measuring, at least a hundred feet high, gauged
by the trees, and I could see here and there
between the groups of firs traces of a road
coming down the mountain side. In a saner
moment, I should have seen that this was only
the accident of the formation, but then it kindled
me like inspiration. And then I heard one of
those mocking voices in the air say, "The city
of Silence," as one had before said, "The pro-
THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 259
cession of the Anakim." It seemed at the moment
that I had only to launch through the air to
reach the city, and why I did not attempt it I
could hardly say. My blood rushed through my
veins with a mad energy, and my brain seemed
to have been replaced by some ethereal substance
and to be capable of floating me off as if it were
a balloon. Yet I clung and looked, my whole
soul in my eyes, and had no thought of losing
the spectacle even for an instant, were it to
reach the city itself. The glorious glamour of
that place and moment, who can comprehend
it? The wind swung my tree-top to and fro,
and I climbed up it until the tree bent with my
weight like a twig with a bird's.
Presently I heard bells and strains of music,
as though all the military bands of a large city
were coming together on the walls; and the
sounds rose and fell with the wind one moment
entirely lost, another full and triumphant. Then
I heard the sound of hunting horns and the
baying of a pack of hounds, deep-mouthed, as
if a hunting party were coming down the moun-
tain-side. Nearer and nearer they came, and
I heard merry laughing and shouting as they
swept through the valley, and I had a horrible
dread lest they should find me and drive me,
intruding, from the enchanted land.
The agitation grew so that I determined, coute
qui coute, to fathom the mystery. I descended
to the ground and pushed my way through to
the lake. Near the guardian pines they lost
260 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT
their menace; and when I had, after long and
hard work, launched my boat on the waters, I
found no mystery the mountain-top before me
was a common-place mountain-top, and all the
enchantment had withdrawn again. There was
a fever in my blood, and a fainting weakness
took the place of the mad enthusiasm of an
hour before. I felt that to return to Raquette
Lake was beyond my powers, and to pass the
night there was nothing but to sleep under my
overturned boat on the fir branches. With Carlo
to keep guard, I knew that I was in no danger
from the wolves, and I had food enough for him
and me. I looked about the lake to find the
most promising place for a sleeping-place, with
a water-source; and, while I watched, I caught
sight of a thin column of smoke rising from the
trees at the farther end of the sheet of water.
Sick from the reaction of my delusions, in-
wardly ashamed of them and of myself, I
paddled slowly down to the place whence the
smoke arose. I found there a camp, deserted
for the moment; and, drawing the boat up on
the shore, I sat down on the bed of branches
in the camp to await the return of the owner
and ask for a night's lodging. I was weak, and,
trembling from the reaction, for the eager quest
of the morning was dead, I fell asleep, and woke
at the growl of Carlo, announcing an approaching
footstep. The owner of the camp was not far
away, and welcomed me in his rough cordiality,
with few words, to share his lodgings. He was
THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 261
a trapper engaged in running his lines for the
next "winter's sable trapping. He cut some
venison steaks and I produced some bread, which
he had not eaten for days, and we, having eaten
heartily, lay down and slept till daylight. How
dull and grey the landscape was in the morning
twilight! My host, willing to take the oppor-
tunity to go down to Wilbur's on Raquette Lake
for supplies, accepted my invitation to a seat in
my boat and give me the aid of his stronger
arm to work our way back. The dull and
matter-of-fact life of the next day or two was
beyond my power to lighten by any effort or
labour, and it was not till three or four days
had passed that I cared to approach my Daemon.
To my question as to the meaning of my experi-
ence of a few days before, it replied, "It was a
freak of your imagination."
" But what is this imagination, then ? " I asked,
"which, being a faculty of my own, yet masters
my reason?"
