NATURE, ENJOYMENT OF
One of the most interesting passages in modern literary history is that in which Audubon, the naturalist, met the sudden destruction, by the voracity of rats, of the treasures he had accumulated in fifteen years of incessant exploration. At the shock of what seemed the irremediable disaster, he was thrown into a fever, which had well-nigh proved fatal. “A burning heat,” as he described it, “rushed through my brain; and my days were oblivion.” But as consciousness returned, and the rally of nature fought back the sudden incursion of disease, there sang again through his wakening thoughts the wild notes he had heard in the bayous of Louisiana, the everglades of Florida, the savannahs of the Carolinas, and the forests that fringe the sides of the Alleghanies. He saw again the Washington eagle, as it soared and screamed from its far rocky eery. He startled again, from her perch on the firs, the brown warbler of Labrador. He traced in thought the magic hues on crest and wing that so often had shone before the dip of his rifle. And the passion for new expeditions and discoveries, arising afresh, was more to him than medicine. In three years more, passed far from home, he had filled once more the despoiled portfolios; and at every step, as he told his biographer, “it was not the desire of fame that prompted him; it was his exceeding enjoyment of nature!”—Richard S. Storrs.
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Nature Malleable—See [Conquest by Man].
Nature Merciless—See [God, Not Nature].
NATURE’S AGGRESSIVENESS
Winthrop Packard, in “Wild Pastures,” describes the way in which nature’s wild growths obliterate the marks of human labor:
Let but vigilance relax for a year, a spring month even, and bramble and bayberry, sweet-fern and wild-rose, daring scouts that they are, will have a foothold that they will yield only with death. Close upon these will follow the birches, the light infantry which rushes to the advance line as soon as the scouts have found the foothold. These entrench and hold the field desperately until pine and hickory, maple and oak, sturdy men of the main line of battle, arrive, and almost before you know it the farm is reclaimed. The wilderness has regained its lost ground, and the cosmos of the wild has wiped out that curious chaos which we call civilization.
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NATURE’S ANTIDOTES