Literary Pilgrimages of a NaturalistPackard, Winthrop
History
Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist
Packard, Winthrop
Natural history -- Outdoor books; New England -- Description and travel
Hither come the pilgrims that have hastily viewed the Minute Man
and the bridge, puffing in rows up the hillside and standing,
breathless but voluble, before the stone they have sought.
Reverence in their hearts they have without doubt, yet little of
it gets to the surface as they, panting, recite one to another
the legend of the stone and pass on. It is a wonderful piece of
white quartz that marks Emerson’s grave. There is dignity in its
roughness, and something of the pure opacity of Emerson’s thought
seems to dwell in its white crystals, fittingly touched here and
there with a color which might be the matrix of all gems. One
thinks from what he sees of those who pass that Emerson is best
known, Hawthorne most loved, while Thoreau and the Alcotts have
each their own special worshipers. Now and then one sees much
reverence based upon a rather slender knowledge, as when a young
man balancing a year-old baby on his arm said to his wife, “This,
my dear, is the grave of Thorough, David Thorough, the man who
wrote ‘Zounds.’” One can fancy David, who was Henry to most of us,
being willing to be called thorough, yet hesitating to acknowledge
“Zounds,” except perhaps as an exclamation of astonishment. As an
offset for this I might cite the small boy who, having been shown
the stone which marks the grave of Louisa Alcott, gave it shyly a
little loving hug and a pat before he went away. In the highest
group of Concord immortals it is not customary to include the
talented daughter of the transcendentalist, yet of the worshipers
who pass not a few lay their fondest offering on the turf that
covers her.
For a few hours out of the twenty-four, visitors to Sleepy Hollow
come and go. Except for that the hollow indeed sleeps, steeped in
the gentle peace of all nature which seems to well up out of it and
encompass all the region round about in its golden haze. Surely
the lotos grows where the Assabet and the Sudbury join to make the
Concord, that sleeps on so gently that one may hardly know that
it is on its way. The lotos grows there and the land has eaten of
it, for the bustle of the world passes over it but does not change
nor wake it. The very farms of Revolutionary time linger on, and
if they are tilled now as they were then I do not know, but the
cattle graze on the hills in herds as great now as then, and as
broad cornfields toss their golden plumes toward the sky. The
houses where dwelt Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, still stand,
and into the fields round about them few others have crowded. The
fertile soil still yields crops to the husbandman, in whose breast
slumbers mayhap the same sturdy courage which made the Minute Men
and would make others should the need arise. Manufacturing, summer
hotel keeping, these things do not seem to have touched the town
much. I fancy it as lying fallow, waiting the flow of that ichor of
the immortals that shall some day again waken it to great things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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