Flora of Michigan. SriJov at Mk.ur.an 5 



valley: these, and a multitude of other joyous memories, lingered 

 with him many years. There was formed his deep consciousness 

 of obligation to the Creator. Insights into nature were awakened 

 there, which, with the years would mature and quicken an inspired 

 interest in interpreting facts of creation. Erwin found God in the 

 fields and forests about him, as well as in the church of which he 

 was so regular an attendant. Whereas he sought ostensibly for 

 things, fisii, water-weeds, red berries, the robin's nest, and other 

 natural objects, he discovered an elusive, but very real, cosmic 

 kinship with a " subtile presence everywhere that lends all motion, 

 light, and life," which comprehends all and "in one harmony all 

 discord blends." "All tends to good, all life is one in span," he 

 later wrote. " The Love Divine beneath its brooding wings, tender 

 as mother's love, enfolds all things that live and move, from 

 monad unto man; And what to us seems wrong in God's vast 

 plan, to our disturbed and faulty vision clings, as low-hung clouds 

 obscure the lark that sings, or blot Polaris and Aldebaran." 



Probably Miss Ida Holmes, a friend and school teacher, more 

 than anyone gave Erwin his intelligent love of nature. Years of 

 Civil War between the North and South wrought a change in 

 the family of Rancellor King Smith. Lucy King Smith died while 

 serving as a nurse to Union soldiers. R. K. Smith enlisted with 

 Company K of the 184th New^ York Infantry and for years w^as 

 away from his home. While located with the Army of the Poto- 

 mac near Washington, D. C, in May 1865, he received a letter 

 from Ida Holmes which told of his children. " Lilly," she wrote, 

 "has grown like a w^eed. Irwin too has grow^n, and is quite a 

 gentleman. He reads my books with as much appreciation as 

 anybody and is, I think, an uncommonly intelligent boy for his 

 age." He borrowed from her books by Tennyson, Longfellow, 

 and Dickens. By the hour he listened to her tell "of Lowell and 

 Hawthorne, of Emerson and Thoreau, of James Freeman Clarke 

 and Edward Everett Hale; and of what the world would be when 

 all men should be noble and all women should come into their 

 own." 



She lent him copies of the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Maga- 

 zine, Putnam's Magazine, and The Round Table. She believed in 

 the youth's future and, when a few years later she died, he cher- 

 ished the memory of her spirit and at last offered the following 

 tribute to her in verse: 



