UPLAND SHOOTING. 
189 
of excitement—those are the ruder and less genial attributes 
of his profession—hut a lover of nature ] To his mere success 
as a sportsman, I have already shown that a knowledge of the 
habits and instincts of animals is necessary ; and let a man once 
set himself to study these, and he has turned already the first 
page of natural history; and so enticing is the study, that he 
perforce must persevere. And none can study natural history, 
without loving nature. The true sportsman, the gentle sports¬ 
man, must he in some sort a poet—not a jingler of rhymes, or a 
cramper of English words into strange and uncongenial mea¬ 
sures, a meter of syllables, and a counter of fingers, but a lover 
of all things beautiful and wild—a meditator, a muser ! He 
must be, as the old pastorals were, nympharum fugientum ama- 
tor; and to the very farthest flight of their coy footsteps must 
he follow them. Were it not for this, the sportsman were but 
a mere skilful butcher,—out upon it! there be better things 
than this in our philosophy ! 
This it is, with the sense of freedom, the sense of power, of 
manhood, of unchained and absolute volition, which we feel 
when our foot is on the mountain sod, our lungs expanded by 
the mountain air, that makes, in some sort, every man a sports¬ 
man. 
And then the noonday repose beneath the canopy of some 
dark hemlock, or tall pine, still vocal with the same fitful mur¬ 
mur which pleasured in Arcadia the ears of old Theocritus—the 
dainty morsel, rendered a thousand times more savory than 
your city banquets, by the true Spartan sauce of hunger, the 
cool draught tempered by waters cooller and clearer, though 
perchance less full of inspiration, than the lymph of Hippocrene ; 
the pleasant converse on subjects manifold, over the mild fumes 
of the composing cigar,—or, if need be, the camping out in the 
wild woods, the plying of the axe to form the temporary shanty, 
the kindling of the merry blaze, the rude yet appetizing cook¬ 
ery, the buoyancy of soul caught from all these things, the un¬ 
tutored jest, the untaught laughter; and, last not least, com¬ 
posed on the fragrant hemlock tips, which strew the woodman’s 
