For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills
Where was their occupation and abode."
Your real lover of nature does not love merely the beautiful things which he culls here and there; he loves the earth itself, the faces of the hills and mountains, the rocks, the streams, the naked trees no less than the leafy trees,—a plowed field no less than a green meadow. He does not know what it is that draws him. It is not beauty, any more than it is beauty in his father and mother that makes him love them. It is "something far more deeply interfused,"—something native and kindred that calls to him. In certain moods how good the earth, the soil, seems! One wants to feel it with his hands and smell it—almost taste it. Indeed, I never see a horse eat soil and sods without a feeling that I would like to taste it too. The rind of the earth, of this "round and delicious globe" which has hung so long upon the great Newtonian tree, ripening in the sun, must be sweet.
I recall an Irish girl lately come to this country, who worked for us, and who, when I dug and brought to the kitchen the first early potatoes, felt them, and stroked them with her hand, and smelled
them, and was loath to lay them down, they were so full of suggestion of the dear land and home she had so lately left. I suppose it was a happy surprise to her to find that the earth had the same fresh, moist smell here that it had in Ireland, and yielded the same crisp tubers. The canny creature had always worked in the fields, and the love of the soil and of homely country things was deep in her heart. Another emigrant from over the seas, a laboring man, confined to the town, said to me in his last illness, that he believed he would get well if he could again walk in the fields. A Frenchman who fled the city and came to the country said, with an impressive gesture, that he wanted to be where he could see the blue sky over his head.
These little incidents are but glints or faint gleams of that love of Nature to which I would point,—an affection for the country itself, and not a mere passing admiration for its beauties. A great many people admire Nature; they write admiring things about her; they apostrophize her beauties; they describe minutely pretty scenes here and there; they climb mountains to see the sun set, or the sun rise, or make long journeys to find waterfalls, but Nature's real lover listens to their enthusiasm with coolness and indifference. Nature is not to be praised or patronized. You cannot go to her and describe her; she must speak through your heart. The woods and fields must melt into your mind, dissolved by your love for them. Did they not melt into Wordsworth's mind? They colored all
his thoughts; the solitude of those green, rocky Westmoreland fells broods over every page. He does not tell us how beautiful he finds Nature, and how much he enjoys her; he makes us share his enjoyment.
Richard Jefferies was probably as genuine a lover of Nature as was Wordsworth, but he had not the same power to make us share his enjoyment. His page is sometimes wearisome from mere description and enumeration. He is rarely interpretative; the mood, the frame of mind, which Nature herself begets, he seldom imparts to us. What we finally love in Nature is ourselves, some suggestion of the human spirit, and no labored description or careful enumeration of details will bring us to this.
"Nor do words
Which practiced talent readily affords,