March 27 Across the county to Benton's today. Afternoon bright and mild. All the streams full of water, and not a leaf or weed or rush to hide them. How naked and watery the landscape looked, yet refreshing and good. It is pleasant to see the water courses full of clear hurrying water. There is something so vital and renewing in water. This too was the liquidation of winter; his rigid icy form full of life and motion. The little brown brooks, how swift and strong they ran; and the larger creeks, how they pushed on trailing their ragged skirts along the edges of the fields and marshes. [crossed out: Little saucer-shaped pools and lakelets in the] [crossed out: meadows and pastures, showing the greening turf beneath them] Many a slope [crossed out: sends in a] runs down to a little saucer shaped pool or lakelet - a turfy apron filled with clear water. The cattle sun themselves upon the damp sward without fear of ague or rheumatism.
No obsolete water courses now. The creek seeks out many an abandoned bed and lingers and loiters there as if dwelling upon the memory of other days. The golden willows, their tops as yellow as if the sunshine had become fixed there, a kind of permanent gilding, how the eye lingers upon them!
A bountiful supply of water! It reaches or laps away many a parched place in my memory. Only desires and afflictions go out toward the full streams. No fear of drought in Nature now, no stagnation. Her circulation is brisk. No cure for a festering pool like hydropathy; no relief for a parched field like the wet-pack. Here and there an elm or an oak stands in the midst of a clear pool as if rising from its bath. And all the waters are clear and sweet. No corruption now, no liquid mud, as in a summer freshet; no dead water as comes down-stream with the fall rise.
All is trout water; all is spring water. Here and there on the brown earth a dab of new green where the warmth of a spring has made itself felt. Now the first notes of the brown meadow starling come up from the browner meadows, now the red shouldered black bird perch in the golden willows or amid the cat-tail flags and utter their liquid brook-side notes.
31. The top of a high barometric wave-a day like a crest, lifted up, sightly, sparkling. A cold snap, without storm, issuing in this clear, dazzling, sharp, northern day. How light, as if illuminated by more than the sun; the sky is full of light; light seems to be streaming up all around the horizon. The leafless trees seem to make no shadows; the woods are flooded with light; everything shines. [crossed out: The day is] Day large and imposing, breathing strong masculine breaths out of the North; day without a speck of film winnowed through and through; the golden beams of the sun sifter of all obscurity. Day of crumpled rivers, of crested waves, of bellying sails, high-domed, lustrous day. The only typical March day of the brilliant heroic sort we have had.
April lst Welcome to April, my natal month; in many ways the most poetical month of the year, the month of the swelling bud, [crossed out: and first] the springing grass, and the first shad! Month of the first birds nests, [crossed out: and] the first plantings, the first flowers.
The door of the season first stands ajar this month, and gives us a peep beyond. The month in which to begin the World, in which to begin your house, in which to begin your courtship; in which to enter upon any enterprise. The bees get their first pollen this month and their first honey. All hibernating creatures [crossed out: crawl] are out before April is past.
Now at 11 a.m., the day is soft and brilliant; a let-down from yesterday, but equally fair, the wind blown out, and only drifting a little this way and that. The air quivers above the fields, looking, Julian says, like oil; it is the mingling of hot air and cold. Phoebe calls, the bees hum, the sparrow sings.
To my delight in these things come the thought, with a fresh pang, "father is in his grave."
April 2nd Out of the sharp brilliant days comes snow as I predicted. [crossed out: lazy static days] The snow-crystals were forming in the crystal air; that light in the north was the light of the forge where the ice-spears were being shaped. Snow all day, much of it melting as it falls.
April 3rd My 47th birthday - my first fatherless birthday. I have lived to see my father and mother grow old and die and be buried from my sight. Well, it is the order of nature that the child should look upon the grave of his parents, rather than they upon his grave.
I should have been at the old home today but for this storm and snow. But how empty and desolate that home is I know full well.
Health pretty good, but more lameness or soreness in right leg than ever before; left leg quite free from it; arms strong, with only now and then slight twinge of shooting pain. Seem to be stronger in many ways than one year ago.
Three or four inches of heavy snow on the ground. I roll up big snow balls for J. uncovering a strip of green grass behind me.
-New girl came April 1st our 25th girl.
7. Go home to-day in afternoon. Walk up from the depot through mud and snow. Snowbanks high, roads full. Reach home a little before dark. Hiram Olly and the new dairy-maid alone in the house. No father to open the door for me now. Hiram well and cheerful-more so than I expected to find him. An empty house. I look about the familiar kitchen and wander through the other rooms as in a strange kind of dream. While eating my supper am shocked by being told of the serious illness of Channy Caswell, my niece's little boy to whom I am greatly attached.
8 A day of great brightness and clearness - a crystalline April day that precedes snow. I go up in the sugar-bush and linger for an hour about the old place. The air is still and has the property of being "hollow" as the farmers say; that is, it is heavy, motionless and transmits sounds well. Every warble of a bluebird or robin, or caw of crow, or bark of dog, or bleat of sheep, or cackle of geese, or call of boy or man, within the landscape comes to ear. The smoke from the chimney goes straight up. Then I walk down to Abigails and back. Shore-larks in the bare fields run or flit before me. I hear their shuffling, jingling, lisping, half inarticulate song. The crows are conspicuous in the brown fields, or against the snow-banks, or in the clear sky. How still the air; one could carry a lighted candel over the hills. The light becomes very strong and the effect of the wall of white mountains rising up all around from the checkered landscape is very strange. The blue dome of the sky rests upon them.
In the afternoon go down to Smith Caswell's to see Channy. Walking fearful-mud and melting snow every where; walk the walls when I can. Cut across the hill to Smiths. See a woodchuck here and there. Poor Channy very
bad; am alarmed when I look upon him, sitting nearly up right in bed, almost panting rather than breathing. Smith and Emma apparently not much alarmed. Say he is better than yesterday, and has a little appetite. He is very nervous, makes no complaint, but rolls his head from side to side a good deal, just as my little sister Evaline did 30 years ago, when she was dying. Oh, I fear it is death. Some strange affection of his right lung, perhaps an abscess, the return of the danger passed through last fall. I stay but a little while; cannot bear to be near the suffering child. Stop and take tea with Curtis. A sad walk home in the early evening.
