The

and responsibility is primarily personal and individual. sense of responsibility is the basis of character. Wherever the individual is effaced there efficiency and character are lost. We have been reminded that an occasional Indian student at such institutions as Hampton and Carlisle tends, on returning to his old haunts, to revert to savagery. If so, is this as reprehensible as it is for some adult representatives of civilized society so far to forget themselves as to allow the crowd to efface their individuality and character? The tribe on the plains or in the metropolis is not an unqualified good. Communism, even with a Brook Farm constituency, cannot long hold together because the personal spirit naturally protests against its own effacement, while communism of the unselected type fails because it makes the honest and efficient a prey of the dishonest and useless.

Frank M. Merrick.

ART. IV.-THE LITERATURE OF NATURE.

GOD must be glad in seeing how the citizens of his earth are coming, though only inch by inch, to the enjoyment of his earth and theirs. Nobody told man the world was lovely; he was left to find that out for himself—a thing, as the event shows, he was slow to do. Love of nature has been the tardiest of century plants to come to flower. Sixty centuries is a long while for anybody but God to wait, and he has waited—and not in vain. We begin to see. Day dawn is on the soul. The first thing made was the out of doors, and this was the last thing seen. We are not precocious. We are like children who rub their eyes open when they wake. God's love for nature is something stranger than any fiction. He loves it for its own sake; he walks in his garden because it is fair, not because it is useful. You will never explain the wonder of creation by appeal to utility. Utility there is in plenty, but never as a last word. Coal banks are here, and so are violet banks; and as between the two we may not hesitate to name the one God lingers the longer beside. Apple blooms are more to his liking than apple fruit. He makes the blossom precursor of the fruit not as a necessity, but as a courtesy; and the radiancy of apple blossoms and their perfume haunt the air and memory with such witchery as belongs not to the edible fruit. Between winter and fall comes the blossom, a sheer gratuity of God. Birds' nests could have been as crude as where the mourning dove lays its two white eggs; but the oriole's cradle, for winds to rock, is woven with such surpassing skill as makes the nest an adornment for a studio wall, and the vireo builds of dainty grasses a house so dainty that one who has once seen this homestead of the birds always wants to see it again. Beauty for its own sake is a cardinal principle with God. Providence is as fond of adornment as any woman. Prairies and orchards are garbed in flowers; the stars are unlike worlds, but quite like jewels; the skies are not like atmosphere fit for good breathing, but like one huge sapphire hollowed to a dome; and the sea is not a bridge for ships, but a wild plain, bloomed out, at certain moods of light, in lapis lazuli.

Emeralds are rare and costly, but not any emerald ever flashed green lights, sudden and strange, as beautiful as leaves of trees or green of wild grasses. Beauty has been universalized. Men, set into this beauty as a mountain into a plain, were as if the mountain knew not that the plain was there; in such a world, but not of it.

Literature is a record of what hearts have seen, never anything else. What books have said is what men have seen. Literature is a use of eyes, sometimes turned on men, sometimes on manners, sometimes on hearts, sometimes on ranges of gigantic hills or furrowed wastes of malcontent seas; but evermore in letters we are dealing with eyes. "The things we have seen declare we unto you," is the legend writ on the title-page of every volume the world has hazarded to write; so that at some time or other everything will come in for its share of attention. When we see a thing we shall talk of it. Men's slow eyes are blamable for men's slow tongues. Democracy in letters was a tardy appearance solely because our human eyes were so unpardonably slow in seeing that man's value lay in that he was man: any man was tall enough to touch the skies. This once seen, literature has suffered an invasion. Dialect speech from the lips of Burns or Cable or Dickens-what matters from whose lips?-that speech is the answer to the ordinary man among us, "I am here." Men did not see nature and, of course, did not talk about it. This is reason for entire national literatures being almost exempt from any word about the world whose only roofing is the sky and whose only hedgerow is the sky line. The notion that to be a barbarian is to be close to nature is one of those sentimental follies we have at the hands of Rousseau, who, with captivating egotism, thought things were true not because they were facts, but because he thought them. Barbarians did not see nature. They had a lewd freedom far from economy or comfort. They dwelt out of doors as the tramp does, not for love of its odors and freedom, but for lack of energy to build a shelter. To be in things does not argue that such things become a constituent of our frame. We have no justifying reason for saying that the early world that lived out of doors saw the outdoors. To march bareheaded is not to get close