" Not at all a faculty, but your very highest self,
your own life in an activity, perhaps abnormal,
or even morbid, but always your own life in
creative function. Your reason is a faculty, and
is always subject to the purposes of your ima-
gination. If, instead of regarding imagination
as an appendage to your mental organisation,
you had conceived it as it is, the highest
state of your whole being, your life in its
noblest function, you would have seen why it
is that it works unconsciously, just as you live
262 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT
unconsciously and involuntarily. Men set their
reason and feeling to subdue what they consider
a treacherous element in themselves ; they only
succeed in dwarfing their natures and material-
ising and stifling their best selves, and succeed
in keeping imagination inert while reason has
the control; but when reason rests in sleep and
you cease to live to the material world, imagina-
tion resumes its normal power. You dream; it
is only the revival or imperfect issue of the
creation you suppress when awake. You consider
the sights and sounds of your late experience to
be follies ; you reason imagination demonstrates
its power by overturning your reason and deceiv-
ing your very senses. The madman, in whom
reason has gone definitely to sleep, has nothing
left him but his imagination and the habits of
his appetites; but his imagination has only lost
the guide to its evolution, which is all that your
reason is."
"You speak of its creations," I replied. "I
understand this in a certain sense; but, if these
were such, would they not insist on permanence?
and can anything created perish?"
" Nonsense ! what will these trees be to-morrow ?
and the rocks you are sitting on, are they not
changing to vegetation under you? The only
creation is that of ideas ; things are thin shadows.
If man is not imaginative i.e., creative he is
still undeveloped."
"But is not such an assumption trenching on
the supremacy of God?" I asked.
THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 263
"What do you understand by 'God,' and where
do you place Him ? "
"An infinitely wise and loving Controller of
events, of course," I said. "I do not attempt to
define Him, but I recognise Him."
"Did you ever find anyone whose ideas of God
were the same as your own?" it asked.
"Not entirely."
"Then your God is not the same as the God of
other men; from the Feejeean to the Christian
there is a wide range. Of course, there is a first
great principle of life; but this personality you
all worship is it not a creation of your own?"
I now felt this to be the ultimate end of the
Daemon's urging : it recurred too often not to
be designed. Led on by the sophistry of the
Tempter, I had floated on unconsciously to this
issue, practically admitting, and half -believing all;
but when this suggestion stood completely un-
clothed before me, everything in me revolted
from the abyss it opened. For an instant all
was chaos, and the very order of nature seemed
disorder. Life and light vanished from the face
of the earth; my night made all things dead
and dark. An universe without a God ! Creation
seemed in that moment but a galvanised corpse.
What my emotions were in that brief space no
one who has not felt them can conceive. My
first impulse was to finish with all questionings
in death; with the next I was swept back to the
old life of unhesitating faith and daily reverence
for the Creator, and I cried from the depth of
264 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT
despair, "God deliver me from the body of this
death ! " It was but a moment and then there
came in the place of the cold questioning voice
of the Daemon one of ineffable music, repeating
words familiar from my childhood and lovely in
my past, "Ye believe in God believe also in me."
The hot tears for another moment blotted out
the world from sight. I said passionately to the
questioner, "Now, who are you? what are you?"
"Your own doubts," was the reply, and it was as
if I spoke to myself. Little by little I grew
clearer, and after the state had long gone by, it
seemed as if I had been in a long and troubled
dream. But the experience never came back
the lesson was learned.
THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP
I REMEMBER that in one of his early letters to me,
Professor Ruskin expressed the opinion that the
character of American landscape was such as not
to favour invention, but that its largeness must
give the art a high degree of grandeur, once
excited. It was true, for the sameness of the wild
nature is not much relieved by the incomplete
domestication, where men have improved its
humanisation it lacks the appeals to human
sympathy and imagination which are made by
the landscape of an old country, and what
Theodore Rousseau used to call intimity which is
partially interpreted by our feeling of association
the presence of a "light that never was on sea
or land." I have always found that it lacked the
quality of the pictorial, which is so abounding in
English and Italian scenery and some parts of
the lands of France, and the search for the pictur-
esque was one of the great pre-occupations of the
landscape painter when I was a student. In de-
fault of a motive in the familiar scenes, we used
to frequent the wild ones, and the great, un-
tracked wildernesses of the Northern states were
a field of study and search of emotion the
sentiment of savage nature, since the picturesque
was not at our doors. The huge forest of the
265
266 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP
Adirondack region of New York state, threaded
by rivers, and interspersed with lakes of all sizes
from Champlain, where fleets once fought, to the
tiny sheets of water where the skiff passes with
difficulty through the fields of pond-lilies, was
that which most caught my imagination; and for
several years I passed the summer there, more
fascinated by the solitude and savagery of it than
by anything paintable I found there. The rela-
tions with Lowell and the University town of
Cambridge, alluded to in another paper, led him
and some of his friends to share the fortunes of
one of my excursions, recorded in "The Sub-
jective of It," and from this to the formation of
a club, known as the Adirondack, amongst whose
members were Lowell, Emerson, Agassiz, Professor
Jeffries Wyman (the rare scientific genius taken
from his studies too soon for the honour of his
country), Dr Estes Howe, Judge Hoar (General
Grant's Attorney -General later on), S. G. Ward,
J. M. Forbes, and others amongst the leading
personages of Boston and Cambridge. The club
existed until the war absorbed all the thought of
its members, and the estate of over 20,000 acres
of untouched and primitive forest in the wildest
and most beautiful part of the Adirondacks was
allowed to be re-conveyed to the lumber cutters.
But the first meeting was of unique interest,
from its having given rise to incidents and records
which survived the duration of the club. Chief
amongst these is the poem in which Emerson re-
corded his impressions of the first contact with
THE PHILOSOPHEKS' CAMP 267
primeval nature. The excursion also brought the
section into an unenviable notoriety, and so set
the fashion of luxurious camping out, and pur-
chase of tracts of land in the forest, which have,
in the sequence, destroyed its original character
altogether. Then the wolf howled and the bear
prowled about our camps, and more than once
have I heard the cry of the panther (Felis puma)
as it skirted our vicinity ; the grey eagle was al-
most the commonest of birds, and one might pass
a fortnight in the forest without seeing another
human being. The estate, which we afterwards
purchased at tax sale, included a pretty lake a mile
and a half long, with islands, all untouched still
by the lumberer's axe, the forest standing as it
had stood before Columbus sailed from Palos ; and
the larger lake where we made our initiatory
meeting, though of easier access, was in the
same condition. The condition of the club meet-
ing was, that for six weeks the camp should
be open to all the members and guests invited
by the committee, after or before which members
were free to invite their friends and occupy the
camp without restriction, each person having his
own guide and boat and exploring the forest
around or remaining in camp at pleasure, forming
parties or moving independently, lapsing as far
as might be into the original state of society.
The mountain country, which is known collec-
tively as the " Adirondack," is an elevated plateau
of the Laurentian range, lying between the valleys
of the Mohawk and St Lawrence, deeply cut by
268 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP
vales and gorges amongst the granite hills, and
in every depression holding a lake, the water
connection of which, with its companions, gives
rise to the characteristic feature of the region,
each chain of lakes forming a water - course,
through which lie the routes which explore the
entire region, it being rarely the case that more
than a mile separates the water of one chain
from that of another. The guides use light boats,
which they can easily carry on their shoulders
from one water to the next, and so they traverse
the entire mountain country freely. The lake
where our first encampment was made was known
as Follansbee Pond (the term lake being, in the
section, reserved for a sheet of several miles in
length), and it lies in a cul-de-sac of the chain of
lakes and streams named after one of the first
of the Jesuit explorers of the northern states,
Pere Raquette. Being elected captain of the
hunt and chief guide of the club, it depended on
me also, as the oldest woodsman, to select the
locality and superintend the construction of the
camp, and the choice was determined by the
facility of access, the abundance of game, and the
fact that the lake was out of any route to regions
beyond, giving the maximum of seclusion, as the
etiquette of the woods prevented another party
camping near us.
