THE AUGUST FIELDS. 93 
and that, when our eyes appear blinded, it is only some 
dark shadow that has interposed. And the thought 
comes to him that, despite the gloom and the sorrow, 
the care and the turmoil that brood over life: 
“Haply, the river of Time — 
As it grows, as the towns on its marge 
Fling their wavering lights 
On a wider, statelier stream — 
May acquire, if not the calm 
Of its early mountainous shore, 
Yet a solemn peace of its own,” 
and the thought brings renewed hope and comfort to 
his desponding heart. 
The long lists of outdoor books, which deal with 
the picturesque or esthetic side of Nature as distin- 
guished from the scientific or the practical, would seem 
to indicate an increase in the number of those who are 
able to appreciate or wish to learn to appreciate the 
charms in this study of Nature. As the reading of 
Robinson Crusoe has incited many a youth with a 
longing for the sea and the strange adventures incident 
to a mariner’s life, so the reading of a good outdoor 
book has been a guide and a stimulus to a truer love 
for outdoor life. Such books may not be considered as 
literature in the same sense as Homer and Plato, Dante 
and Boccaccio, Shakspere and Addison, Irving and 
