I HAD made a nice piece of dissection, a pretty demonstration - for a junior.

"You did n't know a dog was put together so beautifully, did you?" said the professor, frankly enjoying the sight of the marvelous system of nerves laid bare by the knife. "Now, see here," he went on, eying me keenly, "does n't a revelation like that take all the moonshine about the 'beauties of nature' clean out of you?"

I looked at the lifeless lump upon my table, and answered very deliberately, "No, it does n't. That's a fearful piece of mechanism. I appreciate that. But what is any system of nerves or muscles,

mere dead dog, -- compared with the love and affection of the dog alive?"

The professor was trying to make a biologist out of me. He had worked faithfully, but I had persisted in a very un

scientific love for live dog. Not that I did n't enjoy comparative anatomy, for I did. The problem of concrescence or differentiation" in the cod's egg was intensely interesting to me, also. And so was the sight and the suggestion of the herring as they crowded up the run on their way to the spawning pond. The professor had lost patience. I don't blame him.

"Well," he said, turning abruptly, "you had better quit. You'll be only a biological fifth wheel.”

I quit. Here on my table lies the scalpel. Since that day it has only sharpened lead pencils.

Now a somewhat extensive acquaintance with scientific folk leads me to believe that the attitude of my professor toward the out-of-doors is not exceptional. The love for nature is all moonshine, all

maudlin sentiment. Even those like my professor, who have to do with out-ofdoor life and conditions, — zoologists, botanists, geologists, look upon naturalists, and others who love birds and fields, as of a kind with those harmless but useless inanities who collect tobaccotags, postage stamps, and picture postal cards. Sentiment is not scientific.

I have a biological friend, a professor of zoology, who never saw a woodchuck in the flesh. He would not know a woodchuck with the fur on from a mongoose. Not until he had skinned it and set up the skeleton could he pronounce it Arctomys monax with certainty. Yes, he could tell by the teeth. Dentition is a great thing. He could tell a white pine (strobus) from a pitch pine (rigida) by just a cone and a bundle of needles, one has five, the other three, to the bundle. But he would n't recognize a columned aisle of the one from a Jersey barren of the other. That is not the worst of it: he would not see even the aisle or the barren, only trees.

As we jogged along recently, on a soft midwinter day that followed a day of freezing, my little three-year-old threw his nose into the air and cried,

"Oh, fader, I smell de pitch pines, de scraggly pines, 'ou calls 'em Joisey 'ou calls 'em Joisey pines!" And sure enough, around a double curve in the road we came upon a single clump of the scraggly pitch pines in a drive through miles of the common white species.

Did you ever smell them when they are thawing out? It is quite as healthful, if not so scientific, to recognize them by their resinous breath as by their needles per bundle.

Some time I want this small boy to know the difference between these needle bundles. But I want him to learn now, and to remember always, that the hard days will soften, and that then there oozes from the scraggly pitch pines a balm, piney, penetrating, purifying, a tonic to the lungs, a healing to the soul. All foolishness? sentiment? moon

shine ? this love for woods and fields, this need I have for companionship with birds and trees, this longing for the feel of grass and the smell of earth? When I told my biological friend that these longings were real and vital, as vital as the highest problems of the stars and the deepest questions of life, he pitied me, but made no reply.

He sees clearly a difference between live and dead men, a difference between the pleasure he gets from the society of his friends, and the information, interesting as it may be, which he obtains in a dissecting-room. But he sees no such difference between live and dead nature, nature in the fields and in the laboratory. Nature is all a biological problem to him, not a quick thing, a shape, a million shapes, informed with spirit, — a voice of gladness, a mild and healing sympathy, a companionable soul.

-

"But there you go!" he exclaims, "talking poetry again. Why don't you deal with facts? What do you mean by nature-study, love for the out-of-doors, anyway!"

I do not mean a sixteen weeks' course in zoology or botany, or in Wordsworth. I mean, rather, a gentle life course in getting acquainted with the toads and stars that sing together, for most of us, just within and above our own dooryards. It is a long life course in the deep and beautiful things of living nature, the nature we know so well as a corpse. It is of necessity a somewhat unsystematized, incidental, vacation-time course, -- the more's the pity. The results do not often come as scientific discoveries. They are personal, rather, more after the manner of revelations, data that the professors have little faith in. For the scientist cannot put an April dawn into a bottle, cannot cabin a Hockomock marsh, nor cage a December storm in a laboratory. And when, in such a place, did a scientist ever overturn a "wee bit heap o' weeds an' stibble?" Yet it is out of dawns and marshes and storms that the revelations come; yes, and out of mice nests, too, if

--

you love all the out-of-doors, and chance to be ploughing late in the fall.

