Complete Prose Works

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TWO HOURS ON THE MINNESOTA

From 7 to 9, aboard the United States school-ship Minnesota, lying up
the North river. Captain Luce sent his gig for us about sundown,
to the foot of Twenty-third street, and receiv'd us aboard with
officer-like hospitality and sailor heartiness. There are several
hundred youths on the Minnesota to be train'd for efficiently manning
the government navy. I like the idea much; and, so far as I have seen
to-night, I like the way it is carried out on this huge vessel. Below,
on the gun-deck, were gather'd nearly a hundred of the boys, to give
us some of their singing exercises, with a melodeon accompaniment,
play'd by one of their number. They sang with a will. The best part,
however, was the sight of the young fellows themselves. I went
over among them before the singing began, and talk'd a few minutes
informally. They are from all the States; I asked for the Southerners,
but could only find one, a lad from Baltimore. In age, apparently,
they range from about fourteen years to nineteen or twenty. They are
all of American birth, and have to pass a rigid medical examination;
well-grown youths, good flesh, bright eyes, looking straight at you,
healthy, intelligent, not a slouch among them, nor a menial--in every
one the promise of a man. I have been to many public aggregations of
young and old, and of schools and colleges, in my day, but I confess I
have never been so near satisfied, so comforted, (both from the fact
of the school itself, and the splendid proof of our country,
our composite race, and the sample-promises of its good average
capacities, its future,) as in the collection from all parts of the
United States on this navy training ship. ("Are there going to be _any
men_ there?" was the dry and pregnant reply of Emerson to one who had
been crowding him with the rich material statistics and possibilities
of some western or Pacific region.)

_May 26_.--Aboard the Minnesota again. Lieut. Murphy kindly came for
me in his boat. Enjoy'd specially those brief trips to and fro--the
sailors, tann'd, strong, so bright and able-looking, pulling their
oars in long side-swing, man-of-war style, as they row'd me across. I
saw the boys in companies drilling with small arms; had a talk with
Chaplain Rawson. At 11 o'clock all of us gathered to breakfast around
a long table in the great ward room--I among the rest--a genial,
plentiful, hospitable affair every way--plenty to eat, and of the
best; became acquainted with several new officers. This second visit,
with its observations, talks, (two or three at random with the boys,)
confirm'd my first impressions.

MATURE SUMMER DAYS AND NIGHTS

_Aug. 4_.--Forenoon--as I sit under the willow shade, (have retreated
down in the country again,) a little bird is leisurely dousing
and flirting himself amid the brook almost within reach of me.
He evidently fears me not--takes me for some concomitant of the
neighboring earthy banks, free bushery and wild weeds. _6 p.m._--The
last three days have been perfect ones for the season, (four nights
ago copious rains, with vehement thunder and lightning.) I write this
sitting by the creek watching my two kingfishers at their sundown
sport. The strong, beautiful, joyous creatures! Their wings glisten in
the slanted sunbeams as they circle and circle around, occasionally
dipping and dashing the water, and making long stretches up and down
the creek. Wherever I go over fields, through lanes, in by-places,
blooms the white-flowering wild-carrot, its delicate pat of
snow-flakes crowning its slender stem, gracefully oscillating in the
breeze,

EXPOSITION BUILDING--NEW CITY HALL--RIVER TRIP

PHILADELPHIA, _Aug. 26_.--Last night and to-night of unsurpass'd
clearness, after two days' rain; moon splendor and star splendor.
Being out toward the great Exposition building, West Philadelphia, I
saw it lit up, and thought I would go in. There was a ball, democratic
but nice; plenty of young couples waltzing and quadrilling--music by
a good string-band. To the sight and hearing of these--to moderate
strolls up and down the roomy spaces--to getting off aside, resting in
an arm-chair and looking up a long while at the grand high roof with
its graceful and multitudinous work of iron rods, angles, gray colors,
plays of light and shade, receding into dim outlines--to absorbing
(in the intervals of the string band,) some capital voluntaries
and rolling caprices from the big organ at the other end of the
building--to sighting a shadow'd figure or group or couple of lovers
every now and then passing some near or farther aisle--I abandon'd
myself for over an hour.

Returning home, riding down Market street in an open summer car,
something detain'd us between Fifteenth and Broad, and I got out to
view better the new, three-fifths-built marble edifice, the City Hall,
of magnificent proportions--a majestic and lovely show there in the
moonlight--flooded all over, facades, myriad silver-white lines and
carv'd heads and mouldings, with the soft dazzle--silent, weird,
beautiful--well, I know that never when finish'd will that magnificent
pile impress one as it impress'd me those fifteen minutes.

