The majority of the writers did not press this idealistic conception of nature, but much of the nature literature of this group shows a belief in the soul's mystic companionship with the bird, the flower, the cloud, the ocean, and the stars. Emerson says:-- "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them." Hawthorne exclaims:-- "O, that I could run wild!--that is, that I could put myself into a true relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial elements." Thoreau (p. 194) often enters Nature's mystic shrine and dilates with a sense of her companionship. Of the song of the wood thrush, he says:-- "Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.... It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary." Thoreau could converse with the Concord River and hear the sound of the rain in its "summer voice." Hiawatha talked with the reindeer, the beaver, and the rabbit, as with his brothers. In dealing with nature, Whittier caught something of Wordsworth's spirituality, and Lowell was impressed with the yearnings of a clod of earth as it "Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers." One of the chief glories of this age was the fuller recognition of the companionship that man bears to every child of nature. This phase of the literature has reacted on the ideals of the entire republic. Flowers, trees, birds, domestic animals, and helpless human beings have received more sympathetic treatment as a result. In what previous time have we heard an American poet ask, as Emerson did in his poem _Forbearance_ (1842):-- "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?" [Illustration: MARGARET FULLER'S COTTAGE, BROOK FARM]