A SUMMER AFTERNOON 125 
knowledge of frost and freshet, pickerel and 
muskrat, and is exceedingly good company 
while you can keep him beyond scent of the 
tavern. Any intelligent farmer’s boy can give 
you some narrative of outdoor observation 
which, so far as it goes, fulfils Milton’s defini- 
tion of poetry, “simple, sensuous, passionate.” 
He may not write sonnets to the lake, but he 
will walk miles to bathe in it; he may not 
notice the sunsets, but he knows where to 
search for the blackbird’s nest. How surprised 
the school-children looked, to be sure, when 
the Doctor of Divinity from the city tried to 
sentimentalize in addressing them about “the 
bobolink in the woods”! They knew that the 
darling of the meadow had no more personal 
acquaintance with the woods than was exhib- 
ited by the preacher. 
But the preachers are not much worse than 
the authors. The prosaic Buckle, indeed, ad- 
mits that the poets have in all time been con- 
summate observers, and that their observations 
have been as valuable as those of the men of 
science ; and yet we look even to the poets for 
very casual and occasional glimpses of Nature 
only, not for any continuous reflection of her 
glory. Thus, Chaucer is perfumed with early 
spring; Homer resounds like the sea; in the 
Greek Anthology the sun always shines on the 
t 
