I

Read the lines written by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the page facing 512. They are printed in a different type from that of the text of the book in order to show you that they are a key to the study of Part IV. What does the poet mean by saying, "All are needed by each one"? What illustration does he give? Has Nature any part in the idea of brotherhood that the poem tells about?

In a celebrated address, Emerson once said that the mind of man is formed, or educated, by three forces: the Mind of the Past; Action; and the World of Nature. By the mind of the past he meant the records in history and literature of what men have done, the story of the progress of civilization. By action he meant man's relations to his fellows, not business relations alone, or a man's career, but all that brings him into contact with life in his own time. The World of Nature is important to us because we live in this world. It is our city. We need to know how to find our way about in it, just as we need to know how to find our way about in the city which we visit or in which we live. To know this World of Nature means to enjoy its beauty, to understand its laws, and to make use of it through the power that science has given to us.

You will observe that this book is an introduction to each of these three sources of education. You can easily name selections in this book that have a bearing upon each of these sources of education. One of the uses of literature is that it has this direct application to life. It is only an introduction; the subjects studied in school and college, and the experience of

life itself, must be drawn upon for the complete training to which Emerson refers. Thus, you study history as another means of knowing what he calls the Mind of the Past; you study botany and geography and physics as another means of knowing the World of Nature, while the world of action can never be studied merely in books.

In this last section of the book you will find some of the things that literature has to say about the world in which we live. Some of the selections are poems which express the joy that springs in the heart when one looks on the flowers or the trees or the ocean or any other of the thousand forms that clothe the world in beauty. You do not read these poems in order to gain scientific knowledge. If you want information about seaweed or the ocean you will go to a scientific textbook, not to Longfellow's poems. But the joy of the spring is expressed in such poems as those by Wordsworth and Noyes; the noble conception of the earth as the tomb of man is in Bryant's "Thanatopsis"; the mystery and magic of the sea, even the motion of the waves, you find in the poems by Longfellow and Byron; the clouds, the winds, the marvel of a day in June all ways in which Nature brings a message of beauty to our lives are put into words for us by the poets.

A second way in which we may get acquainted with the world in which we live is illustrated by the group of selections which begins on page 533 with the essay called "The Wonders of the World," by Sir John Lubbock. This essay is the work of a scientist, not a poet. He was interested in studying Nature itself, not in giving lyrical expression to the emotions inspired by Nature. Yet like the poet he approaches the subject with a sense of its beauty and wonder. In the stories that follow, about the ants, the tortoise, the coral reefs, the falling star, you have other illustrations of the pleasure as well as the knowledge that comes from the exact observation of Nature. Once more, these selections form only an introduction to the subject. You will find that the books from which they are taken are filled with stories just as interesting. What is more, when you study geography or botany or astronomy, or any other science, you are yourself engaged in making the same kind of observations. The appeal of Nature to the feelings and imagination may be found by anyone who will open his eyes.

The last four selections introduce you to the World of Nature in a different way. Here the theme is the way in which Nature aids and serves man. The great fields of cotton or hemp or wheat, the giant industries that man has built up to make life happier and safer all these are results of man's mastery of Nature and represent forces that he has learned to use. The story is filled with beauty, like the others. This is the service of literature always: to show the beauty and the good that are in Nature and in human life. There is beauty in the waving fields of grain, in the blast furnaces with their flames that shoot against the sky at night, in the express train, in the great ship moving slowly down the bay. And in the last selection, written expressly for this book, you have a summary of much that the book contains. It is a comment in prose upon Emerson's lines that you read on page 513. It shows how our present life springs out of what men have thought and done in the past; it tells of the coöperation of men, of the world of action in which men work with one another; and it shows how Nature serves men and contributes to their happiness.

II

Now that you are about to begin the reading of this last section of our book of Literature and Life, it will be an advantage if you will recall some of the stories and poems that you have read in the earlier parts of the book in order to see how largely they, too, draw upon the world of Nature. In the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," for example, you will now see not merely a ballad, or a legend told in verse, but an illustration of that "all-sustaining beauty" that Lowell speaks about in his "Vision of Sir Launfal." The Mariner, you will remember, could not pray until his hate had turned to love. As soon as Nature had taught him this lesson of love the spell was broken and he could pray. Bryant expresses the same thought in "Thanatopsis"

To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language.

Finally, throughout the book we see how literature, whatever its form or time, is the interpretation of beauty. Beauty of the heroic deed, revealed in ballad and epic; beauty of the life of the cottager and of all wholesome human relations; beauty of the June day and of the delicate patterns traced by the frost; the beauty of the coral and the falling star, of the fields of hemp, of the surge of industryall these themes are one. It is because literature in all its varied forms has been in all ages and is forever to be an expression of

That thread of the all-sustaining Beauty
Which runs through all and doth all unite,

that it ministers to the mind and heart of man. It is an introduction to all your studies. It is a world of adventure that gives zest to living. It is not something apart, a means of filling vacant hours, but the expression, in terms of beauty, of the meaning of life.

LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sat reclined,

THE CALL OF THE SPRING*

ALFRED NOYES

Come, choose your road and away, my lad, Come, choose your road and away!

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.

crown

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But it rolls through the heart of the May.

Though many a road would merrily ring
To the tramp of your marching feet,
All roads are one from the day that's done,
And the miles are swift and sweet,

To the land where all roads meet.

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And the graves of your friends are the milestones

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The budding twigs spread out their fan
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

Is brought like a rose to the birth; And knights ride out to adventure As the flowers break out of the earth.

If this belief from Heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

1. Wordsworth says that he composed this poem while sitting by the side of a brook, enjoying a beautiful scene in Nature; imagine the scene that inspired this poem and describe your picture. What details for your picture does the poem give you?

2. What thought grieved the poet as he viewed the scene? How would you answer the question the poet asks in the last stanza? What is Nature's message to us, about which you read on page 516?

Library Reading. Bring to class and read a poem on spring from a recent magazine; or one of the following: "Spring Song," Carman; "Spring Song in the City," Buchanan; "A Vagabond Song," Carman; "Home Thoughts from Abroad," Browning.

With cataract-dews impearled; And the way, the way, that you choose this day

Is the way to the end of the world.

It rolls from the golden long ago

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To the land that we ne'er shall find;
And it's uphill here, but it's downhill there,

For the road is wise and kind,
And all rough places and cheerless faces
Will soon be left behind.

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A wisdom and a meaning which may speak Of spiritual secrets to the ear

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Of spirit; so, in whatsoe'er the heart
Hath fashioned for a solace to itself,
To make its inspirations suit its creed,
And from the niggard hands of falsehood
wring

Its needful food of truth, there ever is
A sympathy with Nature, which reveals,
Not less than her own works, pure gleams
of light

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And earnest parables of inward lore.
Hear now this fairy legend of old Greece,
As full of gracious youth and beauty still
As the immortal freshness of that grace
Carved for all ages on some Attic frieze. 35