Patently the impulse exists, and counts for
something here in America.
It counts for something, too, in American literature. Since our
writing ceased being colonial English and began to reflect a race
in the making, the note of woods-longing has been so insistent
that one wonders whether here is not to be found at last the
characteristic "trait" that we have all been patriotically
seeking.
I do not limit myself in this statement to the professed "nature
writers" of whom we have bred far more than any other race with
which I am familiar. In the list--which I shall not attempt--of
the greatest American writers, one cannot fail to include Emerson,
Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, Lowell, and Whitman. And every one of
these men was vitally concerned with nature, and some were
obsessed by it. Lowell was a scholar and man of the world, urban
therefore; but his poetry is more enriched by its homely New
England background than by its European polish. Cooper's ladies
and gentlemen are puppets merely, his plots melodrama; it is the
woods he knew, and the creatures of the woods, Deerslayer and
Chingachgook, that preserve his books.
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