BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 99 
“But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the 
meadow.” 
And when Keats forgets the Greek myths and 
turns to pastoral memories, how true and fresh 
and fine his note ;— 
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs; 
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet 
Wherewith the seasonable month endows 
The grass, the thicket, the fruit-tree wild.” 
But we poor clay mortals, who have never 
been able to get within the charmed life of the 
poets, can have our sip of honey-dew, and our 
morsel of wild balsamic resin, our mouthful of 
pungent buds, and our taste of aromatic roots, 
notwithstanding our coarse natures, just as 
well as these successors of the gods. Still, I 
fancy that it is the literary man and the artist 
who get the most out of our out-door browsing 
and nibbling. Wild plums and haws and ber- 
ries, papaws, nuts, grapes, and all the fruits of 
ungardened nature, have something in them to 
feed originality. One cannot chew a bit of 
slippery-elm bark without acknowledging the 
racy charm of nature at first hand. Children 
like all these things, because their tastes are 
pure and natural. Poets like them, because 
poets are grown-up children. Painters like 
them, because painters affect to interpret 
poetry and nature. Clods, like you and me, 
reader, like them, because they are racy and 
good; because they take out of our mouths 
the taste of artificial food, and because they 
seem to strengthen our connection with un- 
trimmed and uncultured nature. They are, in 
their way of laying hold on our taste, like the 
poetic myths of the Greeks. They cloy for a 
