NATURE LORE 



full of notes of birds and trees and flowers as a heart 

 warmed and refreshed by sympathetic intercourse 

 and contact with these primal forces. When "the 

 press of one's foot to the earth springs a hundred 

 affections," as Whitman says, then one gets some- 

 thing more precious than exact science. Nature lore 

 is a mixture of love and knowledge, and it comes 

 more by way of the heart than of the head. We 

 absorb it with the air we breathe; it awaits us at 

 the side of the spring when we stoop to drink; it 

 drops upon us from the trees beneath which we 

 fondly linger; it is written large on the rocks and 

 ledges where as boys we prowled about on Sundays, 

 putting our hands in the niches or on the rocky 

 shelves older than Thebes or Karnak, touching care- 

 fully the phcebe's mossy nest, with its pearl-white 

 eggs, or noting the spoor of coon or fox, or coming 

 face to face with the oldest inhabitant of the region, 

 who saw the foundations of the hills laid and the 

 valleys scooped out Geologic Time, whose tent 

 is the gray, overhanging rocks. 



Many a walk I take in the fields and woods when 

 I gather no new facts and make no new observa- 

 tions; and yet I feel enriched. I have been for an 

 hour or more on intimate terms with trees and rocks 

 and grass and birds and with "Nature's primal 

 sanities"; the fragrance of the wild things lingers 

 about my mind for days. 



Yet the close observation of nature, the training 

 29 



