As quickly as possible I shook off the spell of his haunting word magic. There have been times when I have given myself up to his morbid brooding, for like Vance Thompson I have
"Walked in Broadway, to and fro,
With the sombre ghost of Edgar Poe."
But he did not belong in the open sunshine. I had to seek another companion.
In the intervals of gathering brush for the fire and pouring sap into the steaming pan—which still leaked here and there, drat it!—I began to hunt for a poet companion to help me pass the time—not to improve the time, mark you, but to make it pass pleasantly. Naturally I thought of Shakespeare for he is supposed to fit everywhere, but I guess the wrong quotations came to me. Every quotation had a moral tagged to it—sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, etc. Under a roof Shakespeare can be uproariously humorous, wise, witty, sublime, but in the open air he seems to moralise everything "into a thousand similes," to be constantly gathering "honey from the weed" and making "a moral of the devil himself." I would have none of him. Whitman proved equally difficult. I could not attend to my work and at the same time "loaf and invite my soul." Neither could I chum with him in his more cosmical moods. To do that I would have to spurn the earth away with my toe and look at things from "the outer dark."
"I see a great round wonder rolling through space,
I see the shaded part on one side where the sleepers are sleeping,
and the sunlit part on the other side."
But what would happen to the boiling syrup while I was taking such flights? It would be scorched and burned beyond a doubt. Moreover, I like to keep my feet on the earth—in good Canadian mud—even when indulging the wildest flights of imagination. I would have none of Whitman, even if he is the poet of outdoors. So one by one I tested many poets and rejected them all. They demanded too much.
After all, do the poets amount to so very much? Out in the woods I do not feel that they do. At their best they merely give us a point of view and a mood so that we can see and feel things as they did. But we all have moods and points of view of our own. Why shouldn't we use our own? You will soon find that every point of view overlooks as wonderful a world as any other. And you will find that your own moods attract the thoughts that belong to them as a magnet attracts steel filings. What if they are not the thoughts that you have seen in books? They are better, for they are your own. And that reminds me that we are inclined to make too much of books and even of thoughts. Books are all right to hold facts until we need them, just as a tool-chest holds tools. And thoughts are dangerous, whether they be our own or the thoughts of others, unless we keep them under control. Do you not remember Shelley's picture of one who
"Fled astray
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey."
On this perfect afternoon I did not want to be harried by thoughts, by my own or those of other men. I wanted to let the great sunshine and the earth smells, the sounds of wind and wing, and the homely farm and woodland sights—spreading about me as far as the horizon—seep into my soul through my senses, so that on some future day of storms and sorrow I could recall it entire and regain something of its peace. Is it not wonderful how in this way the things of the material world are constantly entering our minds through our senses, while the things of the inner and immaterial world are constantly passing out into the material world through our words and actions? Our observations and our thoughts are forever being woven into a wonderful tapestry of life and we are a part of the pattern. As I realise that I seem to see the spirit that answered:
"Beside the roaring loom of Time I ply
And weave for God the garment that thou seest him by."