Were some bright seraph sent from bliss
With songs of heaven to win my soul

From simple memories such as this,

What could he tell to tempt my ear

From you? What high thing could there be,
So tenderly and sweetly dear

As my lost boyhood is to me?

William Dean Howells

"The

When we enjoy what we observe, we are much more likely to remember it. It becomes a part of us. Song the Oriole Sings," was written by Mr. William Dean Howells many years after he had observed and studied the bird by the Miami river in Ohio where he was a boy. Now he hears it by the "dusty Concord road," and it reminds him of his childhood. As he says, "I know his name." He had observed the oriole when he was a boy, and the rapture that came to him then now comes again. The observations of his early boyhood have inspired his after-life. Let us read the poem, enjoying all the pictures that he gives us, and letting them remind us of our own woodlands and the orioles' songs we ourselves have heard.

In reading such a poem, the pictures that come into our minds and the feelings that awaken in our hearts and that we try to express by our voices, deepen and become more a part of us. We share in Mr. Howell's delightful experiences, and we ourselves are led to observe more carefully, and to feel more deeply. By these deepened feelings we are enabled to share in the thoughts and lives of other men.

If you have known the bluebird very well the word awakens all your memories, so that you see and hear the bird as if it were before you. You can hear, at the word "brook," the gentle ripple, see the water running between its banks, or espy some quiet pool reflecting the trees and bushes. You must allow your feeling to enjoy it, and remember that expression is simply a sharing of your enjoyment with others.

WHO TOLD THE NEWS?

Oh, the sunshine told the bluebird,
And the bluebird told the brook,
That the dandelions were peeping
From the woodland's sheltered nook;
So the brook was blithe and happy,
And it babbled all the way,
As it ran to tell the river

Of the coming of the May.

Then the river told the meadow,
And the meadow told the bee,
That the tender buds were swelling
On the old horse-chestnut tree;
And the bee shook off its torpor,
And it spread each gauzy wing,
As it flew to tell the flowers

Of the coming of the spring.

Author not known

Try, therefore, to make someone else enjoy the idea with you. Do not hurry or doubt your own feelings or instincts. You will quickly see interest awaken among those who listen. You have set them to thinking with you. Though each one thinks his own ideas in his own way, yet your expression awakens the thought.

The development of feeling is very important. We should be able not only to define objects but to enjoy them. True observation of nature really brings thinking and feeling together.

There are, of course, some kinds of nature study that will not develop feeling. Any study may be perfunctory or intellectual, abstract and analytic. Such study, no matter what the subject, even literature and poetry or beautiful things in nature, will tend to repress feeling.

There are many different ways of studying nature. Some study it in a purely scientific spirit, seeking only for facts. Others emphasize the general spirit or feeling for nature.

The first has received the
Not only must we study

Both of these are necessary. greater emphasis in our time. nature, to learn facts; we must also appreciate with our

imagination and feeling the beauty and life of nature. We need an imaginative sense of the atmosphere of the woods and a sympathy with birds and animals.

There are other ways of observing nature than those here advocated. Some persons go to the woods simply to find something to write about. They portray animals for a mere literary purpose. Or, they use rabbits and bears and birds as if they were human characters and as a means of portraying human experiences - often without the spirit of the ancient fable! Still others may be regarded as in a class by themselves, those who have only a hunter's attitude towards nature. They like the wild forest life. They have a strong, crude, savage instinct to kill. Their love of the woods is neither scientific nor poetic; they revel in its wildness and the opportunity which it offers for action and for the exercise of the savage instinct for butchery.

The existence of these four classes of nature lovers and the antagonism of some of them to the others are due to the shortcomings of human nature; to the lack of imagination and feeling in some, and the development of the higher, more modern and truer poetic attitude toward nature in others.

Mr. William Long has a beautiful passage, entitled "Himself" which is here given, and which will be very helpful in awakening an imaginative sense of a certain phase of nature life.

In this sketch Mr. Long gives a rare hint of the deep feeling of the woods in the night and storm. The truth of the description is palpable to those who have gone into the woods "without a gun " and used their scientific observation and their imagination and feeling so as to appreciate.

