ing seen suggests.
We all see about the same; to one it means much, to another little. A
fact that has passed through the mind of man, like lime or iron that
has passed through his blood, has some quality or property superadded
or brought out that it did not possess before. You may go to the
fields and the woods, and gather fruit that is ripe for the palate
without any aid of yours, but you cannot do this in science or in art.
Here truth must be disentangled and interpreted,--must be made in the
image of man. Hence all good observation is more or less a refining
and transmuting process, and the secret is to know the crude material
when you see it. I think of Wordsworth's lines:--

"The mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create and what perceive;"

which is as true in the case of the naturalist as of the poet; both
"half create" the world they describe. Darwin does something to his
facts as well as Tennyson to his. Before a fact can become poetry, it
must pass through the heart or the imagination of the poet; before it
can become science, it must pass through the understanding of the
scientist. Or one may say, it is with the thoughts and half thoughts
that the walker gathers in the woods and fields, as with the common
weeds and coarser wild flowers which he plucks for a bouquet,--wild
carrot, purple aster, moth mullein, sedge, grass, etc.: they look
common and uninteresting enough there in the fields, but the moment he
separates them from the tangled mass, and brings them indoors, and
places them in a vase, say of some choice glass, amid artificial
things,--behold, how beautiful! They have an added charm and
significance at once; they are defined and identified, and what was
common and familiar becomes unexpectedly attractive. The writer's
style, the quality of mind he brings, is the vase in which his
commonplace impressions and incidents are made to appear so beautiful
and significant.

Man can have but one interest in nature, namely, to see himself
reflected or interpreted there; and we quickly neglect both poet and
philosopher who fail to satisfy, in some measure, this feeling.

The Riverside Press

_Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._
_Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._

Books by John Burroughs.

WORKS. 14 vols., uniform, 16mo, gilt top, $17.10; half calf, $34.10;