INFLUENCES IN LITERATURE. II 
Bryant had possessed Keats’s genius, of if 
Keats had had Bryant’s physique! ‘Think of 
the boy-author of Ludymion singing till he was 
eighty! And yet suchathing might be if 
recreation were regular and judicious. If 
Keats were alive to-day he would not be ninety 
years old, and yet his poems have been classics 
for more than sixty years. 
The study of Nature, as I have said, should 
be indirect, in order to perfect recreation. 
Some cheerful sport, to absorb one’s direct at- 
tention, is the best aid to the end in view, and 
to my mind the best sport is that which neces- 
sarily takes one into the woods and along the 
streams, where wild flowers blow and wild 
birds sing, and where the flavor of sap and the 
fragrance of gums and resins are in the 
breezes. - If I were a poet I think I should be 
one of that class described as 
“Poets, a race long unconfined and free, 
Still fond and proud of savage liberty.” 
I could not be the one of the garret and 
the crust; better a hollow tree and locusts and 
wild honey. ‘The redeeming feature of Walt 
Whitman’s deservedly tabooed, and yet deserv- 
edly admired, Leaves of Grass, is the sweet, 
ever-recurring wood-note, the sincere voice of 
Nature, half strangled as it is in incoherent 
sounds—a feature that affects one like the 
notes of a wood-thrush heard in the depths of 
a dismal, swampy hollow. Too much time 
spent in the streets and crowds of the cities— 
too much knowledge of the brutal side of life 
—has given us a Whitman, a Baudelaire, and 
a Zola. Too much knowledge of Nature gave 
us a Thoreau. It is a curious fact that, so 
