The memory of my youthful Sundays is fragrant with wintergreens,
black birch, and crinkle-root, to say nothing of the harvest apples
that grew in our neighbor's orchard; and the memory of my Sundays
in later years is fragrant with arbutus, and the showy orchid, and
wild strawberries, and touched with the sanctity of woodland walks
and hilltops. What day can compare with a Sunday to go to the
waterfalls, or to "Piney Ridge," or to "Columbine Ledge," or to
stroll along "Snake Lane"? What sweet peace and repose is over
all! The snakes in Snake Lane are as free from venom as are
grasshoppers, and the grasshoppers themselves fiddle and dance as
at no other time. Cherish your Sundays. I think you will read a
little deeper in "Nature's infinite book of secrecy" on Sunday than
on Monday. I once began an essay the subject of which was Sunday,
but never finished it. I must send you the fragment.
But I have not yet solved my equation--what sent me to nature?
What made me take an intellectual interest in outdoor things?
The precise value of the /x/ is hard to find. My reading, no doubt,
had much to do with it. This intellectual and emotional interest
in nature is in the air in our time, and has been more or less for
the past fifty years. I early read Wordsworth, and Emerson and
Tennyson and Whitman, and Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," as
I have before told you.
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