Lastly, we go to nature for solitude and for communion with our own
souls. Nature attunes us to a higher and finer mood. This love springs
from our religious needs and instincts. This was the love of Thoreau,
of Wordsworth, and has been the inspiration of much modern poetry and
art.
Dr. Johnson said he had lived in London so long that he had ceased to
note the changes of the seasons. But Dr. Johnson was not a lover of
Nature. Of that feeling for the country of which Wordsworth's poetry,
for instance, is so full, he probably had not a vestige. Think of
Wordsworth shut up year in and year out—in the city! That lover of
shepherds, of mountains, of lonely tarns, of sounding waterfalls,
"Who looked upon the hills with tenderness,
And made dear friendships with the streams and groves."
Dr. Johnson's delight was in men and in verbal fisticuffs with them,
but Wordsworth seems to have loved Nature more than men; at least he
was drawn most to those men who lived closest to Nature and were more a
part of her. Thus he says he loved shepherds, "dwellers in the valleys,"
"Not verily
For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills
Where was their occupation and abode."
Your real lover of nature does not love merely the beautiful things
which he culls here and there; he loves the earth itself, the faces of
the hills and mountains, the rocks, the streams, the naked trees no
less than the leafy trees,—a plowed field no less than a green meadow.
He does not know what it is that draws him. It is not beauty, any more
than it is beauty in his father and mother that makes him love them.
It is "something far more deeply interfused,"—something native and
kindred that calls to him. In certain moods how good the earth, the
soil, seems! One wants to feel it with his hands and smell it—almost
taste it. Indeed, I never see a horse eat soil and sods without a
feeling that I would like to taste it too. The rind of the earth, of
this "round and delicious globe" which has hung so long upon the great
Newtonian tree, ripening in the sun, must be sweet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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