On a spring morning in the Catskill Mountains, an elderly man with a flowing white beard sits beneath a gnarled apple tree, notebook in hand, watching a hermit thrush build its nest. This is John Burroughs in his element—not in a library or lecture hall, but in the cathedral of nature itself. For more than six decades, Burroughs served as America's interpreter of the natural world, transforming simple observations of…
“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Nature Poets, Transcendentalists, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Spirituality, Joy
James Henry Leigh Hunt, known throughout his literary life as Leigh Hunt, was born on 19 October 1784 at Southgate, then a village north of London, and died at Putney on 28 August 1859. He was a poet, essayist, journalist, editor, critic, translator, dramatist, and indefatigable friend to writers whose fame would eventually eclipse his own. To describe him merely as a minor Romantic poet is to miss the range of his a…
“The world is most unquestionably happier upon the whole than otherwise; or light and air, and the face of nature, would be different from what they are.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Joy, