But the previous question is, why the
nature poets and nature books appealed to me. One cannot corner
this unknown quantity. I suppose I was simply made that way--the
love of nature was born in me. I suppose Emerson influenced me
most, beginning when I was about nineteen; I had read Pope and
Thomson and Young and parts of Shakespeare before that, but they
did not kindle this love of nature in me. Emerson did. Though
he did not directly treat of outdoor themes, yet his spirit seemed
to blend with Nature, and to reveal the ideal and spiritual values
in her works. I think it was this, or something like it, that
stimulated me and made bird and tree and sky and flower full of
a new interest. It is not nature for its own sake that has mainly
drawn me; had it been so, I should have turned out a strict man of
science; but nature for the soul's sake--the inward world of ideals
and emotions. It is this that allies me to the poets; while it is
my interest in the mere fact that allies me to the men of science.
I do not read Emerson much now, except to try to get myself
back into the atmosphere of that foreworld when a paradox, or a
startling affirmation, dissolved or put to flight a vast array of
commonplace facts. What a bold front he did put on in the presence
of the tyrannies of life! He stimulated us by a kind of heavenly
bragging and saintly flouting of humdrum that ceases to impress us
as we grow old.
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