t enthralled my
imagination in the whole subject of natural history was not the
orderly array of facts, but the glimpse I caught, through this or that
fragment of science, of the grand principles underlying the facts. By
asking questions, by listening when my wise friends talked, by
reading, by pondering and dreaming, I slowly gathered together the
kaleidoscopic bits of the stupendous panorama which is painted in the
literature of Darwinism. Everything I had ever learned at school was
illumined by this new knowledge; the world lay newly made under my
eyes. Vastly as my mind had stretched to embrace the idea of a great
country, when I exchanged Polotzk for America, it was no such
enlargement as I now experienced, when in place of the measurable
earth, with its paltry tale of historic centuries, I was given the
illimitable universe to contemplate, with the numberless aeons of
infinite time.

As the meaning of nature was deepened for me, so was its aspect
beautified. Hitherto I had loved in nature the spectacular,--the
blazing sunset, the whirling tempest, the flush of summer, the
snow-wonder of winter. Now, for the first time, my heart was satisfied
with the microscopic perfection of a solitary blossom. The harmonious
murmur of autumn woods broke up into a hundred separate melodies, as
the pelting acorn, the scurrying squirrel, the infrequent chirp of
the lingering cricket, and the soft speed of ripe pine cones through
dense-grown branches, each struck its discriminate chord in the
scented air. The outdoor world was magnified in every dimension;
inanimate things were vivified; living things were dignified.

No two persons set the same value on any given thing, and so it may
very well be that I am boasting of the enrichment of my life through
the study of natural history to ears that hear not. I need only recall
my own obtuseness to the subject, before the story of the spider
sharpened my senses, to realize that these confessions of a nature
lover may bore every other person who reads them. But I do not pretend
to be concerned about the reader at this point. I never hope to
explain to my neighbor the exact value of a winter sunrise in my
spiritual economy, but I know that my life has grown better since I
learned to distinguish between a butterfly and a moth; that my faith
in man is the greater because I have watched for the coming of the
song sparrow in the spring; and my thoughts of immortality are the
less wavering be