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 merely the 

 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 plowed 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 interfused, " — 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 feel- 

 ing 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 country, 

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

 brought to the kitchen the first early potatoes, felt 

 them, and stroked them with her hand, and smelled 



