



Produced by Anthony J. Adam





MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE


By 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 temperament, 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