9. A crystalline day in the spring brings crystals. Snows nearly all day. No "hollow" air now, the hollow filled with a snowbank! Boil sap in the woods [crossed out: in the ???] nearly all day amid the wet falling snow. The sparrows will sing now and then amid the storm. Thoughts of father and mother and of my early and late life on the farm fill my mind.
10 Still stormy and squally and unpleasant. Boil sap in the woods; everything covered with wet snow.
When I go down to dinner at noon Olly tells me they have just heard of Channy's death; died last night in
his mother's arms. Poor stricken Smith and Emma what will they do is the first thought. He was their all, and a boy of rare sweetness, gentleness and intelligence.
In the afternoon Hiram K. Jr. drives me down, Abigail, Olly and myself.
Can I ever forget that look of utter despair upon Emma's tear drenched face as she came and threw herself upon me! "Oh Uncle John, he is gone, he is gone, my darling! [crossed out: he] and I was all alone with him when he died." What words had I to comfort her, or to comfort him, when he came towards me, as if for succor, none. I could only pour out my tears with their own. I loved the boy dearly and never so much as when I saw his lifeless form lying there in his crib, and when all love was vain. [Crossed out: Such] It was enough to break my heart to look upon him, he was so beautiful. Asleep, but oh, such sleep; such repose, with that pensive, heart.breaking look about the closed eyes, that death alone can give. Oh, that look, who can describe it, the look of a sweet innocent boy who has met a speedy death! It defies all words, the memory of it is a sorrowful, yet beautiful possession forever.
[crossed out: In the] Curtis and I go down to the grave yard and select the spot for his grave beside his uncle, Chaney B. Deyoe, whose death, 10 years ago, come May,
was my first great sorrow in this world. By fathers new made grave I pause with such thoughts as few may know, and by Mother's, and by the graves of all my dead. Curtis says to me "here I suppose we will all lay "one of these days." Yes I reply, here is to be our last bed." Each trying to talk carelessly and hiding any emotion. Whose place will be next to father I mentally asked and had my own thoughts.
11 Boil Sap with Hiram in forenoon. In afternoon go over the hill, walking fence-tops and, to see old Mrs Smith once more. Stop and have another look in Grandfathers old house, with long long thoughts. Mrs. Smith in bed for the past three months quite helpless, slowly sinking into the dark gulf. Not dark to her mind tho, but all light and peace. She lay and talked to me as if in health, cheerful, alert, curious, canny. The sweet, pious, old Scotch woman who left her native land (Forres) near 50 years ago. She had known me as a baby, and now as a gray, saddened man. Her son William from Iowa, whither he went 15 years ago, with her all winter and I could see, intended to stick to her till the end. Every night he reads a chapter in the Book, and she lying there on her back, conducts family prayers. He told me much about the West and his life there that was interesting. About 4 I say good bye and never again expect to set eyes on the dear old Scotch woman.
12. Bright and clear. Again I walk down to the house of death over my former course, with many long pauses on the brown, sun-drenched hills and fields. Smith and Emma calm with now and then a paroxysm of grief. In afternoon we bury the dear child beside his uncle and all is over. Foolish and illiterate John Hubble preached from the text. "Be still, and know that I am God" Oh, how I should like to have talked from that text, if I were in the way of such things
In the morning of the day Channy died, he asked to be taken to the window to look out (nearly always a fatal sign) "How sweet the birds do sing" the dear soul said.
I know well when the loss will be felt most keenly by Smith and Emma - if there can be degrees in such suffering. When they wake in the morning after the blessed forgetfulness of sleep. Oh, what a pang the first waking moment will bring! Abigail said she heard them weeping and moaning about 4 o'clock. My God, how my heart bleeds for them!
13. Another bright, still day. Boil sap in the woods till noon, then to the train and home at night.
[Crossed out: 15] 14 Julians birth day - bright and warm, and vocal with bird songs. Pluck some dark blue sweet scented hepaticas, nearly as sweet as arbutus.
15 First warm south rain of the season. How fresh, how welcome it is. The grass greens as if by magic. Robins laugh, high-holes call, sparrows sing. Sparrows, phoebes, and blue birds are building nests.
16 Warm, wooing, moist, half sunshine, half shadow. The warmest, most spring-like day of the season.
Julian and I walk up to the P.O. See the honey bees working on the pussy willows. Walk back on the R.R. track, blood.root and dicentra in bloom, also arbutus. Paint and fix our boat.
The way Arnold steers clear of the novel, the curious, the surprising, in fact, of everything fanciful, far-fetched, or strained or violent, leads people to accuse him of dealing only in common-places. But this is not quite just. His ideas are easy and obvious and near at hand, and this is his glory, as it is of all great writers. It is the application that is fresh and surprising. You must look for no bric-a-brac in his pages, no curious specimens, no novel or fantastic ideas, but the most common and universal ideas.
20 Sunday. A walk to the woods. First swallow today.
April 21 North wind for nearly a week now, today becoming nearly a gale. The river this morning wears its sternest, most masculine look. The tide is breasting the wind and there is stiff opposition. A great molten mass down there, rolling and heaving, in strange contrast to the dark motionless shores.
These days when the sky is free of clouds, the sun seems traveling in a dim pink haze. At a little distance from the sun it becomes quite distinct and gradually fades away at a greater distance from him. The same condition of the sky that begat our crimson sunsets and sunrises last fall and spring.
April 23 A charming April morning, [crossed out: the day] still, smoky, dreamy; the day reposing, sleeping as in a hammock after the long period of windy boisterous weather. The boats of the fisher-men float in a dark firmament of water.
The gummy fragrant budscales of the balm of Gilead strew the road. They are like the beaks of birds. Indeed the scales are falling from the eyes of all the buds now. There is some-thing very suggestive about these dropping scales. The snakes and frogs shedding their skins, and the birds shedding the outer webs of their feathers, are samples of the same process. The chick escaping from the shell is but a bud dropping its scales.
