Nature-writing must grow more and more human, personal, interpretative. If I go into the wilderness and write a book about it, it must be plain to my reader that “the writing of the book was only a second and finer enjoyment of my holiday in the woods.” If my chippy sings, it must sing a chippy’s simple song, not some gloria that only “the careless angels know.” It must not do any extraordinary thing for me; but it may lead me to do an extraordinary thing--to have an extraordinary thought, or suggestion, or emotion. It may mean extraordinary things to me; things that have no existence in nature, whose beginnings and ends are in me. I may never claim that I, because of exceptional opportunities, or exceptional insight, or exceptional powers of observation, have discovered these marvelous things here in the wilds of Hingham. My pages may be anthropomorphic, human; not, however, because I humanize my bees and toads, but because I am human, and nature is meaningful ultimately only as it is related to me. I must not confuse myself with nature; nor yet “struggle against fact and law to develop and keep” my “own individuality.” I must not anthropomorphize nature; never denature nature; never follow my own track through the woods, imagining that I am on the trail of a better-class wolf or a two-legged bear. I must never sentimentalize over nature again--write no more about “Buzz-Buzz and Old Man Barberry”; write no more about wailing winds and weeping skies; for mine is not “a poet’s vision dim,” but an open-eyed, scientific sight of things as they actually are. Once I have seen them, gathered them, if then they turn to poetry, let them turn. For so does the squash turn to poetry when it is brought in from the field. It turns to pie; it turns to poetry; and it still remains squash. Good nature-literature, like all good literature, is more lived than written. Its immortal part hath elsewhere than the ink-pot its beginning. The soul that rises with it, its life’s star, first went down behind a horizon of real experience, then rose from a human heart, the source of all true feeling, of all sincere form. Good nature-writing particularly must have a pre-literary existence as lived reality; its writing must be only the necessary accident of its being lived again in thought. It will be something very human, very natural, warm, quick, irregular, imperfect, with the imperfections and irregularities of life. And the nature-writer will be very human, too, and so very faulty; but he will have no lack of love for nature, and no lack of love for the truth. Whatever else he does, he will never touch the flat, disquieting note of make-believe. He will never invent, never pretend, never pose, never shy. He will be honest--which is nothing unusual for birds and rocks and stars; but for human beings, and for nature-writers very particularly, it is a state less common, perhaps, than it ought to be. VI JOHN BURROUGHS JOHN BURROUGHS