Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/395

Rh purely physical effects upon the tissues. It is reflected in many characteristics. As a matter mainly of feeling it finds expression in literature; as a motor response, in the working out of ideals and in material progress.

A sense of spaciousness, of being untrammelled by close-set boundaries, had worked upon the imagination of the people. More than anything else was the idea of expanse in the vast extent of territory that lay to the west. The motor response to this feeling found expression in that great westward movement of population into the rich bottomlands and fertile prairies of the Mississippi Basin. Men had caught the inspiration on the threshold, amid the homely farm-lands and clearings, and in the growing towns with their semblance of European culture. Here on the threshold they felt the stir of a new life and moved under its impulse. Daniel Boone, standing on the bluff edge of Muldraugh's Hill and gazing out over the vast primeval forest that lay at his feet, is the prophetic figure of that time; a figure with its face ever turned toward the west.

The earliest feeling for the natural objects and scenery of the American land that found expression in literature appears in the stories, essay and verse of such writers as Cooper, Irving, Bryant and Thoreau, and in the journals of travelers and naturalists. In the "Episodes" which Audubon interspersed through his "Ornithological Biography," and often, indeed, in the descriptions of various birds, we find portrayed many scenes of the early American background. Thoreau was steeped in the natural features of New England and the fascination of his books is largely in the local color which he reflects through his peculiar personality. To a less extent both Emerson and Lowell have reflected this home environment of the Atlantic slope. Cooper's "Novels" emphasize the frontier life as it existed on the western edge of the threshold—the typical "backwoods" period in central New York and the northern Appalachian region. Washington Irving, for all his indebtedness to a long residence in England and to Addisonian sources, found the inspiration for much of his best work in the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. English poets and writers had set the nightingale, the skylark and the cuckoo forever singing in the hearts of men. Irving, harking back to his boyhood days, immortalized the bobolink, "the happiest bird of our spring." William Cullen Bryant, in like manner, gave literary value to many objects of native growth. To lovers of that English literature that found expression in the new homeland the "Fringed Gentian" and the "Yellow Violet" will hold an equal place in the heart with the "rathe primrose" and "daffodils that come before the swallow dares." Bryant was under the spell of the aboriginal spirit of the land, and the haunting mood of the ancient wilderness appears in many of his verses. In his poem, "The Prairies," he has given voice to that sense of