GARDENS, BOO. 



others, the beauties of nature. He was able to 

 make people hear "the songs, the silences and 

 murmurings of the air." Millet's testimony regard- 

 ing these "silent sounds" is worth noting. Some 

 effect to despise this phrase, or at the best only 

 allow the faculty of hearing these voices to be a 

 dreamer's or a poet's privilege. But our own 

 Whitman, who is a poet but no dreamer, of whom 

 a critic has well said that he stands on his own 

 ground with no man his leader as an interpreter of 

 nature, has emphasized this intimacy with one of 

 her phases in the line where he hears 



" The bravuras of birds, the bustle of growing wheat, 

 Gossip of flames, clacl< of sticks cooking my meals." 



Virgil's testimony is softer, smoother, less virile, 

 but none the less true when he tells how 



" Soft whispers steal along the leafy woods." 



At times these voices of nature speak to us with 

 the blare and twang of instruments of brass ; 

 again with the silvery, dulcet tones of a lute, an 

 MoMslxx harp. Now it is the gods in Walhalla 

 sounding the funeral dirge ; again the fairies trip- 

 ping a fantastic measure in the wild wood. 



That Whitman was true to nature cannot be 

 better evidenced than by Thoreau's appreciation of 

 his work, for Thoreau was by far the keenest ob- 

 server of the moods and tenses of nature that the 

 New World has yet known. Possibly, if the profes- 

 sional naturalist is excepted, he takes precedence 

 of all others, here or elsewhere, now or in times 

 past. He did not, like Linnjeus, so minimize 

 the study of nature as to say that a patch of moss 

 no bigger than a man's hand would suffice for the 

 study of a life-time, but he knew where and when 

 the first bud started in the spring — what tree held 

 the last leaf in the autumn. He heard the first 

 notes of the hylodes, the first song of the robin as 

 it came, the harbinger of spring, to the lonely 

 cabin on the shore of Walden pond. 



Lonely ! did I say ? Ah ! never was the abode 

 of man less so, for with Thoreau dwelt unceasingly 

 the intimate spirits of the earth and air, and while 

 they told him many of the secrets of their realms, 

 they yet gave him grace to know that more was left 

 untold, so that he did not say with Carlisle : 



" It has come about now that the creation of a 

 world is little more mysterious than the cooking of 

 a dumpling." 



In contrast to this is Emerson's infinitely truer 

 thought, that ' ' we learn geology the morning after 

 the earthquake on ghastly diagrams of cloven 

 mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of 

 the sea." While the tree is budding, the flower 



'S AND NATURE. 515 



unfolding, we see only the bud and the bloom ; 

 the processes by which nature arrives at its fructi- 

 fication are too deeply hidden to be revealed to the 

 eye of the finite observer. It is true that "we 

 know in part. " 



Where nature is used as an aid to illustration 

 in literature, it is almost always in her gentler 

 aspect. 



" The violets 

 That strew the green top of the new-come spring" 



make a more seductive picture than the 



" oak, whose boughs were moss'd with age, 



And high top bald with dry antiquity—" 



albeit a less striking one. Not often is the grinning 

 skeleton exposed, as by Emerson. Less often yet 

 are we shown those phases by which the unsightly 

 ordure of nature — cast off as a worn and worthless 

 garment — becomes re-habilitated into a thing of 

 life and beauty. Carlyle, never long content to 

 dwell upon the purely or ideally beautiful, gives 

 this picture of a battle-field, where 



" The kind seed-field lies a hideous, desolate 



place of skulls ; nevertheless, nature is at work : 

 all that gore and carnage will be shrouded in, a'b- 

 sorbed into manure, and next year the March-field 

 will be green — nay, greener. Thrifty, unwearied 

 nature, ever out of our great waste educing some 

 little profit of thy own, how dost thou, from the 

 very carcass of the killer, bring life for the living ? " 



We find this thought also paralleled in Virgil, 

 where 



" th' Enanthian plains once more were strow'd 



With Roman bodies, and just heav'n thought good 

 To fatten twice those fields with Roman blood " 



True, it is, that in nature there is no waste. 

 The dry leaf in the forest, the dead body of her 

 great son, Man, are alike food for the building of 

 next year's herbage and fruitage. "The withered 

 leaf is not dead and lost. There are forces in it 

 and around it, though working in inverse order, 

 else how could it rot ? Despise not the rag from 

 which man makes paper, nor the litter from which 

 the earth makes corn." 



This idea has been beautifully touched by the 

 graceful pen of Dickens. After the carnage of 

 battle has made havoc of fertile English meadows, 

 he leads us down through the fields that have 

 become green again, where nature, "far above the 

 evil passions of men, soon recovered her serenity, 

 and smiled upon the guilty battle-ground as she 

 had done before, when it was innocent. But there 

 were deep green patches in the growing corn, at 

 first, that men looked at awfully. Year after year 

 they re-appeared, and it was known that under- 



