most luxurious house, have their regions of unsightliness; but the fine chemistry of Nature is constantly clearing away all its impurities before our eyes, and yet so delicately that we never suspect the process.  The most exquisite work of literary art exhibits a certain crudeness and coarseness, when we turn to it from Nature,—­as the smallest cambric needle appears rough and jagged, when compared through the magnifier with the tapering fineness of the insect’s sting.

Once separated from Nature, literature recedes into metaphysics, or dwindles into novels.  How ignoble seems the current material of London literary life, for instance, compared with the noble simplicity which, a half-century ago, made the Lake Country an enchanted land forever!  Is it worth a voyage to England to sup with Thackeray in the Pot Tavern?  Compare the “enormity of pleasure” which De Quincey says Wordsworth derived from the simplest natural object with the serious protest of Wilkie Collins against the affectation of caring about Nature at all.  “Is it not strange”, says this most unhappy man, “to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amidst which we live can gain on our hearts and minds?  We go to Nature for comfort in joy and sympathy in trouble, only in books....  What share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends?...  There is surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it.”

Leslie says of “the most original landscape-painter he knew,” meaning Constable, that, whenever he sat down in the fields to sketch, he endeavored to forget that he had ever seen a picture.  In literature this is easy, the descriptions are so few and so faint.  When Wordsworth was fourteen, he stopped one day by the wayside to observe the dark outline of an oak against the western sky; and he says that he was at that moment struck with “the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country,” so far as he was acquainted with them, and “made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency.”  He spent a long life in studying and telling these beautiful wonders; and yet, so vast is the sum of them, they 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.