Aspects of Nature in England and in America

— Nature has her parallels of longitude as well as latitude, her occidental and oriental as well as her tropical and temperate and hyperborean zones. The flora and fauna of nations differ as their men do. Accent, attitude, proportion, enter into all things. Life has the same basis everywhere, but the elements are differently mixed. If I may be permitted to formulate a generalization, I am disposed to say that with us Nature is more dædal and less human than in England ; wilder, and with a touch more of maziness in her charm. It is the difference between Shelley and Tennyson or Wordsworth, between Thoreau and Robert Burns. The elm of New England differs as much from that of old England as the Yankee from John Bull. There is a sturdiness as of one who has fought a lifelong battle in the aspect of the English tree which is absent from our own ; its boughs are less adventurous and less resilient, and the trunk is gnarled and knotted as if through years of stress and hardship. Even the docks and thistles are coarser and thicker-stemmed in English than in American pastures ; they bulk more than they aspire. Perhaps the propinquity of all parts of the island to the sea, and the salty breezes that sweep across it, may have something to do with this peculiarity. I notice a distinction between the trees and plants that fringe our Atlantic seaboard and those that grow farther inland. But perhaps, also, it may be explained in part by our clearer and more constant sunshine.

I find, however, that though such as I have indicated is the general tendency, it is one to which there are exceptions. The beech looks stouter and hardier here than there, and has less resilient boughs ; but the specimens I saw in England were on lawns or in cultivated closes, and their grace was perhaps the product of the gardener’s earlier care. With the pines the case is different. The distinction is not so much in balance and in delicacy of outline — for in these I think our trees have the advantage — as in the refinement and tinting of the surfaces. In England the bark is finer and more delicately shaded ; it has tones of pink and gray. Take, for instance, the tall Scotch fir which inhabits the whole of northern Europe. How exquisite the warm, rich salmon-pink of its bark in sunshine, with its curling, peeling scales, and the silvery blueness of its long thin spines ! And so similarly of other firs and spruces.

Of English wild flowers I remember few that compare in delicacy and lightness with our own. They surpass them in mass and numbers, in ubiquity and obtrusiveness; their presence and their scent, indeed, are all-pervading ; but somehow they have a too familiar, almost a domesticated air. Except in very early spring they come to us, and are not sought ; and they share a little the fate of all beautiful things that are too little reticent : we love them less because they are so easy to secure. The raggedrobin bends to us from every hedgerow, and beneath, it the violet and the primrose and the wild hyacinth mingle, or else alternate, and behind it cowslips cover the entire surface of the field. One feels the sympathetic value of this close companionship, though one tires of it by and by, and wishes to be more a seeker, and to follow Nature into those recesses where she is more coy. I feel as if, in England, outdoor life were bent on appealing to a wider class of minds, and so thrusts her charms a little boldly forward. It is the antithesis to the English social attitude.

There are compensations, however, in this opulence and all-pervasiveness. Nature is often mellow in England where she is rathe and harsh with us, and benignant where with us she is austere. The human quality in her is more pronounced. She is more loving, if less beautiful ; more constant, if less entrancingly delightful. What she lacks in æsthetic interest she makes up to us in the enduringness of her charm. The lichens and mosses of England are thicker and less graceful than ours, but they are, I think, more deeply and richly tinted, and it would be difficult to decide to which to give the palm. When I close my eyes and look back upon the panorama of her landscapes, it is chiefly with her fructuousness that I am impressed, and the confiding semidomesticity of her floral and faunal life. Nature has taken on the tone of man through long intimacy with his presence, and reflects as in a mirror the procession of his thoughts and ways.

The length of England’s spring and the mildness of her winters result in the slow growth of the foliage on her deciduous trees, and the young leaves lack that delicacy and diversity of tone which make the charm of the woods at the end of our New England May. But there is a regularity in the procession of her growths which to us is unfamiliar. In a normal spring, it is possible to tell almost to a day when any flower will be first in bloom, or the leafbuds at a certain stage in their development. The constancy of her ocean temperature and the uncertainty that attends our nearness to the northern snowfields account for this diversity; the sea being, calorically, a more stable neighbor than the land.

Among the birds, the rule I have enunciated for the flora holds good, with few exceptions. Not so, however, with the denizens of the streams. Our common fish are coarser and less idyllic. Our pumpkin-seeds and shiners do not equal their roach and dace, nor has our minnow the ruby gullet that is turned up at us in the purling English stream. Our fish seem to be of a lower and less developed type æsthetically as well as biologically; they are more the product of the weeds and of the mud than of the flowers and of the shimmering upper waters. It is as if Nature had not begun to put the finishing touches to this portion of her economy until she had brought them into contact with the Caucasian mind, and as if, therefore, we were behindhand by reason of the lateness of America’s discovery.

