Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
“O blessed Bird! the earth we Pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial faëry place,
That is fit home for thee!”
Nature will not do, nor all the truth of nature, for stuff of song and story. As life is more than meat, so is literature more than life. Nature conforms to art; and in fiction “the only real people are those who never existed.”
At Good-Will Farm, Maine, there is a rock marked with a copper plate. It had been marked for drill and dynamite, until, one day, my car swung up and over a sharp turn in the road before the schoolhouse, skidding rather horribly on the smooth outcropping ledge which had been uncovered and left as part of the roadbed.
“You ought to blast that thing out,” I said, somewhat testily, to the supervisor who came out to greet me, my nerves, strung a bit too tight on the long day’s drive, snapping with the skid here at the very end of the trip.