erate, in the effort to hold his own. The community is
bored by the conceit and egotism of the innovators; so it is by that of
poets and artists, orators and statesmen; but if we knew how heavily
ballasted all these poor fellows need to be, to keep an even keel amid
so many conflicting tempests of blame and praise, we should hardly
reproach them. But the simple enjoyments of out-door life, costing next
to nothing, tend to equalize all vexations. What matter, if the Governor
removes you from office? he cannot remove you from the lake; and if
readers or customers will not bite, the pickerel will. We must keep
busy, of course; yet we cannot transform the world except very slowly,
and we can best preserve our patience in the society of Nature, who does
her work almost as imperceptibly as we.

And for literary training, especially, the influence of natural beauty
is simply priceless Under the present educational systems, we need
grammars and languages far less than a more thorough out-door experience.
On this flowery bank, on this ripple-marked shore, are the true literary
models. How many living authors have ever attained to writing a single
page which could be for one moment compared, for the simplicity and
grace of its structure, with this green spray of wild woodbine or yonder
white wreath of blossoming clematis? A finely organized sentence should
throb and palpitate like the most delicate vibrations of the summer
air. We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and
measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical
perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies
in the future; tried by the out-door standard, there is as yet no
literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet
succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional
sentence, that fresh and perfect charm. If by the training of a lifetime
one could succeed in producing one continuous page of perfect cadence,
it would be a life well spent, and such a literary artist would fall
short of Nature's standard in quantity only, not in quality.

It is one sign of our weakness, also, that we commonly assume Nature to
be a rather fragile and merely ornamental thing, and suited for a model
of the graces only. But her seductive softness is the last climax of
magnificent strength. The same mathematical law winds the leaves around
the stem and the planets round the sun. The same law of crystalliza