2 Boyhood, Early Schooling, and Teaching 



Big droves of kine, orchards on all the hills, 

 Flower-banked white cottages in all the vales, 

 Broad pastures, zigzag-fenced with hemlock rails 

 The anvil's clang, the rumbling busy mills. 

 Tan-vats in rows, a salt-well's heavy drills. 

 The parson's Sunday face, the miller's tales, 

 Mowers with scythes and maids with milking pails. 

 The mill pond's mysteries ! The mill-stream's thrills. 



Hour after hour he watched " the giant mill-beams gloom in 

 rows cobweb-festooned and hoar wtih whitest flour." Student 

 from his early years of intellectual awareness, he meditated on 

 the "prisoned god" he heard in the grinding of the mill-wheel. 

 But more, he studied the "finny tribes" he saw below the mill- 

 wheel. A stanza of quiet rapture caught his spirit: 



Daily round and round the mill-wheel goes. 

 Dull rumbling like a demi-god in pain; 

 And endlessly like some god's ichor flows 

 The crystal stream o'er its green algal plain. 



He early began to find " the strong sweet life of Nature . . . 

 the God of earth and heaven whom Science bares." Nature's 

 processes, as well as her myriad forms, appealed to his observa- 

 tion. "This swarming earth," he later wrote," "has been a trial 

 field wherein a virile God has sown in haste a horde of strug- 

 gling forms, hoping as yield to reach some consummating perfect 

 stage — elusive ever and evermore erased." The type is precious 

 to Nature; and the "rocks are full of types sketched out, re- 

 viewed, found wanting, cast away, or slowly trued to perfect 

 forms. Ceaseless, God's winnow-fan sorts better still from best." 

 Of all the mind's highways " the most sublime" were those made 

 from "deeps of space" by the astronomers. He, however, lived 

 and worked closely to the earth. In April he was often " a wan- 

 dering boy, in hemlock forests dim," enjoying the " spring's sweet 

 ferment," and conscious that " myriad million cells to one blind 

 end, in harmony attuned, within each tree, expand and bud: 

 absorb, consume and blend the gifts of earth and air by sun set 

 free." He wrote: 



^ The Geological Record, January 2, 1913. Other quotations are taken from 

 published and unpublished poems which have a definite retrospective and biographi- 

 cal significance. 



