re-worshiper; and he appears
to have walked as many, or more, hours each day, in all seasons, as
did Thoreau; but he was hunting for no lost paradise of the wild; nor
waging a war against the arts and customs of civilization. Man and
life were at the bottom of his interest in Nature.

Wordsworth never knew the wild as we know it in this country--the
pitilessly savage and rebellious; and, on the other hand, he never
knew the wonderfully delicate and furtive and elusive nature that we
know; but he knew the sylvan, the pastoral, the rustic-human, as we
cannot know them. British birds have nothing plaintive in their
songs; and British woods and fells but little that is disorderly and
cruel in their expression, or violent in their contrasts.

Wordsworth gathered his finest poetic harvest from common nature and
common humanity about him--the wayside birds and flowers and
waterfalls, and the wayside people. Though he called himself a
worshiper of Nature, it was Nature in her half-human moods that he
adored--Nature that knows no extremes, and that has long been under
the influence of man--a soft, humid, fertile, docile Nature, that
suggests a domesticity as old and as permanent as that of cattle and
sheep. His poetry reflects these features, reflects the high moral and
historic significance of the European landscape, while the poetry of
Emerson, and of Thoreau, is born of the wildness and elusiveness of
our more capricious and unkempt Nature.

The walker has no axe to grind; he sniffs the air for new adventure;
he loiters in old scenes, he gleans in old fields. He only seeks
intimacy with Nature to surprise her preoccupied with her own affairs.
He seeks her in the woods, the swamps, on the hills, along the
streams, by night and by day, in season and out of season. He skims
the fields and hillsides as the swallow skims the air, and what he
gets is intangible to most persons. He sees much with his eyes, but he
sees more with his heart and imagination. He bathes in Nature as in a
sea. He is alert for the beauty that waves in the trees, that ripples
in the grass and grain, that flows in the streams, that drifts in the
clouds, that sparkles in the dew and rain. The hammer of the
geologist, the notebook of the naturalist, the box of the herbalist,
the net of the entomologist, are not for him. He drives no sharp
bargains with Nature, he reads no sermons in stones, no books in
running brooks, but he does see good in everything. The