To-night, since, I have been long on the river. I watch the C-shaped
Northern Crown, (with the star Alshacca that blazed out so suddenly,
alarmingly, one night a few years ago.) The moon in her third quarter,
and up nearly all night. And there, as I look eastward, my long-absent
Pleiades, welcome again to sight. For an hour I enjoy the soothing
and vital scene to the low splash of waves--new stars steadily,
noiselessly rising in the east.

As I cross the Delaware, one of the deck-hands, F. R., tells me how
a woman jump'd overboard and was drown'd a couple of hours since. It
happen'd in mid-channel--she leap'd from the forward part of the
boat, which went over her. He saw her rise on the other side in the
swift running water, throw her arms and closed hands high up, (white
hands and bare forearms in the moonlight like a flash,) and then she
sank. (I found out afterwards that this young fellow had promptly
jump'd in, swam after the poor creature, and made, though
unsuccessfully, the bravest efforts to rescue her; but he didn't
mention that part at all in telling me the story.)

SWALLOWS ON THE RIVER

_Sept. 3_--Cloudy and wet, and wind due east; air without palpable
fog, but very heavy with moisture--welcome for a change. Forenoon,
crossing the Delaware, I noticed unusual numbers of swallows in
flight, circling, darting, graceful beyond description, close to the
water. Thick, around the bows of the ferry-boat as she lay tied in her
slip, they flew; and as we went out I watch'd beyond the pier-heads,
and across the broad stream, their swift-winding loop-ribands of
motion, down close to it, cutting and intersecting. Though I had seen
swallows all my life, seem'd as though I never before realized their
peculiar beauty and character in the landscape. (Some time ago, for
an hour, in a huge old country barn, watching these birds flying,
recall'd the 22d book of the Odyssey, where Ulysses slays the suitors,
bringing things to _eclaircissement_, and Minerva, swallow-bodied,
darts up through the spaces of the hall, sits high on a beam, looks
complacently on the show of slaughter, and feels in her element,
exulting, joyous.)

BEGIN A LONG JAUNT WEST

The following three or four months (Sept. to Dec. '79) I made quite a
western journey, fetching up at Denver, Colorado, and penetrating the
Rocky Mountain region enough to get a good notion of it all. Left West
Philadelphia after 9 o'clock one night, middle of September, in a
comfortable sleeper. Oblivious of the two or three hundred miles
across Pennsylvania; at Pittsburgh in the morning to breakfast.
Pretty good view of the city and Birmingham--fog and damp, smoke,
coke-furnaces, flames, discolor'd wooden houses, and vast collections
of coal-barges. Presently a bit of fine region, West Virginia, the
Panhandle, and crossing the river, the Ohio. By day through the latter
State--then Indiana--and so rock'd to slumber for a second night,
flying like lightning through Illinois.

IN THE SLEEPER

What a fierce weird pleasure to lie in my berth at night in the
luxurious palace-car, drawn by the mighty Baldwin--embodying, and
filling me, too, full of the swiftest motion, and most resistless
strength! It is late, perhaps midnight or after--distances join'd like
magic--as we speed through Harrisburg, Columbus, Indianapolis.
The element of danger adds zest to it all. On we go, rumbling and
flashing, with our loud whinnies thrown out from time to time, or
trumpet-blasts, into the darkness. Passing the homes of men, the
farms, barns, cattle--the silent villages. And the car itself, the
sleeper, with curtains drawn and lights turn'd down--in the berths the
slumberers, many of them women and children--as on, on, on, we fly
like lightning through the night--how strangely sound and sweet they
sleep! (They say the French Voltaire in his time designated the grand
opera and a ship of war the most signal illustrations of the growth of
humanity's and art's advance beyond primitive barbarism. Perhaps if
the witty philosopher were here these days, and went in the same car
with perfect bedding and feed from New York to San Francisco, he would
shift his type and sample to one of our American sleepers.)

