Books: The Writings of John Burroughs
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John Burroughs >> The Writings of John Burroughs
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II
SPRINGS
"I'll show thee the best springs."
--TEMPEST.
A MAN who came back to the place of his birth in the East, after an
absence of a quarter of a century in the West, said the one thing
he most desired to see about the old homestead was the spring.
This, at least, he would find unchanged. Here his lost youth would
come back to him. The faces of his father and mother he might not
look upon; but the face of the spring, that had mirrored theirs and
his own so oft, he fondly imagined would beam on him as of old. I
can well believe that, in that all but springless country in which
he had cast his lot, the vision, the remembrance, of the fountain
that flowed by his father's doorway, so prodigal of its precious
gifts, had awakened in him the keenest longings and regrets.
Did he not remember the path, also? for next to the spring itself
is the path that leads to it. Indeed, of all foot-paths, the
spring-path is the most suggestive.
This is a path with something at the end of it, and the best of
good fortune awaits him who walks therein. It is a well-worn path,
and, though generally up or down a hill, it is the easiest of all
paths to travel: we forget our fatigue when going to the spring,
and we have lost it when we turn to come away. See with what
alacrity the laborer hastens along it, all sweaty from the fields;
see the boy or girl running with pitcher or pail; see the welcome
shade of the spreading tree that presides over its marvelous birth!
In the woods or on the mountain-side, follow the path and you are
pretty sure to find a spring; all creatures are going that way
night and day, and they make a path.
A spring is always a vital point in the landscape; it is indeed the
eye of the fields, and how often, too, it has a noble eyebrow in
the shape of an overhanging bank or ledge! Or else its site is
marked by some tree which the pioneer has wisely left standing, and
which sheds a coolness and freshness that make the water more
sweet. In the shade of this tree the harvesters sit and eat their
lunch, and look out upon the quivering air of the fields. Here the
Sunday saunterer stops and lounges with his book, and bathes his
hands and face in the cool fountain. Hither the strawberry-girl
comes with her basket and pauses a moment in the green shade. The
plowman leaves his plow, and in long strides approaches the life-
renewing spot, while his team, that cannot follow, look wistfully
after him. Here the cattle love to pass the heat of the day, and
hither come the birds to wash themselves and make their toilets.
Indeed, a spring is always an oasis in the desert of the fields.
It is a creative and generative centre. It attracts all things to
itself,--the grasses, the mosses, the flowers, the wild plants, the
great trees. The walker finds it out, the camping party seek it,
the pioneer builds his hut or his house near it. When the settler
or squatter has found a good spring, he has found a good place to
begin life; he has found the fountain-head of much that he is
seeking in this world. The chances are that he has found a
southern and eastern exposure, for it is a fact that water does not
readily flow north; the valleys mostly open the other way; and it
is quite certain he has found a measure of salubrity, for where
water flows fever abideth not. The spring, too, keeps him to the
right belt, out of the low valley, and off the top of the hill.
When John Winthrop decided upon the site where now stands the city
of Boston, as a proper place for a settlement, he was chiefly
attracted by a large and excellent spring of water that flowed
there. The infant city was born of this fountain.
There seems a kind of perpetual springtime about the place where
water issues from the ground,--a freshness and a greenness that are
ever renewed. The grass never fades, the ground is never parched
or frozen. There is warmth there in winter and coolness in summer.
The temperature is equalized. In March or April the spring runs
are a bright emerald while the surrounding fields are yet brown and
sere, and in fall they are yet green when the first snow covers
them. Thus every fountain by the roadside is a fountain of youth
and of life. This is what the old fables finally mean.
An intermittent spring is shallow; it has no deep root, and is like
an inconstant friend. But a perennial spring, one whose ways are
appointed, whose foundation is established, what a profound and
beautiful symbol! In fact, there is no more large and universal
symbol in nature than the spring, if there is any other capable of
such wide and various applications.
What preparation seems to have been made for it in the conformation
of the ground, even in the deep underlying geological strata! Vast
rocks and ledges are piled for it, or cleft asunder that it may
find a way. Sometimes it is a trickling thread of silver down the
sides of a seamed and scarred precipice. Then again the stratified
rock is like a just-lifted lid, from beneath which the water
issues. Or it slips noiselessly out of a deep dimple in the
fields. Occasionally it bubbles up in the valley, as if forced up
by the surrounding hills. Many springs, no doubt, find an outlet
in the beds of the large rivers and lakes, and are unknown to all
but the fishes. They probably find them out and make much of them.
