INFLUENCES IN LITERA TURE. 1 1 1 



Bryant had possessed Keats's genius, of if 

 Keats had had Bryant's physique ! Thins of 

 the boy-author of Endymion singing till he was 

 eighty ! And yet such a thing might be if 

 recreation were regular and judicious. If 

 Keats were alive to-day he would not be ninety 

 years old, and yet his poems have been classics 

 for more than sixty years. 



The study of Nature, as I have said, should 

 be indirect, in order to perfect recreation. 

 Some cheerful sport, to absorb one's direct at- 

 tention, is the best aid to the end in view, and 

 to my mind the best sport is that which neces- 

 sarily takes one into the woods and along the 

 streams, where wild flowers blow and wild 

 birds sing, and where the flavor of sap and the 

 fragrance of gums and resins are in the 

 breezes. If I were a poet I think I should be 

 one of that class described as 



" Poets, a race long unconfined and free, 

 Still fond and proud of savage liberty." 



I could not be the one of the garret and 

 the crust; better a hollow tree and locusts and 

 wild honey. The redeeming feature of Walt 

 Whitman's deservedly tabooed, and yet deserv- 

 edly admired, Leaves of Grass, is the sweet, 

 ever-recurring wood-note, the sincere voice of 

 Nature, half strangled as it is in incoherent 

 sounds — a feature that affects one like the 

 notes of a wood-thrush heard in the depths of 

 a dismal, swampy hollow. Too much time 

 spent in the streets and crowds of the cities— 

 too much knowledge of the brutal side of life 

 — has given us a Whitman, a Baudelaire, and 

 a Zola. Too much knowledge of Nature gave 

 us a Thoreau. It is a curious fact that, so 