And

But there is the trouble with my professor. He never ploughs at all. How can he understand and believe? is n't this the trouble with many of our poets, also? Some of them spend their summers in the garden; but the true poet and the naturalist must stay later, and they must plough, plough the very edge of winter, if they would turn up what Burns did that November day in the field at Mossgiel.

How amazingly fortunate were the conditions of Burns's life! What if he had been professor of English literature at Edinburgh University? He might have written a life of Milton in six volumes, a monumental work, but how unimportant compared with the lines Toa Mouse! We are going to live real life and write real poetry again, when all who want to live, who want to write, draw directly upon life's first sources. To live simply, and out of the soil! To live by one's own ploughing, and to write!

-

Instead, how do we live? How do I live? Nine months in the year by talking bravely about books that I have not written. Between times I live on the farm, hoe and think, and write, whenever the hoeing is done. And where is my poem to a mouse?

Its silly wa's the win's are strewin! With a whole farm o' foggage green, and all the year before me, I am not sure that I could build a single line of genuine poetry. But I am certain that, in living close to the fields, we are close to the source of true and great poetry, where each of us, at times, hears lines that Burns and Wordsworth left unmeasured, -lines that are only waiting to be lived into song.

Now, I have done just what my biological friend knew I would do,-made over my course of nature-study into a pleasant but idle waiting for inspiration. I have frankly turned poet! No, not unless Gilbert White and Jefferies, Thoreau, Burroughs, Gibson, Torrey, and Rowland

We all are, a chance,

Robinson are poets. But they are poets. even the biologist, with half and in some form we are all waiting for inspiration. The naturelover who lives with his fields and skies simply puts himself in the way of the most and gentlest of such inspirations.

He may be ploughing when the spirit comes, or wandering, a mere boy, along the silent shores of a lake, and hooting at the owls. You remember the boy along the waters of Winander, how he would hoot at the owls in the twilight, and they would call back at him across the echoing lake? And when there would come a pause of baffling silence,

Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he

hung

Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery.

That is an inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with the outof-doors. It does n't come from books, from laboratories, not even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.

It was in the latter end of December, upon a gloomy day that was heavy with the oppression of a coming storm. In the heart of the maple swamp all was still and cold and dead. Suddenly, as out of a tomb, I heard the small, thin cry of a tiny tree frog. And how small and thin it sounded in the vast silences of that winter swamp! And yet how clear and ringing! A thrill of life tingling out through the numb, nerveless body of the woods that has ever since made a dead day for me impossible.

That was an inspiration. I learned something, something deep and beautiful. Had I been Burns or Wordsworth I should have written a poem to Hyla. All prose as I am, I was, nevertheless, so

The thrush's song is silent now,

The rill no longer sings;

But loud and long the strong winds strike
Ten million singing strings.

O'er mountains high, o'er prairies far,

Hark! the wild pæan's roll!
The lyre is strung 'twixt ocean shores,
And swept from pole to pole!

My meeting with that frog in the dead of winter was no trifling experience, nor one that the biologist ought to fail to understand. Had I been a poet, that meeting would have been of consequence to all the world; as I was, however, it meant something only to me,-a new point of view, an inspiration - a beautiful poem that I cannot write.

This attitude of the nature-lover, because it is contemplative and poetical, is not therefore mystical or purely sentimental. Hooting at the owls and hearing things in baffling silences may not be scientific. Neither is it unscientific. The attitude of the boy beside the starlit lake is not that of Charlie, the man who helps me occasionally on the farm.

We were clearing up a bit of mucky meadow recently when we found a stone just above the surface that was too large for the horse to haul out. We decided to bury it.

Charlie took the shovel and mined away under the rock until he struck a layer of rather hard sandstone. He picked awhile at this, then stopped awhile; picked again, rather feebly, then stopped

and began to think about it. It was hard work, the thinking, I mean, harder than the picking, but Charlie, however unscientific, is an honest workman, so he thought it through.

