THIS THEN IS
                            UPLAND PASTURES

                          BEING SOME OUT-DOOR
                         ESSAYS  DEALING  WITH
                          THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS
                         THAT  THE  SPRING  AND
                           SUMMER BRING ☘ ☘ ☘


                            By ADELINE KNAPP

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

 Done into a book at the Roycroft Printing Shop in East Aurora, New York

                                MDCCCXCVII




                             Copyrighted by
                       The Roycroft Printing Shop
                                  1897




 ❧ OF THIS EDITION THERE WERE
 PRINTED BUT SIX HUNDRED COPIES
 ☘ EACH BOOK IS SIGNED AND NUMBERED:
 THIS BOOK IS NUMBER _101_




When the warm rains succeed winter’s driving downpours, and the young
grass begins to mantle the meadows ❦ with tender green, is the time, of
all the year, to be out of doors ❧ All the woodsy places are cool and
dripping and dim and delicious. A month later they will be not less
beautiful, perhaps, but less approachable. The things of Nature grow
sophisticated as the season advances. In the early springtime they are
frank and confiding, and willingly tell the secrets of their growth to
him who asks ✪ They have time, in these first beginnings of things, for
friendly sociability: to show their tiny roots and bulbs, and let us
study the delicate, gracious unfoldings of leaf and bud and blossom. In
a few weeks they will all be too busy, keeping up with the season’s
swift march, to stop and visit with the lovingest of human friends.

[Illustration]

Do we forget, from springtime to springtime, how lovely will be the
year’s awakening? Each winter of our discontent I think that I remember,
as my longing imagination looks forward, the tender charm of the
springtime wonder, yet with each recurring year it comes to me as a new
and unknown joy ❦

The whole world seems to welcome the new year-child. Even before the
first growths appear there is a hushed awareness throughout Nature that
moves the heart to thankfulness and remembered expectation ❦ The hope of
springtime comes without stint, and without fail, bringing each one of
us the message his heart is prepared to receive, and quickening our
purest, least sordid impulses. The best that is in us seems possible, in
the springtime. Who of us does not then dream that this best will yet
gain strength to withstand the heat and drouth of summer’s fierce
searching? We turn to Mother Nature like children who long to be good.
The worshipping instinct that lies deep within each soul goes out to
her, vesting her in that personality which we have long since pronounced
unthinkable when applied to God. There is a suggestion in the situation
that is not without a certain saving humor to relieve it from
grotesqueness. We are not far from a personal god when we send our souls
out in loving contemplation of personified Nature, yet we still go on
asking if God is, and if He is Truth. Whom do we ask, and why does the
question rise? If God is Truth, He must be universal; and to be
perceived by each soul for himself ❧ If, then, I perceive him not,
either He is not the truth or else I am simple and sincere in desiring
the truth. If He is not the truth, do I then desire human persuasion
that He is? Or, if I am not simple and sincere, who can make me so?


Nature will help us if we turn to her. We have filled our lives so full
of complexities and problems that it is well for us to have her annual
reminder that even without our taking thought about it the real world,
that will be here when we, with all our busyness, shall have passed from
sight, has renewed itself, and stands bidding us come and find peace.

For Nature keeps open house for us, and even when we visit her and leave
a trail of dust and desolation behind us, like the stupid, untidy
children we are, she only sets herself, with the silent, persistent
patience of her age-wise motherhood, to cover and remove it. Down in the
canyon, this morning, among the trillium and loosestrife and wild
potato, I found the inevitable tin can left by some picnicker to mar and
desecrate the landscape, but now completely filled with soft brown mold,
and growing in it a mass of happy green wood-sorrel ❧

This is better than going at things with a broom, gathering them up and
removing them from one place to another, which is about as far as we
humans have progressed in our science of cleaning up ❧ I was glad to
welcome the trillium. How one loves its quaint old name of wake-robin,
fitting title for this first harbinger of spring, that comes to us even
before the robin’s note is heard. Many of our common wild-flowers have
several names, but there is none with such invariably pretty ones as all
ages have united in bestowing upon wake-robin. Birth-root, our
forefathers called it, seeing the birth of the new year in its early
blossoming, and how many generations have known it as the
trinity-flower! But ’tis best known, I think, as wake-robin, and the
very breath of spring is in the name.

[Illustration: ❦]




A member of the great lily family is wake-robin ☙ It loves damp, shady
places and moist, rich valleys. On the Pacific Coast we do not find the
typical Eastern variety, but we have a variety of our own, tho’
unmistakably wake-robin. Its color varies from rich madder-red to
pale-pink, sometimes almost white. It grows from a thick, tuber-like
root, and the calyx has, surrounding its three red petals and three
green sepals, three broad, mottled-green leaves which, for some
unaccountable reason, our florists remove when they offer the flower for
sale. A strange whimsy, this. The poor blossoms, thus denuded, have a
bewildered, self-conscious air, such as may have been worn by the little
egg-selling woman of old, who awoke from her nap by the king’s highway
to find her petticoats shorn. Well may wake-robin thus question its own
identity. It is no longer the trillium of the forest: it is only the
trillium of commerce, a sad, unlovely object ❧

[Illustration]

A bank where wake-robin lifts its bonny head is always fair to see. The
plant has certain boon companions always sure to be close at hand. The
Solomon’s seal is one of these, its roots bearing to this day the round
marks imagined by the early foresters to be none other than the seal of
Solomon, the son of David, (on both of whom be peace!) ❧ There is no
more exquisite green than the beautiful, shining leaves of this plant,
with its tiny white bells of flowers. It has a near relative almost
always growing near it, that, with singular paucity of imagination, our
botanists have called “False Solomon’s Seal.”


