But Phelps's Voice Is Not Seldom
Plaintive, As If Touched By The Dreamy Sadness Of The Woods
Themselves.
When Old Mountain Phelps was discovered, he was, as the reader has
already guessed, not understood by his contemporaries.
His
neighbors, farmers in the secluded valley, had many of them grown
thrifty and prosperous, cultivating the fertile meadows, and
vigorously attacking the timbered mountains; while Phelps, with not
much more faculty of acquiring property than the roaming deer, had
pursued the even tenor of the life in the forest on which he set out.
They would have been surprised to be told that Old Phelps owned more
of what makes the value of the Adirondacks than all of them put
together, but it was true. This woodsman, this trapper, this hunter,
this fisherman, this sitter on a log, and philosopher, was the real
proprietor of the region over which he was ready to guide the
stranger. It is true that he had not a monopoly of its geography or
its topography (though his knowledge was superior in these respects);
there were other trappers, and more deadly hunters, and as intrepid
guides: but Old Phelps was the discoverer of the beauties and
sublimities of the mountains; and, when city strangers broke into the
region, he monopolized the appreciation of these delights and wonders
of nature. I suppose that in all that country he alone had noticed
the sunsets, and observed the delightful processes of the seasons,
taken pleasure in the woods for themselves, and climbed mountains
solely for the sake of the prospect. He alone understood what was
meant by "scenery." In the eyes of his neighbors, who did not know
that he was a poet and a philosopher, I dare say he appeared to be a
slack provider, a rather shiftless trapper and fisherman; and his
passionate love of the forest and the mountains, if it was noticed,
was accounted to him for idleness. When the appreciative tourist
arrived, Phelps was ready, as guide, to open to him all the wonders
of his possessions; he, for the first time, found an outlet for his
enthusiasm, and a response to his own passion. It then became known
what manner of man this was who had grown up here in the
companionship of forests, mountains, and wild animals; that these
scenes had highly developed in him the love of beauty, the aesthetic
sense, delicacy of appreciation, refinement of feeling; and that, in
his solitary wanderings and musings, the primitive man, self-taught,
had evolved for himself a philosophy and a system of things. And it
was a sufficient system, so long as it was not disturbed by external
skepticism. When the outer world came to him, perhaps he had about
as much to give to it as to receive from it; probably more, in his
own estimation; for there is no conceit like that of isolation.
Phelps loved his mountains. He was the discoverer of Marcy, and
caused the first trail to be cut to its summit, so that others could
enjoy the noble views from its round and rocky top. To him it was,
in noble symmetry and beauty, the chief mountain of the globe.
To stand on it gave him, as he said, "a feeling of heaven
up-h'istedness." He heard with impatience that Mount Washington was a
thousand feet higher, and he had a childlike incredulity about the
surpassing sublimity of the Alps. Praise of any other elevation he
seemed to consider a slight to Mount Marcy, and did not willingly hear
it, any more than a lover hears the laudation of the beauty of another
woman than the one he loves. When he showed us scenery he loved, it
made him melancholy to have us speak of scenery elsewhere that was
finer. And yet there was this delicacy about him, that he never
over-praised what he brought us to see, any more than one would
over-praise a friend of whom he was fond. I remember that when for
the first time, after a toilsome journey through the forest, the
splendors of the Lower Au Sable Pond broke upon our vision, - that
low-lying silver lake, imprisoned by the precipices which it reflected
in its bosom, - he made no outward response to our burst of admiration:
only a quiet gleam of the eye showed the pleasure our appreciation
gave him. As some one said, it was as if his friend had been admired
- a friend about whom he was unwilling to say much himself, but well
pleased to have others praise.
Thus far, we have considered Old Phelps as simply the product of the
Adirondacks; not so much a self-made man (as the doubtful phrase has
it) as a natural growth amid primal forces. But our study is
interrupted by another influence, which complicates the problem, but
increases its interest. No scientific observer, so far as we know,
has ever been able to watch the development of the primitive man,
played upon and fashioned by the hebdomadal iteration of "Greeley's
Weekly Tri-bune." Old Phelps educated by the woods is a fascinating
study; educated by the woods and the Tri-bune, he is a phenomenon.
No one at this day can reasonably conceive exactly what this
newspaper was to such a mountain valley as Keene. If it was not a
Providence, it was a Bible. It was no doubt owing to it that
Democrats became as scarce as moose in the Adirondacks. But it is
not of its political aspect that I speak. I suppose that the most
cultivated and best informed portion of the earth's surface - the
Western Reserve of Ohio, as free from conceit as it is from a
suspicion that it lacks anything owes its pre-eminence solely to this
comprehensive journal. It received from it everything except a
collegiate and a classical education, - things not to be desired,
since they interfere with the self-manufacture of man. If Greek had
been in this curriculum, its best known dictum would have been
translated, "Make thyself." This journal carried to the community
that fed on it not only a complete education in all departments of
human practice and theorizing, but the more valuable and satisfying
assurance that there was nothing more to be gleaned in the universe
worth the attention of man.
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