There are those who look at Nature from the standpoint of conventional and artificial life—from parlor windows and through gilt-edged poems—the sentimentalists. At the other extreme are those who do not look at Nature at all, but are a grown part of her, and look away from her toward the other class—the backwoodsmen and pioneers, and all rude and simple persons. Then there are those in whom the two are united or merged—the great poets and artists. In them the sentimentalist is corrected and cured, and the hairy and taciturn frontiersman has had experience to some purpose. The true poet knows more about Nature than the naturalist because he carries her open secret in his heart. Eckerman could instruct Goethe in ornithology, but could not Goethe instruct Eckerman in the meaning and mystery of the bird?
It is the soul the poet interprets, not Nature. There is nothing in Nature but what the beholder supplies. Does the sculptor interpret the marble or his own ideal? Is the music in the instrument, or in the soul of the performer? Nature is a dead clod until you have breathed upon it with your own genius. You commence with your own soul, not with woods and waters; they furnish the conditions, and are what you make them. Did Shelley interpret the song of the skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale? They interpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. You cannot find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet's heart to the woods. He sees Nature through a colored glass, sees it truthfully, but with an indescribable charm added, the aureole of the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a sunset, have no hidden meaning that the art of the poet is to unlock for us. Every poet shall interpret them differently, and interpret them rightly, because the soul is infinite. Nature is all things to men. The "light that never was on sea or land" is what the poet gives us, and is what we mean by the poetic interpretation of Nature.
The poet does not so much read in Nature's book—though he does this too—as write his own thoughts there; Nature is the page and he the type, and she takes the impression he gives. Of course the poet uses the truths of Nature also, and he establishes his right to them by bringing them home to us with a new and peculiar force—a quickening or kindling force. What science gives is melted in the fervent heat of the poet's passion, and comes back supplemented by his quality and genius. He gives more than he takes, always.
JOHN BURROUGHS.
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