MISSOURI STATE

We should have made the run of 960 miles from Philadelphia to St.
Louis in thirty-six hours, but we had a collision and bad locomotive
smash about two-thirds of the way, which set us back. So merely
stopping over night that time in St. Louis, I sped on westward. As I
cross'd Missouri State the whole distance by the St. Louis and Kansas
City Northern Railroad, a fine early autumn day, I thought my eyes
had never looked on scenes of greater pastoral beauty. For over two
hundred miles successive rolling prairies, agriculturally perfect
view'd by Pennsylvania and New Jersey eyes, and dotted here and
there with fine timber. Yet fine as the land is, it isn't the finest
portion; (there is a bed of impervious clay and hard-pan beneath this
section that holds water too firmly, "drowns the land in wet weather,
and bakes it in dry," as a cynical farmer told me.) South are some
richer tracts, though perhaps the beauty-spots of the State are the
northwestern counties. Altogether, I am clear, (now, and from what
I have seen and learn'd since,) that Missouri, in climate, soil,
relative situation, wheat, grass, mines, railroads, and every
important materialistic respect, stands in the front rank of the
Union. Of Missouri averaged politically and socially I have heard all
sorts of talk, some pretty severe--but I should have no fear myself of
getting along safely and comfortably anywhere among the Missourians.
They raise a good deal of tobacco. You see at this time quantities
of the light greenish-gray leaves pulled and hanging out to dry on
temporary frameworks or rows of sticks. Looks much like the mullein
familiar to eastern eyes.

LAWRENCE AND TOPEKA, KANSAS

We thought of stopping in Kansas City, but when we got there we found
a train ready and a crowd of hospitable Kansians to take us on to
Lawrence, to which I proceeded. I shall not soon forget my good days
in L., in company with Judge Usher and his sons, (especially John and
Linton,) true westerners of the noblest type. Nor the similar days in
Topeka. Nor the brotherly kindness of my RR. friends there, and the
city and State officials. Lawrence and Topeka are large, bustling,
half-rural, handsome cities. I took two or three long drives about the
latter, drawn by a spirited team over smooth roads.

THE PRAIRIES (_and an Undeliver'd Speech_)

At a large popular meeting at Topeka--the Kansas State Silver Wedding,
fifteen or twenty thousand people--I had been erroneously bill'd to
deliver a poem. As I seem'd to be made much of, and wanted to be
good-natured, I hastily pencill'd out the following little speech.
Unfortunately, (or fortunately,) I had such a good time and rest, and
talk and dinner, with the U. boys, that I let the hours slip away and
didn't drive over to the meeting and speak my piece. But here it is
just the same:

"My friends, your bills announce me as giving a poem; but I have no
poem--have composed none for this occasion. And I can honestly say
I am now glad of it. Under these skies resplendent in September
beauty--amid the peculiar landscape you are used to, but which is new
to me--these interminable and stately prairies--in the freedom and
vigor and sane enthusiasm of this perfect western air and autumn
sunshine--it seems to me a poem would be almost an impertinence. But
if you care to have a word from me, I should speak it about these very
prairies; they impress me most, of all the objective shows I see or
have seen on this, my first real visit to the West. As I have roll'd
rapidly hither for more than a thousand miles, through fair Ohio,
through bread-raising Indiana and Illinois--through ample Missouri,
that contains and raises everything; as I have partially explor'd your
charming city during the last two days, and, standing on Oread hill,
by the university, have launch'd my view across broad expanses of
living green, in every direction--I have again been most impress'd,
I say, and shall remain for the rest of my life most impress'd, with
that feature of the topography of your western central world--that
vast Something, stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined,
which there is in these prairies, combining the real and ideal, and
beautiful as dreams.

"I wonder indeed if the people of this continental inland West know
how much of first-class _art_ they have in these prairies--how
original and all your own--how much of the influences of a character
for your future humanity, broad, patriotic, heroic and new? how
entirely they tally on land the grandeur and superb monotony of the
skies of heaven, and the ocean with its waters? how freeing, soothing,
nourishing they are to the soul?

"Then is it not subtly they who have given us our leading modern
Americans, Lincoln and Grant?--vast-spread, average men--their
foregrounds of character altogether practical and real, yet (to those
who have eyes to see) with finest backgrounds of the ideal, towering
high as any. And do we not see, in them, foreshadowings of the future
races that shall fill these prairies?

"Not but what the Yankee and Atlantic States, and every other
part--Texas, and the States flanking the south-east and the Gulf of
Mexico--the Pacific shore empire--the Territories and Lakes, and the
Canada line (the day is not yet, but it will come, including Canada
entire)--are equally and integrally and indissolubly this Nation, the
_sine qua non_ of the human, political and commercial New World. But
this favor'd central area of (in round numbers) two thousand miles
square seems fated to be the home both of what I would call America's
distinctive ideas and distinctive realities."

