The man who lives out of doors awhile acquires better sense of moral proportions, and thinks patiently and not under stress, making tranquil companions of his worthy thoughts. This is a great thing, not to be hurried. There seems to me always more time out of doors than in houses, and if you have intellectual problems to settle, the cool quiet of the woods or the lounging comfort of the canoe, or to be out under "the huge and thoughtful night," has many times seemed to me helpful. One gets near realities out of doors. Thought is more sober; one becomes a better friend to one's self.
As to the effect of out-door life on the imaginative side of us, much may be said. Certainly some books get fresh flavors out of doors, and you see men or women greedily turn to reading and talking over verse who never dream of it when at home. I am tempted to mention the poets, and even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the gentle company of lake and wood and stream. I should frankly name Walt Whitman and Thoreau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration. A good many of them--read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump in the woods--shrink to well-bred, comfortable parlor bards, who seem to you to have gotten their nature-lessons through plate-glass windows. The test is a sharp one, and will leave out some great names and let in some hardly known, or almost forgotten. Books to be read out of doors would make a curious catalogue, and would vary, as such lists must, with every thoughtful reader, while some would smile, perhaps with reason, at the idea of any such classification. Certainly all would name Wordsworth, and a few would add Clough, whilst the out-door plays of Shakespeare would come in, and we should soon be called on to feel that for this sort of congenial open-air poetic company we have still to fall back on the vast resources of English verse. Somehow, as yet, our own poets have not gotten fully into imaginative relation with what is peculiar in our own flowers, trees, and skies. This does not lessen our joy in the masters of English verse, because, of course, much of what they have sung has liberal application in all lands; yet is there something which we lose in them for lack of familiar knowledge of English lanes and woods, of English flowers and trees. A book of the essentially American nature--poems found here and there in many volumes--would be pleasant, for surely we have had no one poet as to whom it is felt that he is absolutely desirable as the interpretive poetic observer who has positive claims to go with us as a friendly bookmate in our wood or water wanderings. I have shrunk, as will have been seen, from the dangerous venture of enlarging my brief catalogue. What I have just now spoken of as one's bookmates will appear in very different lights according to the surroundings in which we seek to enjoy their society. If, as to this matter, any one doubts me, and has the good luck to camp out long, and to have a variety of books of verse and prose, very soon, if dainty of taste, he will find that the artificial flavoring of some books is unpleasantly felt; but, after all, one does not read very much when living thus outside of houses. Books are then, of course, well to have, but rather as giving one texts for thoughts and talk than as preachers, counsellors, jesters, or friends.