The bursting buds of the poplars and hickories give forth a gummy perfume. One may often catch a whiff of this bud perfume on the April air. No fragrance of May bloom is so bewitching. The bees know the value of the gummy buds; here they get their propolis to varnish their hives and seal up the cracks, etc. They probably carry it in their jaws. (Quimby says on their thighs and is doubtless right) Buds are kind of seeds. Many birds live on them, as the grouse, the grosbeck, [crossed out: Sp] English sparrows, etc. Think of the slow silent falling of the scales all through the woods .Nature unpacking or undoing her parcels and throwing the wrapping away.
The quickening of the earth at this season is in streaks and spots. All the more fat, moist, and genial places in the fields green first. Along the fences the turf awakens before it does in the middle of the lot.
Soft maple in bloom; first anemone to-day. A great many sweet scented hepaticas to-day.
P.M. a day of great lustre and beauty. Columns of smoke from burning rubbish. So beautiful the day, like a rare jewel, and yet it is gone before one can thoroughly seize upon it.
April 27. A Sunday of great beauty and warmth. Signs of a drought. Yesterday went to the woods with my P. correspondent. Saw honey-bee gathering pollen from blood root. A rough, bushy, neglected piece of ground was starred with these flowers. Apparently the rougher the ground the more delicate the wild flowers. The flower of the blood root enclosed [crossed out: by] or partly enclosed by the leaf, is very striking and beautiful. Bees gather pollen from the adder's tongue also. A great many sweet-scented hepaticas this year, more than ever before.
The keen relish of the earlier April days begins to wane as the heat increases.
April 30. A ride to Coxsackie; met Mary Hallock Foote and her husband and children on the train en route for Idaho. A woman with a rare charm - full of genius, and full of womanliness. Said my "British Fertility" made her sad; quoted Holmes's remark that "grass makes girls"; thought instead of troubling ourselves about "Woman's rights" we had better look to woman's health, and study physiology and the laws of life a little more; all other questions were premature.
A bright lovely day. What pleasure to ride through the country at this time - spring so visible upon the ground, but hardly discernible yet in the trees, as if the latter waited to give the earth a chance. How vivid the green here and there; the home feeling, the work of man in the landscape, is enhanced and brought out. Nearly every farm house has a more genial and expressive look than it will have bye and bye. How the green deepens all about the barns and rich moist places. How friendly certain nooks and slopes look, as if one would like to recline there or walk there. Here and there a little meadow water-course golden with marsh marigolds. Here and there the bloom of the red maple shows vividly against the tender green of a slope beyond. The fresh-plowed fields, too, and the teams plowing or harrowing, the [crossed out: far] sower sowing, and pausing to regard the flying train - how it all pleased! Oh, Spring, all thy sights and sounds are fresh and pleasing. The harvesting looks wearisome, but the sowing and planting, how attractive! There is nothing cloying in nature now, but all is appetizing.
May 1st A soft, gentle May day; the sky white, the sunlight veiled. The first shad trees just in bloom; currants blooming; the tree tops in the woods slightly misty with swelling buds. The songs of the song sparrow and of the vesper and bush sparrows come in at my open door with scarcely a pause. English maples in bloom, native maples with large buds.
Byron says, "So far are the principles of poetry from being invariable that they never were nor ever will be settled. These principles mean nothing more than the predelictions of a particular age, and every age has its own, and different from its predecessor. It is now Homer, [crossed out: it is] and now Virgil; once Dryden and since Sir Walter Scott; now Corneille, and now Racine," Now Byron, and now Tennyson.
When the lean Kine in Pharaoh's dream had eaten up the fat Kine, they were still lean and ill-favored. There is a kind of tape-worm greed in most of us, for wealth, fame, etc., that is is never satisfied.
May 3 To Roxbury this afternoon; to Smith Caswells at night. Poor Emma, how haggard and pale she looked. Smith told me he could think of nothing else but Channy. When he was talking with anyone, he said he did not think of what he was saying.
In the morning we go up to Hiram's, through the fields and woods. In the afternoon I go over to Edens with Ed.
5 Raining. Eden and I go a-fishing, but with poor luck.
10. A cold wet week, much rain; a flood in the streams. To Stamford on the 5th, to Delhi on the 6th.
On the 7th, Curtis, Hiram and I went down and sodded father's grave. A cold, wettish day. I cannot set down my thoughts or feelings here. On the 8th to Andes and home in the evening. Mrs. B. here The leaves coming forth rapidly. The rarer birds arriving. Emma said Channy went to school this spring one week and two days. What a brief career! What pathos in that "week
and two days"!
-Depth of feeling, depth of emotion, profundity of soul, are much more important than extent, or correctness of knowledge. To feel deeply is better than to see clearly - soul is worth more than intellect, love outweighs understanding. Feeling, emotion, stamp future generations, stamp the child unborn; [crossed out: the] science does not. The grandeur and importance of the Puritans was not in what they believed, but in how they believed it. Science laughs at their beliefs, but the world was shaped by their seriousness and power. The grandeur of the Biblical characters is in their depth and sincerity of feeling. Who would not expect greater men to be born out of an age of Puritanism than out of such an age as ours? Serious, earnest men - with such are the secrets of power; to such belong the world, not to mere men of knowledge.
Sunday May 18 - A delightful day. The height of the apple bloom; great clouds of white and pink petals against the green. A pale, yellowish green lace-work of foliage over all the woods. The fringed polygala in bloom. The trees across in Langdons woods individualized as usual at this season. Some of the oaks a delicate flesh tint.
22 Getting hot. Foliage all out except upon the oaks, button balls, and a few other trees. The apple-bloom beginning to fall. Two orioles dart into an apple tree and shake down the white petals like snow. The cotton of the pussy willows [crossed out: ?] ripe for the breeze. Air full of bird voices, The cluster of young leaves of the hickory on their long stems are surrounded at the base with a frill or ruffle of flesh-colored inner bud scales. Along an old wood road in the woods the little frogs (hylodes) as thick as grasshoppers in a summer field. They are all out of the marshes and in the woods now.