ON TO DENVER--A FRONTIER INCIDENT

The jaunt of five or six hundred miles from Topeka to Denver took me
through a variety of country, but all unmistakably prolific, western,
American, and on the largest scale. For a long distance we follow the
line of the Kansas river, (I like better the old name, Kaw,) a stretch
of very rich, dark soil, famed for its wheat, and call'd the Golden
Belt--then plains and plains, hour after hour--Ellsworth county,
the centre of the State--where I must stop a moment to tell a
characteristic story of early days--scene the very spot where I am
passing--time 1868. In a scrimmage at some public gathering in the
town, A. had shot B. quite badly, but had not kill'd him. The sober
men of Ellsworth conferr'd with one another and decided that A.
deserv'd punishment. As they wished to set a good example and
establish their reputation the reverse of a Lynching town, they open
an informal court and bring both men before them for deliberate trial.
Soon as this trial begins the wounded man is led forward to give his
testimony. Seeing his enemy in durance and unarm'd, B. walks suddenly
up in a fury and shoots A. through the head--shoots him dead. The
court is instantly adjourn'd, and its unanimous members, without a
word of debate, walk the murderer B. out, wounded as he is, and hang
him.

In due time we reach Denver, which city I fall in love with from the
first, and have that feeling confirm'd, the longer I stay there. One
of my pleasantest days was a jaunt, via Platte canon, to Leadville.

AN HOUR ON KENOSHA SUMMIT

Jottings from the Rocky Mountains, mostly pencill'd during a day's
trip over the South Park RR., returning from Leadville, and especially
the hour we were detain'd, (much to my satisfaction,) at Kenosha
summit. As afternoon advances, novelties, far-reaching splendors,
accumulate under the bright sun in this pure air. But I had better
commence with the day.

The confronting of Platte canon just at dawn, after a ten miles' ride
in early darkness on the rail from Denver--the seasonable stoppage at
the entrance of the canon, and good breakfast of eggs, trout, and nice
griddle-cakes--then as we travel on, and get well in the gorge, all
the wonders, beauty, savage power of the scene--the wild stream of
water, from sources of snows, brawling continually in sight one
side--the dazzling sun, and the morning lights on the rocks--such
turns and grades in the track, squirming around corners, or up and
down hills--far glimpses of a hundred peaks, titanic necklaces,
stretching north and south--the huge rightly-named Dome-rock--and as
we dash along, others similar, simple, monolithic, elephantine.

AN EGOTISTICAL "FIND"

"I have found the law of my own poems," was the unspoken but
more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass'd, hour after
hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon--this plenitude
of material, entire absence of art, untrammel'd play of primitive
Nature--the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream, repeated
scores, hundreds of miles--the broad handling and absolute
uncrampedness--the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns,
faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two
or three thousand feet high--at their tops now and then huge masses
pois'd, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in
misty lilac, visible. ("In Nature's grandest shows," says an old Dutch
writer, an ecclesiastic, "amid the ocean's depth, if so might be, or
countless worlds rolling above at night, a man thinks of them, weighs
all, not for themselves or the abstract, but with reference to his own
personality, and how they may affect him or color his destinies.")

NEW SENSES: NEW JOYS

We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed,
with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the canon we
fly--mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near,
right in front of us--every rood a new view flashing, and each flash
defying description--on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging
pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild
grass--but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed
in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New
senses, new joys, seem develop'd. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky
Mountain canon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas
or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies,
perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest
element-emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples
and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen--all paintings, poems,
reminiscences, or even music, probably never can.

STEAM-POWER, TELEGRAPHS, ETC

I get out on a ten minutes' stoppage at Deer creek, to enjoy the
unequal'd combination of hill, stone and wood. As we speed again,
the yellow granite in the sunshine, with natural spires, minarets,
castellated perches far aloft--then long stretches of straight-upright
palisades, rhinoceros color--then gamboge and tinted chromos. Ever
the best of my pleasures the cool-fresh Colorado atmosphere, yet
sufficiently warm. Signs of man's restless advent and pioneerage,
hard as Nature's face is--deserted dug-outs by dozens in the
side-hills--the scantling-hut, the telegraph-pole, the smoke of some
impromptu chimney or outdoor fire--at intervals little settlements of
log-houses, or parties of surveyors or telegraph builders, with their
comfortable tents. Once, a canvas office where you could send a
message by electricity anywhere around the world! Yes, pronounc'd
signs of the man of latest dates, dauntlessly grappling with these
grisliest shows of the old kosmos. At several places steam saw-mills,
with their piles of logs and boards, and the pipes puffing.
Occasionally Platte canon expanding into a grassy flat of a few acres.
At one such place, toward the end, where we stop, and I get out to
stretch my legs, as I look skyward, or rather mountain-topward, a huge
hawk or eagle (a rare sight here) is idly soaring, balancing along the
ether, now sinking low and coming quite near, and then up again in
stately-languid circles--then higher, higher, slanting to the north,
and gradually out of sight.

