weeds nor crack in the reign of dust, and be playground withal for
manifold destroyers. Often the tiny mouse builds his house and makes his
granaries underground, or the eyeless mole scoops his cell; and in chinks
is found the toad, and all the swarming vermin that are bred in earth;
and the weevil, and the ant that fears a destitute old age, plunder the
great pile of spelt_."

Perhaps some reader had been disposed hastily to say: "What did you want
with hooks out of doors? Was not Nature enough?" No one who loves both
books and Nature would ask that question, or need to have explained why a
knapsack library is a necessary adjunct of a walking-tour.

For Nature and books react so intimately on each other, and, far more
than one realizes without thought, our enjoyment of Nature is a creation
of literature. For example, can any one sensitive to such considerations
deny that the meadows of the world are greener for the Twenty-third
Psalm, or the starry sky the gainer in our imagination by the solemn
cadences of the book of Job? All our experiences, new and personal as
they may seem to us, owe incalculably their depth and thrill to the
ancestral sentiment in our blood, and joy and sorrow are for us what they
are, no little because so many old, far-away generations of men and women
have joyed and sorrowed in the same way before us. Literature but
represents that concentrated sentiment, and satisfies through expression
our human need for some sympathetic participation with us in our human
experience.

That a long-dead poet walking in the Spring was moved as I am by the
unfolding leaf and the returning bird imparts an added significance to my
own feelings; and that some wise and beautiful old book knew and said it
all long ago, makes my life seem all the more mysteriously romantic for