all times of the day and night he delved into the ground, he probed the swamps, he searched the waters, he dug into woodchuck holes, into muskrats' dens, into the retreats of the mice and squirrels; he saw every bird, heard every sound, found every wild-flower, and brought home many a fresh bit of natural history; but he was always searching for something he did not find. This search of his for the transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will not be caught, he has set forth in a beautiful parable in "Walden: 99

"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves."

XIV

NATURE IN LITERATURE

EVERAL different kinds or phases of this thing

SEVERAL different

we call Nature have at different times appeared in literature. For instance, there is the personified or deified Nature of the towering Greek bards, an expression of Nature born of wonder, fear, childish ignorance, and the tyranny of personality; the Greek was so alive himself that he made everything else alive, and so manly and human that he could see only these qualities in Nature. Or the Greek idyllic poets, whose Nature is simple and fresh like spring water, or the open air, or the taste of milk or fruit or bread. The same thing is perhaps true in a measure of Virgil's Nature. In a later class of writers and artists that arose in Italy, Nature is steeped in the faith and dogmas of the Christian Church; it is a kind of theological Nature.

In English literature there is the artificial Nature of Pope and his class, a kind of classic liturgy repeated from the books, and as dead and hollow as fossil shells. Earlier than that, the quaint and affected Nature of the Elizabethan poets; later the melodramatic and wild-eyed Nature of the Byronic muse; and lastly, the transmuted and spiritualized

Nature of Wordsworth, which has given the prevailing tone and cast to most modern poetry. Thus, from a goddess Nature has changed to a rustic nymph, a cloistered nun, a heroine of romance, besides other characters not so definite, till she has at last become a priestess of the soul. What will be the next phase is perhaps already indicated in the poems of Walt Whitman, in which Nature is regarded mainly in the light of science, through the immense vistas opened up by astronomy and geology. This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs, and has sought to adjust his imagination to the modern problems and conditions, always taking care, however, to preserve an outlook into the highest regions.

I was much struck with a passage in Whitman's last volume, "Two Rivulets," in which he says that he has not been afraid of the charge of obscurity in his poems, "because human thought, poetry or melody, must have dim escapes and outlets, must possess a certain fluid, aërial character, akin to space itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination, but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when addressed to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints." I know no ampler justification of a certain elusive quality there is in the highest poetry something that refuses to be tabulated or explained, and that is a stumbling-block to many readers than is contained in these sentences.

XV

SUGGESTIVENESS

THERE is a quality that adheres to one man's writing or speaking, and not to another's, that we call suggestiveness, something that warms and stimulates the mind of the reader or hearer, quite apart from the amount of truth or information directly conveyed.

It is a precious literary quality, not easy of definition or description. It involves quality of mind, mental and moral atmosphere, points of view, and maybe, racial elements. Not every page or every book carries latent meaning; rarely does any sentence of a writer float deeper than it shows.

Thus, of the great writers of English literature, Dr. Johnson is, to me, the least suggestive, while Bacon is one of the most suggestive. Hawthorne is undoubtedly the most suggestive of our romancers; he has the most atmosphere and the widest and most alluring horizon. Emerson is the most suggestive of our essayists, because he has the deepest ethical and prophetic background. His page is full of moral electricity, so to speak, which begets a state of electric excitement in his reader's mind. Whitman is the most suggestive of our poets; he elaborates the least. and gives us in profusion the buds and germs of

poetry. A musical composer once said to me that Whitman stimulated him more than Tennyson, because he left more for him to do, he abounded in hints and possibilities that the musician's mind eagerly seized.

This quality is not related to ambiguity of phrase or to cryptic language or to vagueness and obscurity. It goes, or may go, with perfect lucidity, as in Matthew Arnold at his best, while it is rarely present in the pages of Herbert Spencer. Spencer has great clearness and compass, but there is nothing resonant in his style, nothing that stimulates the imagination. He is a great workman, but the metal he works in is not of the kind called precious.

The late roundabout and enigmatical style of Henry James is far less fruitful in his readers' minds than his earlier and more direct one, or than the limpid style of his compeer, Mr. Howells. The indirect and elliptical method may undoubtedly be so used as to stimulate the mind; at the same time there may be a kind of inconclusiveness and beating around the bush that is barren and wearisome. Upon the page of the great novelist there fall, more or less distinct, all the colors of the spectrum of human life; but Mr. James in his later works seems intent only upon the invisible rays of the spectrum, and his readers grope in the darkness accordingly.

In the world of experience and observation the suggestiveness of things is enhanced by veils, concealments, half lights, flowing lines. The twilight is more suggestive than the glare of noonday, a