128 NATURE STUDY. 



Furthermore, nature, rightly studied, is, to the child 

 at least, a symbol of his higher surroundings. As he 

 sees how much Mother Nature does for her children, 

 how carefully she protects and feeds seed and bud, leaf 

 and flower, how she looks after, plans for, and controls 

 plant and animal and mineral, Mother Nature helps him 

 to better understand how much his mother and friends 

 have done for him. 



As the child studies nature, he learns to appreciate 

 better what has been the source and inspiration of much 

 of the most beautiful in literature and art. Nature 

 study opens his eyes to much of the most beautiful part 

 of his intellectual environment. One who, like the 

 writer, has begun his right sympathetic study of nature 

 in his adult years, when he could understand the effect 

 upon himself, can realize that an appreciation of nature 

 opens a new world in literature. Much in Bryant, 

 Wordsworth, Longfellow, Tennyson, Lowell, Whittier, 

 Helen Hunt Jackson, Lucy Larcom, Burroughs, Thoreau, 

 and a host of other writers, which before meant little, 

 has become full of beauty, because he has some appre- 

 ciation of the world of nature which inspired these 

 writers, and has read something of the story which 

 nature told them. 



Not less is the child helped to appreciate many of the 

 beauties of art. He who never studies the landscape 

 about him or the clouds above him, who scarcely looks 

 at the sunset or notices the trees or flowers or birds, is 

 utterly incapable of really appreciating the pictures 

 which these have inspired. 



