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IT has seemed to many thoughtful readers, within the last fifty or sixty years, that Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations is altogether mistaken in its assumption that the open-air world is dearer to the child than to the man: or that the Heaven which so easily fuses with it in our idea lies nearer to the former than to the latter. Some abnormally perceptive child (like the infant W.W. himself) may have a clear sense of "glory in the grass, of splendor in the flower." But the appreciation of natural objects is infinitely stronger, let us say, in the babe of thirty; and so is even the appreciation of the diversions which they provide. Were it not for the prospects of unforeseen and adventurous company abroad, the child prefers to play in the shed. But the post-meridian child, who is not a "grown-up," but only a giant, desires "the house not made with hands": he has a delicate madness in his blood, the moment he breathes wild air.

Scipio and Laelius cannot keep, to save them, from stone-skipping on the strand, though they have come abroad for purposes of political conversation. Poets and bookmen are famous escapers of this sort. Surrey shooting his toy arrows at lighted windows; Shelley sailing his leaves and bank-notes on the Hampstead ponds; Dr. Johnson, of all persons, rolling down the fragrant Lincolnshire hills; Elizabeth Inchbald ("a beauty and a virtue," as her epitaph at Kensington prettily says) lifting knockers on April evenings and running away, for the innocent deviltry of it;—these have discovered the fun and the solace of out-of-doors at a stroke, and with a conscious rapture impossible to their juniors. Master Robin Hood, Earl of Huntingdon, probably kept to his perfectly exemplary brigandage because he liked the "shaws shene," and objected to going home at nightfall. No child ever tastes certain romantic joys which come of intimacies with creation. That he may write a letter upon birchbark, that he may eat a mushroom from the broken elm-trunk and drink the blood of the maple, that he may woo a squirrel from the oak, a frog from the marsh, or even a twelve-tined buck from his fastness, to be caressed and fed, strikes him as an experiment, not as an honor. It will not do to say that the worship of the natural world is an adult passion: it is quite the contrary; but only certain adults exemplify it. Coleridge, in the Biographia Litteraria, has a very beautiful theory, and a profoundly true one. "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for perhaps forty years, have made familiar:

this is the character and privilege of genius." The genuine faun-heart is the child conscious and retrieved, the child by law established in happy natures. I knew one boy of six who met an ugly gypsy in a lane, and who, on being asked whether he would like to go and live with her, replied in Americanese, with slow-breathed transports: "Oh-ee, yup!" In his mind was an instant vision of a bed suspended among leaves; and the clatter and glitter of the sacred leaves had nearly stolen his soul away. But he was not a common boy. His nurse being close behind, he was providentially saved, that time, to be abducted later by much more prosaic influences. Nor has the love of Nature, of late so laboriously instilled into the young, thanks to Froebel's impetus, made much progress among its small supposed votaries. The examination-papers, which, in a lustier age, began with—"Who dragged Which around the walls of What?" now stoop to other essentials:

"The wood-spurge has a cup of three."

Yet unless misled by the tender cant of their elders, even the modern Master and Missy would rather find and examine the gas-metre than the wood-spurge.

In his best estate, the out-of-doorling hunts not, neither fishes: he simply moves or sits, in eternal amalgamation with the eternal: an enchanted toper of life and death, one with all that has ever been, or shall ever be, convinced that "there is a piece of divinity in us which is older than the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun." He is generally silent, because his sincere speech cannot be what we call sane. No one, however, who is truly content in the sought presence of Nature, can be sure that it is she who gives him all, or even most, of his comfort. It is only the poetic fashion to say so. It is at least doubtful if Nature be not, in her last exquisiteness, for the man already independent of her. There are those who may accost her, not as a petitioner, but as one sovereign to another in a congress of the Powers. Moral poise is the true passport to her favor, not a fine eye for "the leopard-colored trees" in late autumn, nor an ear for the bold diapasons of the surge. The man of vanities and ambitions and agitated fears may as well go to the football game: for the woods are cold to him. The lover, indeed, is notoriously rural while his fit lasts; he has been known to float into a mosquito-marsh, obliviously reading Tristram of Lyonnesse. But so oblique a cult as his can count for nothing with the Mother. Her favorite spite is to deepen melancholy, as her prayer and purpose are to enhance joy. Not primary in her functions, she waits upon man's anterior dispositions, and gives her delights, as Fortuna is said to do, to the indifferent. But he shall not be indifferent after: her praise drips, honey-bright, from his lip. If any question him, remembering Vaughan's

he may say that it is the possessing love of Nature which makes his day so rich. She meanwhile, could put a gloss upon that plausible text. The order and peace in him had first subjugated her terrible heart.

No babe, indeed, is born other than wild: he springs up on the farther border of civilization. Happy for him, if he can find his way back, with waking choice, even once a year, in his maturity, to recapture the perfect condition, and subject to it his own developed faculties. How many have suffered the pure epic homesickness, the longing for decivilization, which has drawn them "to discover islands far away," or to roam without purpose at all, like Alastor and the Scholar Gypsy! Observe, that in all tradition the courtesies of the countryside are showered on the race of the deliberately glad. Magdalen of Pazzi, alone in the cloister-garden, rapturously catching up the roses to her face, and extolling Him who made them fair, signifies much: not only that she was dowered with the keen perception of beauty,—hardly that at all; but that she was at the apex of moral sanity, which has as much right to be passionate with beauty as the sun itself. It is inconceivable that barbarians should admire the sunset: though it is not inconceivable that barbarians in good society should say that they do so. For one of the earmarks of our latter-day culture is this patronal relish of the works of the Most High. Literature is over-ballasted with "descriptive passages," which the reader skips, but which no self-respecting author can afford to do without. We talk incessantly of the hills and the sea, and the flora and fauna thereof; and insolently take it for granted that we alone have arrived at the proper inwardness of these subjects. In naught have we more wronged the feudal ages than in denying to them an intimate knowledge and love of scenic detail. One glance at their cathedral capitals, at leaves, rose-haws, antlers, cobwebs, and shells, in stone carven since the tenth century, should have been corrective of that foolish depreciation of a people far nearer to the heart of things than we. The common dislike of gypsies is another revelation of jealousy: for we are not the Mother's favored children. Us she consigns to starched linen, and roofs, retorts of carbonic acid gas: would we sleep again on her naked breast, we come home to endure gibes, and the sniffles.

