THE PATH OF VISION
lusory. It may be that he did not come at the right time, or he did not open the book at an auspicious moment. But more likely his heart had been preempted elsewhere, so that, outside a particular spot, he finds Carlyle's obvious remark, One green field, all green fields, damping his enthusiasm, hopelessly extinguishing in him every poetic rapture.
Such has been my experience when I visited Concord, such, my disappointment in the Catskills that, although a lover of nature in all her moods, I found myself turning from her text to Thoreau's marginal notes and those of his distinguished but less poetic successor John Burroughs. And while I enjoy their chants, I can not be a worshipper at their shrines, nor can I even pretend to share the least intimacy with their goddess, having already pledged my soul at another temple. For though our faith and our rituals too are the same, our gods differ. It is curious, indeed, how the universal spirit sometimes carries us back to the parochial. Like the Ujigami of
[122]