The trout certainly do. Find a place in the creek where a spring
issues, or where it flows into it from a near bank, and you have
found a most likely place for trout. They deposit their spawn
there in the fall, warm their noses there in winter, and cool
themselves there in summer. I have seen the patriarchs of the
tribe of an old and much-fished stream, seven or eight enormous
fellows, congregated in such a place. The boys found it out, and
went with a bag and bagged them all. In another place a trio of
large trout, that knew and despised all the arts of the fishermen,
took up their abode in a deep, dark hole in the edge of the wood,
that had a spring flowing into a shallow part of it. In midsummer
they were wont to come out from their safe retreat and bask in the
spring, their immense bodies but a few inches under water. A
youth, who had many times vainly sounded their dark hiding-place
with his hook, happening to come along with his rifle one day, shot
the three, one after another, killing them by the concussion of the
bullet on the water immediately over them.
The ocean itself is known to possess springs, copious ones, in many
places the fresh water rising up through the heavier salt as
through a rock, and affording supplies to vessels at the surface.
Off the coast of Florida many of these submarine springs have been
discovered, the outlet, probably, of the streams and rivers that
disappear in the "sinks" of that State.
It is a pleasant conception, that of the unscientific folk, that
the springs are fed directly by the sea, or that the earth is full
of veins or arteries that connect with the great reservoir of
waters. But when science turns the conception over and makes the
connection in the air,--disclosing the great water-main in the
clouds, and that the mighty engine of the hydraulic system of
nature is the sun,--the fact becomes even more poetical, does it
not? This is one of the many cases where science, instead of
curtailing the imagination, makes new and large demands upon it.
The hills are great sponges that do not and cannot hold the water
that is precipitated upon them, but let it filter through at the
bottom. This is the way the sea has robbed the earth of its various
salts, its potash, its lime, its magnesia, and many other mineral
elements. It is found that the oldest upheavals, those sections of
the country that have been longest exposed to the leeching and
washing of the rains, are poorest in those substances that go to
the making of the osseous framework of man and of the animals.
Wheat does not grow well there, and the men born and reared there
are apt to have brittle bones. An important part of those men went
downstream ages before they were born. The water of such sections
is now soft and free from mineral substances, but not more
wholesome on that account.
The gigantic springs of the country that have not been caught in
any of the great natural basins are mostly confined to the
limestone region of the Middle and Southern States,--the valley of
Virginia and its continuation and deflections into Kentucky,
Tennessee, northern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Through this
belt are found the great caves and the subterranean rivers. The
waters have here worked like enormous moles, and have honeycombed
the foundations of the earth. They have great highways beneath
the hills. Water charged with carbonic acid gas has a very sharp
tooth and a powerful digestion, and no limestone rock can long
resist it. Sherman's soldiers tell of a monster spring in
northern Alabama,--a river leaping full-grown from the bosom of the
earth; and of another at the bottom of a large, deep pit in the
rocks, that continues its way under ground.
There are many springs in Florida of this character, large
underground streams that have breathing-holes, as it were, here
and there. In some places the water rises and fills the bottoms
of deep bowl-shaped depressions; in other localities it is reached
through round natural well-holes; a bucket is let down by a rope,
and if it becomes detached is quickly swept away by the current.
Some of the Florida springs are perhaps the largest in the world,
affording room and depth enough for steamboats to move and turn in
them. Green Cove Spring is said to be like a waterfall reversed; a
cataract rushing upward through a transparent liquid instead of
leaping downward through the air. There are one or two of these
enormous springs also in northern Mississippi,--springs so large
that it seems as if the whole continent must nurse them.
The Valley of the Shenandoah is remarkable for its large springs.
