THE ART OF BARTRAM 115 



in this guise. I stumble over such technical terms as " cor dated append- 

 age " and " incarnate lobes " and wonder whether to continue. How- 

 ever, I can and do appreciate " sportive vegetables " and am encouraged 

 to go on. For there is much that I would see in this long-desired book. 



Others have enjoyed it in spite of the obtruding nomenclature and 

 so shall I. There is, I find, less of the technical than at first appears ; or 

 it may be that I become accustomed to it and learn that it does not 

 matter. Names neither make nor mar the beauty of such a passage as. . . . 



. . . Did none of the volume's treasures escape the indefatigable 

 Coleridge and Wordsworth.? I seek in vain for such an omission — 

 unless it be the " splendid fields of golden Oenothera " which I recog- 

 nize as my friend the primrose. ^^ 



That Bartram's style is a perfect expression of his personality 

 has already been suggested. Nature to Bartram was not cold 

 and impersonal, but an object of love and reverence. All its 

 manifestations partook of the miraculous. Nature was a vast 

 unknown region for him to explore, but he did not stop with 

 the accumulation of impersonal knowledge. His imagination 

 played upon what he observed and drew personal meanings ; it 

 found beneath the surfaces a confirmation of the immanence of 

 God and it delighted in the beauty of God's world. His exalta- 

 tion carried him to rhapsodic exclamations and hyperbolic dic- 

 tion, but it also animated nature-description and imparted to it 

 an imaginative glow. He abounds in such subjective epithets as 

 " beautiful," " hideous," " disagreeable," " pleasant," " excel- 

 lent," and in such superlatives as " incredible," " prodigious," 

 " amazing," " magnificent," " intolerable," " extraordinary," 

 " unparalleled," " exceedingly," and " irresistibly." The effect 

 he is thus able to transmit is precisely what the effect of his 

 travels was upon himself. It makes a reader in 1928 exclaim 

 that "To be young was heaven for a naturalist in eighteenth- 

 century America " and that " This is what the New World was 

 like to a loving spirit, thrilled by nature, and conscious of 

 beauty." ^^ His " poetic diction," objectionable as it may be in 

 the Classicist poets he read, is tolerable and at times not ineffec- 



*^ " Browsing through Bartram," by F. H. The Christian Science Monitor, 



May 2, 1929. 



"""Notes of a Rapid Reader," The Saturday Review of Literature, April 21, 



1928. 



9 