24 Thermometer 90 in the shade.
-To what extent does this law of the sphericity of the globe, this circular law of nature, pervade the mind? Probably it pervades it entirely. Probably the very conditions of consciousness, and all our intellectual processes have reference to the fact that the earth is round, and that up and down have no meaning in absolute space, and boundaries and limitations no meaning.
May 27th. A charming day; the 10th anniversary of dear Channy B's death. Clover just blooming; all the birds busy; farmers planting corn; dandelions holding their frail gloves, like lamps, above the grass; first butter-cups at
hand. Thinking of starting to-morrow for New Haven to see Ingersoll. Just learned of the death of Maj. Bates, of the Comptroller's office, an old friend of mine; rest his soul in peace.
28.
Rainy and cold; to NY and thence to New Haven by boat.

29.
With Ingersoll about New Haven. A walk to "East Rock" in morning; to Maltby Park in: afternoon; very cold season a little later than at home.

30.
Heavy frost last night; great damage to gardens and vineyards all over the country. Grapes and strawberries all killed about N.H. In the low lands, ferns, sumac, ash, butternut killed as in September; an autumnal odor on the air.

31.
Home today at 7 p.m. Find little or no damage by frost to my fruit and vegetables. But back from the river vineyards suffered severely.


June 1st Bright cool day. Found a female gold-finch in the bushes near the study with one wing tied by what appeared to be a kind of tough elastic web. The outer quill of the left wing was fastened by the end to the end of a feather on the rump and the bird was helpless and made little effort to escape me. It took quite a little force to liberate the wing. When the little bird found herself free, she darted like an arrow and screamed with delight. Probably just such an accident never before befell a bird. Was it a spider's web? Looked like it, but stronger and more adhesive. As tough as bird-lime, but no bird lime about here.
-Just finished Morleys essay on Emerson. Full of bright, strong things, but by no means the masterpiece Arnold's essay on same subject is; less simplicity, directness, ease, clearness; it is more difficult, scatters more, and not so easily abridged or reduced to its lowest terms. Some English critic says that Newman and Morley are the only two British writers now who have the quality-of style. But [crossed out: Arnold] Morley has far less style than Arnold; in fact, cannot approach him in the qualities that make the master.
2. Clear, cool and rather dry. Here I sit and see my days go by, my days; one by one they pass, and there are only just so many of them, all mine, but no hand of mine can stay them. They pass just the same, whether one is ready for them or not. If one could only hoard his days and use them when best able to, or when most needed, like his income! But this day of mine, when gone, is gone for all eternity.
June 3rd As a writer, especially on literary themes, I suffer much from the want of a certain manly or masculine quality, the quality of self-assertion - strength and firmness of outline of individuality. I am not easy and steady in my shoes. The common and vulgar form of the quality I speak of is called "cheek". But in the master writer, it is firmness, dignity, composure - a steady unconscious assertion of his own personality. When I try to assert myself I waver and am painfully self-conscious, and fall into curious delusions. I think I have a certain strength and positiveness of character, but lack egoism. It is a family weakness; all my brothers are weak as men; do not make themselves felt for good or bad in the community. But this weakness of the I in me is probably a great help to me as a writer upon Nature.
I do not stand in my own light. I am pure spirit, pure feeling, and get very close to bird and beast. My thin skin lets the shy and delicate influences pass. I can surrender myself to Nature without effort. I am like her. That which hinders me with men, and makes me weak and ill at ease in their presence makes me strong with impersonal Nature and admits me to her influences.
-I lack the firm moral fibre of such men as Emerson and Carlyle. I am more tender and sympathetic than either perhaps, but there is a plebeian streak in me, not in them. This again helps me with Nature, but hinders with men.
-A green snake in the grass in front of my study; disposed carelessly across the tops of the bending spears, all but invisible; by mere chance I see him as I lift my eye from my book; first think it is some plant. After a while he slowly, very slowly, like the hand of a clock, draws himself down into the finer grass of the bottom. After he has reached the ground with the forward part of his body, he still keeps his tail upright, which slowly sinks into the grass like a green stalk going into the ground. All this for protection I suppose. He was practically invisible.
5 Very hot again, 88 in shade.
The June perfumes upon the air; the night air heavy laden with the odor of the honey locust; the wild-grape scents the lanes and wood sides. The earlier grasses in bloom, wild strawberries just ripening; the hives sending forth their first swarms; many birds busy with their second nests: black-berries blooming; the daisies and the buttercups paint all the fields.
9 A quart wild strawberries today below Hollands. The nest of the golden crowned thrush on the edge of the fields under a pine; nearly stepped upon it; admirably concealed; 4 white speckled eggs. Hot and dry. Mrs. B. gone to Delhi.
June 16. Cool and very dry. Idling away the summer days reading Plutarch, Bates, Amazon, and Sainte Beuve. Mrs. B. still away at Delhi.
-It often occurs to me how trivial and insignificant my life is compared with what father's and mothers was. What a battle they fought, how arduous, how prolonged. Full of care, full of work for over 50 years. The paying for the farm, the self-denial, the ceaseless toil, the rearing of a large family; my ease, my leisure, my freedom from responsibility, [crossed out: almost?] quite unknown to them. Up early and late, winter and summer, the large dairy, the spring work, the haying and harvesting the fall harvesting, the buttermaking and early in their histories, spinning and weaving, and making of the clothes, their simple pastimes - going to Red Kill, or over to Uncle Thomas's once or twice a season, and at intervals of 10 or 15 years driving to Pennsylvania to see their friends there. I can recall but three trips they made together to Pa: once when I was a child of 5 or 6; then when I was 18; and again in 1871, while I was in England. It was a great event for them to drive there and was discussed and planned for years in advance. It took them 3 or 4 days each way. Mother went alone to Pa. in 1876.
