Under the trees

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I. OUR TENT PITCHED • 9

II. THE GARDEN AND GARDENS 14

I. Our Tent Pitched

It is said that fools build houses and wise men live in them. This is not true of the place where we have now set up our household gods, and in the midst of confusion yet feel already a sense of at-home-ativeness, never enjoyed more completely since the sunny days of childhood. For it was a wise man who chose this spot for his house, and here made for himself a home. His judgment, taste, and skill are seen all over it, and if in this changing world it has finally fallen into our hands, we will not call him unwise, but rather be glad that he was led to make it what it is, that it might be all the more enjoyable for us.

It is on the banks of the Hudson. From this rustic seat where I am writing you might throw a stone far into the river. Twenty miles or more of this glorious stream, embracing the whole of Tappan Zee, lie in full view, and from the house some forty or fifty miles of river, forest, and mountains spread themselves continuously at our feet. Between five and six> acres of land, chiefly covered with old trees, a wild glen crossed by rustic bridges on the southern side of it, walks winding through the woods lO UNDER THE TREES.

and in constant sight of the waters, garden and fruits and flowers, which for many years have been coming to their present condition, ornamental shade-trees, and evergreens arranged to give effect and beauty to the lawn and landscape, are the outline features of the place. It is the midst of spring. The cherry-trees have been in full bloom, and the apples and pears are now getting to blows. The birds have a carnival of song all over the woods, and about sunrise they seem to meet for morning praise, and hold a concert near the house. Three pairs of them have built their nests in the piazzas, and are as much at home as any of the family. They shall have their board and lodging without charge, and the longer they stay, the better we shall like it.

We have not been here a week, and have yet to learn by experience the various inconveniences which every place in this world has j but just now every thing is around us to make up the comfort and beauty of a rural home. It is about twenty miles from the city, and the railroad and steamboat take us to town or from it a dozen times a day, if we should wish to go so often. It is about three miles below the Sunnyside of Washington Irving, and in the midst of scores of our fellow-citizens who have found on the eastern bank of the Hudson River the most elegant, costly, and healthful situations for their summer residences. Every part of the Hudson River is so beautiful that each inhabitant of the shore and the adjacent hills thinks his own spot the most beautiful, and he can make a very good argument in support of his opinion. But the region that we are in, and which is in full view of the old arbor under the trees, has been made classic by the pen and the life and death of Irving, "whose placid and genial humor has rendered every subject and every place that

OUR TENT PITCHED. II

he touched immortal in the affections of his countrymen. This Tappan Sea was the terror of the early Dutch navigators, who made its perilous passage with more fear and trembling than their children feel when crossing the ocean. It is the widest portion of the river, being three or four miles. We are constantly tempted to look out on the ever-changing surface of the water. The steamboats that pass, more than hourly, enliven and diversify the view. A lady sitting by me was a passenger on the first steamer that ever disturbed the waters of the Hudson, and of course the first in the world ! What changes have since come over the shores and over the world !

Yet she is only years of age, and has seen all the

progress of the country and the age since that experiment of Fulton's was made, revolutionizing the commerce and intercourse of mankind.

Those who have been on the Rhine delight to speak of its romantic beauty, its vine-clad hillsides, its castlecrowned crags, and mighty fortresses. A day on the Rhine is a lifetime picture of beauty and grandeur. But it is not patriotism alone that challenges the Rhine or any other to compete with this tranquil river in majestic scenery and picturesque effects. Long may it be before its heights are crowned with citadels, and its people fortified against their neighbors. A few miles of the Rhine are exceedingly lovely, but a day's voyage on the Hudson furnishes far more enchanting scenery, and to a dweller on its banks it spreads a perpetual feast.

And here we have pitched our tent. Strangers and pilgrims on the earth, as all our fathers were, it is well to feel that "this is not our rest." We have no continuing city, no abiding-place. Others have been in these beautiful groves. This rustic summer seat, falling into decay.

speaks of former possessors who doubtless here sat down to stay, but the places that then knew them will know them no more. It may be so with us, even if the stream of life, like this bright, clear river, should flow on these many years.