to nature. To chip flint into arrow points is not to become collector of flesh-colored flints. The arrow maker never saw the color of the stone he contrived. He hewed to get a point to stab a bird or antelope to death. Let us have done with this untruthful talk of how the savage loved his savage world. He never saw the stars save to guide his march, nor the moss on the north side of tree trunks except to help his goings when the stars were hid. And what was true of the savage was in large measure true of the older civilizations of mankind. The Roman was no nature lover. The Greek was no nature lover. He worshiped symmetry, physical beauty, whether in temple column, beast body, or the naked strength of man. He loved such things as marched in the panAthenaic procession. But a flower for its own sake that was not a Greek. Any truthful word about the Greek will assert this, but such word is not always procurable. We have a fateful way of reading into such races or persons as we love such characteristics as we think they should have had. It is the world-old lover fashion. The culturist can hardly persuade himself to tell plain truth about the Greek mind and genius. Maybe he does not know it. Infatuees are admirable panegyrists, but sorry historians. That a shepherd may have about him the freedom of his hills and the Greek a full-chested power of breathing sea air and shore air are doubtless true, but that the air was a conscious delight to him we are not, in my opinion, qualified to remark. Greek literature is a literature of humanity. Man interests Homer and Plato. With some sudden crush of spears dispeople the "Iliad" of battles and warriors, and your plain between Simois and Scamander will be strewn with empty tents. Now and then Homer will drop a word about the "wine-colored deep," but an anthology of his references to nature would be a mere booklet; and when, in a passage become famous centuries ago, reference is made to the stars it is as a flash-light on the tents and hosts of Agamemnon. In the "Odyssey," so often called the epic of the sea, the sea is simple angry background for Ulysses, in other words, the sea is present as a matter of course, and not as in itself a glory unspeakable. It was scorpion lash to Ulysses, that was all. The sea and a man pitted against each other to show how big the man was—

that is the sea's province in the "Odyssey." To come to the ocean with the drunken delight of Conrad is beyond the Greek. In other words, we have grown to a vision the classic writers did not possess. This utterance of a visible fact is not belittling them nor exalting ourselves. The much-talked-of pastoral beauty of Theocritus dwindles away when we read what Theocritus wrote instead of reading what devotees of his have said. He wrote engrossed with the shepherd and shepherdess. The sheep were around somewhere, to be sure; else how have a shepherd? and the sheep were on the meadow; else how could lambs gambol and sheep feed? But to anyone coming with open mind to Theocritus to find a real zest in nature, and a radiant pleasure in being out of doors because it is out of doors, Theocritus will prove a disappointment. My belief, or possibly it were wiser to say my feeling, is that the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles is possessed of more nature love than any other work of Greek literature. I feel the open plain and sky and sea more in him. The Greek idyl and the pastoral were more in name than in fact, and were always more concerned with man than with nature. They are of value principally as indicating a dissent from the crowd in favor (theoretical, mainly) of comparative solitude. Thus much the Greek idyl suggested. A landscape without a human figure in it, like Van Elten's "In the Meadow" or one of Weber's sunsets, is a pastoral effect for which the Greek temper had no affinity.

The pastoral idea had more complete access to the Hebrew mind than to any other of antiquity. The Bible in its entirety has more outdoors in it than all Greek and Latin literature combined. If this statement appear at first sight an exaggeration an appeal to the books will suffice to disclose its sober truthfulness. Roman Horace, with his villa in the Sabine hills, cannot compare in rustic spirit with any one of the Hebrew prophets or poets. They were not playing lovers of nature; they were working at it. The shepherd of Tekoa had nothing of Horace's lack of seriousness about him. The desert was in his blood and breath. I once made an anthology of the Bible references to the sea, and, for adequacy, I would not hesitate to declare them most satisfactory of all that has been said to date-not forgetting Wordsworth's "The trampling