[crossed out: I can] When I was a youth father grew the flax and made the tow from which mother made our linen clothes and linen for the house. He grew the wool also from which our winter clothes were made. Mother spun the yarn, and and the cloth was woven at a fulling mill. How slight my toils and troubles, and my little essay writing seems compared with such lives. The blue-devils never found them idle and vacant as they do me. There is no panoply, no shield like utter absorption in work. A large family too shields and fends one, and to be a part and parcel of your neighborhood, of your town to belong there, to have grown there to have been put there by destiny is a great matter. What comfort they had in their church, in their "yearly meetings", and in their "associations"; what comfort in the intercourse with their friends! They lived on a low plane as it were and the ambitions, the doubts, the yearnings, the disappointments - all the most far reaching shafts of evil fortune, passed over their heads.
How gladly would I too have filled my house with children! How gladly I would have surrounded myself with troops of friends; how gladly would I take root and become one with my fellows!
19. Very hot, very dry. No rain since May 27th. June turning to dust. The eye of the day has an infernal glare, like that of a maniac.
-Do I believe in answer to prayer? Yes, when the faith is perfect. But if men knew the secret of the Lord in this respect, their prayers would not be answered, because they could not have faith. If they knew that putting themselves in the right attitude, in properly opening their minds and hearts, in other words, a proper exercise of faith-if they knew that this was the answer, the blessing they sought instead of something bestowed, as from one person to another, I fear they could not pray. It is [crossed out: necessary] a scientific necessity that you believe the blessing you ask will be granted, and this act of belief is the blessing, and the humility, and feeling of self unworthiness that goes with it. My prayers would not be answered because I cannot believe. I know the secret; they would be insincere and false. I know that prayers are self-answered; that the laws of mind and spirit are such that every sincere prostration of the soul before the Supreme Good is ennobling, tranquilizing, healing. Can there be any doubt say that the soldier, or the general, who before going to battle, has worked himself up to an exalted state of mind, that he falls upon his knees and devoutly and believingly prays God to help him overcome his enemies, will fight more courageously and heroically, than another? The belief that God is helping him is a kind of intoxication; it nerves his arm; it fires his heart, and the victory is already his. Of course God helps him in no other way, not in the way he asked or expects; he is self-deluded and hence self-helped. His belief that God is helping him is God helping him. So, in a thousand other matters. The child is quiet and goes to sleep while it believes its mother is in the room with it, though she may have left long before. Battles have been won by generals not knowing when they were beaten; an attacking column has pressed on against great odds and won the day, because it believed that the other wings of the army were engaging the enemy at another point, or attacking them in the rear, when such was not the case at all. (See one of the battles of Frederick.) Man is strong in his delusions. If he believes in miracles, then miracles practically happen. No ghosts are seen after men cease to believe in ghosts. No witches are hung or burnt after men abandon the belief in witches. The evil eye is in the power of fear and superstition. All these things involve curious psychological laws. A belief that a Supreme Being, a supreme Father, is watching over you in times of danger, in shipwreck, in battle, etc, begets tranquility and [crossed out: comfort?] clearness and steadiness of mind, and intrepidity of spirit, and hence, to all intents and purposes, God does watch over you. The danger is not in danger, but in the fear of danger. The man who is lost in the woods, or on the plains, and prays to God sincerely for help, has all his wits and senses sharpened by that act of faith, and is thereby helped. Because this is so, because mankind [crossed out: have] has in all ages, the heathen and pagan, as well as the Christian, been blessed by sincere prayer to [crossed out: their] the gods, [crossed out: they] men have come finally to pervert and vulgarize prayer by asking for outward, material good. They pray for rain. As soon pray for an eclipse, or for a full moon when it is the old, or for high tide when it is in the ebb. They also seek to influence and change the mind of the Unchangeable. All Christendom prayed for Garfield but it was of no avail, because his wound was mortal. Does prayer ever stop the yellow fever before frost comes? Is there any case where it is safe to let your piety offset a neglect of sanitary observance. If sewer-gas gets into your house, will holiness keep the distemper out? No vaxination is a better safe-guard against small-pox than prayer, no matter how serious. Faith may move mountains, but it never yet removed stone in the bladder, etc. Thou shalt not pray for outward, material good. The fond mother prays that her son may be kept and guided in ways of virtue, but it is the love of virtue in her own heart which [crossed out: she has] he drew in with the milk from her breast, that saves him, if anything. She prays that he may be kept from shipwreck or from sickness and death, but alas how often is he not. But let the mother pray for him still; it will do her good, if it does not save him.
Pray for spiritual good, for humility, for contriteness, for tranquility, for singleness of heart. It is strange that mankind has not learned that it is only such prayers that are answered. That God is really "without variableness, or shadow of turning", and that serious aspiration after the high and the good is itself the blessing.
What remains for us who cannot pray, who cannot believe in God as something objective and apart from us - a supreme man or parent that bestows or withholds gifts and good? This alone, and this is enough, to love virtue, to love truth, to keep the soul open and hospitable to whatsoever things are true, and of good report and a constant desire and aspiration for more light, more truth, for nobler and simpler lives is better than any spasmodic appeal to the Supreme Good. There need be no delusions or illusions. God is not a person or a parent, or even the "moral and intelligent governor of the universe"; prayers are not mechanically answered, but the more we love truth and virtue, the more we love any noble and worthy thing, the more we grow in grace. If my child were to die of mortal disease, I could not pray God to reconcile me to the terrible dispensation, as my fathers could have done; but I could see in it the same law that gave him life, that upholds the world, and could say "thy will be done." Unless poison kills, and fire burns, life were not possible. If natural law is violated, pain, and maybe death, is the result: I would not have it otherwise. "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" The universe is good; it is good because it is adapted to my constitution, it was not shaped to me, but I to it. God did not make the light to suit my eye, but the eye to suit the light, The benefits of pain, of struggle, of sorrow, of fiery trials, are inwoven in the nature of things; the race has come through a fiery furnace, and obstacles strengthen; we are chastised and the species has grown and been evolved through chastise-ment. In no other way does God mould and shape us.
