LOVERS OF NATURE 217 



kind of pitying amusement npon the delight of their 

 newly arrived city friends; but would we not, after 

 all, give something if we could exchange eyes with 

 them for a little while ? 



We who write about nature pick out, I suspect, 

 only the rare moments when we have had glimpses 

 of her, and make much of them. Our lives are dull, 

 and our minds crusted over with rubbish like those 

 of other people. Then writing about nature, as 

 about most other subjects, is an expansive process; 

 we are under the law of evolution; we grow the 

 germ into the tree ; a little original observation goes 

 a good way. Life is a compendium. The record 

 in our minds and hearts is in shorthand. When we 

 come to write it out, we are surprised at its length 

 and significance. What we feel in a twinkling it 

 takes a long time to tell to another. 



When I pass along by a meadow in June, where 

 the bobolinks are singing and the daisies dancing in 

 the wind, and the scent of the clover is in the air, 

 and where the boys and girls are looking for wild 

 strawberries in the grass, I take it all in in a glance, 

 it enters swiftly through all my senses ; but if I set 

 about writing an account of my experience for my 

 reader, how long and tedious the process, how I 

 must beat about the bush ! And then, if I would 

 have him see and feel it, I must avoid a point-blank 

 description and bring it to him, or him to it, by a 

 kind of indirection, so as to surprise him and give 

 him more than I at first seemed to promise. 



To a countryman like myself the presence of nat- 



