Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/603

1858. membrance is worth many nights of indoor slumber. We never found a week in the year, nor an hour of day or night, which had not, in the open air, its own special beauty. We will not say, with Reade’s Australians, that the only use of a house is to sleep in the lee of it; but there is method in even that madness. As for rain, it is chiefly formidable indoors. Lord Bacon used to ride with uncovered head in a shower, and loved “to feel the spirit of the universe upon his brow”; and we once knew an enthusiastic hydropathic physician who loved to expose himself in thunder-storms at midnight, without a shred of earthly clothing between himself and the atmosphere. Some prudent persons may possibly regard this as being rather an extreme, while yet their own extreme of avoidance of every breath from heaven is really the more extravagantly unreasonable of the two.

It is easy for the sentimentalist to say, “But if the object is, after all, the enjoyment of Nature, why not go and enjoy her, without any collateral aim?” Because it is the universal experience of man, that, if we have a collateral aim, we enjoy her far more. He knows not the beauty of the universe, who has not learned the subtile mystery, that Nature loves to work on us by indirections. Astronomers say, that, when observing with the naked eye, you see a star less clearly by looking at it, than by looking at the next one. Margaret Fuller’s fine saying touches the same point,—“Nature will not be stared at.” Go out merely to enjoy her, and it seems a little tame, and you begin to suspect yourself of affectation. We know persons who, after years of abstinence from athletic sports or the pursuits of the naturalist or artist, have resumed them, simply in order to restore to the woods and the sunsets the zest of the old fascination. Go out under pretence of shooting on the marshes or botanizing in the forests; study entomology, that most fascinating, most neglected of all the branches of natural history; go to paint a red maple-leaf in autumn, or watch a pickerel-line in winter; meet Nature on the cricket ground or at the regatta; swim with her, ride with her, run with her, and she gladly takes you back once more within the horizon of her magic, and your heart of manhood is born again into more than the fresh happiness of the boy.