AMERICA'S BACK-BONE

I jot these lines literally at Kenosha summit, where we return,
afternoon, and take a long rest, 10,000 feet above sea-level. At
this immense height the South Park stretches fifty miles before me.
Mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective, every
hue of vista, fringe the view, in nearer, or middle, or far-dim
distance, or fade on the horizon. We have now reach'd, penetrated the
Rockies, (Hayden calls it the Front Range,) for a hundred miles or
so; and though these chains spread away in every direction, specially
north and south, thousands and thousands farther, I have seen
specimens of the utmost of them, and know henceforth at least what
they are, and what they look like. Not themselves alone, for they
typify stretches and areas of half the globe--are, in fact, the
vertebrae or back-bone of our hemisphere. As the anatomists say a man
is only a spine, topp'd, footed, breasted and radiated, so the whole
Western world is, in a sense, but an expansion of these mountains. In
South America they are the Andes, in Central America and Mexico the
Cordilleras, and in our States they go under different names--in
California the Coast and Cascade ranges--thence more eastwardly the
Sierra Nevadas--but mainly and more centrally here the Rocky Mountains
proper, with many an elevation such as Lincoln's, Grey's, Harvard's,
Yale's, Long's and Pike's peaks, all over 14,000 feet high. (East, the
highest peaks of the Alleghanies, the Adirondacks, the Catskills,
and the White Mountains, range from 2000 to 5500 feet-only Mount
Washington, in the latter, 6300 feet.)

THE PARKS

In the midst of all here, lie such beautiful contrasts as the sunken
basins of the North, Middle, and South Parks, (the latter I am now on
one side of, and overlooking,) each the size of a large, level, almost
quandrangular, grassy, western county, wall'd in by walls of hills,
and each park the source of a river. The ones I specify are the
largest in Colorado, but the whole of that State, and of Wyoming,
Utah, Nevada and western California, through their sierras and
ravines, are copiously mark'd by similar spreads and openings, many
of the small ones of paradisiac loveliness and perfection, with their
offsets of mountains, streams, atmosphere and hues beyond compare.

ART FEATURES

Talk, I say again, of going to Europe, of visiting the ruins of feudal
castles, or Coliseum remains, or kings' palaces--when you can come
_here_. The alternations one gets, too; after the Illinois and Kansas
prairies of a thousand miles--smooth and easy areas of the corn and
wheat of ten million democratic farms in the future----here start up
in every conceivable presentation of shape, these non-utilitarian
piles, coping the skies, emanating a beauty, terror, power, more than
Dante or Angelo ever knew. Yes, I think the chyle of not only poetry
and painting, but oratory, and even the metaphysics and music fit
for the New World, before being finally assimilated, need first and
feeding visits here.

_Mountain streams._--The spiritual contrast and etheriality of the
whole region consist largely to me in its never-absent peculiar
streams--the snows of inaccessible upper areas melting and running
down through the gorges continually. Nothing like the water of
pastoral plains, or creeks with wooded banks and turf, or anything of
the kind elsewhere. The shapes that element takes in the shows of the
globe cannot be fully understood by an artist until he has studied
these unique rivulets.

_Aerial effects._--But perhaps as I gaze around me the rarest sight
of all is in atmospheric hues. The prairies--as I cross'd them in my
journey hither--and these mountains and parks, seem to me to
afford new lights and shades. Everywhere the aerial gradations
and sky-effects inimitable; nowhere else such perspectives, such
transparent lilacs and grays. I can conceive of some superior
landscape painter, some fine colorist, after sketching awhile out
here, discarding all his previous work, delightful to stock exhibition
amateurs, as muddy, raw and artificial. Near one's eye ranges an
infinite variety; high up, the bare whitey-brown, above timber line;
in certain spots afar patches of snow any time of year; (no trees, no
flowers, no birds, at those chilling altitudes.) As I write I see the
Snowy Range through the blue mist, beautiful and far off, I plainly
see the patches of snow.