“I am quite proud of it. I wanted to give you the lesson. Now I will smoke and talk and take mine ease, while you draw.”
“I can talk and sketch, too.”
“No doubt. On the Nipigon River there is a long carry once burned over. After the fire must have come a windfall. The whole blasted forest went down before it. It lies to-day a grim tangle of gray or black trunks, with huge agonized arms extended upward. At dusk it is very striking. Years went by, and then I saw the dead Confederates lying below Round Top the day after the fight, with arms and legs in rigid extension,—a most horrible memory. As I looked, it recalled that wrecked forest.”
“How dreadful, Pardy! I think I could draw those trees as you describe them. I will try to-morrow.”
Meanwhile, as she sketched, he went on:
“The growth of power to see is a curiously interesting thing. There is a disease or disorder called ‘mind-blindness,’ about which the doctor was telling me a few weeks ago. People who have it see things only as a mirror sees, and cannot give them names; but if they touch or handle them, are able to say what they are, or to tell their uses. Think, now, of a baby. It merely sees things as a mirror sees. Later, it learns the qualities of things seen, remembers them, learns to group them, and so to say at last what the thing is, or is for. Some people seem to stop in their education a little way beyond their baby gains, and at least never learn to get out of mere observation any pleasure.”
“But one may make many uses of this power to see. Now, the poets—”
“Stop a moment. The poets get an absurd amount of credit for being able to see as other men do not; but, really, the pleasantest people for a woodland walk are those naturalists who see far more than the poet, and combine with their science, or have with it, the love of things for the mere beauty in them. I never did walk with a poet in a wood. I think I should see all he saw.”
“But not the same way.”
“I would dispute that, if you mean to say I get less pleasure, Rose. And there is some nonsense in the notion that poets are very close observers of nature. They vary, of course. Take Wordsworth, he was a mere child in minute observation compared to Shakspere. Tennyson is better, too,—oh, by far; and any clever naturalist sees far more than any one of them.”