Tablets

Amos Alcott

Amos Bronson Alcott

Tablets

BOOK I

PRACTICAL

"Philosophy, the formatrix of judgment and manners, has the privilege of having a hand in everything." – Montaigne.

I

THE GARDEN

"If Eden be on earth at all,

'Tis that which we the country call."

В В В В Henry Vaughan.

THE GARDEN

i. – antiquity

"I never had any desire so strong and so like to covetousness," says Cowley, "as that one which I have had always that I might be master at last of a small house and ample garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there to dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature. Virgil's first wish was to be a wise man, the second to be a good husbandman. But since nature denies to most men the capacity or appetite, and fortune allows but to very few the opportunities or possibility of applying themselves wholly to wisdom, the best mixture of human affairs we can make, are the employments of a country life. It is, as Columella calls it, the nearest neighbor or next in kindred to philosophy. And Varro says the principles of it are the same which Ennius made to be the principles of all nature; earth, water, air, and the sun. There is no other sort of life that affords so many branches of praise to a panegyrist; the utility of it to a man's self, the usefulness or rather necessity of it to all the rest of mankind, the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the dignity."

This wish of the poet's appears to be nearly universal. Almost every one is drawn to the country, and takes pleasure in rural pursuits. The citizen hopes to become a countryman, and contrives to secure his cottage or villa, unless he fail by some reverse of fortune or of character. 'Tis man's natural position, the Paradise designed for him, and wherein he is placed originally in the Sacred Books of the cultivated peoples; their first man being conceived a gardener and countryman by inspiration as by choice.

Gardens and orchards plant themselves by sympathy about our dwellings, as if their seeds were preserved in us by inheritance. They distinguish Man properly from the forester and hunter. The country, as discriminated from the woods, is of man's creation. The savage has no country. Nor are farms and shops, trade, cities, but civilization in passing and formation. Civilization begins with persons, ideas; the garden and orchard showing the place of their occupants in the scale; these dotting the earth with symbols of civility wherever they ornament its face. Thus by mingling his mind with nature, and so transforming the landscape into his essence, Man generates the homestead, and opens a country to civilization and the arts.

In like manner, are the woods meliorated and made ours. Melancholy and morose, standing in their loneliness, we trim them into keeping with our wishes and so adopt them into our good graces, as ornaments of our estates, heraldries of our gentility.

Our human history neither opens in forests nor in cities, but in gardens and orchards whose mythologies are woven into the faith of our race; the poets having made these their chosen themes from the beginning. And we turn, as with emotions of country and consanguinity to the classic pictures of the Paradise, "planted by the Lord God eastward in Eden, and wherein he put the man, whom he had formed to dress and keep it;" where,

"Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow

All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste;

Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balms,

Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind,

Hung amiable, —

Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose;" —

to this; or, of scarce inferior fame, to the gardens of the Hesperides with their golden apples; – or, to those other

" – gardens feigned

Or of revived Adonis, or renowned Alcinous,"

whereof Homer sings:

"Without the hall and close upon the gate

A goodly orchard ground was situate

Of near ten acres, about which was led

A lofty quickset. In it flourished

High and broad fruit trees that pomegranates bo