It is a greater consolation to me to know that the universe is governed by unalterable law, than that it is subject to any capricious and changeable will. I like to know that what we call God is without variableness or shadow of turning. We know now what to depend on. Strict justice is and must be done to every creature, else life and nature would miscarry. I ask but justice, yes, I demand it, and let me not flinch and whimper.
June 22. The only meaning, the only truth that underlies the doctrine of vicarious atonement, is the lesson of unselfishness, to live and die for others - a new doctrine that probably had much to do with [crossed out: its] begetting modern philosophy and humanitarianism. The ancient world, the earlier races were selfish, and to suffer and die for others was a new doctrine to it. This is one of the ways of salvation, salvation from present [crossed out: ?] selfishness. In any other sense the idea of vicarious atonement is preposterous and an offence to the nostrils. That Christ could or did save you or me in another way than by exemplifying to us a noble, unselfish life, is a fable, and a vulgar, debasing [crossed out: ?] fable. Every man or martyr who dies for a principle for an honest conviction, dies for the race. The old martyrs died for you and me just as much, and in the same way, that Christ did.
26. A fine rian last night from the north after great heat and a drought of one month. Too late to help the meadows, but will save other crops. Cool and fresh.
-There is a thought that has often knocked at the door of my mind and as often been invited in, but which I have never been able to get fairly entered and seated and entertained - this, namely, that man is a part of nature that his conscience, benevolence, and virtues, intelligence, etc., come out of this great savage brute nature. What does it mean? I must brood up on this some time.
27. Cool and delicious. The river all light and motion this morning; ten thousand diamonds flash from its surface.
29 Tranquil summer days; elder in bloom; chestnut trees just getting hoary. Looking down upon our forests at a distance the foliage seems to call or boil up - the impression of arrested or impending agitation, and of a swirling, rolling, upheaving motion. The feeling of repose is lacking.
-Ten years now have I lived in the wilderness of Esopus and 27 years with a scolding wife. Yet many men have had a worse fate; the wilderness hath its attractions, and the scolding wife her good traits. She is by temperament and physiology attractive to me, tho' her temper and mental makeup are my special antipathy. In her eyes I am one of the most selfish men that ever lived, and she herself a perfect martyr. She treats my writing and literary propensities as a kind of lazy self-indulgence that ought not to be countenanced a moment - twits me of sitting around and letting her be my "nigger" killing herself. She will not, she cannot see that she is her own nigger - the slave of the most deep grained and unconscious selfishness I ever saw. She does nothing for others, or to please others; but her life is devoted to indulging her own taste for cleanliness and order in and about her house; carried to such a degree that everyone else is made uncomfortable by it. She cleaned and swept me out of the house 3 years ago, and promises to clean me completely off the place.
July 2nd 9 A.M. A little tragedy over the fence a few yards from me: two song sparrows, trying to defend their nest against a black snake. The curious interrogating note of a chicken who stood near by first caused me to look up from my Plutarch. I saw the raised wings and moving forms of the sparrows about a large tussock of grass and low bushes, and then the gliding springing snake. The sparrows darted about and through the little clump of weeds and low bushes, apparently trying to seize the snake or beat him off. Their wings and tails were spread, their beaks open from the heat, and struggle and despair and desperation in every movement. I thought that maybe the snake was trying to charm them, so I looked on intently from behind the fence. The birds charged him and harassed him on every side, but did not seem to be under any spell except that of courage in defending their nest. Every moment or two I could see the head and neck of the serpent make a sweep at them, then the bird struck at would fall back and the other one would follow up the attack from the other side. There was evidently little danger that the snake could strike and hold one of the birds, though I fairly trembled for them, they were so bold and approached so near to the snake's head. I saw him spring at them at least a half dozen times. How the poor birds panted and lifted their wings appealingly. Then the snake started for the wall pursued by the birds. A stone which I hurled at him failed to take effect, and he rushed for cover under the wall. I found the nest rifled and disarranged; whether it had contained eggs or young I know not. The male sparrow had cheered me here many of a day with his song, and I blame myself for not rushing at once to his rescue when the arch one was upon him. There is probably no truth in the current notion that snakes charm birds. The black snake is the most subtle, alert and devilish of our snakes, and I have never seen him have any but young, helpless birds in his mouth.
Getting dry again and hot. 90 degrees in the shade.
3rd To Benton's to-day, all of us; reach there about 2 1/2 P.M.
Stay to B's till the 9th. A dull, heavy time for the most part. [crossed out: Mrs B.] Wife out of sorts. Mrs. Booth came Saturday night. Found Ingersoll here on my return.
11 Ingersoll and I and the Van Benschotens go to black pond after pond lilies. A good time.
July 14 Ingersoll and I start for a climb among the Catskills. From Boiceville go to the Wittenberg. Pass the night there. Return to Phoenicia by way of Snyder Hollow. Ought to write a short article on the trip. 18 Very cool, for the past ten days, almost like fall.
Moses cried, "When, Oh, Lord, shall I find thee?" God said, Know that when thou hast sought thou has already found me." "The best prayers", says Joubert, "are those which have nothing distinct, and which thus partake
of adoration. God listens but to thoughts and sentiments." "To ask is to receive when we ask for a genuine good."
"We always believe that God is like ourselves; the indulgent affirm him indulgent; the stern, terrible",
-Joubert. He said when he left Paris he parted from his friends, when he left the country he parted from himself.
-Ours is a mechanical age. Its voice is the steam whistle loud, dissonant, hideous.
A row boat shoots along over the smooth glassy surface of the river; reminds me in some ways of a spider spinning its web, something seems to be drawn out from its stem [crossed out: and be] which shows a long widening line on the surface of the water.
Indications of mid-summer. Flies aggressive, dispute your dinner with you at the restaurant, disturb you after your noon nap; swallows perch on the telegraph wires; song birds begin to let up; white elder blows; buckle berries on the mountains; rye cut; grass ripening; goldfinch and cedar birds nesting; first thistles in bloom; meadow lilies hanging their flame-colored bells above the grass; here and there in wet woods they have peculiar charm seen at a distance; large flying grasshoppers; first cicada; harvest apples.
