LOVERS OF NATURE 205 



Dr. Johnson's delight was in men and in 

 verbal fisticuffs with them, but Wordsworth 

 seems to have loved nature more than men; at 

 least he was drawn most to those men who 

 lived closest to nature and were more a part 

 of her. Thus he says he loved shepherds, 

 "dwellers in the valleys,'' 



" Not verily 

 For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills 

 Where was their occupation and abode." 



Your real lover of nature does not love the 

 merely beautiful things which he culls here and 

 there ; he loves the earth itself, the faces of the 

 hills and mountains, the rocks, the streams, the 

 naked trees no less than the leafy trees, — a 

 ploughed field no less than a green meadow. 

 He does not know what it is that draws him. 

 It is not beauty, any more than it is beauty in 

 his father and mother that makes him love 

 them. It is "something far more deeply in- 

 terfused, " — something native and kindred that 

 calls to him. In certain moods how good the 

 earth, the soil, seems! One wants to feel it 

 with his hands and smell it — almost taste it. 

 Indeed, I never see a horse eat soil and sods 

 without a feeling that I would like to taste it 

 too. The rind of the earth, of this "round and 

 delicious globe " which has hung so long upon 

 the great Newtonian tree, ripening in the sun, 

 must be sweet. 



I recall an Irish girl lately come to this coun- 

 try, who worked for us, and who, when I dug 

 and brought to the kitchen the first earlv pota- 