Follansbee was then a rare and beautiful piece
of untouched nature, divided from the highway,
the Raquette, by a marsh of several miles of
weary navigation, shut in by the hills on all sides
THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 269
but that by which we entered, the forest still
unscarred, and the tall white pines standing in
files along the lake shores and up over the ridges,
not a scar of axe or fire being visible as we
searched the shore for a fitting spot to make our
vacation lodging-place. Many things are requisite
for a good camping-ground, and to fix one is a
thing to be learned. First and indispensable is a
spring of good water near by; then a dry and
elevated plateau, wooded with "hard wood,"
beeches, birch, and maple with level ground for
the camp, free from the tangle of undergrowth
which makes the fir thicket impenetrable ; then
a smooth sandy beach on which the boats may
be drawn at night, and which may be approached
without danger from the rocks, and on which
loading or unloading is easy. Ours was one of
the best I have ever seen at the head of the lake,
with beach, spring, and maple grove. Two of the
hugest maples I ever saw gave us the shelter of
their spreading branches and the supports to the
camp walls. Here we placed our ridge-pole, laid
our roof of bark of firs (stripped from trees far
away in the forest, not to disfigure our dwelling-
place with stripped and dying trees), cut an open
path to the lake-side, and then left our house to
the naiads and dryads, and hurried back forty
miles to meet our guests at Martin's Landing.
A generation has gone by since that unique
meet, and of those who were at it only John
Holmes (a younger brother of Oliver Wendell)
and I now survive. The voices of that merry
270 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP
assemblage of "wise and polite" vacation-keepers
come to us from the land of dreams ; the echoes
they wakened in the wild wood give place to the
tender and tearful evocation of poetic memory ;
they and their summering have passed into the
traditions of the later camp-fires, where the guides
tell of the "Philosophers' Camp," of the very
location of which they have lost the knowledge.
But Emerson, the philosopher whose genius was
fittest to the temple in which we all worshipped,
its high priest and oracle, has left his history
of the meeting in his poem, " The Adirondacs. A
Journal. Dedicated to my fellow - travellers in
August, 1858," and to which my prose may serve
as commentary, to be written before I have done
with the memory. I, the youngest, the steward
of that memorable company, the master of the
hunt, the insect preserved in the amber of the
poet's verse,
" Our guide's guide, and Commodore,
Crusoe, Crusader, Pius
purpose to frame, even if in a poor way, this
picture of a gathering unique in the history of
vacations ; this record, which is to those who
know and love unsophisticated nature the most
curiously truthful and interesting existing revela-
tion of her aspect, seen for the first time with a
mind trained to the finest shades of impression
and reflection the most Homeric and Hellenic of
all nature-poems ever written.
This was not the solitude of Thoreau's Walden
Pond, where isolation kept within the sound of a
THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 271
dinner-horn, and where no bird, leaf, or tree was
ignorant of the daily footfall of idlers and curious,
but a virgin forest, where the crack of our rifles
reached no other human ear, and where the care-
lessly wandering foot found no path to lead it
back to camp, and the inexpert, once out of hear-
ing of camp-call, or out of sight of the water,
was in imminent danger of having his bones
picked by the wolves that listened dismayed
to the sounds of our unaccustomed invasion.
This was "the forest primeval." Hardly a trace
of it now exists as we then knew it. The
lumberer ; the reckless sportsman with his
camp-fires and his more reckless and careless
guide; the axe and the fire, have left no large
expanse of virgin forest in all the Adirondack
region, and every year effaces the original aspect
of it more completely. Then there were no
song-birds, companions of mankind; no familiar
sound of the paternal fields greeted the wise men
of the East : but the weird laugh of the loon, the
scream of the osprey or the grey eagle ; and of
the minor featherlings, the friendly Canada jay
or the chickadee, only greeted us.
I had done all I could to induce Longfellow and
Oliver Wendell Holmes to join the party, but the
latter was too closely identified with the Hub in all
his mental operations to care for unhumanised
nature, and Longfellow was too strongly attached
to the conditions of completely civilised life to
enjoy roughing it in flannels and sleeping on fir
boughs. The company of his great-brained friends
272 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP
was a temptation at times, I think ; but he hated
killing animals, had no interest in fishing, and
was too settled in his habits to enjoy so great a
change. Possibly he was decided in his refusal by
Emerson's purchase of a rifle. "Is it true that
Emerson is going to take a gun?" he asked me.
"Yes," I replied. "Then I shall not go," he said;
" somebody will be shot."
