"
Thoreau (p. 194) often enters Nature's mystic shrine and dilates with a
sense of her companionship. Of the song of the wood thrush, he says:--
"Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring.
Whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates
of heaven are not shut against him.... It changes all hours to an eternal
morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion,
makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This
minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the
village can be contemporary."
Thoreau could converse with the Concord River and hear the sound of the
rain in its "summer voice." Hiawatha talked with the reindeer, the beaver,
and the rabbit, as with his brothers. In dealing with nature, Whittier
caught something of Wordsworth's spirituality, and Lowell was impressed
with the yearnings of a clod of earth as it
"Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers."
One of the chief glories of this age was the fuller recognition of the
companionship that man bears to every child of nature. This phase of the
literature has reacted on the ideals of the entire republic.
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