-Thompson says that in Africa dogs do not bark nor cows low; he thinks because of the danger from lions and other wild animals.
-The water from the sprinkling cart raises a dust.
-An addition of fuel checks the fire.
-[crossed out: a] The slackened boat is tossed by its own swells.
-A sleeper is disturbed by his own snoring.
July 22nd Still cool and autumnal like
-How different the feeling and purpose with which I sit down to read the bible from that with which father and grand.father sat down to read it. I sit down to read it as a book, a curious and instructive legend, and to suck the literary value out of it; they sat down to read it as the authentic word of God; to learn [crossed out: his] Gods will toward them, and to feed their souls upon the spiritual riches it contains. It was a solemn and devout exercise with them; with me it is simply a search after truth and beauty, in a mood more critical than devout. Yet I cannot help it; I cannot read it otherwise. I cannot believe the Bible in the way that father and his father believed it. It would be hypocrisy to pretend I could. This reading of it was the best for them, and is not my reading of it the best for me? There is perhaps more religion in the eye with which I read nature, than there was in the eye with which they read it; and there is more religion in the eye with which they read the Book than in mine. Father and mother no more doubted the literal truth of the Bible than they doubted the multiplication table; they knew it to be true; their own experiences told them so. Experience was their guide and test, not reason; and there is no more fallacious guide in such matters than experience. By experience people believed in witches and spooks and signs and wonders etc. When people began to reason about witches, belief in witchcraft ended. When you begin honestly to reason about the Bible, and to exclude all feeling, experience, and sentiment, you cannot [crossed out: to] believe it other than a great primitive book - the greatest, perhaps, because the most human. The [crossed out: inspired] word of God truly, as all good and wise books are the word of God, as every wise word ever spoken by man is the word of God. The Bible is naked, as it were; faces entirely toward God, eternity, etc., whereas other books face toward the world, or towards man etc. Its burden is God, righteousness, etc. There is no pride of letters here - no pride, but only fear, awe, and worship. It transcends all other books so much in this respect that we have come to look upon it as a record of God's word - an exceptionally inspired book. It is full of error, of course, full of human infirmities, but it is [crossed out: flod] flooded with the sentiment of God, and the aspiration of the soul toward the Infinite; and this is the main matter. It has been productive of great evil as well as good. It is not science, but fable, parable, imagination, ecstasy, etc.
Experience, I say, is not a safe guide in certain regions. Self-delusion is so easy; it is so easy to fall into the error of looking upon our private likes and dislikes as decrees of the Eternal, true and binding on all men. The believer knows that God speaks to him through the Bible, therefore the Bible is literally true, the miracles and all. People experience over and over what they call religion; with many it is merely a mental excitement and exaltation of feeling, and is transient; with a few it results in a real change of heart and of life. But I never knew a man who was addicted to lying or to cheating ever to be cured of it by [crossed out: ?] experiencing religion. He will lie and cheat still. The scolding wife scolds still. But habits of swearing and Sabbath-breaking, are often broken up. An honest man and a good neighbor is honest still, whether he "gets" religion, or not; and the fool is not cured of his folly. We are not at all affected in our likes and dislikes of people by their failure to "get religion", and probably God is not.
A sinner with large charity, an open heart and hand [crossed out: ???] is more acceptable to Gods and men than the righteous man without charity. - The things that count with us after all are love, good will, sincerity, truthfulness, and by no means what the world calls religion. It is readily said that a man cannot have religion without love, good will, truthfulness, but if he have these, we need ask no further and that the church can help him to these, admits of serious doubt. A man who is honest through fear or compulsion, is not the man I want to deal with.
-Some people are not susceptible of much culture. Some of the most learned men have little culture; it all stops with the memory and does not reach the spirit. The person who remembers the most of the book he reads, is probably influenced the least by it; its words stick in his memory, but its spirit fails to sink into his heart.
22. Wood-thrush, purple finch, wren, gold-finch, indigo bird, song sparrow, swamp sparrow, social sparrow, water thrush, tanager, still in song. In the Catskills the hermit thrush and winter wren sing all this month. But after midsummer the songs of most birds greatly deteriorate.
That of the wood thrush and purple finch, I note, are much less brilliant and melodious than in May. As the plumage fades, the song fades also.
-Resuming my remarks upon father's religion, and the religion of people like him: experience was a safe guide for him to go by; no other guide was possible for him; the clear light of reason he did not have; for him to have seen the Bible and the Church with my eyes would have been disastrous in the extreme; it would have been like blotting the sun from heaven; he would have had nothing to lean upon, nothing to give him joy or religious satisfaction. The avenues through which my spiritual nature [crossed out: is satisfied] is ministered to were closed to him, or were never opened. To have robbed [crossed out: he] him and mother of their hymnbook, of their faith, of their Bible, would have been the greatest cruelty. Their hymns that [crossed out: ?] are so flat and prosy, or else vulgar to me, were precious beyond words to them. How quickly they could give the reason for it, quoting the Scriptures about the carnal mind, etc, but of course this is not the true explanation. Their minds were much more carnal than mine. They had no taste, no culture, no ideality to satisfy, (these they would have called carnal and irreligious), but only the one thought of their soul's salvation, meaning salvation from some threatened evil in some future world. Their belief, their religion, was not disinterested. Yet I think of them with inexpressible love and yearning, wrapped in the last eternal sleep, the sleep of which they thought so often, and for which they tried to be so well prepared. And prepared they were; no harm can befall them; they had for them the true religion, the religion of serious, simple, hard-working, god-fearing lives. To believe as they did, to sit in their pews, is impossible to me; the Time-Spirit has decreed otherwise; but all I am, or can be, or can achieve, is in emulating their virtues. My soul can only be saved by a like truthfulness and sincerity.
-How incredible that one's parents can pass away, that they are not permanent like the sun and stars!
-Cool mid-summer. Thinking very often of father and mother these days; seem to see them, or some suggestion of them, wherever I turn. The first midsummer I have not passed at the old home for several years.
