Fresh Fields. John Burroughs

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a good working temperature. Clover—white, red, and yellow (white predominating)—in the fields all about me. The red very ruddy; the white large. The only noticeable bird voice that of the yellow-hammer, two or three being within ear-shot. The song is much like certain sparrow songs, only inferior: Sip, sip, sip, see-e-e-e; or, If if, if you ple-e-ease. Honey-bees on the white clover. Turf very thick and springy, supporting two or three kinds of grass resembling red-top and bearded rye-grass. Narrow-leaved plantain, a few buttercups, a small yellow flower unknown to me (probably ladies' fingers), also a species of dandelion and prunella. The land thrown into marked swells twenty feet broad. Two Sunday-school girls lying on the grass in the other end of the field. A number of young men playing some game, perhaps cards, seated on the ground in an adjoining field. Scarcely any signs of midsummer to me; no ripeness or maturity in nature yet. The grass very tender and succulent, the streams full and roily. Yarrow and cinquefoil also in the grass where I sit. The plantain in bloom and fragrant. Along the Avon, the meadow-sweet in full bloom, with a fine cinnamon odor. A wild rose here and there in the hedge-rows. The wild clematis nearly ready to bloom, in appearance almost identical with our own. The wheat and oats full-grown, but not yet turning. The clouds soft and fleecy. Prunella dark purple. A few paces farther on I enter a highway, one of the broadest I have seen, the roadbed hard and smooth as usual, about sixteen feet wide, with grassy margins twelve feet wide, redolent with white and red clover. A rich farming landscape spreads around me, with blue hills in the far west. Cool and fresh like June. Bumblebees here and there, more hairy than at home. A plow in a field by the roadside is so heavy I can barely move it,—at least three times as heavy as an American plow; beam very long, tails four inches square, the mould-board a thick plank. The soil like putty; where it dries, crumbling into small, hard lumps, but sticky and tough when damp,—Shakespeare's soil, the finest and most versatile wit of the world, the product of a sticky, stubborn clay-bank. Here is a field where every alternate swell is small. The large swells heave up in a very molten-like way—real turfy billows, crested with white clover-blossoms."

      "July 17. On the road to Warwick, two miles from Stratford. Morning bright, with sky full of white, soft, high-piled thunderheads. Plenty of pink blackberry blossoms along the road; herb Robert in bloom, and a kind of Solomon's-seal as at home, and what appears to be a species of goldenrod with a midsummery smell. The note of the yellow-hammer and the wren here and there. Beech-trees loaded with mast and humming with bumblebees, probably gathering honey-dew, which seems to be more abundant here than with us. The landscape like a well-kept park dotted with great trees, which make islands of shade in a sea of grass. Droves of sheep grazing, and herds of cattle reposing in the succulent fields. Now the just felt breeze brings me the rattle of a mowing-machine, a rare sound here, as most of the grass is cut by hand. The great motionless arms of a windmill rising here and there above the horizon. A gentleman's turnout goes by with glittering wheels and spanking team; the footman in livery behind, the gentleman driving. I hear his brake scrape as he puts it on down the gentle descent. Now a lark goes off. Then the mellow horn of a cow or heifer is heard. Then the bleat of sheep. The crows caw hoarsely. Few houses by the roadside, but here and there behind the trees in the distance. I hear the greenfinch, stronger and sharper than our goldfinch, but less pleasing. The matured look of some fields of grass alone suggests midsummer. Several species of mint by the roadside, also certain white umbelliferous plants. Everywhere that royal weed of Britain, the nettle. Shapely piles of road material and pounded stone at regular distances, every fragment of which will go through a two-inch ring. The roads are mended only in winter, and are kept as smooth and hard as a rock. No swells or 'thank-y'-ma'ams' in them to turn the water; they shed the water like a rounded pavement. On the hill, three miles from Stratford, where a finger-post points you to Hampton Lucy, I turn and see the spire of Shakespeare's church between the trees. It lies in a broad, gentle valley, and rises above much foliage. 'I hope and praise God it will keep foine,' said the old woman at whose little cottage I stopped for ginger-beer, attracted by a sign in the window. 'One penny, sir, if you please. I made it myself, sir. I do not leave the front door unfastened' (undoing it to let me out) 'when I am down in the garden.' A weasel runs across the road in front of me, and is scolded by a little bird. The body of a dead hedgehog festering beside the hedge. A species of St. John's-wort in bloom, teasels, and a small convolvulus. Also a species of plantain with a head large as my finger, purple tinged with white. Road margins wide, grassy, and fragrant with clover. Privet in bloom in the hedges, panicles of small white flowers faintly sweet-scented. 'As clean and white as privet when it flowers,' says Tennyson in 'Walking to the Mail.' The road and avenue between noble trees, beech, ash, elm, and oak. All the fields are bounded by lines of stately trees; the distance is black with them. A large thistle by the roadside, with homeless bumblebees on the heads as at home, some of them white-faced and stingless. Thistles rare in this country. Weeds of all kinds rare except the nettle. The place to see the Scotch thistle is not in Scotland or England, but in America."