The current of thought has been broken by a thundersfiower that drove me to a better shelter. The sight and sound were another of the entertainments to which we are invited. For an hour or two I had been observing the clouds in the upper bay, and around Mount Taurn they were black with signs of a storm. The sun was obscured, but this was pleasant toward the close of a warm day. Presently a sharp crack of a thunderbolt and the glare of the lightning filled the air, and the rain came in torrents. It was short and sweet. The dark cloud pursued its path down the river, its footsteps in the deep ; and soon the sun tricked his beams and stood out in the western sky, more lustrous than before the rain. He has just sunk down into a bed of golden clouds, that lie on the hills directly in front of us. A broad belt of sunlight stretches across the river; the whole western firmament is aglow ; the vessels that cross the track of the sunshine are covered with the light of it as if they had been suddenly set on fire, and all nature at this evening hour seems to rejoice and be glad in the beauty of its fresh verdure, refreshed with showers. It is very still now. Nothing breaks in on the silence of the hour and the scene but the murmurs of the tree-tops, and the gentle wash of the water on the shore.

" The time, how lovely and how still,

Peace shines and smiles on all below ;

The plain, the stream, the wood, the hill —

All fair with evening's setting glow."

OUR TENT PITCHED. 1 3

It is hard to make it real that so much calmness, peace, and beauty can be and abound in a world with evil in it. It is a beautiful world ; and the true heart swells gratefully to its Maker in the midst of loveliness and glory like this. " Every prospect pleases." The earth is going to rest, and soon the voices of tired nature will be silent. But the praise of God goes up with evening hymns from all the dwellers on the river-side, and from those across the stream, and from these crowded steamers that are rushing by on their journeys. Who can be thankless in such a world, with God all around us, and a better world than this to come ?

THE GARDEN AND GARDENS.

It is high time that the gardens were made and the vegetables fairly on their way toward perfection. But we were so late in coming into the country that we can make no attempt this year to have things early.

While out before breakfast this morning among the roses, radishes, and cucumbers, it occurred to me that the first labor of our first parent, father Adam, was something of the same, for he was placed by his infinitely wise Creator in a garden to dress and keep it. When he awoke from one of his earliest sleeps, and found by his side a full-blown bride, he had such a vision of beauty as his eyes afterward never saw in the fairest flowers that sprang beneath his fostering hands. And when they went together to their morning work, in that Eden which the Lord made for them before he made them, they found it of all conceivable employments the most congenial to their innocence and purity. I believe in the garden of Eden ; the tree of knowledge of good and evil ; the tree of life ; the serpent : the temptation ; the fall that " brought death into the world, and all our woe." It is a thousand times harder to believe the miserable substitutes for the history of the Bible, than to take it as it is and admit that the greatest miracle was creation. After believing that the world was made out of nothing, it is easy enough to believe all the rest.

THE GARDEN AND GARDENS. 1 5

Out in the early morning upon the paths of nature, and communing with God in the works of his hands, it is sweet beyond expression \o feel that the same hands which fashioned the heavens, and hung out the stars, and decked the earth with lovehness, what time the sons of God shouted for joy, made the first garden, and planted the flowers and the fruits, watered them with the rivers of his pleasure, and made for his creatures a Paradise in which he himself loved to walk in the cool of the day and converse with them, his loving children, as friend with friend. There was some wise design in this arrangement of his; and from that glad morning in which our primeval ancestors began their work to the present hour, no employment on earth has been found to combine more completely the idea of the useful and the beautiful than this, from the effect of which just now I confess some aches and pains that are hardly in harmony with that last line. But we shall get used to it shortly, and then the work will be more like play, and leave only pleasant reminders in renovated health and increasing vigor.

