their observations have been as valuable
as those of the men of science; and yet we look even to the poets
for very casual and occasional glimpses of Nature only, not for any
continuous reflection of her glory. Thus, Chaucer is perfumed with early
spring; Homer resounds like the sea; in the Greek Anthology the sun
always shines on the fisherman's cottage by the beach; we associate the
Vishnu Purana with lakes and houses, Keats with nightingales in forest
dim, while the long grass waving on the lonely heath is the last
memorial of the fading fame of Ossian. Of course Shakspeare's
omniscience included all natural phenomena; but the rest, great or
small, associate themselves with some special aspects, and not with the
daily atmosphere. Coming to our own times, one must quarrel with Ruskin
as taking rather the artist's view of Nature, selecting the available
bits and dealing rather patronizingly with the whole; and one is tempted
to charge even Emerson, as he somewhere charges Wordsworth, with not
being of a temperament quite liquid and musical enough to admit the full
vibration of the great harmonics. The three human foster-children who
have been taken nearest into Nature's bosom, perhaps,--an odd triad,
surely, for the whimsical nursing mother to select,--are Wordsworth,
Bettine Brentano, and Thoreau. Is it yielding to an individual
preference too far, to say, that there seems almost a generic difference
between these three and any others,--however wide be the specific
differences among themselves,--to say that, after all, they in their
several paths have attained to an habitual intimacy with Nature, and the
rest have not?

Yet what wonderful achievements have some of the fragmentary artists
performed! Some of Tennyson's word-pictures, for instance, bear almost
as much study as the landscape. One afternoon, last spring, I had been
walking through a copse of young white birches,--their leaves scarce yet
apparent,--over a ground delicate with wood-anemones, moist and mottled
with dog's-tooth-violet leaves, and spangled with the delicate clusters
of that shy creature, the Claytonia or Spring Beauty. All this was
floored with last year's faded foliage, giving a singular bareness
and whiteness to the foreground. Suddenly, as if entering a cavern, I
stepped through the edge of all this, into a dark little amphitheatre
beneath a hemlock-grove, where the afternoon sunlight struck broadly
through the trees upon a tiny stream and a