Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/56

 48 INTR on UC TION

sole occupants of a tract of boundless forest, were often so hospitable as to surrender their only bed to the stranger, and huddle themselves together on the floor. But, since Audubon published his travels and railroads have penetrated everywhere, such accounts cease to be original, and indeed the people themselves have become almost everywhere homogeneous. Itineraries fill all the magazines, and natural curiosities little known forty years ago have become long since familiar to the public.

" ' As for my present self, I will say no more than that, for health's sake to be much out of doors, I have been for a long time engaged in hydraulic, planting, building, and other improvements on my grounds, which create, it is true, pleasant occupation, but which when compared with wild nature so varied about me, I am impressed with the conviction how inferior are our artificial pleasures to those simple enjoyments of wood, water, air and sunshine, which we have unconsciously and inexpensively in common with the innumerable creatures equally capable of enjoying them.

" ' As to my literary works, — if I except scientific papers on subjects long ago abandoned, as one on Crustacea in the Transactions of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia ; two on Insects in the Transactions of the Boston Society of Natural History ; one manuscript vol- ume on the Animals and Plants of Maine, furnished to Dr. Charles T. Jackson to accompany his Geological Sur- vey of that State, and lost by him ; Critical Notes on Etchers and Engravers, one volume ; classification of ditto, one volume, both in manuscript, incomplete and not likely to be completed, together with essays and reviews in manuscript not likely to be published, — my doings re- duce themselves to six volumes of poetic works, the first

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