Big droves of kine, orchards on all the hills,
Flower-banked white cottages in all the vales,
Broad pastures, zigzag-fenced with hemlock rails
The anvil's clang, the rumbling busy mills.
Tan-vats in rows, a salt-well's heavy drills,
The parson's Sunday face, the miller's tales,
Mowers with scythes and maids with milking pails.
The mill pond's mysteries! The mill-stream's thrills.

Hour after hour he watched " the giant mill-beams gloom in
rows cobweb-festooned and hoar wtih whitest flour." Student
from his early years of intellectual awareness, he meditated on
the "prisoned god" he heard in the grinding of the mill-wheel.
But more, he studied the "finny tribes" he saw below the mill-
wheel. A stanza of quiet rapture caught his spirit:

Daily round and round the mill-wheel goes,
Dull rumbling like a demi-god in pain;
And endlessly like some god's ichor flows
The crystal stream o'er its green algal plain.

He early began to find "the strong sweet life of Nature . . .
the God of earth and heaven whom Science bares." Nature's
processes, as well as her myriad forms, appealed to his observa-
tion. "This swarming earth," he later wrote, ² "has been a trial
field wherein a virile God has sown in haste a horde of strug-
gling forms, hoping as yield to reach some consummating perfect
stage--elusive ever and evermore erased." The type is precious
to Nature; and the "rocks are full of types sketched out, re-
viewed, found wanting, cast away, or slowly trued to perfect
forms. Ceaseless, God's winnow-fan sorts better still from best."
Of all the mind's highways "the most sublime" were those made
from "deeps of space" by the astronomers. He, however, lived
and worked closely to the earth. In April he was often "a wan-
dering boy, in hemlock forests dim," enjoying the "spring's sweet
ferment," and conscious that "myriad million cells to one blind
end, in harmony attuned, within each tree, expand and bud:
absorb, consume and blend the gifts of earth and air by sun set
free." He wrote:

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