"Well," he said finally, "'t ain't no use, nohow. You can't keep it down. You bury the darned thing, and it'll come right up. I suppose it grows. Of course it does. It must. Everything grows." Now that is an unscientific attitude. But that is not the mind of the naturelover, of the boy with the baffling silences along the starlit lake. He is sentimental, certainly, yet not ignorant, nor merely vapid. He does not always wander along the lake by night. He is a nature-student, as well as a nature-lover, and he does a great deal more than hoot at the owls. This, though, is as near as he comes to anything scientific and so worth while, according to the professor.

And it is as near as he ought to come to reality and facts according to the philosopher.

"Nor can I recollect that my mind," says one of our philosophers, "in these walks, was much called away from contemplation by the petty curiosities of the herbalist or bird-lorist, for I am not one zealously addicted to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets of nature. It never seemed to me that a flower was made sweeter by knowing the construction of its ovaries. . . . The woodthrush and the veery sing as melodiously to the uninformed as to the subtly curious. Indeed, I sometimes think a little ignorance is wholesome in our communion with nature."

So it is. Certainly if ignorance, a great deal of ignorance, were unwholesome, then nature-study would be a very unhealthy course, indeed. For, when the most curious of the herbalists and birdlorists (Mr. Burroughs, say) has made his last prying peep into the private life of a ten-acre woodlot, he will still be wholesomely ignorant of the ways of nature. Is the horizon just back of the brook that marks the terminus of our philosopher's

path? Let him leap across, walk on, on, out of his woods to the grassy knoll in the next pasture, and there look! Lo! far yonder the horizon! beyond a vaster forest than he has known, behind a range of higher rolling hills, within a shroud of wider, deeper mystery.

There is n't the slightest danger of walking off the earth; nor of unlearning our modicum of wholesome ignorance concerning the universe. The naturelover may turn nature-student and have no fear of losing nature. The vision will not fade. Let him go softly through the May twilight and wait at the edge of the

swamp.

A voice serene and pure, a hymn, a prayer, fills all the dusk with peace. Let him watch and see the singer, a brownwinged woodthrush, with full, spotted breast. Let him be glad that it is not a white-winged spirit, or disembodied voice. And let him wonder the more that so plain a singer knows so divine a song.

Our philosopher mistakes his own dominant mood for the constant mood of nature. But nature has no constant mood. No more have we. Dawn and dusk are different moods. The roll of the prairie is unlike the temper of a winding cowpath in a New England pasture. Nature is not always sublime, awful, and mysterious; and no one but a philosopher is persistently contemplative. Indeed, at four o'clock on a June morning in some old apple orchard, even the philosopher would shout,-

"Hence, loathed melancholy!" He is in no mind for meditation; and it is just possible, before the day is done, that the capture of a drifting flake of dandelion and the study of its fairy wings might so add to the wonder, if not to the sweetness, of the flower, as to give him thought for a sermon.

There are times when the companionship of your library is enough; there are other times when you want a single book, a chapter, a particular poem. It is good at times just to know that you are turning with the earth under the blue of the

sky; and just as good again to puzzle over the size of the spots in the breasts of our several thrushes. For I believe you can hear more in the song when you know it is the veery and not the woodthrush singing. Indeed, I am acquainted with persons who had lived neighbors to the veery since childhood, and never had heard its song until the bird was pointed out to them. Then they could not help but hear. No amount of familiarity will breed contempt for your fields. Is the summer's longest, brightest day long enough and bright enough, to dispel the brooding mystery of the briefest of her nights? And tell me, what of the vastness and terror of the sea will the deep dredges ever bring to the surface, or all the circumnavigating drive to shore? The nature-lover is a man in a particular mood; the nature-student is the same man in another mood, as the fading shadows of the morning are the same that lengthen and deepen in the afternoon. There are times when he will go apart into the desert places to pray. Most of the time, however, he will live contentedly within sound of the dinner horn, glad of the companionship of his bluebirds, chipmunks, and pine trees.

This is best. And the question most frequently asked me is, How can I come by a real love for my pine trees, chipmunks, and bluebirds? How can I know real companionship with nature?

How did the boy along the starlit lake come by it, a companionship so real and intimate that the very cliffs knew him, that the owls answered him, that even the silences spoke to him, and the imagery of his rocks and skies became a part of the inner world in which he dwelt ? Simply by living along Winander and hallooing so often to the owls that they learned to halloo in reply. You may need a second time to come a-trailing clouds of glory before you can talk the language of the owls; but if there is in you any hankering for the soil, then all you need is a Winander of your own, a range, a haunt that you can visit, walk around,