lame foot. I have no doubt that in
his old age he accounted for his lameness by some handsome story
of a wound received at the famous Battle of the Pines, when our
tribe, overcome by numbers, was driven from its ancient camping-
ground. Of late years the jays have visited us only at intervals; and
in winter their bright plumage, set off by the snow, and their
cheerful cry, are especially welcome. They would have furnished
Aesop with a fable, for the feathered crest in which they seem to
take so much satisfaction is often their fatal snare. Country boys
make a hole with their finger in the snow-crust just large enough to
admit the jay's head, and, hollowing it out somewhat beneath, bait it
with a few kernels of corn. The crest slips easily into the trap, but
refuses to be pulled out again, and he who came to feast remains a
prey.
Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted a settlement in my
pines, and twice have the robins, who claim a right of preemption,
so successfully played the part of border-ruffians as to drive them
away,--to my great regret, for they are the best substitute we have
for rooks. At Shady Hill(1) (now, alas! empty of its so long-loved
household) they build by hundreds, and nothing can be more cheery
than their creaking clatter (like a convention of old-fashioned
tavern-signs) as they gather at evening to debate in mass meeting
their windy politics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events
of the day. Their port is grave, and their stalk across the turf as
martial as that of a second-rate ghost in Hamlet. They never
meddled with my corn, so far as I could discover.