The town of Winchester, a town of several thousand inhabitants, is
abundantly supplied with water from a single spring that issues on
higher ground near by. Several other springs in the vicinity
afford rare mill-power. At Harrisonburg, a county town farther
up the valley, I was attracted by a low ornamental dome resting
upon a circle of columns, on the edge of the square that contained
the court-house, and was surprised to find that it gave shelter to
an immense spring. This spring was also capable of watering the
town or several towns; stone steps led down to it at the bottom
of a large stone basin. There was a pretty constant string of
pails to and from it. Aristotle called certain springs of his
country "cements of society," because the young people so
frequently met there and sang and conversed; and I have little
doubt this spring is of like social importance. There is a famous
spring at San Antonio, Texas, which is described by that excellent
traveler, Frederick Law Olmsted. "The whole river," he says,
"gushes up in one sparkling burst from the earth, with all the
accessories of smaller springs,--moss, pebbles, foliage, seclusion,
etc. Its effect is overpowering. It is beyond your possible
conception of a spring."
Of like copiousness and splendor is the Caledonia spring, or
springs, in western New York. They give birth to a white-pebbled,
transparent stream, several rods wide and two or three feet deep,
that flows eighty barrels of water per second, and is alive with
trout. The trout are fat and gamy even in winter.
The largest spring in England, called the Well of St. Winifred, at
Holywell, flows less than three barrels per second. I recently
went many miles out of my way to see the famous trout spring in
Warren County, New Jersey. This spring flows about one thousand
gallons of water per minute, which has a uniform temperature of
fifty degrees winter and summer. It is near the Musconetcong
Creek, which looks as if it were made up of similar springs. On
the parched and sultry summer day upon which my visit fell, it was
well worth walking many miles just to see such a volume of water
issue from the ground. I felt with the boy Petrarch, when he first
beheld a famous spring, that "were I master of such a fountain I
would prefer it to the finest of cities." A large oak leans down
over the spring and affords an abundance of shade. The water does
not bubble up, but comes straight out with great speed, like a
courier with important news, and as if its course underground had
been a direct and an easy one for a long distance. Springs that
issue in this way have a sort of vertebra, a ridgy and spine-like
centre that suggests the gripe and push there is in this element.
What would one not give for such a spring in his back yard, or
front yard, or anywhere near his house, or in any of his fields?
One would be tempted to move his house to it, if the spring could
not be brought to the house. Its mere poetic value and suggestion
would be worth all the art and ornament to be had. It would
irrigate one's heart and character as well as his acres. Then one
might have a Naiad Queen to do his churning and to saw his wood;
then one might "see his chore done by the gods themselves," as
Emerson says, or by the nymphs, which is just as well.
I know a homestead, situated on one of the picturesque branch
valleys of the Housatonic, that has such a spring flowing by the
foundation walls of the house, and not a little of the strong
overmastering local attachment that holds the owner there is born
of that, his native spring. He could not, if he would, break from
it. He says that when he looks down into it he has a feeling that
he is an amphibious animal that has somehow got stranded. A long,
gentle flight of stone steps leads from the back porch down to it
under the branches of a lofty elm. It wells up through the white
sand and gravel as through a sieve, and fills the broad space that
has been arranged for it so gently and imperceptibly that one does
not suspect its copiousness until he has seen the overflow. It
turns no wheel, yet it lends a pliant hand to many of the affairs
of that household. It is a refrigerator in summer and a frost-proof
envelope in winter, and a fountain of delights the year round.
Trout come up from the Weebutook River and dwell there and become
domesticated, and take lumps of butter from your hand, or rake the
ends of your fingers if you tempt them. It is a kind of sparkling
and ever-washed larder. Where are the berries? where is the
butter, the milk, the steak, the melon? In the spring. It
preserves, it ventilates, it cleanses. It is a board of health and
a general purveyor. It is equally for use and for pleasure.
Nothing degrades it, and nothing can enhance its beauty. It is
picture and parable, and an instrument of music. It is servant and
divinity in one. The milk of forty cows is cooled in it, and never
a drop gets into the cans, though they are plunged to the brim. It
is as insensible to drought and rain as to heat and cold. It is
planted upon the sand, and yet it abideth like a house upon a rock.
It evidently has some relation to a little brook that flows down
through a deep notch in the hills half a mile distant, because on
one occasion, when the brook was being ditched or dammed, the
spring showed great perturbation. Every nymph in it was filled
with sudden alarm and kicked up a commotion.
In some sections of the country, when there is no spring near the
house, the farmer, with much labor and pains, brings one from some
uplying field or wood. Pine and poplar logs are bored and laid in
a trench, and the spring practically moved to the desired spot. The
ancient Persians had a law that whoever thus conveyed the water of
a spring to a spot not watered before should enjoy many immunities
under the state, not granted to others.