And since those good old times when Adam and Eve were alone in their glory of innocence and beauty, their children have in all ages spent their highest skill and strength in the embellishment of the garden. Among the wonders of the world were the hanging gardens of Babylon. With what a lavish hand did King Solomon adorn his gardens, pursuing the study and culture of plants till he knew them all, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall. Yet a greater than Solomon has told us that in all his glory he was not arrayed like one of his own flowers, and that one of the most delicate — the lily. Ten years ago I was climbing up the hill of Samaria, where even now, after the rains of two thousand years have washed its terraces, we can yet see the remains of magnificent beauty that once environed its slopes and crowned its smnmit, making it a gorgeous spectacle, probably unsurpassed by any thing on the earth in the days of Herod the Great. And away on the banks of the Bosphorus are " the Gardens of the Blessed," where the daughters of the East, more beautiful than the flowers, may lay aside their perpetual veils, and wander and- waste their indolent lives. Every city of Europe that aspires to rank has its broad acres in public gardens for the instruction and delight of the people, where bands of music entertain them ; and to their credit let it be said that, while thousands walk for hours among beds of tempting beauty, not one will put forth his hand to pick a flower. He feels that it is his where it is ; it grows and blooms there for his pleasure, and to pluck it would destroy his own and others'. This is a popular education we have not attained in our free and enlightened country. There is not a city of this land whfere the people could have free access to a public garden without a strict police, to see that the sovereigns do not steal their own property. The " Central Park" is by far the noblest public promenade in America, resorted to already by thousands daily — yet even here, in our great metropolis, ladies are desired not to carry flowers into the park in their carriages, that the police may be able to take it for granted that any one with flowers in his hands has stolen them, and is to be treated accordingly. Even in our rural cemeteries, where the flowers cover the ashes of the dead — emblems of the loveliness and frailty that perishes below, and emblems, too, of the beauty of the love that cherishes the meniory of the departed — even here our fair countrywomen — not to say the men, of course — will steal flowers.

THE GARDEN AND GARDENS. 1 7

In the city of Florence, the fairest city in beautiful Italy, the city of art and song, some of the masterpieces of the great masters of sculpture, such as the David of Michael Angelo, stand out in the open street, exposed to the hazards of accident or to wanton recklessness ; yet there for centuries may stand the delicate marble that a stone from the hand of a rude boy would mar forever, and yet it is safe as in the halls of the Pitti Palace itself Universal homage protects these memorials that genius has left for posterity to cherish and admire. In a httle village, the name of which is so obscure that I have forgotten it, the " Common " was a beautiful garden surrounded by numerous marble statues of poets and artists and patriots, evidences of the spirit and taste of the people who thus delighted to adorn their rural neighborhood.

On the banks of Lake Como, in Northern Italy, there are hundreds of palaces, the abodes of men and women of wealth and genius and fame, some of them artists, others celebrated singers, and others whose riches have come down to them by inheritance, and these people or their predecessors have made the shores of this enchanting lake a garden, or gardens, of surpassing splendor. You may stop, almost at random, and be charmed with the scenes of loveliness that meet your eyes as soon as you step ashore. And instead of being warned off by a sign-board that "all persons are forbid trespassing on these grounds," you are kindly admitted through the hospitable gates, and permitted to enjoy at your leisure the feast of beauty that is here spread at your feet. One of these gardens is around a hill — a steep and high hill — terraced from the sole of its foot to the crown of its head ; and each successive terrace is adorned with flowers and plants in luxuriant growth, representing different climes,

B

SO that the visitor, as he walked around and gradually ascended the hill, was cheated with the illusion tha't he was reaching a colder and still colder region as he climbs. Toward the summit the hill is pierced with a tunnel three hundred feet long, and wide enough for a coach to be driven through ; the path is curved like a rainbow, and standing in the centre of it, you can look out both ways on lakes that lie on opposite sides of this remarkable garden hill. And this splendid spot, on which wealth is freely lavished with taste and toil, belongs to a gentleman whose duties in the army keep him almost constantly from home, and he rarely visits the place on which he expends his ancestral treasure ; but he freely allows it to be thrown open to travelers, who delight to carry away with them recollections of its beauty, and liberality of its princely proprietor.

No memories of England are more delightful than those of her parks and gardens ; art has made castles and cathedrals and libraries, and yet art has no power to please like that of nature in the hands of art. We have a vivid idea of Westminster Abbey before seeing it, but Chatsworth is a world of whose existence we have no conception till its cultivated grounds are all around us.

III. The Roses

Just now there are at least a thousand, perhaps two thousand roses in full bloom in sight as I sit on an old tumbledown settee under a tree in the midst of the garden. They are of all known colors for roses, and their names are far beyond my attainments in the science of flowers. Beautiful exceedingly, we can repeat again and again as we look at them, but even as we look they are passing away. Beauty soon decays. And this led me off into a meditative ramble on the old question of the distinction between the useful and the beautiful, as if beauty were not useful, and the useful necessarily not beautiful. And it occurred to me that there is another question to be answered first, on the answer depending the result to which we shall come in looking after the comparative merits of cabbage-roses and cabbages.

