onsciously laid down by a small child of my acquaintance. The boy's
father, a college-bred man, had early chosen the better part, and
employed his fine faculties in rearing laurels in his own beautiful
nursery-gardens, instead of in the more arid soil of court-rooms or
state-houses. Of course the young human scion knew the flowers by name
before he knew his letters, and used their symbols more readily; and
after he got the command of both, he was one day asked by his younger
brother what the word _idiot_ meant,--for somebody in the parlor had
been saying that somebody else was an idiot. "Don't you know?" quoth
Ben, in his sweet voice: "an idiot is a person who doesn't know an
arbor-vitae from a pine,--he doesn't know anything." When Ben grows up
to maturity, bearing such terrible tests in his unshrinking hands, who
of us will be safe?

The softer aspects of Nature, especially, require time and culture
before man can enjoy them. To rude races her processes bring only
terror, which is very slowly outgrown. Humboldt has best exhibited the
scantiness of finer natural perceptions in Greek and Roman literature,
in spite of the grand oceanic anthology of Homer, and the delicate
water-coloring of the Greek Anthology and of Horace. The Oriental and
the Norse sacred books are full of fresh and beautiful allusions; but
the Greek saw in Nature only a framework for Art, and the Roman only
a camping-ground for men. Even Virgil describes the grotto of Aeneas
merely as a "black grove" with "horrid shade,"--"_Horrenti atrum
nemus imminet umbra_." Wordsworth points out, that, even in English
literature, the "Windsor Forest" of Anne, Countess of Winchelsea, was
the first poem which represented Nature as a thing to be consciously
enjoyed; and as she was almost the first English poetess, we might be
tempted to think that we owe this appreciation, like some other good
things, to the participation of woman in literature. But, on the other
hand, it must be remembered that the voluminous Duchess of Newcastle, in
her "Ode on Melancholy," describes among the symbols of hopeless gloom
"the still moonshine night" and "a mill where rushing waters run
about,"--the sweetest natural images. So woman has not so much to claim,
after all. In our own country, the early explorers seemed to find only
horror in its woods and waterfalls. Josselyn, in 1672, could only
describe the summer splendor of the White Mountain region as "dauntingly
terrible, being full