Now we reveal our mental habits through this trick we have of falsifying
plants. We say “false” asphodel, “false” rice, “false” hellebore,
“false” spikenard and mitrewort, but the falsity is in our own vain
imaginings. The plants are as true as the earth that bears them, or the
rain and the sunshine that bring them to perfection. The Solomon’s seal
is one lily, the “false” Solomon’s seal another. Man may be false,
“perilous Godheads of choosing” are his, but the wild things of the
woods are true, each in the order of its nature ❧ There are no
complexities or subtilities about wake-robin, here by the streamside.
You may see it at a glance, for its principles are brief and
fundamental, as wise old Marcus Aurelius bids us let our own be, and
yet, the plant has had its vicissitudes; has met and solved its
problems. Reasoning from analogies, time must have been when, like
others of its great family, it grew in the water, floating out its broad
leaves, lolling at ease on the surface of swampy, watery places and
still ponds. Times changed. Lands rose and waters subsided, and
wake-robin found itself in the midst of new conditions. The problem of
self-support confronted it, and the plant solved it by divesting from
its broad, sustaining sepals nutriment to enable the long, swaying stem
to meet the new demands upon it. It still loves water and seeks cool,
damp woods and deep canyons, growing beside little streams where it
lifts its face to greet the springtime. It is probably not so big as
when it rested luxuriously upon the water, but it is wake-robin, still,
and it does more than summon the birds: it calls each of us back to
Nature, bidding us keep our hearts and souls alive to see, with each
renewing of springtime, and to love afresh, the miracles of Nature’s
redemptive force.

[Illustration: ❦]




The beauty of springtime, like the beauty of childhood, is always new.
All about me the things of Nature are still in the mystical, subtile
tenderness of their young, green growth. The golden days of autumn are
full of their own beauty. The grey days of winter’s mist and fog have
theirs, but there is something in the tender blue days of the rainy
springtime that sets the heart apraise, and ☙ brings out as nothing else
can, the meanings of leaf and bud, of flower and tree. It is raining,
now. Up above me, on the road, several picnickers who have been caught
in this April shower are hurrying to shelter ❧ They look down curiously
at me, here under the willow, and I have some misgiving as to whether
they are not setting an example that I should follow ❦ But I am sure
that it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains.
One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of
loveliness. There is, after all, a certain selective wisdom that sees
the desirability of taking the showers as they come.


There is something peculiarly tender and loving about an April shower.
One is so fully conscious, even while the drops are falling, that the
sun is shining behind the light clouds. And the drops themselves come
down so gently, tentatively offering themselves, as it were, to the
welcoming earth—pattering lightly on the leaves, and softly rippling the
surface of the little pool under the willows. That is a wonderful sort
of comparison the Hebrew poet gives us when he likens the teaching of
truth to the small rain upon the tender herb: the showers upon the green
grass ☙

The young colt in the stall, yonder, thrusts an eager head over the
half-door, and with soft black muzzle in the air, stands with open mouth
to catch the delicious trickle. The cattle on the hills seem glad of the
wetting. Even the birds have not sought shelter, and why should I? ☘ I
love to watch the leaves of the trees and plants, in the rain. They tell
us so many secrets about the life of which they are a part. Why, for
instance, does this pond lily spread out its broad, pleasant leaves upon
the water’s surface, while its cousin the brodeia has long, narrow,
grass-like leaves? Why do the leaves of the pungent wormwood, here,
stand rigidly pointing upwards, while those of this big oak are spread
out before the descending rain?


Watch the wormwood. See how the raindrops quiver for an instant on the
tips of the pinnate leaves, then follow one another in a mad chase down
the groove that traverses the center of each leaf. Notice that the leaf
itself rises from three ridges on the stem of the plant, and that
between these ridges lie shallow grooves down which the raindrops run to
the plant’s root. Now, we can tell from these signs what sort of a root
the wormwood has. I never pulled one of the plants, but I am sure that
if we were to do so we should find it to have a main tap-root, with no
branches. All such plants have leaves pointing upwards, and grooved
stems, admirably adapted to bring water to the thirsty roots. The beets
and the radishes afford us capital examples of this provision ❧

This alfileria has another arrangement of leaf, for this same purpose.
It is a widely spreading forage-plant, with an absurdly small root. It
needs a great deal of moisture, and so its stems are thickly set with
soft, fuzzy hairs, that catch the water and convey it to the root ❧
Growing all along the bank is the little chickweed, with its tiny white
star of a blossom. If it were not so common we should wax enthusiastic
over its beauty, and seek it for our garden borders. It has a running,
thread-like root, which receives the raindrops caught by the stem in a
single row of tiny hairs along its lower side, and sprinkled gently
down.

[Illustration: ❧]

[Illustration]




When a plant has a spreading root such as the willow, yonder, sends
down, the leaves spread outward and downward, from base to tip, letting
their gathered moisture down upon it. When the plant grows under water
its leaves are long and thread-like; for the supply of carbon is
limited, and they divide minutely, that the greatest possible surface
may be exposed to absorb it. If the stem grows until the leaves reach
the surface of the water they broaden and spread out, for here they get
an abundant food supply which they may freely appropriate, as none of it
need be diverted to build up a supporting stem. The water affords the
leaves ample support ❧ The grasses grow in blades for the same reason
that the plants growing under water put out slender, thread-like leaves.
The air-supply would seem abundant, but the grass-leaves are many, and
low-growing plants are numerous. So they divide and sub-divide, that
greater surface may be presented to the sunlight and the air. In this
form the blades are fittest to obtain their necessary food supply and
thus to survive. We see this same tendency in the leaves of the wild
poppy, the buttercup and all the great crowfoot family. Across the road
stretches a line of locusts, just now in dainty, snowy, fragrant
blossom. The individuality of a tree is a constant and delightful fact
in Nature. The locust is as unlike the oak or the willow as can well be
imagined, yet like them in taking on an added and characteristic
loveliness in the rain. How delicately the branches pencil themselves
against the blue and silver of the cloudy sky and the dark green of the
orchard beyond them! The leaves have such a purely incidental air. The
lines of the tree were, themselves, lovely enough in their green and
mossy wetness, to delight the eye. To deck them so laceywise in an
openwork of leaf and blossom was beneficent gratuity on the part of
Mother Nature, for the pleasing of her children.


Down below, where the creek widens, the sycamores have grown to great
size. How they help the heart, these gnarly giants, with the white
patches against the greys and blacks of their rough trunks! ❧ How they
spread their patches against the sky and beckon and point the beholder
upwards. The sylvan prophet bears a promise of good, and demands of
every passer-by the query of the wise old stoic: “Who is he that shall
hinder thee from being good and simple?”

