1394 The Cornell Reading-Courses 



blue vault of the sky; or if it rain, to first-hand relationship with the 

 elements — for can I not touch the drops that fall from some myste- 

 rious height? I am conscious of a quick smell of the soil, something 

 like the smell of the sea. I hear the call of a bird or a faint rush of 

 wind, or catch a shadow that passes and is gone. There is a sudden 

 sensation of green things tumbled over the ground. I feel that they 

 are living, growing, aspiring, sensitive. Then the details begin to 

 grow up out of the area, every detail perfect in its way, every one 

 individual, yet all harmonious. The late rain compacted the earth; 

 but here are little grooves and cuts made by tiny rills that ran down the 

 furrows and around the stems of the plants, coalescing and growing as 

 they ran, digging gorges between mountainous clods, spreading into 

 islanded lakelets, depositing deltas, and then plunging headlong toward 

 some far-off sea — a panorama that needs only to be magnified to make 

 those systems of rivers and plains and mountains the names of which 

 I dreaded so much in my old geography days. Soft green things push 

 up out of the soil, growing by some sweet alchemy that I cannot under- 

 stand but that I can feel. Green leaves expand to the sun; buds burst 

 into flowers; flowers change to fruits; the pods burst, and berries 

 wither and fall; the seeds drop and are lost — yet I know that 

 nature the gardener will recover them in due season. Strange plants 

 that I did not want are growing here and there, and now I find that they 

 are as good as the rest, for they spring from the same earth yet are unlike 

 all others, they struggle for place and light, and they too will have their 

 day and will die away and in some mysterious process will come again. 

 Insects crawl here and there, coming from strange crevices and all of them 

 intent. Earthworms heave their burrows. All these, too, pass on and 

 die and will come again. A bird darts in and captures a flying insect ; a 

 dog trots across the farther end of the plot ; a cat is hidden under the vines 

 by the wall. A toad dozes under a bench: he will come out to-night. 

 It is all a drama, intense, complex, ever moving, always dying, always 

 re-born. I see a thousand actors moving in and out, always going, always 

 coming. I am part of the drama; I break the earth; I destroy this 

 plant and that, as if I were the arbiter of life and death. I sow the seed. 

 I see the tender things come up and I feel as if I had created some- 

 thing new and fine, that has not been seen on the earth before; and I 

 have a new joy as deep and as intangible as the joy of religion." — Outlook 

 to Nature. 



