Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
Interpretation
True nature lovers value authentic, unaltered experiences over fabricated ones.
John Burroughs emphasizes that genuine observations of nature, free from embellishment or artificial influences, are what passionate nature enthusiasts seek. He suggests that real-life experiences and characteristics found in nature are far more captivating than anything that can be invented, highlighting the importance of authenticity in oneβs relationship with the natural world.
In practice
This quote can be used in a nature-themed presentation to emphasize the importance of genuine experiences.
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.
Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees.
America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an over-all environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight.
What is now the foliage moving?_x000D_ _x000D_ Air is still, and hush'd the breeze,_x000D_ _x000D_ Sultriness, this fullness loving,_x000D_ _x000D_ Through the thicket, from the trees._x000D_ _x000D_ Now the eye at once gleams brightly,_x000D_ _x000D_ See! the infant band with mirth_x000D_ _x000D_ Moves and dances nimbly, lightly,_x000D_ _x000D_ As the morning gave it birth,_x000D_ _x000D_ Flutt'ring two and two o'er earth.
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
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