and noting the old friends that spring up in the paths. 'The flower of the blood-root enclosed, or partly enclosed, by the leaf, is strikingly beautiful,' he writes. More poetically, on another April, he illustrates his apprehension of the mere fact with his ability to adorn the fact with a pretty conceit, yet without any lessening of its value as a fact:

Plucked my first bloodroot this morning-a full-blown flower with a young one folded up in a leaf beneath it, only the bud emerging, like the head of a papoose protruding from its mother's blanket.

Again he speaks of the leaf shielding the flower-bud, as one shields the flame of a candle in the open air, with his hand half-closed about it.

On the train to the tiresome banks he comes upon Mary Hallock Foote and her family, en route for Idaho:

A woman with rare charm - full of genius and full of womanliness. Said my 'British Fertility' made her sad. She quoted Holmes' remark that 'grass makes girls'; thought instead of troubling ourselves about Woman's Rights, we had better look to woman's health, and study physiology and the laws of life a little more; all other questions were premature.

What self-knowledge and what engaging candor are disclosed in the accompanying entry:

As a writer, especially on literary themes, I suffer much from want of a certain manly or masculine quality, the quality of selfassertion - strength and firmness of outline. I am not easy and steady in my shoes. The common and vulgar form of the quality I speak of is 'cheek.' But in the master writer it is firmness, dignity, composure a steady, unconscious assertion of his own personality.

When I try to assert myself, I waver and am painfully selfconscious, and fall into curious delusions. I think I have a certain strength and positiveness of character, but lack egoism. It is a family weakness; all my brothers are weak as men; do not make themselves felt for good or bad in the community.

But this weakness of the I in me is probably a great help to me as a writer upon nature. I do not stand in my own light. I am pure spirit, pure feeling, and get very close to bird and beast. My thin skin lets the shy and delicate influences pass. I can surrender myself to Nature without effort. I am like her. That which hinders me with men, and makes me weak and ill at ease in their presence, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits me to her influences.

I lack the firm moral fibre of such men as Emerson and Carlyle.

I am more tender and sympathetic than either, perhaps because there is a plebeian streak in me not in them. This again helps me with Nature, but hinders with men.

And the very next entry proves, in a way, what he had just written:

A green snake in the grass in front of my Study, disposed carelessly across the tops of the bending spears, all but invisible. By mere chance I see him as I lift my eyes from my book · first think it is some plant. After a while he slowly, very slowly, like the hand of a clock, draws himself down into the finer grass of the bottom. After he has reached the ground with the forward part of his body, he still keeps his tail upright, which slowly sinks into the grass like a green stalk going into the ground. All this for protection, I suppose. He was practically invisible.

That one with interests so keen and varied in outdoor nature should also have had, as had Burroughs, such penetrative insight into the world of books, often surprises one, though why should it, since books are but nature revealed in the mind of man? As one comes upon his books of literary criticism after long familiarity with his outdoor writings, it is like finding in the midst of a limitless garden a roomy dwelling with open door through which one may pass and sit by the study fire in quiet converse with a host, honest, wise, and companionable; for we cannot always wander with impersonal nature; and to find, combined in a single author, besides his interpretations of nature, his engaging discourse about the books one loves, and guidance and counsel in the realm of the spirit, is deeply satisfying.

Of the ascent of the Wittenberg he writes Benton in August:

We set out for Slide, but contented ourselves with his near neighbor, the Wittenberg, 3825 feet high. The last thousand feet we pulled ourselves mainly by our hands up the rocks.

The view from the top, where we passed the night, was the finest mountain scenery I ever beheld. Ingersoll said the climb was rougher and harder than any he ever had in the Rockies.

[Journal] Sept. 26. A day of great beauty. All the forenoon upon the hills bee-hunting. Find a swarm in a large maple on the side of the mountain. . . . The day not merely bright, but radiant, full of glory.... In the afternoon go a-fishing, Ed, Julian and I, down the winding, loitering river, for bass and suckers. Take a fine lot, with a few trout that did not know the law was up on trout.

What a day! still, restful, the very air luminous. I have to pause and regard the day as one presses a rose to his nose. All the maple trees in the valley burning.

Despite the golden days, to his Journal he turns and writes of the 'days that are no more,' rehearsing the laborious lives of his parents almost as an act of penance:

How slight my toils and troubles, and my little essay-writing seem, compared with such lives! The blue devils never found them idle and vacant as they find me. There is no panoply, no shield, like utter absorption in work. A large family, too, shields and fends one, and to be a part and parcel of your neighborhood, of your town, to belong there, to have grown there, to have been put there by destiny, is a great matter.

What comfort they had in their church, in their 'yearly meetings,' and their 'associations'! what comfort in the intercourse with their friends!

