and that there stands always the higher and
ultimate universal nature of which man is a part,
but the crowning part, the aspiring and suffer-
ing humanity. There is no conflict; only, when
all has been said for the backwoods and the
backwoodsman, he points to another humanity
and nature beyond.

" And presently the sky is changed; world !
What pictures and what harmonies are thine !
The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,
So like the soul of me, what if 'twere me ?
A melancholy better than all mirth.



292 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP

Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,
Or at the foresight of obscurer years?

And, that no day of life may lack romance,
The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down
A private beam into each several heart.

Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home."

In the midst of this hymn to nature, it was
one of the supreme achievements of the me-
chanical mind of man which furnished the text
for his loudest paean. Some of the members of
the company, in their wanderings outside our
realm, had met a traveller with the news of the
laying of the first transatlantic cable, and came
back to camp with the great news.

" One held a printed journal, waving high,
Caught from a late-arriving traveller,
Big with great news, and shouted the report
For which the world had waited, now firm fact,
Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,
And landed on our coast, and pulsating
With ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries
From boat to boat, and to the echoes round,
Greet the glad miracle."

Emerson is, we say, cold. Perhaps in the day
when only bacchanals heat the public ear he may
be so. There is no passion which the public now
generally recognise as such, except the personal;
but in that serener sphere where Plato breathed,
the nature of Emerson is too much at home to
be yet widely understood in its passion. How
Greek is this passionate outburst at the new
revolt of the human mind against its limitations,



THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 293

this clapping of hands at the Promethean un-
loosing ! And Promethean passion was his : it
quickened his blood with every human footstep
upward, it kindled the light of his calm eyes
anew with every indignity offered humanity ; not
only the slavery of the black and the barbarian
made his anger burn, but the slavery of civilisa-
tion and self-imposed wrong made his soul heavy.
And people have the idea of comparing him
with the burly Carlyle ! As well Apollo with a
jotun! "Deficient in form and polish?" Well,
the ages had not yet furnished the material to
cut this diamond to its faceted formality; there
is neither the form of Sophocles nor the fluency
of Plato, but it was further from Homer to
Plato than from Chaucer to Emerson. Then see
the Greek again in his instinctive impersonation
of the forces of nature "Chronos and Tellus
who were before Jove":

" A spasm throbbing through the pedestals
Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent,
Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill
To be a brain, or serve the brain of man.
The lightning has run masterless too long ;
He must to school and learn his verb and noun,
And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage,
Spelling with guided tongue man's messages
Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea."

But our paradise was no Eden. The world
that played bo-peep with us across the moun-
tains came for us when the play-spell was over;
this summer dream, unique in the record of
poesy, melted like a cloud-castle into its original



294 THE PHILOSOPHEKS' CAMP

elements, and Emerson was one of the first to
turn back to the sterner use of time.

" The holidays were fruitful, but must end ;
One August evening had a cooler breath ;
Into each mind intruding duties crept ;
Under the cinders burned the fires of home ;
Nay, letters found us in our paradise :
So in the gladness of the new event
We struck our camp and left the happy hills."

The lake became for a time a place of pilgrim-
age. To visit the Philosophers' Camp was one of
the items of an Adirondack trip.

" We planned

That we should build, hard by, a spacious lodge,
And how we should come hither with our sons
Hereafter."

And the permanent meeting-place was fixed at
Ampersand Pond, to which in time the tradition
of the Philosophers' Camp was attached, and
where, as long as the club existed, the annual
meetings were held.

Twenty-five years elapsed before I returned to
Follansbee Water. The genius loci, dryad or
hamadryad, had there been one, would have
found it as hard to recognise me as I found it
hard to find Camp Maple. I had the same guide,
Steve Martin, a grey-headed man, the worse for
a, life of hardship, which, I find, does not always
harden; but we found with great difficulty the
landing and the choked-up spring. A half-re-
forested clearing spread round the spot where
our "ten scholars" used to lie, and a tangled



THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 295

thicket of raspberry bushes, lady's-willow, birch
saplings, and tall grass, made walking almost
impossible. We found a huge rock that had
been a landmark, but this and the spring alone
were to be distinguished. The careless sports-
men had cut all the hard wood away, and let the
fires in, and the whole forest round had been
burned, and was succeeded by thickets of under-
growth. The great maples and the tall white
pines had gone from the entire vicinity, and a
vulgar new forest was on its way; the trees that
used to line the lake-shore had fallen into the
lake, their roots being burned away; and not the
slightest feature remained of the grove where
wit and wisdom held tournament a generation
before. All was ashes and ruin. I

" felt like one who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted."

Nor was the lake less changed in outward ap-
pearance. Every fit camping-ground on the shore
had been occupied in succession, and the camp-
fires allowed to spread into the forest until the
whole shore had been denuded of its fringe of
hoary trees. The "procession of the pines" had
gone by for ever; only here and there a dead
trunk was standing, among them that up which
Lowell's guide climbed to the osprey's nest to get
an egg for Agassiz. Speculating manufacturers
had built a dam across the Baquette and flooded
all the bottom-land, killing the trees over a large
tract; wretched dolts had put pike into the



296 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP

Raquette waters, and the trout had become
exterminated in every stream to which the
ravenous fish had access.

It was well that the charm once broken, the
desecration begun, it should be complete. The
memories sacred to the few survivors can never
be quickened by this ruin, and to the rest of
the world it does not matter. Emerson has
embalmed it; that is enough. In some Eastern
countries it is the custom to break the bowl
from which an honoured guest has drunk ; nature
has done this service to Follansbee Water.



W. H. WHITE AND CO. LTD., RIVERSIDE PRESS, EDINBURGH.



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