rance....

The evolution of this author in his use of titles is interesting.
Compare the crudity of "Vagaries vs. Spiritualism," and "Deep," for
example, with those he selects when he begins to publish his books.
"Wake-Robin," "Winter Sunshine," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Leaf and
Tendril,"--how much they connote! Then how felicitous are the titles
of most of his essays! "Birch Browsings," "The Snow-Walkers," "Mellow
England," "Our Rural Divinity" (the cow), "The Flight of the Eagle" (for
one of his early essays on Whitman), "A Bunch of Herbs," "A Pinch of
Salt," "The Divine Soil," "The Long Road" (on evolution)--these and many
others will occur to the reader.

Following "A Thought on Culture" was a short essay on poetry, the drift
of which is that poetry as contrasted with science must give us
things, not as they are in themselves, but as they stand related to our
experience. Our young writer is more at his ease now:--

Science, of course, is literal, as it ought to be, but science is not
life; science takes no note of this finer self, this duplicate on a
higher scale. Science never laughs or cries, or whistles or sings, or
falls in love, or sees aught but the coherent reality. It says a soap
bubble is a soap bubble--a drop of water impregnated with oleate of
potash or soda, and inflated with common air; but life says it is a
crystal sphere, dipped in the rainbow, buoyant as hope, sensitive as
the eye, with a power to make children dance for joy, and to bring youth
into the look of the old....

Who in his youth ever saw the swallow of natural history to be the
twittering, joyous bird that built mud nests beneath his father's shed,
and in the empty odorous barn?--that snapped the insects that flew up in
his way when returning at twilight from the upland farm; and that filled
his memory with such visions of summer when he first caught its note on
some bright May morning, flying up the southern valley? Describe water,
or a tree, in the language of exact science, or as they really are
in and of themselves, and what person, schooled only in nature, would
recognize them? Things must be given as they seem, as they stand
represented in the mind. Objects arrange themselves in our memory, not
according to the will, or any real quality in themselves, but as they
affect our lives and stand to us in our unconscious moments. The hills
we have dwelt among, the rocks and trees we have looked upon in all
moods and feelings, that