turn to reading and talking over verse who
never dream of it when at home. I am tempted to mention the poets, and
even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the
gentle company of lake and wood and stream. I should frankly name Walt
Whitman and Thoreau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number
of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration. A
good many of them--read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump
in the woods--shrink to well-bred, comfortable parlor bards, who seem to
you to have gotten their nature-lessons through plate-glass windows. The
test is a sharp one, and will leave out some great names and let in some
hardly known, or almost forgotten. Books to be read out of doors would
make a curious catalogue, and would vary, as such lists must, with every
thoughtful reader, while some would smile, perhaps with reason, at the
idea of any such classification. Certainly all would name Wordsworth,
and a few would add Clough, whilst the out-door plays of Shakespeare
would come in, and we should soon be called on to feel that for this
sort of congenial open-air poetic company we have still to fall back on
the vast resources of English verse. Somehow, as yet, our own poets have
not gotten fully into imaginative relation with what is peculiar in our
own flowers, trees, and skies. This does not lessen our joy in the
masters of English verse, because, of course, much of what they have
sung has liberal application in all lands; yet is there something which
we lose in them for lack of familiar knowledge of English lanes and
woods, of English flowers and trees. A book of the essentially American
nature--poems found here and there in many volumes--would be pleasant,
for surely we have had no one poet as to whom it is felt that he is
absolutely desirable as the interpretive poetic observer who has
positive claims to go with us as a friendly bookmate in our wood or
water wanderings. I have shrunk, as will have been seen, from the
dangerous venture of enlarging my brief catalogue. What I have just now
spoken of as one's bookmates will appear in very different lights
according to the surroundings in which we seek to enjoy their society.
If, as to this matter, any one doubts me, and has the good luck to camp
out long, and to have a variety of books of verse and prose, very soon,
if dainty of taste, he will find that the artificial flavoring of some
books is unpleasantly fe