THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 
ment, without love? It is sympathy, appreciation, 
emotional experience, which refine and elevate and 
breathe into exact knowledge the breath of life. 
My own interest is in living nature as it moves 
and flourishes about me winter and summer. 
I know it is one thing to go forth as a nature-lover, 
and quite another to go forth in a spirit of cold, 
calculating, exact science. I call myself a nature- 
lover and not a scientific naturalist. All that sci- 
ence has to tell me is welcome, is, indeed, eagerly 
sought for. I must know as well as feel. I am not 
merely contented, like Wordsworth’s poet, to enjoy 
what others understand. I must understand also; 
but above all things I must enjoy. How much of my 
enjoyment springs from my knowledge I do not 
know. The joy of knowing is very great; the delight 
of picking up the threads of meaning here and there, 
and following them through the maze of confusing 
facts, I know well. When I hear the woodpecker 
drumming on a dry limb in spring or the grouse 
drumming in the woods, and know what it is all for, 
why, that knowledge, I suppose, is part of my enjoy- 
ment. The other part is the associations that those 
sounds call up as voicing the arrival of spring: they 
are the drums that lead the joyous procession. 
To enjoy understandingly, that, I fancy, is the 
great thing to be desired. When I see the large 
ichneumon-fly, Thalessa, making a loop over her 
back with her long ovipositor and drilling a hole in 
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