twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down
into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird that
sings indifferently by night and by day. I told him he must beware of
finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him.
He said, "What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full
upon all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as
you find it you become its prey."

His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was
connected with Nature,--and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to
be defined by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to the
Natural History Society. "Why should I? To detach the description from its
connections in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and
they do not wish what belongs to it." His power of observation seemed to
indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with
ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and
heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that
imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact
lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.
His determination on Natural History was organic. He confessed that he
sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among Indians,
would have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts
culture, he played out the game in this mild form of botany and
ichthyology. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller
records of Butler the apiologist, that "either he had told the bees things
or the bees had told him." Snakes coiled round his leg; the fishes swam
into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck
out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from
the hunters. Our naturalist had perfect magnanimity; he had no secrets: he
would carry you to the heron's haunt, or even to his most prized botanical