Over the rounded hill, stealing softly, in Indian file, through the
mist, a row of eucalyptus trees climb, fringing up the slopes. These
ladies of the hilltop have a fashion of growing thus, and in no other
position is their delicate, suggestive beauty more apparent. The
eucalyptus is an original genius among trees, never repeating itself. It
stands for endless variety, for strong good cheer, for faith that seeks
and reaches and goes on, never wavering ❧ It blesses as well as delights
its friends. I love its wonderful, ever varying leaves, its up-reaching,
outstretching branches, and the annual surprise of its mystic
blossoming. Each tree is distinct and individual in its growth, yet
every one is typical of the genus.


It is a tree of the wind and the storm. See how those in yonder group
sway and courtesy, bow and beckon, advance and retreat in the light
breeze! And the rain does such marvels to them in the way of color,
tinting the leaves into wondrous things of glistening black-and-silver,
and bringing out exquisite, evasive greens and browns, red and rose
colors, tender blues and greys, from the trunks and branches ☘ All the
things of Nature are for man’s use and joy, but perhaps they serve their
very highest use when we return God thanks for their beauty ❦

Yes, I am sure that there is a wisdom wiser than the prudence which
sends us in out of the rain. The flowers and the grasses teach us more
than has ever been put between the covers of books. The trees bring us
the real news of the real world long before they are crushed into pulp
and made into the paper on which is printed our morning service from the
scandal monger and the stock broker. It was heralded as a marvelous
triumph of modern ingenuity when, the other day, a forest tree was cut
down and made into paper on which the news of the world was printed and
hawked along the streets within four and one-half hours from the moment
when the axe was laid at the root of the tree. Marvelously clever, that,
but shall we ever be wise enough to bring the trees themselves to the
city, instead? If we were but able to read the message they bear, the
newspaper might go away into outer darkness, whence it sprang.


[Illustration]

There is a fearful moment of reckoning before us should it ever chance
that when all our trees shall have been sacrificed on the altar of the
patron-fiend of news, the newspaper supply shall suddenly be cut off and
we find ourselves some fine morning minus our tidbits of shame and
failure and disaster, left to the companionship of our own thoughts ☘
Dante never imagined a terror like this ❧

But the sun has come out again. The rain is over and gone. Only the last
treasured drops chase one another along the leaves and down the stems of
the plants. Our picnickers are venturing forth ❧ The wet blades of grass
sparkle in the sunlight. Over on the bank a ruby-throated hummer is
flying back and forth across a tiny stream that patters and splashes
against a rock. These morsels of birds love a shower-bath and this
fellow now has one exactly to his mind. The clouds have drifted down the
sky and everything seems glad and grateful for “the useful trouble of
the rain.”

[Illustration: ❦]




Once upon a time man conceived the belief that this universe, with its
many worlds swinging through space, was created for him. He fancied that
the sun shone by day to warm and vivify him; that the stars of night
were none other than lamps to his feet; that the other animals existed
to afford him food and clothing—and sport; that the very flowers of the
field blossomed and fruited and were beautiful for his gratification. In
fact, man conceived the belief that instead of being the wise brother
and helper of this creation amidst which he moves, he was the great
central pivot upon which all revolves ☘

[Illustration]

A sorry lesson, surely, for man to read into the broad, open page of
Nature’s great book. Small wonder that to him in his meanness its
message came as “the painful riddle of the earth.” But it was the best
he could do: it is the best any of us can do until we have learned the
great lesson which the ancient Wise One has written out for us—which she
will teach us, in time, through death, if we will not let her teach it
through life: the lesson that use is not appropriation; that
appropriation sets use to groan and sweat under fardels of evil ❧

We are learning this lesson, with a bad grace, like blundering school
boys, fumbling at our hornbook, stuttering and stammering over the
alphabet of life, the while our minds wander stupidly off to the
playthings of our unholy civilization. Perhaps some day we shall spell
out something of this riddle which we have made so painful, and with the
lesson get somewhat of the humility that comes with knowing ❧

But now man does not read the book of Nature to much better purpose than
he reads those other volumes, written by himself, and bought by himself,
in bulk, to adorn his libraries: portly tomes to which he may point with
pride as evidence that at least his shelves hold wisdom, tho’ his head
may never.


I use no figure of speech when I say that we may now buy our books in
bulk. I saw, only this morning, the advertisement of a large dry goods
“emporium” (’tis laces and literature now) wherein is announced for sale
the bound volumes of a popular magazine. “Over eight pounds of the
choicest reading, bound in the usual style—olive green.” ❧

Nature has olive greens, too, in styles usual and unusual, and she has
marvelous messages for her lovers, but she cannot be bought in bulk, nor
put upon shelves, nor even carried in the head until she first be
received into the heart ❧ A little flaxen haired girl brought me, this
morning, a pure white buttercup on the stem with three yellow ones.

“See,” she said, “Here is one buttercup they forgot to paint.” ❧

I took the flower from her hand. I could not tell her just how it
happened that this one perianth was white, but I explained to her
something of how the others came to be yellow ☙ What we call a flower is
not, usually, the flower at all, but merely its petals. The real flower
is the cluster, in the center of the calyx, of pistils and their
surrounding pollen-bearing stamens. Away back in the ages when man had
not yet developed his æsthetic sense, perhaps even before he had learned
to make fire, the primitive flower bore only these pistils and stamens,
with a little outer protective whorl of green petals. It was fertilized
by the pollen falling upon the pistils.


