Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 edition. Excerpt: ... iii mine own country to one who loves her and accepts the rigor of her economy as part of her lasting reward, nature is not everywhere in a communicable mood, nor is she always the same. Her disposition often changes with our own; her appeal seldom reaches the discordant heart. Her inner voice is never heard by the passing stranger. To say that we love nature only when we take the pains to understand her, is trite; but we can only partly understand her when we suffer her to impose upon us her supreme will. She unveils for those who linger and wait; and she speaks only to him who stands in reverence before a moss or a fern as before the greatest of the mysteries of the universe. A bird is singing in the branches of a hemlock; a worm is eating into its bark. The ranger passes by indifferent to both, nothing seeing or hearing. But the poet-naturalist lingers, eager to see and learn; and with an undivided heart, an observing eye and mind, he returns again and again to his schooling, discovers the secret of both bird and worm, informs the music and the silence with a spirit of his own, and actually adds to the idealism and the practical knowledge of man. He saves the tree for the State and he saves the song for the world. Strictly speaking, the pages of nature's book we admire the most are those that bear marginal notes of our own personality and experience. That is why, I think, Thoreau would not have felt as much at home in the rugged sptendors of the ancient Lebanons as he did in the placid solitudes of Walden woods. "He might have been a naturalist there, but not a poet;_even as a stranger, coming to Concord from a distant land, might only find in the Thoreau-country the visible landscape, not of Thoreau's poetic J5buT/J)ut..ai-.nature's...