They lived on a low plane, as it were, and the ambitions, the doubts, the yearnings, the disappointments—all the most farreaching shafts of evil fortune, passed over their heads.

How gladly would I, too, have filled my house with children! how gladly would I have surrounded myself with troops of friends! how gladly would I take root and become one of my fellows!

When sorrow visits his friend Benton, he writes in understanding sympathy:

I am grieved to know that another grave has opened in your pathway, and this time the grave of a brother. Alas! I, too, have lost in Orville a valued friend.

I know well how such a loss, next to that of father and mother, lets in the cold and the desolation takes down and removes the precious barriers that one tries to fend himself with, against the great chilling Unknown and Unknowable. Piece by piece the roof is taken from over one's head, till the vast and mysterious void descends wholly upon him. Or, a family is like a flock that warms and cheers one another against the night; one by one the flock dwindles, till some one of the number is alone on the mountains.

CHAPTER X

A COMMON GRAYNESS

1884-1887

A common grayness silvers everything.

BROWNING

DESPITE much of variety in his life for the next few years, retrospection is still the prevailing mood. Everything is viewed in the light of the afternoon sun, a little faded and diluted by the vapors, and with a pensive tinge.

Let us hope [he writes] that the land of old age, when we have once really arrived there, will have its own compensations and charm. When the sun really begins to shade the hills, there is a new charm in nature more color in the sky, more privacy and illusion on the earth. Let us hope it will be so in life.

I am trying to write a little [he says in a letter to Benton], but my ink flows badly. Proof of the new book ['Fresh Fields'] nearly finished.

One finds him in an October entry unconsciously hitting upon the quality which insures the permanence and charm that characterize his own writing:

Must write an essay on the value of the sense of reality to the literary man. Indeed, only those in whom this sense is strong, whether poets or prose writers, ever achieve any lasting work. A lively and intimate sense of things, and to convey this sense in words, so that the reader shares it with you, is at the bottom of all literary success. Think of this sense in Dante! To be real, to have real impressions and emotions, and not feigned ones! It is closely allied to being sincere.

Nov. 4. Election day.
Rain, rain,

To the defeat of Blaine!

Vote for Cleveland. Ah, me! a pretty bitter pill. Never before voted for a Democratic candidate for president, but shall do so again, if I live and the Democrats take the stand on a tariff for revenue only. High protection has had its day. Let our manufacturers sink or swim now; the people should be no longer taxed to buoy them up.'

He came to have great admiration for Cleveland, and twice voted for him, and many times thereafter voted the Democratic ticket; in fact, was henceforth an Independent in politics.

Nov. 22. Indian summer again in the sky, but winter upon the ground. Sold some honey to Dick Atkins, and Julian and I put it on a sled this morning and ran across the fields over the crust with it to his house. It was a pretty little idyl—a sled loaded with clover honey, and we running with it through the soft sunshine over the hard snow.

The following characterizations appear in the Journal after a few days in New Haven:

...

.. [Dr. Newman Smyth], a man of solid and clear talent. Met Prof. Beers and Lounsbury, both fine fellows. Beers a slight man with a big voice, a slight incongruity here. Lounsbury a larger man with a smaller, higher-keyed voice, but more in keeping with his look and quality. Prof. Eaton a large hearty fellow, with rather a fine tone to him; on his knees examining the mosses, sometimes on his belly, his eye-glasses falling from his nose just as he gets ready to look.

The mosses are a world by themselves—a Lilliputian world, yet very ancient the second step, probably, in the vegetable life of the globe. Eaton knows them all, and brought home many specimens.

He said Torrey and Drummond were one day walking in the woods by West Point when Torrey said, 'I have never seen so and so.' 'Never seen so and so!' said Drummond with scorn, and stooped and plucked the moss at their very feet. . . .

Dec. 4. To Philadelphia. Found Walt and Dr. Bucke at Green's Hotel. Walt looks well, as usual, and seems to be so. The grain of him yet seems sound and good, though perhaps a little more inclined to a purplish tint. . . .

Pass the night, all of us, at Mrs. Smith's a Quaker family in Germantown. . . .

Walt is writing a long preface for his poems. Has many ups and downs about it. One day thinks it a good idea, and the next thinks it is too much like a concession that his poems should be taken as they are, without any argument or explanation, like the works of

nature.

He seemed anxious to hear what I had to say about it. I told him it was a secondary matter: that the poems would have to stand or fall on their own merits. As time went on, his Preface would be dropped if it had nothing important in it, but if it is necessary to the poems, it would be retained. I said, 'Write it, if you feel you have something valuable to say, and let it take its chances; it can neither make nor break.'

It is noteworthy how much more assured is the tone of the younger man now. He speaks to Whitman, no longer as disciple to master, but as one candid friend to another.