of an oak against the western sky; and he says that he was at that
moment struck with "the infinite variety of natural appearances which
had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country," so far as he was
acquainted with them, and "made a resolution to supply in some degree
the deficiency." He spent a long life in studying and telling these
beautiful wonders; and yet, so vast is the sum of them, they seem almost
as undescribed before, and men to be still as content with vague or
conventional representations. On this continent, especially, people
fancied that all must be tame and second-hand, everything long since
duly analyzed and distributed and put up in appropriate quotations, and
nothing left for us poor American children but a preoccupied universe.
And yet Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely
nothing in Nature has ever yet been described,--not a bird nor a berry
of the woods, nor a drop of water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor
winter, nor sun, nor star.

Indeed, no person can portray Nature from any slight or transient
acquaintance. A reporter cannot step out between the sessions of a
caucus and give a racy abstract of the landscape. It may consume the
best hours of many days to certify for one's self the simplest out-door
fact, but every such piece of knowledge is intellectually worth the
time. Even the driest and barest book of Natural History is good and
nutritious, so far as it goes, if it represents genuine acquaintance;
one can find summer in January by poring over the Latin catalogues
of Massachusetts plants and animals in Hitchcock's Report. The most
commonplace out-door society has the same attraction. Every one of those
old outlaws who haunt our New England ponds and marshes, water-soaked
and soakers of something else,--intimate with the pure fluid in that
familiarity which breeds contempt,--has yet a wholesome side when you
explore his knowledge of frost and freshet, pickerel and musk-rat, and