Hilly and mountainous countries do not always abound in good
springs. When the stratum is vertical, or has too great a dip, the
water is not collected in large veins, but is rather held as it
falls, and oozes out slowly at the surface over the top of the
rock. On this account one of the most famous grass and dairy
sections of New York is poorly supplied with springs. Every creek
starts in a bog or marsh, and good water can be had only by
excavating.
What a charm lurks about those springs that are found near the tops
of mountains, so small that they get lost amid the rocks and debris
and never reach the valley, and so cold that they make the throat
ache! Every hunter and mountain-climber can tell you of such,
usually on the last rise before the summit is cleared. It is
eminently the hunter's spring. I do not know whether or not the
foxes and other wild creatures lap at it, but their pursuers are
quite apt to pause there to take breath or to eat their lunch. The
mountain-climbers in summer hail it with a shout. It is always a
surprise, and raises the spirits of the dullest. Then it seems to
be born of wildness and remoteness, and to savor of some special
benefit or good fortune. A spring in the valley is an idyl, but a
spring on the mountain is a genuine lyrical touch. It imparts a
mild thrill; and if one were to call any springs "miracles," as the
natives of Cashmere are said to regard their fountains, it would be
such as these.
What secret attraction draws one in his summer walk to touch at all
the springs on his route, and to pause a moment at each, as if what
he was in quest of would be likely to turn up there? I can seldom
pass a spring without doing homage to it. It is the shrine at
which I oftenest worship. If I find one fouled with leaves or
trodden full by cattle, I take as much pleasure in cleaning it out
as a devotee in setting up the broken image of his saint. Though I
chance not to want to drink there, I like to behold a clear
fountain, and I may want to drink next time I pass, or some
traveler, or heifer, or milch cow may. Leaves have a strange
fatality for the spring. They come from afar to get into it. In a
grove or in the woods they drift into it and cover it up like snow.
Late in November, in clearing one out, I brought forth a frog from
his hibernacle in the leaves at the bottom. He was very black, and
he rushed about in a bewildered manner like one suddenly aroused
from his sleep.
There is no place more suitable for statuary than about a spring or
fountain, especially in parks or improved fields. Here one seems
to expect to see figures and bending forms. "Where a spring rises
or a river flows," says Seneca, "there should we build altars and
offer sacrifices."
I have spoken of the hunter's spring. The traveler's spring is a
little cup or saucer shaped fountain set in the bank by the
roadside. The harvester's spring is beneath a widespreading tree
in the fields. The lover's spring is down a lane under a hill.
There is a good screen of rocks and bushes. The hermit's spring is
on the margin of a lake in the woods. The fisherman's spring is by
the river. The miner finds his spring in the bowels of the
mountain. The soldier's spring is wherever he can fill his
canteen. The spring where schoolboys go to fill the pail is a long
way up or down a hill, and has just been roiled by a frog or
muskrat, and the boys have to wait till it settles. There is yet
the milkman's spring that never dries, the water of which is milky
and opaque. Sometimes it flows out of a chalk cliff. This last is
a hard spring: all the others are soft.
There is another side to this subject,-- the marvelous, not to say
the miraculous; and if I were to advert to all the curious or
infernal springs that are described by travelers or others,--the
sulphur springs, the mud springs, the sour springs, the soap
springs, the soda springs, the blowing springs, the spouting
springs, the boiling springs not one mile from Tophet, the springs
that rise and fall with the tide; the spring spoken of by
Vitruvius, that gave unwonted loudness to the voice; the spring
that Plutarch tells about, that had something of the flavor of
wine, because it was supposed that Bacchus had been washed in it
immediately after his birth; the spring that Herodotus describes,--
wise man and credulous boy that he was,--called the "Fountain of
the Sun," which was warm at dawn, cold at noon, and hot at
midnight; the springs at San Filippo, Italy, that have built up a
calcareous wall over a mile long and several hundred feet thick;
the renowned springs of Cashmere, that are believed by the people
to be the source of the comeliness of their women,--if I were to
follow up my subject in this direction, I say, it would lead me
into deeper and more troubled waters than I am in quest of at
present.
