When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast.
Interpretation
This quote symbolizes harmony and balance in nature through the bluebird's colors.
John Burroughs reflects on the beauty and symmetry in nature, suggesting that the bluebird's coloration serves as a bridge between the sky and the earth. The blue on its back represents the heavens, while the warm hues on its breast connect it to the earth, illustrating the interconnectedness of all elements of the natural world.
In practice
During a nature conservation seminar to emphasize the beauty of biodiversity.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.
April ... hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
All those who love Nature she loves in return, and will richly reward, not perhaps with the good things, as they are commonly called, but with the best things of this world-not with money and titles, horses and carriages, but with bright and happy thoughts, contentment and peace of mind.
Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune.
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