ey seem almost
as undescribed before, and men to be still as content with vague or
conventional representations. On this continent, especially, people
fancied that all must be tame and second-hand, everything long since
duly analyzed and distributed and put up in appropriate quotations, and
nothing left for us poor American children but a preoccupied universe.
And yet Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely
nothing in Nature has ever yet been described,--not a bird nor a berry
of the woods, nor a drop of water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor
winter, nor sun, nor star.

Indeed, no person can portray Nature from any slight or transient
acquaintance. A reporter cannot step out between the sessions of a
caucus and give a racy abstract of the landscape. It may consume the
best hours of many days to certify for one's self the simplest out-door
fact, but every such piece of knowledge is intellectually worth the
time. Even the driest and barest book of Natural History is good and
nutritious, so far as it goes, if it represents genuine acquaintance;
one can find summer in January by poring over the Latin catalogues
of Massachusetts plants and animals in Hitchcock's Report. The most
commonplace out-door society has the same attraction. Every one of those
old outlaws who haunt our New England ponds and marshes, water-soaked
and soakers of something else,--intimate with the pure fluid in that
familiarity which breeds contempt,--has yet a wholesome side when you
explore his knowledge of frost and freshet, pickerel and musk-rat, and
is exceedingly good company while you can keep him beyond scent of the
tavern. Any intelligent farmer's boy can give you some narrative
of out-door observation which, so far as it goes, fulfils Milton's
definition of poetry, "simple, sensuous, passionate." He may not write
sonnets to the lake, but he will walk miles to bathe in it; he may not
notice the sunsets, but he knows where to search for the black-bird's
nest. How surprised the school-children looked, to be sure, when the
Doctor of Divinity from the city tried to sentimentalize, in addressing
them, about "the bobolink in the woods"! They knew that the darling of
the meadow had no more personal acquaintance with the woods than was
exhibited by the preacher.

But the preachers are not much worse than the authors. The prosaic
Buckle, to be sure, admits that the poets have in all time been
consummate observers, and that