Читать книгу The Observations of Professor Maturin онлайн

35 страница из 38

“‘I intend to deal but briefly with the physical results of such inhabitation. The wisdom of experience is beginning to check the perhaps natural tendency to spoil ruthlessly the conquered forest; and even the most materially minded are beginning to act toward the universal mother no more harshly than they would toward a captive or slave whose usefulness is increased by considerate treatment.

“‘The peculiar relations between nature and the human spirit in the United States, however, seem to me worthy of extended study. Thus, it is undoubtedly because of our unique environment, that so just an observer as Emerson found American perceptions keener than any he met with elsewhere. Our poets have certainly recorded other and more varied aspects of nature than their English brethren, who in comparison seem to deal chiefly with the “common or garden variety.” Nothing is more mistaken than to consider Bryant a kind of inferior Wordsworth. There is more truth in the remark that Wordsworth himself was not primarily a nature poet, since nature was to him chiefly the source of certain stimuli to the mental life, which was his fundamental interest. Bryant not only feels this stimulus, along with nature’s suggestive and representative qualities, and its physical benefits; but he also apprehends nature as an independent world of physical life and order, of which man is a citizen so far as he is a creature, and of which he may be a ruler so far as his mind works in harmony with natural law, and partakes of the power behind it.