How amazingly fortunate were the conditions of Burns’s life! What if he had been professor of English literature at Edinburgh University? He might have written a life of Milton in six volumes,—a monumental work, but how unimportant compared with the lines “To a Mouse”! We are going to live real life and write real poetry again,—when all who want to live, who want to write, draw directly upon life’s first sources. To live simply, and out of the soil! To live by one’s own ploughing, and to write! Instead, how do we live? How do I live? Nine months in the year by talking bravely about books that I have not written. Between times I live on the farm, hoe, and think, and write,—whenever the hoeing is done. And where is my poem to a mouse? Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin! With a whole farm o’ foggage green, and all the year before me, I am not sure that I could build a single line of genuine poetry. But I am certain that, in living close to the fields, we are close to the source of true and great poetry, where each of us, at times, hears lines that Burns and Wordsworth left unmeasured,—lines that we at least may _live_ into song. Now, I have done just what my biological friend knew I would do,—made over my course of nature-study into a pleasant but idle waiting for inspiration. I have frankly turned poet! No, not unless Gilbert White and Jefferies, Thoreau, Burroughs, Gibson, Torrey, and Rowland Robinson are poets. But they are poets. We all are,—even the biologist, with half a chance,—and in some form we are all waiting for inspiration. The nature-lover who lives with his fields and skies simply puts himself in the way of the most and gentlest of such inspirations. He may be ploughing when the spirit comes, or wandering, a mere boy, along the silent shores of a lake, and hooting at the owls. You remember the boy along the waters of Winander, how he would hoot at the owls in the twilight, and they would call back to him across the echoing lake? And when there would come a pause of baffling silence, Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery. That is an inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with the out-of-doors. It doesn’t come from books, from laboratories, not even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.