But this was not good for the plant. Those flowers that in some way
became fertilized by pollen from other plants of the same variety, by
cross-fertilization, in fact, were healthier and stronger than those
fertilized by their own pollen. In such plants as wind-blown pollen
reached this cross-fertilization was an easy matter, but the buttercup
is not one of these. It is forced to rely upon insects for
fertilization. So the plant began to secrete a sweet drop at the base of
each green petal. Such insects as discovered this nectar and stopped to
sip were dusted with the pollen of the plant and carried it to other
flowers, where it fertilized the pistils, the insect gathering from
every blossom a fresh burden of pollen to be carried along on his
nectar-seeking round. This was very good, so far as it went, but the
flowers were pale and inconspicuous, and many of them, overlooked by the
insects, were never visited. Certain ones, however, owing to accidents
or conditions of soil and moisture, had the calyx a little larger, or
brighter colored than their fellows, and these the insects found. It
happened, therefore, if anything ever does merely happen, that the
flowers with bright petals were fertilized, and their descendants were
even brighter colored. Thus, in time, the buttercup, by the process
which, for lack of a better name, we call natural selection, came to
have bright yellow petals, because these attract the insect best adapted
to fertilize it ☙ If man’s æsthetic sense is gratified by the flower’s
beauty, why man is by so much the better off, but that man is pleased by
the bright color is not half so important to the buttercup as is the
pleasure of a certain little winged beetle which sees the shining golden
cup and knows that it means honey ☘ In the same way the lupin, yonder,
with its pretty blue and white blossoms, has developed its blue petals
because it is fertilized by the bees. They seek it as they do other
blossoms, not only for honey, but for the pollen itself, which stands
them in place of bread ☙ The very shape of the flower is due to the
visits of countless generations of this insect. The bee is the insect
best adapted to fertilize the lupin, and when he alights upon the
threshold of a blossom his weight draws the lower petal down, and
entering to suck the sweets he gets his head dusted with pollen. If a
fly were to gain entrance to the flower, he would carry away no pollen.
He is smaller than the bee, and his head could not reach it. So
honey-seeking flies alight in vain; their weight is not enough to press
the calyx open, so they may not enter and drink of its sweets. Yonder on
a blossom of the mimulus, the odd-looking monkey-plant, a honeybee just
had this same experience. The bumblebee is the only insect that is large
enough to reach the pollen in this blossom, and so its doors will open
only to him. Botanists tell us that all this great family, to which
belong the various peas blossoms and their cousins, were once
five-petaled plants, but natural selection has brought about their
present shape, which is an admirable protection against the depredations
of small insects that could only rob but could not fertilize the
flowers ❧

[Illustration]

Blue is the favorite color of the honeybee, and next to blue he prefers
red. So bee blossoms are blue or red.


Most of our small white flowers are fertilized by insects that fly at
night. This is the reason why white blossoms are more fragrant than
their bright-hued sisters. Bright colors could not be seen at night, but
the fragrance of the white flowers, always more noticeable by night than
by day, serves the same end—to attract the useful insects. This is an
essential part of Nature’s wonderful plan. The flower lives by giving ☙

There is an endless fascination in this page which Nature opens out
before us, in her upland pastures. A wise teacher once told me his
experience with a restless, unmanageable boy ☙ “I could do nothing with
him,” the teacher said, “until I got him interested in field life.” One
day this boy went off on a holiday tramp, returning the day following.
His teacher asked him what he had seen, and this is what he remembered
of his outing: “I camped in a field for the night,” said he, “and I saw
a bee light on a poppy and crawl in. The poppy shut up and caught him.
Next morning I woke up early and watched, and by and by the poppy opened
and the bee came out.” ☙ There are those who might have missed the
sacred significance of such a narrative, but that teacher was a very
wise man and he knew that the reading lesson given him then was a page
from his rough boy’s soul-life, and he conned it with reverent delight.
Life together was more real for them both after that day.


The keener our realization of the human love that is in the flowers, in
the trees, in all the wild life about us, the richer is our humanity,
the fuller our reception of life and love, the more thoughtful our use
of all the things of Nature becomes ❧ Once I saw an oriole weaving some
bits of string into his nest. He hung head downwards, by one string,
from a projecting branch, and worked, for nearly an hour, with beak and
claws. Then he flew away, triumphant. Later I saw his nest and
understood his action. He tied two pieces of string together in a very
respectable sort of knot: had wound the long cord thus obtained in and
out among the meshes of his nest and then, giving it a half-hitch about
a twig, had brought the free end up and tied it securely to another
small branch ❧

I felt grateful for what that bird had accomplished. All human
achievements seemed to me worthier after seeing him do this thing.
Nature teaches us so much if we will but keep still long enough to let
her: if we will only empty ourselves of conceit and knowingness, and get
rid of the notion that all things, Nature included, are made for us. We
are not the lords of creation. We are only a small part, albeit the
highest part, of it all, and the better we learn this lesson the better
men and women we shall become.

[Illustration: ❦]

[Illustration]




I was sitting here beside the stream, watching the bees swarm in and out
at the entrance to their hive, when Hercules passed by. “Come and watch
the bees,” I called as he passed. “They are interesting.” ☘

He stood and studied the busy workers, intent upon the business of their
miniature society ☘

“I wonder,” he said at last, “if our human reason shall ever evolve a
system half so perfect as the one that mere instinct has taught these
feeble insects.” As I was silent he continued:

“Well, at all events, I can learn one lesson from the bees, and be about
my business. If society is ever to be freed from its burdens every soul
must do its full duty. One life wasted means a whole world hindered just
that much.” And Hercules was gone to his labors ❧

How fearful we all are of wasting our lives, yet so rarely fearful for
the results of the ceaseless activity with which we crowd them ❦ But
Hercules’ words are full of suggestiveness. Is our boasted human reason
really less adequate to the needs of our life than is what we call the
instinct, this thing that looks so much more reasonable than our reason,
of the lower orders? What if, after all, we are making a desperate
mistake in supposing that it is this faculty which we call reason that
distinguishes us from the brute creation?


It is because the bees and the other dumb creatures have nothing more
than this measure of reason which we call instinct, that it serves them
perfectly. Man has something else, that draws him higher; that prompts
him further. But alas for us! With the destiny to live perfectly as
human beings, we yet long for the restrictions through which we may live
perfectly as the beasts. We seek our lessons from the brutes while the
Eternal waits to teach us. We cannot live like the beasts. The divine
human spark within us will not let us. We must live higher than they or
we shall live lower, for our perfection of order is infinitely higher
than theirs, and our failure immeasurably lower than they can sink ❧

But we go on, we modern Athenians, seeking to ameliorate the conditions
we have brought upon society by our own stupid disobedience and
inhumanity, and only now and then do we have a faint suspicion that our
newest thoughts are but mere rephrasings of ideas old as thought
itself ❧

Men get these new sets of phrases and dress therein the ideas that
underlie the universe. We apply the terms of science to the old faiths
and think we have invented a new religion. We find new names for God
Himself, and believe ourselves to have discovered a new life-principle ☙
Loving the neighbor becomes enlightened altruism, and lo, faith is born
anew, with a subtiler power to redeem the world.


