Is this because, in the wilderness, we recover something of what we have lost?... Because we newly find ourselves as though surprised into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to go, seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound, among obscure dusks and forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul! It is not we only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the wilderness and lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are often troubled we know not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some memory, not our own, but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dusk move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no fanciful challenge of speculation. In the order of psychology it is as logical as in the order of biology is the tracing of our upright posture or the deft and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealizably remote periods wherein the pioneers of man reach slowly forward to inconceivable arrivals.
The weakness of these essays that are like out-of-door essays, but are not out-of-door essays, is their dearth of freshly observed fact. This dearth would not matter so much if there were not so many of them, but a book full of such essays with little original observation will pall, no matter how well written, no matter how interesting the personality of the writer. Thus it is that some of the essays of Jefferies pall, some of those written in his last days, of Jefferies who had in his earlier writing been so objective. In Thoreau there is a happy combination of freshly observed fact with personal comment, and in Mr. Burroughs a personal element greatly subdued, and presented in most of the essays only through the selective art that has preserved the incidents he relates out of many of a vast store of their kind.
In these "nature studies" of Sharp, as in so much of his writing, there is a great deal of generalization from phenomena superficially observed. He is not so often inaccurate, but he is very often merely repetitive, giving us in beautiful and oftentimes distinguished phrase what others have given us before. Sharp wrote sometimes, I have no doubt, with the thing he describes before him but oftener, it would seem, from notes, and oftenest, I take it, from memory. Sometimes it is best to write thus from memory. The unessential will fade out, the essential remain; but with Sharp the trouble is that the first observation has often been hurried. He was content with the beauty that he saw when he first noticed the incident; he did not wait to observe what in the further actions of the life observed would make that beautiful incident more significant. It may, of course, be said that all he was after was the impression that the passing incident made upon him. Perhaps so, and if so, more is the pity, because, while, as I have said, one out-of-door essay with little or even with nothing but the personality of the writer may interest, or perhaps two such, or even ten, a book full will be monotonous. At its best, however, his writing of "natural romance" is of great beauty. "Still Waters," for one, is almost perfect, as perfect as this sort of thing may be. It is wrought of his own experiences with just enough of mythological data to give it the texture of old and lasting things.