If we live to eat, and that is most to be desired which gives us food ; if we live to dress, and that is best that yields us clothes, we shall very soon have a standard by which to measure the value of every thing within our reach. But by so much as the inner life is more than the visible, and the enjoyment and advancement of the soul more to be desired than the lust of the flesh or the pride of life, so is the gratification, the cultivation, and perfection of the higher tastes to be esteemed of more account than those which man has in common with the brutes that perish.

Home Tooke defined virtue to be any thing that answers its purpose — certainly a very low and disgusting conception of the term. But we may say that every thing beautiful is or ought to be useful, and if it is not so, it is either neglected or abused. Because more than one half of the world go through it without a thought of the charms with which its face is clothed, we often fall into the mistake of thinking that beauty is thrown away on them, and reserved only for those whose eyes have been anointed by culture or association. But when I was in New York a few days ago, in a part of it where poverty alone would be content to dwell, and the last place in the city where ' one would look for taste and beauty, I saw the third-story windows of one of the houses filled with pots of flowers, set out on the sills to catch the sweet influences of the spring-time sun, and it was pleasing to reflect that up in those small, unventilated rooms, where the poor women must spend the whole year and never once get out into the country to enjoy such a wealth of floral beauty as this sweet June unfolds, they can and will have their few pet flowers, on which to lavish their affectionate care, and get the return that beauty gives to its humblest lover. Coleridge was admiring a waterfall, and overheard a man near him who said " Majestic." The poet turned to him, and said, " That is the very word." "Yes," continued the admiring rustic, "it is jest the purtiest, majesticest thing I ever seed." He had the soul to admire and enjoy it, but rhetoric was not his forte. One of our greatest heroes and statesmen had been neglected in the days of his youth, and he never recovered from the effects of such neglect. Some of his words were quite as peculiar as Mrs. Partington's. Yet he loved flowers and had a glorious garden, in which he was walking one day with a friend

THE ROSES. 21

who admired its splendor, and said to him, " You have a fine taste for horticulture." "Oh yes," said he, "I was always fond of horses."

The ox looks out on a green meadow and admires it as it is good for food. Is he any better than an ox who sees in a rose only what it will bring in market ? Beauty certainly has higher uses than to enrich its owner. The value we set on a painting or a statue has no relation to the price it will bring, unless we are in the " picture line." I was looking the other day at a painting — a single portrait — that the owner will not sell for $10,000. Mr. Church painted his last Niagara, the "Under the Fall," in six hours, from the white canvas to the last touch. I was' unwilling to believe it, till he told me so himself. Mr. Roberts, the liberal gentleman for whom it was painted, gave him $1500 for it. The amount of time and labor expended seems to be in no proper proportion to the price paid ; but the possessor has value in it far beyond the money that he parted with to secure such a " thing of beauty " for himself and friends. Every body can not have Niagara or a Church's painting of it. When an American lady was visiting England a few years ago, she was asked "if she had seen Niagara Falls." "Oh, certainly," said she, " I own them." She was, indeed, one of the owners — Miss Porter of Niagara. But if we can not own all the beauty and glory in the world around us, we may enjoy it, and so make all the earth our own. The possession of it sometimes poisons the enjoyment. Lady Coventry was so proud of her beauty that she always sat with her mirror tn hand ; when sickness made ravages in her charms, she had her windows darkened, that the wrinkles might not be so palpable ; and when she grew worse, she received her food and medicine through the closed curtains of her couch, refusing to be seen even by her most intimate friends — and so she died ! This is the madness of beauty, of which we have another example in the case of a young lady who admired her own beauty so much that she could not believe it possible for her to die, and when she was wasting away with consumption, she had a mirror always before her that she might delight herself in the charms that were fading from all eyes but her own. She died raving mad because she must die.

The love of beauty is not a fault. The love of being admired is not a fault. God himself, all holy and the perfection of beauty, loves to be admired in and by his saints. And in the ranks of all his sentient beings, how far down we can not say, this love reigns, a common, perhaps universal law of being. Some plants shrink from the touch, and we call them sensitive ; arid these flowers seem to smile in the morning sunlight as if they took delight in the beauty with which the hand of God has clothed them. The love of the beautiful is a virtue ; it is useful in itself; it makes a people more gentle, refined, courteous, and happy. It is to be encouraged, stimulated, and developed.

