Explore "Wild Life Near Home" by Dallas Lore Sharp on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
One real source of the joy in out-of-door study lies in its off-time character. A serious, bread-winning study of birds must be a lamentable vocation; it comes to measuring egg-shells merely, and stuffing skins. To get its real tonic, nature study must not be carried on with Walden Pond laboriousness, nor with the unrelieved persistence of a five years aboard a _Beagle_. Darwin staggered under the burden of his observations; and Thoreau says: "I would not have any one adopt _my_ mode of living; for before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself" -- and so he did.
No; the joy in wild things is the joy of being wild with them -- vacation joy. Think of being forced to gather ants and watch spiders for a living! It would be quite as bad as making poetry or prophecy one's profession. From the day Mohammed formally adopts Koran-making as a business, he begins to lose his spontaneity and originality, and grows prosy and artificial, even plagiaristic. Nature shuns the professional. She makes her happiest visits as short surprises, delightful interruptions and diversions in the thick of our earnest business.