T16 BY-WAYVS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
Drifting might be condensed into that one 
line— 
“ Infinis bercements du loisir embaumeé.” 
In fact, the few poems worthy the name, writ- 
ten by Baudelaire, were made out of the sweet, 
warm shreds of his out-door life, while on a 
voyage in the far East. Even in France, this 
freshness of Nature is recognized and relished. 
In Muma Roumestan M. Daudet has, as one 
might say, wafted the odors of Provence 
through the streets of Paris. The critics felt 
the atmospheric change, and went to the win- 
dows to see the mistral flurrying along the 
boulevards. So, in America, when Bret Harte 
and Joaquin Miller sent their stories and poems 
over the mountains and deserts from our far 
Pacific coast, it was their freshness—their 
woodsy, dewy, out-door flavor that recom- 
mended them. A happy blending of the 
bucolic with the latest fashionable tendencies 
—a welding together of the pastoral and the 
ultra-urban, made a great success of An Earn- 
est Trifier. It would be easy to multiply in- 
stances. The proofs are perfect that the in- 
fluences of out-door life upon literature are of 
the subtlest and most interesting nature. 
Whilst every one must admit the paramount 
importance of human life in every form of lit- 
erary composition, still the side-light of out- 
door nature is absolutely necessary to the his- 
torian, the poet, and the novelist, and he who 
neglects it fails in one of the prime require- 
ments of the best art. As well might the 
painter draw a group of figures without color, 
atmosphere, or background, and expect to 
win the highest fame, as for the novelist or the 
