descriptive novels, 'Cook's excursions,'
etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was,--perhaps
rarer. It is quite an affair of individual temperament: it cannot be
learned; it cannot be lost. That no writer has ever tried to explain
it shows how little it is known. Often it has but little to do with
poetry, little with science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its
very highest; the man of science as rarely. I wish I could define
it:--in human souls--in one, perhaps, as much as in another--there is
always that instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress;
there is always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to
get as close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most
individuals this yearning is simply for contact with other human
souls; in some few it is not. There are some in every country of
whom it is the blessing, not the bane, that, owing to some
exceptional power, or to some exceptional infirmity, they can get
closer to '_Natura Benigna_' herself, closer to her whom we now call
'Inanimate Nature,' than to the human mother who bore them--far
closer than to father, brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin
among English _savants_, and Emily Bronte among English poets, and
Sinfi Lovell among English gypsies, showed a good deal of the
characteristics of the 'Children of the Open Air.' But in the case
of the first of these, besides the strength of his family ties the
pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodising pedantry of the man of
science; in the second, the sensitivity to human contact; and in the
third, subjection to the love passion--disturbed, and indeed
partially stifled, the native instinct with which they were
undoubtedly endowed.

"Between the true 'Children of the Open Air' and their fellows there
are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other
barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to
overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the
attempt is not found to be worth the making. For, what the
Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not
the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to
touch her close, soul to soul--but another _ego_ enisled like his
own--sensitive, shrinking, like his own--a soul which, love him as it
may, i