In the Lake Country III 
and enriched by that Arctic ice sheet which 
scooped out lake basins and scattered hills 
in the form of terminal moraines and drumlins 
over the land. Here is a charming pastoral 
country—a lake country as essentially and as 
poetically as the English Lake Country, and 
doubtless quite as worthy to be sung. But 
as yet no genius has cast a glamour over it 
as did Wordsworth over the English lakes; 
hence we must see it for ourselves unaided, 
and, alas, our vision is painfully matter of fact 
in these days. This country is not so mellow 
as the English country, nor as cultivated, 
cultivated though it be. It lacks the hedge 
and the thatch, but to one who has any 
poetic spectacles of his own, it is full of charm. 
There is nothing remarkable surely about 
Walden. It has no particular or unusual 
beauty—a little New England pond, nothing 
more. But we see it through Thoreau’s 
eyes. This habit of seeing places through 
other minds, while it may easily invest with 
a new interest, may also deprive us of our 
own clearer and purer vision. We look at 
Nature usually in the most commonplace 
way, and when we wish to see it in a differ- 
ent light we ask the poet to see for us. We 
looked at Nature so long through the eyes 
