NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE. In the literature of the world the two subjects of abiding poetic interest are nature and human nature; but as these subjects appear in Colonial records they are uniformly prosaic, and the reason is very simple. Before nature can be the theme of poets she must assume her winsome mood, must "soothe and heal and bless" the human heart after the clamor of politics, the weariness of trade, the cruel strife of society. To read Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" or Bryant's "To a Waterfowl" is to understand the above criticism. But the nature which the Colonists first looked upon seemed wild and strange and often terrible. Their somber forests were vast, mysterious, forbidding; and they knew not what perils lurked in them or beyond them. The new climate might give them sunshine or healing rain, but was quite as likely to strike their houses with thunderbolts or harrow their harvests with a cyclone. Meanwhile marauding crows pulled up their precious corn; fierce owls with tufted heads preyed upon their poultry; bears and eagles harried their flocks; the winter wail of the wolf pack or the scream of a hungry panther, sounding through icy, echoless woods, made them shiver in their cabins and draw nearer the blazing fire of pine knots on the hearth. [Illustration: NEW AMSTERDAM (NEW YORK) IN 1663] We can understand, therefore, why there was little poetry of nature in Colonial literature, and why, instead of sonnets to moonbeams or nightingales, we meet quaint and fascinating studies of natural or unnatural history. Such are Josselyn's _New England's Rarities Discovered_ and the first part of William Wood's _New England's Prospect_; and such are many chapters of Byrd's _Dividing Line_ and other annals that deal with plant or animal life,--books that we now read with pleasure, since the nature that was once wild and strange has become in our eyes familiar and dear. As for the second subject of poetic interest, human nature, the Colonists had as much of that as any other people; but human nature as it revealed itself in religious controversy, or became a burden in the immigrants that were unloaded on our shores for the relief of Europe or the enrichment of the early transportation companies, as Bradford and Beverley both tell us,--this furnished a vital subject not for poetry but for prose and protest. [Sidenote: THE INDIANS]