Well may the "sylvan" (a dear Elizabethan word gone into the dust-heap) feel that he is manumitted and exempt. He has no occasion to grow up. He looks with affectionate strangeness on his life past, as on his life to come, thinking it a solecism to anticipate decay where hitherto no decay has been, or where indeed, if it have been, he "has had the wit never to know it." The Heaven which lies around us in our infancy is always there afterwards, waiting in vain, for the most part, for reciprocations. Symbolisms, sacraments, abound in the natural world, and to avail oneself of them is to regain and retain fleeting good, and to defy the time-dragon's tooth with a smile as of immortality. Devotion to a blackberry pasture and a swimming-pool confers youth on the devotee, provided he has not to pick fruit nor rescue ribald little boys for a living. A travelled man, a man of the world, has a ripe expert look: one says of him, admiring his talk and his manners, that he bears his age with grace. But nothing is so ageless as a sailor: he can bear his age neither well nor ill, for the obvious reason. In his hard cheek and blue eye are innocence, readiness, zest, taciturnity, daring, shyness, truth: all the fine wild qualities which "they that sit in parlors never dream of." It is not a physiological fact alone, that for health's sake you must be in league with the open. Whoever clings to it for love, is known by his superior simplicity and balance. Many a coast-guardsman, or scout in the Canadian forest, has achieved the complete power which is mistakenly supposed to come, like an imposition of hands, upon the educated; and he gets this inestimable accolade, mark you, merely by smelling sea-kelp and sassafras, and welcoming a rainstorm as a pleasant sort of fellow: by the exercise of sheer natural piety, whose processes turn about and hit back by keeping him young. Would you perpetrate an elfin joke on such a one, present him with a calendar: the urban and domestic accuser. To register time, and consult its phases scientifically, is to give it a deplorable advantage over you. A brook scoffs at birthdays: and many a violet errs in chronology, and sidles forth at Martinmas. It is the shepherd-boy in the Arcadia who "pipes as if he should never grow old": marry, it is not anybody in a theatre orchestra! Which, think you, died with her girlhood yet unconsumed within her, Madame RÉcamier or the Nut-brown Maid? The victory is not with cosmetics. To the soirÉes of the hermit thrush, tan is your only wear. The "sylvan" is anti-chronological. He who comes close to the heart-beat of progress and dissolution in the wilderness, the vicissitudes of the vegetable world, must feel that, save in an allegory, these things are not for him: they go under him as a swimmer's wave. "Change upon change: yet one change cries out to another, like the alternate seraphim, in praise and glory of their Maker." The human atom gets into the mood of the according leaf, caring not how long it has hung there, how soon it may fall. God's will, in short, is nowhere so plain and acceptable as on a lonely stretch of moor or water. Who can feel it so keenly in the town? The town has never allowed man to guess his superiority to it: creature of his own exaggerations, it cows him, and compels him to remember, in his unrest, that he is no longer a spirit, no longer a child.

At Hampton Court, in the Great Hall, in the right lower corner of the rich pagan borderings of one of the Old Testament tapestries (that of the Circumcision of Isaac), there is a tiny delicate faded figure of a lad, all in soft duns and dusty golds. He wears curious sandals; a green chaplet is on his brows; a hare hangs over his shoulder; he carries a stocked quiver, and a spear. His look is one of sweet sensuous idleness and delight. He is centuries old, but to him the same sun is shining in the aromatic alleys of the forest. He does not know that there is a very fine Perpendicular roof over him, and he has never noticed the kings and their courts who have been blown away like smoke from before his path. The parent and the schoolmaster who sought him have also fallen to dust. But for him the hunt and the moist morning: for him the immortal pastoral life. We used to see him often, and we saw him once again, after a long interval. His charm was all that it had ever been: but at the encounter, he brought hot tears of envy to the eyes. All those years, those years of ours and the world's, wasted in prison on casuist industries, he had been at large with the wind, he had been playing! How some of us have always meant to do just that for ever, and that only! for why not do the sole thing one can do perfectly? But an indoor demon, one Duty, a measly Eden-debarring angel armed with platitudes, has somehow clogged our career. Were it not for a cloud of responsibilities, a downpour of Things to Do, one might be ever at the other side of window-panes, and see Pan twelve hours a day. Ah, little Vita Silvestris! Blamelessly may we feel that you have found the way, and that we have missed it, growing gray at the silly desk, and sure only of this: that presently we shall indeed find ourselves inside sycamore planks, so that all the dryads in their boles, watching our very best approximation to their coveted estate, shall smile to see. But thereafter, at least, and for good, we are where we belong, "sub dio, under the canopy of Heaven," and ready for the elemental game.

1895.