THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 



ment, without love? It is sympathy, appreciation, 

 emotional experience, which refine and elevate and 

 breathe into exact knowledge the breath of life. 

 My own interest is in living nature as it moves 

 and flourishes about me winter and summer. 



I know it is one thing to go forth as a nature-lover, 

 and quite another to go forth in a spirit of cold, 

 calculating, exact science. I call myself a nature- 

 lover and not a scientific naturalist. All that sci- 

 ence has to tell me is welcome, is, indeed, eagerly 

 sought for. I must know as well as feel. I am not 

 merely contented, like Wordsworth's poet, to enjoy 

 what others understand. I must understand also; 

 but above all things I must enjoy. How much of my 

 enjoyment springs from my knowledge I do not 

 know. The joy of knowing is very great; the delight 

 of picking up the threads of meaning here and there, 

 and following them through the maze of confusing 

 facts, I know well. When I hear the woodpecker 

 drumming on a dry limb in spring or the grouse 

 drumming in the woods, and know what it is all for, 

 why, that knowledge, I suppose, is part of my enjoy- 

 ment. The other part is the associations that those 

 sounds call up as voicing the arrival of spring : they 

 are the drums that lead the joyous procession. 



To enjoy understandingly, that, I fancy, is the 

 great thing to be desired. When I see the large 

 ichneumon-fly, Thalessa, making a loop over her 

 back with her long ovipositor and drilling a hole in 



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