But the distinction changes as we mount upwards in the biological scale. It is true that the song of our robin is less beautiful in tone — more common and less flutelike — than that of his close congener, the English blackbird, —

but our thrushes make up for this declension, and more than expiate this plebeian trait. While far less copious, their song is rarer and more ethereal, and their shy woodland habits are in well-bred contrast with the boldness of the English species, which sing openly on the tall trees of the lawn. I am obliged, however, to admit that our hawks seem to me less proudly graceful and less exquisitely mottled ; and our kingfisher is a churl beside his glancing English cousin, lacking both in the daintiness of his body and in the brilliancy of his blues and reds and greens. Ours is a rough utilitarian fellow, while the function of the English species is chiefly to be beautiful. It is of him that sportsmen aver that the brightness of his dye makes it almost impossible to see his small dead body on the snow in the winter sunshine ; and it is of his pellucid coat that Tennyson is thinking when he tells us how

I know of no other bird to whose plumage the word “ translucent ” may be so appropriately applied, nor any whose hues approach so nearly the blue-green color of the sunkissed wave.

But, in spite of this brilliant rarity, England has little to place beside our summer redbird and scarlet tanager, our oriole and bluebird ; nor is there anything among British sylvidœ to compare with our orangethroated and cerulean warblers. In delicacy and brilliancy of coloring our woodbirds take the lead. One hears the adjective “ beautiful ” applied in England to birds which would not here excite remark. Even the goldfinch and the chaffinch — notwithstanding the exquisite rose-pink breast of the male of the last-named species — pale beside many of our lesser songsters ; and our yellow summer warbler is far prettier and more dainty than the yellow-hammer. The bullfinch, however, holds his own, and may be correlated with our cardinal and rose-breasted grosbeaks, which he patterns on a smaller scale.

The markings of many even of the most beauteous English birds look too pronounced, as if done by the hand of Nature ere she had become initiated into the modes of blending and shading off. The bars upon the wings of the chaffinch and the red throat-patch of the goldfinch seem too definitely bounded. One would like them better if their edges had been toned a little, and merged in the colors that come next.

The linnet, however, is a rarely beautiful symphony in green and brown, and well deserves his encomiums at the hands of Wordsworth : —

Of English game-birds I saw only the partridge and the pheasant, and these seemed to me to have suffered that degeneration which in nature is almost always the attendant upon an easy way of life. Despite his richer plumage, the former is grosser and less wilding than the partridge of our woods ; gamekeepers and continued cosseting have reduced him almost to the level of the fowl, and both he and the lordly pheasant smack to me a little of the barnyard. For my own part, I have little sympathy with the drive and the battue. I should rather shoot one ptarmigan among the Scottish boulders, or one woodcock beside an English stream, than bag a score of pheasants in a preserve, or half a hundred brace of partridges. I care little for the bulking of my game-bag, — it is a consideration altogether gross and plebeian ; but I care for the training of hand and ear and eye, and for the quality of my marksmanship. I have a feeling that the exquisite sensibilities of Frederick Robertson found more and deeper pleasure in his long and lonely watching in the Sussex reeds for a coy and solitary wild duck than enters into the consciousness of the employer of a score of beaters.

There is one charming phase of Nature in England to which I have not adverted, closely connected with the half-domesticity of her fauna. I am inclined to consider it the outcome of in-breeding and of the contact of the brutes with man. It is the deeper culture and more tender and receptive aspect of the ferine eye. Notice the contrast there is between the eye of the well-bred, well-trained hunter and that of the unbroken mustang, between that of the St. Bernard and that of the wolf or fox. The one lets us look below the surface ; it is all softness and receptiveness, even though it may be fringed with lightning ; but the other is hard and impenetrable, — a ball of smouldering and unconquerable fire. In the eye of the animal brought into subjection to man, and not yet yielding willingly to his dominion, there is a suggestion, if not an element, of insanity. It was into the eye of a captive European swallow which he held in his hand, under the eaves at Königsberg, that Kant was looking when he declared it was “ as if he were gazing into heaven ; ” and one is led to wonder what might be the result to the eye of the woodcock if he could be induced to leave his sequestered haunts and mix more intimately and more confidingly with mankind.