Emerson's record plunges in medias res. He gives
a line to Champlain :
"Thence, in strong country cart, rode up the forks
Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach
The Adirondac lakes. At Martin's Beach
We chose our boats, each man a boat and guide,
Ten men, ten guides, our company all told."
But here I must correct my evangelist. I was
Agassiz's guide and rowed my own boat, sharing
with the guides whatever work there was for all.
I could not have kept in proper subordination so
large a company of men, collected from all parts
of the woods, though with all the care in selection
possible under the circumstances, if I had not been
ready to do my share of any work I called on them
for. I not only rowed my own boat, but carried
my own axe and rifle, and my boat when necessary.
From one cause I missed, to my infinite regret, the
hearing of Emerson's first impressions of the forest.
I had been building a new boat for the occasion,
and it lacked several hours' work when the com-
pany started up the lakes at midday, I only
following toward sunset, and overtaking them at
midnight at the "Indian Carry," then a mere
THE PHILOSOPHEKS' CAMP 273
pathway a mile long, through dense pine groves,
between the Saranac and Raquette chains of lakes,
with a lumberer's hut at each end. A violent rain-
storm greeted our entry into the wilderness, and I
arrived after the company were dried and had
eaten, myself drenched like a water-rat.
Emerson wrote out his "Adirondacs" after he
had returned to Concord, and it is curious to see
in what a Greek way he condensed and idealised
his impressions, forgetting all details which inter-
fered with symmetry.
"Next morn we swept with oars the Saranac,
With skies of benediction, to Round Lake,
Where all the sacred mountains drew around us,
Tahawus, Seaward,* Maclntyre, Baldhead,
And other Titans without muse or name.
Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on,
Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills.
We made our distance wider, boat from boat,
As each would hear the oracle alone.
By the bright morn the gay flotilla slid
Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,
Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower,
Through scented banks of lilies white and gold,
Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day.
On through the Upper Saranac, and up
Pere Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass
Winding through grassy shallows in and out,
Two creeping miles of rushes, pads, and sponge,
To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons."
The poet has painted his picture with the group-
ing of an artist's imagination. The drenching day
of arrival, the night of discomfort at the hut on
the "carry," and the "carry" itself, the journey
* Mount Seward, south of the Saranacs, the common name being
repudiated by Emerson.
S
274 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP
through the " Spectacle Ponds," a curious and most
picturesque part of the second day, with the row
down the charming stream that forms the water-
way to the Raquette proper all are dismissed
as useless detail, while the "two creeping miles"
of the marshy outlet of Follansbee, up which we
had to pole and push, are remembered through
Agassiz's discovery there of a fresh-water sponge
till then unknown. But to Emerson, as to most
men who are receptive to nature's message, the
forest was the overpowering fact.
" We climb the bank,
And in the twilight of the forest noon
Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard."
The "twilight of the forest noon" is the most
concentrated expression of the one dominant
sentiment of a poetic mind on first entering this
eternal silence and shadow. His catalogue of
trees is in error:
"The wood was sovran with centennial trees
Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech, and fir,
Linden and spruce."
There is no oak, linden, or poplar in these forests.
He had passed them in the Ausable valley on his
way up, and probably forgot their exact habitat.
But the impression of the first night clung to him
with all its detail. No modern man knew the "great
god Pan " as Emerson knew him, not even Keats,
and the falling asleep in the arms of the universal
mother, whose dearest child Pan was, must have
left its influence on him long after he had recorded
the poetic version of the experience.
THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 275
" ' Welcome ! ' the wood-god murmured through the leaves,
'Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.'
Evening drew on ; stars peeped through maple-boughs,
Which o'erhung, like a, cloud,* our camping-fire.
Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks,
Lit with phosphoric crumbs^ the forest floor."
Lowell named the camping-place " Camp Maple,"
from the huge maples under which we had pitched
our house of bark ; but tradition has long known
it as the " Philosophers' Camp," though, like Troy,
its site is unknown to all the subsequent genera-
tions of guides, and I doubt if in all the Adiron-
dack country there is a man except my old guide,
Steve Martin, who could point out the place where
it stood.
To me the forest was familiar. I knew it as a
boy charged with sophomorical sentiment, casting