LITERARY TREATMENT OF NATURE 
that point of view; but he must always be true to 
the facts of the case, and to the limited intelligence 
for which he speaks. 
In the humanization of the animals, and of the 
facts of natural history which is supposed to be the 
province of literature in this field, we must recog- 
nize certain limits. Your facts are sufficiently hu- 
manized the moment they become interesting, and 
they become interesting the moment you relate 
them in any way to our lives, or make them sug- 
gestive of what we know to be true in other fields 
and in our own experience. Thoreau made his bat- 
tle of the ants interesting because he made it illus- 
trate all the human traits of courage, fortitude, 
heroism, self-sacrifice. Burns’s mouse at once strikes 
a sympathetic chord in us without ceasing to be a 
mouse; we see ourselves in it. To attribute human 
motives and faculties to the animals is to carica- 
ture them; but to put us in such relation with them 
that we feel their kinship, that we see their lives 
embosomed in the same iron necessity as our own, 
that we see in their minds a humbler manifestation 
of the same psychic power and intelligence that 
culminates and is conscious of itself in man, — 
that, I take it, is the true humanization. 
We like to see ourselves in the nature around us. 
We want in some way to translate these facts and 
laws of outward nature into our own experiences; 
to relate our observations of bird or beast to our 
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