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 miniature swamp,—­this last being intensely and luridly green, yet overlaid with the pale gray of last year’s reeds, and absolutely flaming with the gayest yellow light from great clumps of cowslips.  The illumination seemed perfectly weird and dazzling; the spirit of the place appeared live, wild, fantastic, almost human.  Now open your Tennyson:—­

  “And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire
  in swamps and hollows gray.”

Our cowslip is the English marsh-marigold.

History is a grander poetry, and it is often urged that the features of Nature in America must seem tame because they have no legendary wreaths to decorate them.  It is perhaps hard for those of us who are untravelled to appreciate how densely even the ruralities of Europe are overgrown with this ivy of associations.  Thus, it is fascinating to hear that the great French forests of Fontainebleau and St. Germain are full of historic trees,—­the oak of Charlemagne, the oak of Clovis, of Queen Blanche, of Henri Quatre, of Sully,—­the alley of Richelieu,—­the rendezvous of St. Herem,—­the star of Lamballe and of the Princesses, a star being a point where several paths or roads converge.  It is said that every topographical work upon these forests has turned out a history of the French monarchy.  Yet surely we lose nearly as much as we gain by this subordination of imperishable beauty to the perishable memories of man.  It may not be wholly unfortunate, that, in the absence of those influences which come to older nations from ruins and traditions, we must go more directly to Nature.  Art may either rest upon other Art, or it may rest directly upon the original foundation; the one is easier, the other more valuable.  Direct dependence on Nature leads to deeper thought and affords the promise of far fresher results.  Why should I wish to fix my study in Heidelberg Castle, when I possess the unexhausted treasures of this out-door study here?