It seems as if," he said, or rather dreamed out, it seems as if the Creator had kept something just to look at himself."To a lady whom he had taken to Chapel Pond (a retired but rather uninteresting spot), and who expressed a little disappointment at its tameness, saying, of this "Why, Mr.Phelps, the principal charm of this place seems to be its loneliness,""Yes," he replied in gentle and lingering tones, and its nativeness.
It lies here just where it was born."
Rest and quiet had infinite attractions for him.A secluded opening in the woods was a "calm spot." He told of seeing once, or rather being in, a circular rainbow.He stood on Indian Head, overlooking the Lower Lake, so that he saw the whole bow in the sky and the lake, and seemed to be in the midst of it; "only at one place there was an indentation in it, where it rested on the lake, just enough to keep it from rolling off." This "resting" of the sphere seemed to give him great comfort.
One Indian-summer morning in October, some ladies found the old man sitting on his doorstep smoking a short pipe.
He gave no sign of recognition except a twinkle of the eye, being evidently quite in harmony with the peaceful day.They stood there a full minute before he opened his mouth: then he did not rise, but slowly took his pipe from his mouth, and said in a dreamy way, pointing towards the brook,--"Do you see that tree?" indicating a maple almost denuded of leaves, which lay like a yellow garment cast at its feet."I've been watching that tree all the morning.There hain't been a breath of wind: but for hours the leaves have been falling, falling, just as you see them now; and at last it's pretty much bare." And after a pause, pensively: "Waal, I suppose its hour had come."This contemplative habit of Old Phelps is wholly unappreciated by his neighbors; but it has been indulged in no inconsiderable part of his life.Rising after a time, he said, "Now I want you to go with me and see my golden city I've talked so much about." He led the way to a hill-outlook, when suddenly, emerging from the forest, the spectators saw revealed the winding valley and its stream.He said quietly, "There is my golden city." Far below, at their feet, they saw that vast assemblage of birches and "popples," yellow as gold in the brooding noonday, and slender spires rising out of the glowing mass.Without another word, Phelps sat a long time in silent content: it was to him, as Bunyan says, "a place desirous to be in."Is this philosopher contented with what life has brought him?
Speaking of money one day, when we had asked him if he should do differently if he had his life to live over again, he said, "Yes, but not about money.To have had hours such as I have had in these mountains, and with such men as Dr.Bushnell and Dr.Shaw and Mr.
Twichell, and others I could name, is worth all the money the world could give." He read character very well, and took in accurately the boy nature."Tom" (an irrepressible, rather overdone specimen),--"Tom's a nice kind of a boy; but he's got to come up against a snubbin'-post one of these days."--"Boys!" he once said: "you can't git boys to take any kinder notice of scenery.I never yet saw a boy that would look a second time at a sunset.Now, a girl will some times; but even then it's instantaneous,--comes an goes like the sunset.As for me," still speaking of scenery, "these mountains about here, that I see every day, are no more to me, in one sense, than a man's farm is to him.What mostly interests me now is when Isee some new freak or shape in the face of Nature."In literature it may be said that Old Phelps prefers the best in the very limited range that has been open to him.Tennyson is his favorite among poets an affinity explained by the fact that they are both lotos-eaters.Speaking of a lecture-room talk of Mr.Beecher's which he had read, he said, "It filled my cup about as full as Icallerlate to have it: there was a good deal of truth in it, and some poetry; waal, and a little spice, too.We've got to have the spice, you know." He admired, for different reasons, a lecture by Greeley that he once heard, into which so much knowledge of various kinds was crowded that he said he "made a reg'lar gobble of it." He was not without discrimination, which he exercised upon the local preaching when nothing better offered.Of one sermon he said, "The man began way back at the creation, and just preached right along down; and he didn't say nothing, after all.It just seemed to me as if he was tryin' to git up a kind of a fix-up."Old Phelps used words sometimes like algebraic signs, and had a habit of making one do duty for a season together for all occasions.