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 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