III

       Table of Contents

      England is like the margin of a spring-run, near its source,—always green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer. The spring-run to which it owes this character is the Gulf Stream, which brings out of the pit of the southern ocean what the fountain brings out of the bowels of the earth—a uniform temperature, low but constant; a fog in winter, a cloud in summer. The spirit of gentle, fertilizing summer rain perhaps never took such tangible and topographical shape before. Cloud-evolved, cloud-enveloped, cloud-protected, it fills the eye of the American traveler with a vision of greenness such as he has never before dreamed of; a greenness born of perpetual May, tender, untarnished, ever renewed, and as uniform and all-pervading as the rain-drops that fall, covering mountain, cliff, and vale alike. The softened, rounded, flowing outlines given to our landscape by a deep fall of snow are given to the English by this depth of vegetable mould and this all-prevailing verdure which it supports. Indeed, it is caught upon the shelves and projections of the rocks as if it fell from the clouds,—a kind of green snow,—and it clings to their rough or slanting sides like moist flakes. In the little valleys and chasms it appears to lie deepest. Only the peaks and broken rocky crests of the highest Scotch and Cumberland mountains are bare. Adown their treeless sides the moist, fresh greenness fairly drips. Grass, grass, grass, and evermore grass. Is there another country under the sun so becushioned, becarpeted, and becurtained with grass? Even the woods are full of grass, and I have seen them mowing in a forest. Grass grows upon the rocks, upon the walls, on the tops of the old castles, on the roofs of the houses, and in winter the hay-seed sometimes sprouts upon the backs of the sheep. Turf used as capping to a stone fence thrives and blooms as if upon the ground. There seems to be a deposit from the atmosphere,—a slow but steady accumulation of a black, peaty mould upon all exposed surfaces,—that by and by supports some of the lower or cryptogamous forms of vegetation. These decay and add to the soil, till thus in time grass and other plants will grow. The walls of the old castles and cathedrals support a variety of plant life. On Rochester Castle I saw two or three species of large wild flowers growing one hundred feet from the ground and tempting the tourist to perilous reachings and climbings to get them. The very stones seem to sprout. My companion made a sketch of a striking group of red and white flowers blooming far up on one of the buttresses of Rochester Cathedral. The soil will climb to any height. Indeed, there seems to be a kind of finer soil floating in the air. How else can one account for the general smut of the human face and hands in this country, and the impossibility of keeping his own clean? The unwashed hand here quickly leaves its mark on whatever it touches. A prolonged neglect of soap and water, and I think one would be presently covered with a fine green mould, like that upon the boles of the trees in the woods. If the rains were not occasionally heavy enough to clean them off, I have no doubt that the roofs of all buildings in England would in a few years be covered with turf, and that daisies and buttercups would bloom upon them. How quickly all new buildings take on the prevailing look of age and mellowness! One needs to have seen the great architectural piles and monuments of Britain to appreciate Shakespeare's line,—

      "That unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish Time."

      He СКАЧАТЬ