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.
Summer's lease hath all too short a date.
The English winter - ending in July to recommence in August
Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms of those who have submitted to the mystical life. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors.
The truth is, as most of us know, that global warming is real and humans are major contributors, mainly because we wastefully burn fossil fuels.
'Twas Easter-Sunday. The full-blossomed trees_x000D_ _x000D_ Filled all the air with fragrance and with joy.
Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.
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