A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



yet I cannot quite divest myself of the suspicion 

 that the solitudes had given him grace of utter 

 ance. It seems to be the lesson of natural elo 

 quence that Nature s educational course makes 

 some of the nobler and deep-buried appetencies 

 of the soul imitate the grasses of the field and 

 spring their tender blades in waste places. More 

 than once I have noticed that those speakers who 

 are most effective have studied the book that was 

 never written. Eloquence, unlike wit, feeds itself 

 in unfrequented glades. The American savage, 

 who is never an inventor or a philosopher, is very 

 often an orator. The speeches of Red Jacket and 

 Sitting Bull have a large Roman vibration like the 

 echo of a strong voice in the woods. 



In those academic days we were swept off our 

 feet by successive literary waves. We had Goethe 

 freshets, and, later, Carlyle inundations, when we 

 talked in the Chelsea dialect and called our pro 

 fessors &quot; Sea-Green &quot; and &quot; Teufelsdrockh,&quot; and 

 tried, absurdly enough, in our dormitories, to 

 &quot; welter in the immensities &quot; and balance the 

 &quot;Tartarian darks&quot; on the tips of our tongues. 

 Then there was a year when we all went off with 

 Balzac, and neglected everything but our pipes 

 and beer, in making obeisance to Parisian analyses. 

 But Bannister never joined in the fellowcraft 

 worship at these shrines. Effloresce as he might 

 at the top, his roots remained fixed in the 

 American soil. I believe he tugged at Goethe 

 assiduously and plodded through the &quot; Comedie 

 Humaine,&quot; as if to see what it was all about. 



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