Pliny, in a letter to one of his friends, gives the following
account of a spring that flowed near his Laurentine villa:--
"There is a spring which rises in a neighboring mountain, and
running among the rocks is received into a little banqueting-room,
artificially formed for that purpose, from whence, after being
detained a short time, it falls into the Larian Lake. The nature
of this spring is extremely curious: it ebbs and flows regularly
three times a day. The increase and decrease are plainly visible,
and exceedingly interesting to observe. You sit down by the side
of the fountain, and while you are taking a repast and drinking its
water, which is exceedingly cool, you see it gradually rise and
fall. If you place a ring or anything else at the bottom when it
is dry, the water creeps gradually up, first gently washing,
finally covering it entirely, and then, little by little, subsides
again. If you wait long enough, you may see it thus alternately
advance and recede three successive times."
Pliny suggests four or five explanations of this phenomenon, but is
probably wide of the mark in all but the fourth one:--
"Or is there rather a certain reservoir that contains these waters
in the bowels of the earth, and, while it is recruiting its
discharges, the stream in consequence flows more slowly and in less
quantity, but, when it has collected its due measure, runs on again
in its usual strength and fullness."
There are several of these intermitting springs in different parts
of the world, and they are perhaps all to be explained on the
principle of the siphon.
In the Idyls of Theocritus there are frequent allusions to springs.
It was at a spring--and a mountain spring at that--that Castor and
Pollux encountered the plug-ugly Amycus:--
"And spying on a mountain a wild wood of vast size, they found
under a smooth cliff an ever-flowing spring, filled with pure
water, and the pebbles beneath seemed like crystal or silver from
the depths; and near there had grown tall pines, and poplars, and
plane-trees, and cypresses with leafy tops, and fragrant flowers,
pleasant work for hairy bees," etc.
Or the story of Hylas, the auburn-haired boy, who went to the
spring to fetch water for supper for Hercules and stanch Telamon,
and was seized by the enamored nymphs and drawn in. The spring was
evidently a marsh or meadow spring: it was in a "low-lying spot,
and around it grew many rushes, and the pale blue swallow-wort, and
green maidenhair, and blooming parsley, and couch grass stretching
through the marshes." As Hercules was tramping through the bog,
club in hand, and shouting "Hylas!" to the full depth of his
throat, he heard a thin voice come from the water,--it was Hylas
responding, and Hylas, in the shape of the little frog, has been
calling from our marsh springs ever since.
The characteristic flavor and suggestion of these Idyls is like
pure spring-water. This is, perhaps, why the modern reader is apt
to be disappointed in them when he takes them up for the first
time. They appear minor and literal and tasteless, as does most
ancient poetry; but it is mainly because we have got to the
fountain-head; and have come in contact with a mind that has been
but little shaped by artificial indoor influences. The stream of
literature is now much fuller and broader than it was in ancient
times, with currents and counter-currents, and diverse and curious
phases; but the primitive sources seem far behind us, and for the
refreshment of simple spring-water in art we must still go back to
Greek poetry.
III
AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE
THERE is no creature with which man has surrounded himself that
seems so much like a product of civilization, so much like the
result of development on special lines and in special fields, as
the honey-bee. Indeed, a colony of bees, with their neatness and
love of order, their division of labor, their public-spiritedness,
their thrift, their complex economies, and their inordinate love of
gain, seems as far removed from a condition of rude nature as does
a walled city or a cathedral town. Our native bee, on the other
hand, the "burly, dozing bumblebee," affects one more like the
rude, untutored savage. He has learned nothing from experience. He
lives from hand to mouth. He luxuriates in time of plenty, and he
starves in time of scarcity. He lives in a rude nest, or in a hole
in the ground, and in small communities; he builds a few deep cells
or sacks in which he stores a little honey and bee-bread for his
young, but as a worker in wax he is of the most primitive and
awkward. The Indian regarded the honey-bee as an ill omen. She was
the white man's fly. In fact, she was the epitome of the white man
himself. She has the white man's craftiness, his industry, his
architectural skill, his neatness and love of system, his
foresight; and, above all, his eager, miserly habits. The honey-
bee's great ambition is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to
possess the sweet of every flower that blooms. She is more than
provident. Enough will not satisfy her; she must have all she can
get by hook or by crook. She comes from the oldest country, Asia,
and thrives best in the most fertile and long-settled lands.
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