HIMSELF

Killooleet, the white-throated sparrow, Little Sweet Voice, as my Indians call him, sums up for me the peace and gladness of the big wilderness. The most interesting thing about him, during the spring and early summer when I meet him on the northern trout-streams and the salmon-rivers, is that he is

always singing. Not only by day when all the woods are vocal, but by night also when all other little singers are still as the sleeping earth, Killooleet's heart seems full of the gladness that is breaking into life all around him. Whenever he wakes up his first impulse is always to sing, and the Micmacs call him the hour-bird, because they think he wakes and sings at regular intervals all night long.

Sometimes as he sleeps on his fir-twig, just over the hidden nest of his mate, the moon peeps in and wakes him up; sometimes a big moose glides by and brushes his little fir-tree; sometimes he hears your canoe grate on the pebbles as you come home; and sometimes the flash of the match is mistaken for a star or the moon or the first dawn light over the mountain; but whatever it is that wakes Killooleet, he tells you he is there not by a frightened chirp or flurry, like other birds, but by a glad, tinkling little song that seems to say, "All's well in the wilderness."

A hundred times I have heard him by my camp-fire, or when following the animals after dark in the big woods, but only once when it seemed to me that his song had any other message or meaning than simple gladness.

The wind was howling across the big lake and the little canoe was jumping like a witch when we paddled ashore, Simmo and I, at the first inviting beach and jumped out on either side to ease our frail craft ashore. A storm was coming with the night, and we had little time to make all snug before it would break over our heads. First we threw our stuff out, turned the canoe over, and carried it well up out of reach of waves and wind. Then we whipped up my little tent, double-staked it down, and guyed the ridgepole fore and aft to two big trees. They were barely ready when the rain came down in torrents, and we grabbed everything from the fire and scuttled into my dry little tent. There we ate our supper with immense thankfulness.

The night was intensely black, the rain falling, the gale roaring over the woods, and the waves lashing the shore wildly, when I threw a poncho over my head and slipped away into the darkness, following an old logging-road that I had noticed when I gathered the fir-boughs. What was I doing out in the woods at that hour? I don't exactly know; partly following my instincts, which always drive me out in a storm and make me long for a boat and the open sea, and partly trying to find or lose myself I don't know which in the darkness and uproar of a wilderness night.

Farther and farther into the forest I drifted, till the roar of the smitten lake was utterly lost in the nearer roar of the struggling woods. The great trees groaned and cracked at the strain; the rain rushed over innumerable leaves with the sound of a waterfall; the gale rumbled and roared over the forest, hooting in every hollow tree and whining over every dry stub, and suddenly "the voices" began wildly to whoop and yell.

I know not how to explain this curious impression of human voices calling to you from the stormy woods or the troubled river. Some men feel it strongly, while others simply cannot understand it. I have been waked at night in my tent by a man new to the wilderness, who insisted that somebody was in trouble and shouting to us from the rapids; and then I have waked another man lying close beside me, who listened and who heard nothing. To-night the delusion was startling in its vivid reality; above the roar of the gale and the rush of the rain a multitude of wild human voices seemed to be laughing, wailing, shrieking, through the woods.

In the intense blackness of the night, wherein eyes were utterly useless, I presently lost the old road, blundered along through the woods and underbrush, and then stood still among the great trees, - which I could not see, though my hands touched them on every side, trying to lose or to find myself in the elemental uproar and confusion.

Curiously enough, a man loses all memory, all ambition, all desire, at such a time. An overwhelming sense of fear rushes over you at first; but that only marks the contrast between your ordinary and your present surroundings, and the feeling passes speedily into a sense of exultation, as life stirs wildly and powerfully within you in answer to the uproar without. Presently you become just a part of the big struggling world, an atom in the gale, a drop rushing over the leaves with a multitude of other drops. That also is only a momentary impression, the curious inner reflection of the storm without, as if a man were only a looking-glass in which the world regarded itself. Soon this feeling also passes with the fear, and then, deep in your soul, the elemental power that makes you what you are wakens and asserts itself, telling you in the sudden stillness that you are not an atom, not a drop, not a part of the world, but something radically and absolutely different, and that all the change and confusion and struggle of the universe can never touch or harm you in the least. And then, for the first time, you really find yourself.