[Illustration]

Hercules is a Socialist. He always spells society with a great S, and he
declares in the present state of Society we can take no thought for
individuals ☘ “The individual may perish,” he says, in moments of
eloquence, “but the integrity of Society must be jealously
maintained.” ☙

I wonder, as I sit here watching the bees, whether Society might not,
after all, find easement from its ails if each individual of us, myself
and Hercules included, should pay strict attention to our individual
business of growing, or becoming humanized? ✪

Just here at my hand a bee has alighted and is burying its nose in a
clover blossom. Here is an example of a life that is lived only for
Society, yet so important is the individual in the opinion of this
highly perfected body social, that I have seen half a dozen bees, when a
laden worker has arrived at the hive opening, weighted down, too
exhausted to do other than drop, helpless, upon the threshold, rush to
its assistance, relieve it of its heavy load and help it to pass within
to gather strength for further effort. The strict individualist
complains, in turn, of the bees because they have no individual life; no
existence separate from the hive. This is true, but what higher
individuality can any creature desire than is comprised and summed up in
the divine opportunity to bring his individual gift to the common store?


I have picked the clover blossom that the bee just left. Beside it are
growing other blossoms, and I gather a couple. They are the veriest
wayside weeds—dandelion and dog-fennel—but they are important because
they are typical representatives of the largest order in the floral
kingdom; an order which, although it was the last to appear in the
vegetable world, has outstripped every other and leads them all today.
Botanists call it the Composite Order. Its members are really floral
socialists, just as Hercules and the rest of us who believe that
government is an order of nature, and good for the race, are human
socialists, whether we know it or not.


But most of us hold a mistaken idea about the relation of the individual
to the whole. We are apt to theorize that it is the duty of the
individual to keep the whole in order, and a good many of us are fully
convinced that the world owes us a living. So it does, and it behooves
each one of us to be faithful in discharging his individual share of the
aggregate debt ❧ Nature has a whole page about that in her wonderful
volume ❧

Take, for instance, this clover. What we call the blossom is, in
reality, many blossoms ☙ Look at the mass under a glass. You will see
that the clover head is made up of numerous minute cups in a compact
cluster. Each cup is a perfect blossom. As we now see it in the clover
it is a tiny tube, but it once possessed five slender petals which are
now united ☙ The little pointed scollops that rim the cup suggest these
petals. Now, the tiny cup is descended from a five-petaled ancestor,
growing upon its individual stem and depending upon insects for its
fertilization. The flower was small, however, and many of them must have
been overlooked by the insects ❧

But those blossoms that, growing very close together, formed little
clusters, were more conspicuous than the solitary ones, and were
discovered, visited for their honey and incidentally fertilized by the
winged freebooters. These blossoms bore fruit and their descendants
inherited the social instinct prompting them to draw together that each
might give the other its help and co-operation in attracting the
insects. So, by degrees, the co-operative habit became fixed in the
clover, and in many other plants, until the compositæ became a botanical
fact. In other words, the individuals formed a body social of their own,
growing from a compact cluster from a common stem, each giving and
receiving, constantly, its use and share in the common life. The
many-petaled flowers found it inconvenient to arrange themselves in the
composite order, and so, as we see in the clover, the petals have
pressed closely together and united to form a tube-shaped flower, and as
the tubular form is best adapted to receive fertilization by the bee,
which insect is the most useful to the clover blossom, that form has
been perpetuated in this plant.


Thus by the simple process of each individual giving itself to the
common life, the mutual protection and development of the whole, this
order of plants has become the largest in the floral kingdom. The
compositæ have circled the globe. They fill our hothouses and flourish
in our gardens; they greet us by the dusty road, and in the summer
woods. The lovely golden-rod, the sturdy asters, the aristocratic
chrysanthemums, the dainty daisies all belong to this great order. So
does helianthus, the big, beaming sunflower.


It is quite true that each blossom of the compositæ has given its life
to the race. But what if, after all, life with our fellows is a giving
instead of the receiving we are wont to think it? ❧ What if, after all,
the true outlook upon Society will one day show us that our neighbor is
put here that we may have the great, the inestimable joy of living for
him? ❧

All matter is made up of molecules, Science tells us, and there is
another Voice as of one having authority, which tells us that One hath
made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell upon the face of the
earth ❧

[Illustration]

We humans are but larger molecules in the body social. We live only in
so far as the common life flows through us. We never fully, in our
plans, and by a wonderful provision of Divine Wisdom we cannot give one
another that which is really and unmistakably our own. No human thought,
even, ever traveled a straight course from one human soul to another and
was received exactly as it was sent. We live our lives each within the
molecular envelope of his individual body, and we can no more mix, in
reality, than the molecules mix. We live only in the flux and reflux of
the Life of all, and only as we pass this on have power to receive.


It is when life is fullest that we turn to our fellows. Those of us who
are true know that then we need them most, and so, our real drawings
together are in order that we may give. We know this in that secret part
of us where lies what most of us call our human weakness, but we are
faithless to the knowledge, and choose to live on a lower plane, within
that outer circle which we call knowing ☙ We think we come together to
receive, but who of us does not know the emptiness of death that lies in
such coming? We are all a little better than this. In secret we know
that it is more blessed to give than receive, but we are ashamed of the
knowledge ❦

We are less simple and true than the dandelion, the dog-fennel and the
sweet-clover here in the grass. The small common blossoms grow so
cheerily one is glad to come back to them. It is true that not one wee
tube or strap or head in any cluster could have much life outside the
aggregate blossom, but the integrity and perfection of each is an
essential factor in the integrity and perfection of the whole. The tiny
single flower that I can pull from this dandelion seems but an
insignificant speck, but, by and by, could it have been let alone, it
would, its ripeness and perfection attained, have taken to itself wings
and sailed fluffily off upon the breeze to renew its life perhaps a
thousand miles from here. Seeing it float through the air a poet might
have found it a theme for a sonnet. A scientist might have seen
universal law embodied in its structure, or a seer have reasoned from it
to life eternal.


