The Mature Movement 
off into the deep woods alone. They were after new 
facts, newspecies. Emerson and Bryant and Thoreau 
went into the woods, too, but not for facts, nor did they 
go far, and they invited us to go along. We went, 
because they got no farther than the back-pasture 
fence. It was not to the woods they took us, but to 
nature; not a-hunting after new species in the name 
of science, but for new inspirations, new estimates 
of life, new health for mind and spirit. 
But we were slow to get as far even as their back- 
pasture fence, slow to find nature in the fields and 
woods. It was fifty years ago that Emerson tried to 
take us to nature; but fifty years ago, how few there 
were who could make sense out of his invitation, to 
say nothing of accepting it! And of Thoreau’s first 
nature book, “A Week on the Concord and Merri- 
mack Rivers,” there were sold, in four years after 
publication, two hundred and twenty copies. But two 
hundred and twenty of such books at work in the 
mind of the country could leaven, in time, a big lump 
of it. And they did. The out-of-doors, our attitude 
toward it, and our literature about it have never 
been the same since. 
Even yet, however, it is the few only who respond 
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