She Mature-Atudent 
into a bottle, cannot cabin a Hockomock marsh, nor 
cage a December storm in a laboratory. And when,. 
in such a place, did a scientist ever overturn a “wee 
’ bit heap o’ weeds an’ stibble”? Yet it is out of 
* 
dawns and marshes and storms that the revelations 
come; yes, and out of mice nests, too, if you love all 
the out-of-doors, and chance to be ploughing late in 
the fall. 
But there is the trouble with my professor. He 
never ploughs at all. How can he understand and 
believe? And isn’t this the trouble with many of 
our preacher poets, also? Some of them spend their 
summers in the garden; but the true poet — and 
the naturalist — must stay later, and they must 
plough, plough the very edge of winter, if they would 
turn up what Burns did that November day in the 
field at Mossgiel. 
How amazingly fortunate were the conditions of 
Burns’s life! What if he had been professor of Eng- 
lish literature at Edinburgh University? He might 
have written a life of Milton in six volumes,—a 
monumental work, but how unimportant compared 
with the lines “To a Mouse”! 
We are going to live real life and write real poetry 
61 