[Illustration]

Yet, but for the co-operation of its fellows in the body floral, it
could not have lived any more than, save for its fellows, what we know
as the dandelion could have lived. The law of co-operation, like all of
Nature’s laws, makes for rightness and fitness all along the line ⚜ She
teaches us, with ever-repeated emphasis, the lesson of independence of
kind. The isolated being is, everywhere, the comparatively helpless
being. The tree growing by itself in the open field often attains to
more symmetrical perfection and beauty than the tree in the crowded
forest, but woodmen tell us that the forest tree makes better timber ☙

We must live with and for our fellows, but he does this best who, in the
quiet order of the common life, opens widest his soul to the Source
thereof, and growing to the full stature of a man helps on to perfection
what should be that composite flower of the race, our human
civilization.

[Illustration: ❦]

[Illustration]




The little spring here gushes up and then sweeps away along a stony bed
overgrown with brakes and tares. On its margin, amid a tangle of wild
blackberry, I have come upon a forest of scouring-rush ☙

It is a quaint growth. I love to put my face close to the earth and,
looking through the rushes’ green stems, to fancy myself a wee brownie,
wandering among a ☘ dense wilderness of pines. The development of the
miniature trees is an interesting process ❦ First the ground is covered
with slender brown fingers ❧ thrusting up through the soil. These grow
rapidly, and in a few days spread out their brief, verticillate branches
to the breeze, as proudly as any great tree might do. Here is a tiny
finger just pointing upward; yonder towers the giant of the lilliputian
forest, fully half-a-foot high. “Scouring-weed,” says the farmer,
contemptuously, “they aint no good. Some call ’em horsetail.”


In fact, the queer, witchy little things have a number of names:
candle-rush, scouring-rush, horsetail, and their own proper appellation,
equisetum. I have gathered a number of the little trees and they lie
side by side in my palm while my mind tries to recall a few of the facts
that go to make up the plant’s wonderful history. Our grandmothers used
to strew their floors with it, that no careless tread might soil the
snowy boards. They used it, as well, for scouring, hence its name. Those
who seek correspondences between the natural and physical kingdoms find
the rush an emblem of cleansing, and this is precisely the office which,
since earliest creation, it has filled for the world. For our
scouring-rush was not always the puny, insignificant thing we see it. It
belongs to the carboniferous age. It has nothing to do with our modern
civilization. It had reached its highest perfection and entered upon its
downward career before man appeared on the earth. Its progenitors
flourished with the giant ferns, the great, rank mosses, and all the
rest of the carbon-storing vegetation. A mighty tree was our little rush
in those days, growing several hundred feet tall and spreading out its
huge whorls of branches in every direction. So we find it today, in the
anthracite beds of the eastern slope. What happened to it that we should
know it, living, as this degenerate creature of the bog?


In the carboniferous age the air surrounding the earth was much warmer
than at present, warmer than we find it in the tropics. The great mass
which constitutes this globe was not yet cool enough to support any very
high forms of life. There were no trees, as we now understand the word,
and there was very little animal life. Beetles crawled about, spiders
and scorpions, and salamanders big as alligators, but there were no
mammals, no birds ❧ The world was in twilight, reeking with moisture,
steaming in the warm air which it filled with all sorts of noxious
gases. It rained aquafortis and brimstone, and the sweating earth sent
these up again in deadly fog-banks of poisonous vapor ❧

[Illustration]

These were the conditions that our big rush loved. Its huge spongy stem
and branches drank in life from the death-laden atmosphere. Its great
creeping rootstocks soaked it up from the morass beneath and the rush
grew luxuriantly. Its office was indeed a cleansing one, to purify the
atmosphere and make it fit to sustain animal life. In time, as the huge
primeval trees reached maturity, they died, and the mighty stems fell
back in the bog. Then came some great upheaval, some cataclysm of nature
such as we find everywhere recorded in her rocky books. The land rose or
sank, and the rocks and debris of the sea floor were thrown upon the
decaying vegetation. It was pressed and compressed beneath this weight.
The fronds of the huge ferns; the tall stems of the giant rushes; the
monstrous club-mosses, and the primeval forest became a peat-bog. Still
greater pressure—a longer lapse of aeons, and the peat became coal.


We burn them now, in our grates, the progenitors of these feeble things
lying here, limply, in my palm. Is it not, as I said, a wonderful
history the frail thing has. A degenerate stock, botanists call it. So
are its cousins the ferns degenerate, with no botanical Nordau to sound
warning against them. But degenerates tho’ they all are, they have still
the spirit of the pioneer. They dwell in the outposts of vegetable
civilization. We do not find them flourishing where Nature is in her
gentlest moods ❦ Once, down in the crater of an active volcano,
half-a-mile from any soil, growing from a sulphur-stained black-lava
floor, I found a clump of waving green ferns, as high as my head,
spreading out their broad fronds as though to cover and hide the
terrible nakedness of the unfinished earth. A thousand years from now a
grain-field may spread where now those frail green plumes have just
begun their gracious work.


This clothing of the earth and the cleansing of the air are the tasks
the giant rushes helped to perform for the young world. During the
process the rank gases of the atmosphere were gradually stored up within
their great stems. Liberated, now, in our grates and retorts they give
us heat and light. Then, the atmosphere becoming purer, the earth cooled
and life sustaining, new growths appeared. All the conditions were
improved, but the improvement meant death to the big rush. It was
starving. It could not find food in the thin air. Its roots could not
suck up enough moisture to sustain life. It became smaller and smaller.
Flowers and seeds it had never borne. It now gave up its leaves. Between
every two whorls of branches on the scouring-rush we find a little
brown, toothed sheath encircling the stem. In the days of the plants’
prosperity each of these teeth was a leaf, but now the rush can maintain
no such extravagance as leaves, so there remain only these poor
survivals. The stem is hollow, and is divided, between the whorls of
branches, into closed sections, or joints. It has also an outer ring of
hollow tubes, through which moisture is drawn up from the soil, to feed
the branches. The rush is a little higher order of creation than the
fern, but it is a cryptogram; that is, a plant never bearing true seeds,
but propagating by spores ❧

And so, fallen upon hard lines, chilled, stunted by the cold, but having
a brief span of life when the spring rains have made the earth wet and
warm, and before the summer heat has come to wither it, we have our
scouring-rush only a few inches high.

