126 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
fisherman’s cottage by the beach ; we associate 
the Vishni Purana with lakes and _ lotuses, 
Keats with nightingales in forest dim, while 
the long grass waving on the lonely heath is 
the last memorial of the fading fame of Ossian. 
Of course Shakespeare’s omniscience included 
all natural phenomena; but the rest, great or 
small, associate themselves with some special 
aspects, and not with the daily atmosphere. 
Coming to our own times, one must quarrel 
with Ruskin as taking rather the artist’s view 
of nature, selecting the available bits and deal- 
ing rather patronizingly with the whole; and 
one is tempted to charge even Emerson, as he 
somewhere charges Wordsworth, with not be- 
ing of a temperament quite liquid and musical 
enough to admit the full vibration of the great 
harmonies. 
Yet what wonderful achievements have some 
of the fragmentary artists performed! Some 
of Tennyson’s word pictures, for instance, bear 
almost as much study as the landscape. One 
afternoon, last spring, I had been walking 
through a copse of young white birches, — their 
leaves scarce yet apparent,— over a ground 
delicate with wood-anemones, moist and mot- 
tled with dog-tooth violet leaves, and spangled 
with the delicate clusters of that shy creature, 
the Claytonia or Spring Beauty. All this was 
