The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-08-24
THE LOVE OF NATURE.
One Writer Presents Proof That It Is
 an Acquire Taste.

From the chicago News.
 T often wonder" said the high school principal, how many of the people who are travelling across our own continent and the sea to view nature at her widest appreciate the fact that their enjoyment of her handiwork in Its most awesome as- poets is result due rather to long train ing and education than to any innate sense of the beautiful and the aesthetic. There was a time. and not so many centu- ries ago, when the attitude of cultivated men and women toward nature was quite different from what it Is today. The eighteenth century looked askance at what the nineteenth and twentieth go to no end of trouble, inconvenience, and ex- pense to pay the warmest sort of tribute and the highest admiration.
 Without being able to lay my hands on the passage, l remmber that Addison speaks somewhere, 1 believe in his letters, about the barbarous and abhorrent seen cry of the Alps. Macaulay. writing about the Celtic wilds of Scotland tells us that it excited nothing but contempt and loath- ing. Wood, water, and crag, he observes, were In no wise different then from what they are now, when they are being visited by no end of those who come to sketch or merely to praise and see. The Tros- achs wound as now between gigantic walls of rock tapestrled with broom and wild roses; Foyers came headlong down through the birchwood with the same leap and the same roar with which he still rushes to Loch Ness, and, in defiance of the sun of June, the snowy scalp of Ben Cruachan rose, as it still rises over the willowy islets of Loch Awe. Yet none of these sights had power until recent pe- riod to attract n single poet or painter from more opulent and more tranquil re- gions.
 Tn 1730 Captain Burt, an English trav- eer of intelligence and cultivation, wrote of the mountains of Inverness-shre, with the feeling and the sentiment com mon to his age, that they were mon strous excresences, the deformity of which made the sterile plains seem lovely by comparison. In fine weather he found them still more disagreeab ble, for the clear CT the day the more disagreeably did those misshapen masses of gloomy brown and dirty purple affect the eye. The tame and subdued beauties of Richmond Hill he found admirable by contrast.
 Even Oliver Goldsmith, poet though he was, and alive to the beauties of nature when tanned and subdued, was repelled by the scenery of the highlands, and declared that he found infinitely more pleasing the conventional and sober beauties of the cultivated country around Leyden, the vast expanse of verdant meadow, the villas with their statues and grottoes, the trim flower beds, and the recullnear ave nues. Of the district that comprises Loch Katrne and Loch Lomond, which today calls forth exclamations of rapture from the most commonplace and the most mat ter-of-fact and business like travellers, the poet could write: Shall I tire you with a description of this unfrutful country where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath of their valleys scarce able to feed a rabbit? Ev- cry part of the country presents the same dismal landscape. No grove or brook lends its music to cheer the stranger While of Leydon, one of his letters says: T was wholly taken up In observing the face of the country. Nothing can equal Its beauty. Wherever I turned my eyes fine houses, elegant gardens, statues. grottoes, and vistas presented themselves. Scotland and this country bear the high- est contrast there hills and rocks inter cept every prospect; here it is all con- tinued plain
 And so one might go on quoting in definitely to show how our love for na- ture, like many of our other sentiments, has been instilled and cultivated and how all of us in one way or another are but the children of our age and our time