[Illustration: ☘]

[Illustration]




And this branched stem which we see is not fertile. ’Tis enough for it
to support its waving green feather. The fertile stems are not branched.
They appear above the earth, pale and shrinking; put forth no branches,
but live a brief season, develop their spores and disappear ❧

The growth of the scouring-rush seems to me to show something beautiful,
as well as interesting. There is a certain light-hearted gaiety in the
waving, tree-like thing which makes one forget that it is a degenerate
stock, and doomed to destruction. Still a little work remains for it to
do: still some waste places and miasmatic bogs to be cleansed and
purified, and so the little rush grows on, the merest shadow of its once
opulent self. I am sure that the last horsetail to be seen on earth will
grow just as breezily, as greenly and as cheerily as any now waving in
this make-believe enchanted forest at my feet ❧

And who knows what may be the fate of that which was the real life of
that ancient plant—the forces of light and heat set free in our furnaces
and forges, to begin, again, their office of ministering use? ❧

Did the giant rush die? Does anything die? Ages have seen the rushes
fall and pass from sight, to wake to glorious light in the leaping
flames. We see leaves fall each year and turn to mold from which other
life-forms spring. There will be other poppies, next year, where yonder
orange-red blossoms nod in the breeze. The waving grain, already headed
out and bowing under its burden of raindrops, was but a few months since
a mere handful of dry kernels. They were cast upon the ground, and they
died, if that tossing sea of green is death. We see these things
recurring upon every side of us, yet we still go up and down the earth
demanding of prophet, priest and poet: “If a man die shall he live
again?” ☙

A far cry from the little sprigs of scouring-rush in my hand? But Life
is a far cry, from Everlasting through Eternity, and who shall say, of
the least of these, its manifestations, “It is no good?”

[Illustration: ❦]

[Illustration]




Down among the watercresses, an hour ago, studying the movements of a
mammoth slug, I was startled by a shadow that fell directly across my
hands. At the same moment there was an excited flurry and scurrying to
shelter, among a tuneful mob of song-sparrows who, all unmindful of my
presence, were teetering close beside me upon the tall mustard stalks
that swayed beneath their weight ❧

[Illustration]

Looking upward I saw, between me and the sun, a pigeon-hawk soaring on
motionless wings in the freedom of the upper air. I watched him with a
joy that had no touch of envy, as he circled widely against the sky,
rising, falling, swerving, returning, with scarcely a dip of the strong,
outstretched wings ☙ High though he poised, my thought could reach him;
strong though his flight, my fancy could follow and outstrip him. He,
high above the mountain-tops, gazed downward to the earth. His thoughts,
his desires were here. To materialize them he mounted the air. With my
feet upon the earth; with no palpable pinions wherewith to climb the
ether, yet have I moments of being, more trusty than he, a creature of
the sky ☙




Something of this ☘ passed through my brain as I watched the circling
hawk. Once, with a flash of his strong wings, he made a downward turn
and, swift and still, he dropped earthward ❧ Then, as if frustrated in
whatever had been his design, he wheeled again and climbed as swiftly up
the air ☙

I like that phrase as describing the flight of a bird. It is so
literally what the creature does. A bird is not superior to gravitation.
But for that force he would be the helpless victim of every little
breeze, like a balloon, which is unable to shape a course or do anything
but float helplessly before the wind. The balloon floats because it is
lighter than the air, but the air which the bird displaces is lighter
than he, and he only moves in it by virtue of his ability to extract
from it, by the motion of his wings, sufficient recoil to propel himself
forward. He rises, as do we humans, by means of that which resists him ❧

I love to watch the seagulls. They do this so perfectly, and seem to
delight to give us lessons in ærial navigation as they dip and whirl and
call about the steamers, on the Bay. Their wings are so easy to study
while in action. The first joint, to where the wing bends back and
outward, is strong and compact, cup shaped underneath. The second joint
tapers. The feathers are long and do not overlap so closely as do those
of the first joint, and at the free end they spread out and turn upward.
The upper surface of the wing is convex, the lower surface concave. In
flying the wings are thrown forward and downward. Flying is not a
flapping of the wings up and down, and if a bird were to strike its
wings backward and downward, as its manner of flight is so often
pictured, it would turn a forward somersault in the air.


Structurally the wing of a bird is a screw. It twists in opposite
directions during the up and down strokes, and describes a figure of 8
in the air. The bird throws its wings forward and downward. The air is
forced back and compressed in the cup-shaped hollows of the wings, and
these latter, by the recoil thus obtained, drag the body forward ☙ This
resistance of the air is absolutely essential to flight. We who think
that, but for the buffetings of hard fate, we, too, might soar high and
fly free in the upper realm of endeavor, should watch the efforts of the
birds in a calm. We shall scarcely see them flying. If impelled to
flight, by necessity, the process is a most laborious one. There being
no resisting wind on which to climb (birds always fly against the wind)
the climber must, by the rapid action of his wings, establish a recoil
that will send him along. Watch the little mud-hen, flying close to the
surface of the water, ready to dive the instant its timidity takes
fright. Its wings vibrate swiftly, unceasingly, for it rarely rises high
enough above the water to have advantage of the air currents. For it
there are no long, soaring sweeps through the air; no freedom from the
labors of its cautious flight. It is a very spendthrift of effort
because of the timidity that never lets it rise to the sustaining forces
just above its head. To climb the sky is not for him who hugs cover.


To fly! The very thought sets the nerves atingle. It is joy to be
afloat, “with a wet sheet and a flowing sea and a wind that follows
fast.” It is a joy to be on the back of a swiftly running horse, with
the wind rushing away from your face as you ride, bearing every care
from your brain ❧ But to traverse the air—to fly! This joy we long for:
we have an indisputable, an inalienable right to long for it. To what
heights may we rise? This, after all, is the question that concerns us.
Sordid, creeping wights that we are, constantly referring our heavenward
aspiration to the desire of the mortal, we still

                “To man propose this test—
                Thy body, at its best,
          How far can that project its soul on its lone way?”


