The same
temporary arrest of progress has been noted in France and
England, however, where different causes have been at work. No
one can tell, in truth, what makes some plants in the literary
garden wither at the same moment that others are outgrowing their
borders.
There is one plant in our own garden, however, whose flourishing
state will be denied by nobody--namely, that kind of
nature-writing identified with Thoreau and practised by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, Starr King, John Burroughs, John Muir,
Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore Roosevelt, William J.
Long, Thompson-Seton, Stewart Edward White, and many others.
Their books represent, Professor Canby* believes, the adventures
of the American subconsciousness, the promptings of forgotten
memories, a racial tradition of contact with the wilderness, and
hence one of the most genuinely American traits of our
literature.
* "Back to Nature," by H. S. Canby, "Yale Review," July, 1917.
Other forms of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own
generation less distinctive of our peculiar quality.
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