rturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dusk
move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral
hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander
communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret
oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no fanciful challenge of
speculation. In the order of psychology it is as logical as in the
order of biology is the tracing of our upright posture or the deft
and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealizably remote periods
wherein the pioneers of man reach slowly forward to inconceivable
arrivals.

The weakness of these essays that are like out-of-door essays, but are
not out-of-door essays, is their dearth of freshly observed fact. This
dearth would not matter so much if there were not so many of them, but a
book full of such essays with little original observation will pall, no
matter how well written, no matter how interesting the personality of
the writer. Thus it is that some of the essays of Jefferies pall, some
of those written in his last days, of Jefferies who had in his earlier
writing been so objective. In Thoreau there is a happy combination of
freshly observed fact with personal comment, and in Mr. Burroughs a
personal element greatly subdued, and presented in most of the essays
only through the selective art that has preserved the incidents he
relates out of many of a vast store of their kind.

In these "nature studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, there
is a great deal of generalization from phenomena superficially observed.
He is not so often inaccurate, but he is very often merely repetitive,
giving us in beautiful and oftentimes distinguished phrase what others
have given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I have no doubt, with the
thing he describes before him but oftener, it would seem, from notes,
and oftenest, I take it, from memory. Sometimes it is best to write thus
from memory. The unessential will fade out, the essential remain; but
with Sharp the trouble is that the first observation has often been
hurried. He was content with the beauty that he saw when he first
noticed the incident; he did not wait to observe what in the further
actions of the life observed would make that beautiful incident more
significant. It may, of course, be said that all he was after was the
impression that the passing incident made upon him. Perhaps so, and if
so, more