Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Interpretation
Naturalists develop their skills through innate talent and extensive observation over time.
This quote emphasizes that the craft of being a naturalist, much like that of a poet, combines both inherent ability and long-term dedication to observation and understanding of nature. It suggests that while some individuals may have a natural inclination towards these disciplines, the true mastery comes only through years of careful and deliberate study.
In practice
A speaker at a nature conservation event might use this quote to highlight the importance of both passion and diligence in studying the environment.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.
If we all used clotheslines, we could save 30 million tons of coal a year, or shut down 15 nuclear power plants. And you don't have to wait to start. Yours could be up by this afternoon. To be specific, buy 50 feet of clothesline and a $3 bag of clothespins and become a solar energy pioneer.
The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. Itβs as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
Nature encourages no looseness; pardons no errors.
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