Our very protests, our kicking against the pricks that would incite us
to higher effort are but our blind fear lest, after all, they should not
mean flight. We are afraid of our moments of faith; ashamed of our
aspiring impulse, the upward impulse that throbbed through all life
since the world was born. We send forward our souls if haply they should
find God, while we remain behind to weigh and test their evidence when
they return to us—if they ever do, hugging the surface the while, lest a
sustaining breath of spiritual force lift us clean above the safe
shelter in which we may dive altogether should our returning souls bring
back news of the meanings of life, scaring us to cover, after all, by
the thought that we ourselves, are heaven and hell ❧

[Illustration]

Usually we are content to grovel. We traverse our little round and
declare it to be destiny. We prate of the limitations of our humanity,
forgetful of that humanity’s limitless capacity to receive. With
insincere self-abasement we declare ourselves to be worms of the dust,
and the spirits of light who look upon us may readily believe our
assertions ☙

But there are moments when the scales fall from our eyes. We get
fleeting glimpses, then, of the meaning and the end of our human nature.
We know that it is in the skies. We know that we have ourselves
fashioned the chain that binds us to earth. We know that we were made
for flight, and we know that we know all this. Still afar in the sky the
hawk soars, with downward gaze seeking his desire. Still, tho’ my feet
are upon the earth, my spirit fares upward in its flight toward its
desire, above and beyond its strong wings’ farthest flight.

[Illustration: ❧]

[Illustration]




I wonder whether the restless impulse that sends city folks hill-ward in
the springtime is not a part of the Divine Plan that would lead us all
to lift up our eyes to the hills whence our help cometh. They flock up
here, the city folks, during these first spring days, to eat their
luncheons by the roadside and to fill their hands with the poppies and
wild hyacinth, the blue-eyed grass and pimpernel that everywhere dot the
young meadows’ glowing green. I hear, at night-fall, mother’s voices
calling the little ones to prepare for home-going, and I love to see the
contented parties go wandering down, the tiniest tired climber usually
sound asleep in his father’s arms with the sun’s last rays caressing the
small face. It is good for them to be here. There is, in the dumbest of
us, a faint stirring of recognition that the hope and promise of life
are in the young year. This love of the childhood of things is the best
thing our human nature knows: the best because there is in it the least
of self. It is a different thing from the love of new beginnings. It is
not new beginnings, but first principles that the soul seeks, now, and
so we climb the hills, as naturally as the daisies look upward, leaving
behind us the pitiful aims that end in self and belong to the dead
level.


In the springtime love awakens, born anew in the green wonder of the
season’s childhood. Yonder where the road climbs the hill the sunlight
is sifting in long bars through the eucalyptus trees, making a brown and
golden ladder all along the way. In everything is the fresh, tender
suggestion of a Sunday afternoon in the springtime. The air is full of
the scent of swamp-willow and laurel, and the breath of feeding cattle
on the hills ❧

By the roadside He and She walk shyly apart. They could scarcely clasp
hands across the space that separates them, yet one seeing them knows
their hearts are close together. The blue sky arches over them: the soft
clouds pass lightly above their heads: the sunbeams bring brighter
rounds for the brown and golden ladder his feet and hers tread lightly.
They are palpably “of the people.” Her hands are roughened and red from
toil. His shoulders are bent by the early bearings of heavy burdens.
Neither He nor She is over twenty years old, and they are poor, as some
count riches, but to them, together, has come the sweetness of life, and
He and She are walking on the heights ❧


Yesterday they were but a boy and a girl, but today He to her is
Manhood; She, to him, is Womanhood, and in this great human wilderness
they have reached out and found each other. Could anything be more
wonderful than this? Could anything exceed in beauty this secret of
theirs that he who runs may read in every line of their illumined
faces? ❧

Students versed in the ’ologies: sociologists, philanthropists,
economists and progressionists of every sort, we know all that you would
say. We have heard your arguments time and again. We have listened to
your statistics and watched the shaking of your head over these unions
of the poor. But the wisdom of life is wiser than men, else He and She
would do well to listen to you instead of walking together here on the
hill road. They do not know these things that we are seeking to reduce
to what we call social science; and if they should know them, what then?
Are they not of more value than many sparrows? ❧

[Illustration]

The afternoon shadows lengthen. Home-going groups are beginning the long
descent. The voices of little children calling to one another silverly
over the hillside. He and She are not hastening. They have loitered
along to where a bend in the road affords a wide outlook upon the city
below, the gleaming bay, the white-winged ships coming in through the
Golden Gate, the distant hills. In her hand are some poppies which he
gathered.


Down to the western horizon sinks the sun. The gold has faded from the
road, leaving it a winding ribbon of grey. The crests of the hills and
the gently swelling uplands are flooded with crimson light. It touches
the eucalyptus trees into glory and flames in splendor along the western
sky. It lights her face and his as they stand transformed before each
other. They do not know that the crimson light has made them beautiful.
They think the beauty each sees is the other’s, a part of their
wonderful discovery, and who shall say that either is wrong? It is we
who are blind, and not love. Indeed, love, alone, sees clearly.
External, temporal conditions have made his body less than noble; have
crossed his face with dull, heavy lines. They have narrowed her mental
horizon and imprisoned her soul in a poor little cage, but He and She
are held above these, now. They have been touched by the finger of God,
and have seen each other’s beauty, the beauty that is their human right;
that once seen is never, again, wholly lost.


The crimson has faded to rose, the rose to ☘ wonderful green—the green
has turned to ❧ white. The early moon has come out to light the hill.
Hand in hand they are passing down the road. Hand in hand they are going
through life, toiling together, bearing together the burdens Fate brings
to them. They know not what these may be. It is not given them to know
the future, or by taking thought to lighten its ills or explain the
blunders that have heaped these up. They have no strength or power, but
to them has been given love ❦

Will love be theirs when Spring is gone and the summer drouth is upon
them; when Autumn’s harvest time is passed them by and Winter’s breath
has chilled their blood? Will love be theirs when, hand in hand, in the
uncertain white light, they journey down the hill of life? ❧

The cynic smiles at the question. The scientist deprecates it.
Philanthropist and sociologist shake their heads ⚜

Let it pass. Love is theirs now. The universe is theirs, for each to
each is universal. The Life of the universe is in them, and in the
shimmering radiance that lights the way, silvering the city and making
long, shining paths across the distant water as they go walking down the
hill road.

[Illustration: ❦]

[Illustration]

 SO HERE THEN ENDETH UPLAND ☘
 PASTURES BY ADELINE KNAPP AS
 PRINTED BY ME, ELBERT HUBBARD,
 AT THE ROYCROFT PRINTING SHOP
 IN EAST AURORA, NEW YORK, U.S.A.

[Illustration]

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
 2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
 3. The author often used the small plant symbols as end of sentence
      punctuation.
 4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.