Part 6 (1/2)
Date, time of day, place. Hills to either side and their character; a guess at their height; a river below, swift, broken, or placid; the place of the sun, behind, in front, or overhead. Then the nature of the trees and how the light falls on them or in them, according to their kind. Next come color of wave and bank and sky, with questions as to water-tints and their causes. Last of all, and here she must be simple and natural, what mood of mind does it all bring to her, for every landscape has its capacity to leave you with some general sense of its awe, its beauty, its sadness, or its joyfulness.
Try this place again at some other hour, or in a storm, or under early morning light, and make like notes. If she should go on at this pleasant work, and one day return to the same spot, she will wonder how much more she has now learned to see.
Trees she will find an enchanting study. Let her take a group of them and endeavor to say on paper what makes each species so peculiar. The form, color, and expression of the boles are to be noted. A reader may smile at the phrase ”expression,” but look at a tattered old birch, or a silvery young beech-hole, ”modest and maidenly, clean of limb,” or a lightning-scarred pine. Tree-study has advantages because it is always within reach. The axe has been so ruthlessly wielded that you must go far into the woods to get the best specimens of the pine, and the forests about our Maine lakes and in the Adirondacks have been sadly despoiled of their aristocrats. To see trees at their savage best one must go South, and seek the white-oaks of Carolina, the cypress of Florida, but the parks of Philadelphia and Baltimore afford splendid studies, and so also do the mountains of Virginia. Private taste and enterprise is saving already much that will be a joy to our children. A n.o.ble instance is the great wild park with which Colonel Parsons has protected the Natural Bridge in Virginia. I saw there an arbor-vitae said by botanists to be not less than nine hundred years old, a chestnut twenty-six feet in girth at the height of my shoulders, and oaks past praise. But trees are everywhere, and if my observant pupil likes them, let her next note the mode in which the branches spread and their proportion to the trunk. State it all in the fewest words. It is to be only a help to memory. Then she comes to the leaf forms and the mode in which they are ma.s.sed, their dulness or translucency, how suns.h.i.+ne affects their brilliancy, as it is above or falls laterally at morn or eve. Perhaps she will note, too, on which the gray moss grows, and just in what forms, and how the mosses or lichens gather on the north side of trees and on what trees.
I may help my pupil if, like an artist teacher, I give one or two ill.u.s.trations, copied _verbatim_ from my note-books. The first was written next morning, as it is a brief record of a night scene.
Time, July 21, 1887, 9 P.M. Ristigouche River, New Brunswick, Canada.
Black darkness. Hill outlines nearly lost in sky. River black, with flas.h.i.+ng bits of white rapid; banks have grayish rocks, and so seem to be nearer than the dark stream limits. Sky looks level with hill-tops.
Water seems to come up close. Effect of being in a concave valley of water, and all things draw in on me. Sense of awe. Camp-fire's red glare on water. Sudden opening lift of sky. Hills recede. Water-level falls.
This is a barren, unadorned sketch, but it seems to tell the thing.
Or this, for a change. Newport. A beach. Time, August 1, 1887; 4 P.M.
About me cleft rocks, cleavage straight through the embedded pebbles.
Tones ruddy browns and grays. Gray beach. Sea-weed in heaps, deep pinks and purples. Boisterous waves, loaded with reddish seaweed, blue, with white crests, torn off in long ribbons by wind. Curious reds and blues as waves break, carrying sea-weed. Fierce gale off land. Dense fog, sun above it and to right. Everywhere yellow light. Sea strange dingy yellow. Leaves an unnatural green. Effect weird. Sense of unusualness.
Of course, such study of nature leads the intelligent to desire to know why the cleaved rock shows its sharp divisions as if cut by a knife, why yellow light gives such strangeness of tints, and thus draws on my pupil to larger explanatory studies. So much the better.