vibration of the great harmonics. The three human foster-children who
have been taken nearest into Nature's bosom, perhaps,--an odd triad,
surely, for the whimsical nursing mother to select,--are Wordsworth,
Bettine Brentano, and Thoreau. Is it yielding to an individual
preference too far, to say, that there seems almost a generic difference
between these three and any others,--however wide be the specific
differences among themselves,--to say that, after all, they in their
several paths have attained to an habitual intimacy with Nature, and the
rest have not?

Yet what wonderful achievements have some of the fragmentary artists
performed! Some of Tennyson's word-pictures, for instance, bear almost
as much study as the landscape. One afternoon, last spring, I had been
walking through a copse of young white birches,--their leaves scarce yet
apparent,--over a ground delicate with wood-anemones, moist and mottled
with dog's-tooth-violet leaves, and spangled with the delicate clusters
of that shy creature, the Claytonia or Spring Beauty. All this was
floored with last year's faded foliage, giving a singular bareness
and whiteness to the foreground. Suddenly, as if entering a cavern, I
stepped through the edge of all this, into a dark little amphitheatre
beneath a hemlock-grove, where the afternoon sunlight struck broadly
through the trees upon a tiny stream and a miniature swamp,--this last
being intensely and luridly green, yet overlaid with the pale gray of
last year's reeds, and absolutely flaming with the gayest yellow light
from great clumps of cowslips. The illumination seemed perfectly weird
and dazzling; the spirit of the place appeared live, wild, fantastic,
almost human. Now open your Tennyson:--

"_And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire
in swamps and hollows gray_."