-Up to certain grade of intelligence, I consider it a good sign if a man belongs to the Church. Then there is a higher grade in which belonging to the church implies a certain hypocrisy of insincerity. An intelligent, disinterested seeker of the truth cannot be found inside the Church in these days.
-The newspaper gives currency to all manner of flippancies, levities, irreverences, ephemeries; its tendency is undoubtedly to beget a shallow, gossipy, loud, tonguey, irreverent type of mind. In the course of generations, the most serious consequences must flow from it - elephantiasia of the lip and tongue, metaphorically speaking.
29 Still cool with plenty of rain and now our measure is to heaped. Began raining last night and this morning a steady, heavy rain from the S.E. An old fashioned rain; the air all white with it; the gray rainy river with smooth dark streaks here and there; the farmer stands in his barn beside his half-filled hay-mow with his coat on, and looks out into the drenched meadows.
-Only one or two feeble notes of the cicada yet heard; too cool for them.
-Rousseau says "I in a measure dull the edge of grief in advance; the more I suffer in anticipation of it, the greater is the facility with which I forget it."
Rousseau was in many respects like a bee drowned in his own honey. His imagination swamped him.
-Speaking of nature, botany, etc., Rousseau says the ignorant "see nothing in detail, because they know not what to look for; nor do they perceive the whole, having no idea of the chain of connection
and combination that overwhelms the mind of the observer with wonder. He said of himself that he knew little enough to make the whole world new to him, and yet possessed knowledge enough to make him sensible of the beauties of all the parts. p 396. II
"Behavior lawless as snowflakes" is from Rousseau.
"Leisure-Studies" a good tile for one of my books, or chapters
July 31st Start for Phoenicia on the 6:45 am train to meet Aaron for a trip to the woods. We start for head of Snyder Hollow at 11 a.m. Sprits of rain all the way. Reach Larkins, the upper inhabitants, at 1 p.m. amid quite heavy rain. We bring up at the barn. Larkin comes out and invites us to the house, but Aaron prefers the barn and the hay mow Rain stops near night and I take enough trout for our breakfast. Mrs L. gets us some dinner. We sleep on the hay mow, and Mrs L. does not feel complimented that we prefer the hay mow to her feather beds. In the morning fry our fish [crossed out: on her] and make our coffee on her stove and eat in the barn, in front of the ox stall, the soldier in Aaron asserting itself once more. Make camp Aug 1st and take lots of trout. Play the old game of camping out and sleeping on hemlock boughs till Tuesday, August 5th Have a good time; must try to write it up. Aug 5th break camp and reach home at 7 p.m. on boat.
Aug 6. Large, lucid, tranquil Aug. day; the grass fresh and green from frequent showers.
Aug 8. What is your scheme of religion, your conception of this universe, as a theatre upon which God acts the drama of the salvation of man, in the presence of the facts and deductions of astronomy and geology? How these sciences take the conceit out of us. Man and his history becomes a mere episode, the ephemera of an hour like flies in summer.
10 Cool and overcast for past three days. Orioles pecking and destroying every ripe peach, mellow apple, and pear on my trees. These birds must look out. My gun will get its round black eye upon them if they don't beware.
-Keeping to quite general terms, one may say that a great writer must have two things - namely, great power of thinking and great powers of expression. Some writers have one
some the other; a few have both. Did Emerson have both? That he had great powers of expression no one will deny; that he was a great thinker many will deny. His thinking lacked consecutiveness, the tie of logic; but it seldom lacked profundity; it always carried him through to high and safe grounds. Without the method of the philosopher he reached the best conclusions of philosophy. He carried the difficult problems by sallies of the mind rather than by siege. Hence the bright and aerial character of his page; it is the bird's view of the landscape rather than that of the traveler. Goethe was a more logical thinker, but not a safer or more profound. There are great thoughts in E's page, if not great thinking.
Aug 11. One year ago today I and father walked over the hill to the old house his father built and where his youth was passed - the last walk we ever took together in this world, and the only time we ever entered the old house together that I can remember.
Placid river, placid day. The boughs gently wag, the bees make lines through the air. The passing boats make a great commotion in the water - convert it from a cool, smooth shadowy surface to one pulsing and agitated. The pulsations go shoreward in long rolling shadows.
Aug 12. [crossed out: Go to] Start for Marion this afternoon to visit the Gilders.
20th. Home from Marion today. Passed a week with the G's, a pretty good time.
-Religion according to the conventional notion, is something miraculous - something entirely apart from life, from nature, from all that is necessary and inherent in [crossed out: life] man and things; something without which the best, bravest, most virtuous man may live and die. The antique world, the towering bards and sages of Greece had it not, the time was not yet ripe, the Almighty had not yet perfected his plans. Can anything be more preposterous and repulsive? I meet persons daily who turn a practical reasonable, common sense side to life, to events, and things; but who, the moment the subject of religion is broached execute a partial summersault and stand on their heads, seeing everything in false relation: reason, common sense, no longer prevail; they seem to contemplate a condition of things arbitrary, artificial, preposterous, where miracles instead of law prevail. Truly are these things hidden from the natural man; it is only the unnatural man to whom they are revealed, as every lunatic is convinced of things that are preposterous enough to sane people.
Sept. 1st A bright, cool placid day, very green and fresh, the 3rd, 4th, 5th, very hot, 90 in shade.
11. Very hot yet, from 94 to 96 under my old apple tree since the 4th. The hottest 7 consecutive days I
have ever seen here.
My time pretty empty; no thoughts, little reading (Herodotus and Stuart Mill). Some occupation as path master on the road. My Mothers birthday.
Sept 20. Bright and cool: nearly a frost last night. Mrs B and Julian start for Delaware this morning. Mrs B. in a state of mind as usual. One of the most unwifely of women. The only attitude she seems capable of assuming toward her husband is either one of affected babyishness, or of insolent domineering. The attitude of deference, respect, love, obedience is as far from her as the moon. In nearly all her relations with me and with others, she is the proverbial cow that kicks over the milk.