It is a good, but not to kaion, the good — not the highest good. It may exist, and it has been, in the midst of the lowest moral debasement. The love of the beautiful in nature and art never flourished more luxuriantly in Greece and Italy than in the days of their vilest corruption and degeneracy. Kritobulus at one of the banquets of Xenophon said : " By the gods, I would rather be beautiful than be King of Persia." And a modern writer says that " the four things most desirable as a crown to the happiness of life are beauty, riches, health, and friends ;" placing beauty at the head of the list. I would reverse the order

THE ROSES. 23

precisely, and first ask friends, then health, then wealth, and then beauty, ^^efore all these, of course, a right mind would have One Friend, and if the rest were added, what more could heart desire ! If we put beauty last, it is because it is the crown and glory of all the rest. Hence, woman was made last, and the last becomes first. Anacreon sings of woman endowed with beauty, in which she is stronger than lions or men. Beauty in nature is woman in creation. Our sweetest Christian poet, in his " World before the Flood," recounts the work of creation, day by day, and in language of high poetic fancy speaks of the several parts of the work as done by the various energies or faculties of the Creator : thus He looked, and " sun and stars came forth to meet his eye." And last of all when he comes to the creation of Woman, the poet says :

" He made her with a smile of grace, And left the smile that made her, on her face."

Thus beauty is the smile of the Lord ; the charm of being \ the fertile garden in the desert of life. We might live without it, and so we might live if we were blind. But what the earth now is to the blind, it would be to all if nothing grew but what is good to eat or wear. If " that reforming ass" who wished to "take down the sun and light the world with gas" were to root out all flowers in the pathway of life, and plant it with corn, he would prove his wisdom by the length of his ears.

IV. The Birds

Our daily and constant companions, as we sit under the trees, are the birds in the boughs overhead. I have tried several times to reckon the number and varieties of feathered songsters who are part and parcel of the household. We allow no gun to be fired on the premises, no bird to be disturbed in the pursuit of an honest living, or in the care of his own family, and consequently the birds are very familiar and abundant. Besides the sparrows, cedar-birds, yellow-birds, orioles, robins, phoebes, wrens, thrushes, quails, and larks, we have the mocking-birds in great numbers, whose music is wonderful for its sweetness and variety ; misleading us often into the idea that the various tribes have gathered about us to give a grand concert, the finest singers having "volunteered their services for this occasion." But after watching to see as wejl as to hear, we find that most of the music comes from the mocking-birds, whose skill is so remarkable as to deceive the best ear. It becomes a curious question, Why do the birds sing ? Have they themselves a musical ear, an organization peculiarly favorable to the enjoyment of song ?

It is mentioned in an interesting work, entitled " Miscellanea Curiosa," that Mr. Clayton and Dr. Maudlin discovered a remarkable peculiarity in the structure of the ears of birds, particularly those distinguished for their

THE BIRDS. 25

song. Contrary to what takes place in man or in quadrupeds, there is in birds almost a direct passage from one ear to the other, so that, if the drum of both ears be pricked, water will pass, when poured in, from one ear to the other. There is, however, no cochlea, but a small cochlea passage, which opens into a large cavity, formed between the two bony plates of the skull, and this passes all round the head. The upper and external plate of the bone forming the skull is supported by many hundreds of small threadlike pillars or columns, which rest upon the lower and interior plate, immediately over the brain. Now, what is worthy of attention is that this passage between the outer and inner plates of the skull was observed to be strikingly larger in song-birds than in birds which are not possessed of musical powers. So very remarkable is this difference described to be, that any person to whom it has been once pointed out may readily pronounce, upon inspecting the skull of a bird, whether it was a bird of song or otherwise, though he might have no previous knowledge of the bird or its habits. No other animal, examined with a view to comparison in these particulars, was found to have any resemblance of conformation, except the mole — an animal reputed to be very quick of hearing. This singular construction of the skull in birds is evidently conformable to the known principles of acoustics, and is, in fact, a sort of whispering gallery for increasing the intensity of the sounds conveyed to the ear.