124 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
analyzed and distributed and put up in appro- 
priate quotations, and nothing left for us poor 
American children but a preoccupied universe. 
And yet Thoreau camps down by Walden 
Pond, and shows us that absolutely nothing in 
nature has ever yet been described, — not a 
bird, nor a berry of the woods, nor a drop of 
water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor 
winter, nor sun, nor star. 
Indeed, no person can portray nature from 
any slight or transient acquaintance. A re- 
porter cannot step out between the sessions of 
a caucus and give a racy abstract of the land- 
scape. It may consume the best hours of 
many days to certify for one’s self the simplest 
outdoor fact, but every such piece of know- 
ledge is intellectually worth the time. Even 
the driest and barest book of Natural History 
is good and nutritious, so far as it goes, if it 
represents genuine acquaintance; one can find 
summer in January by poring over the Latin 
catalogues of plants and insects. The most 
commonplace outdoor society has the same 
attraction. Every one of those old outlaws 
who haunt our New England ponds and 
marshes, water-soaked and soakers of some- 
thing else, — intimate with the pure fluid in 
that familiarity which breeds contempt, — has 
yet a wholesome side when you explore his 
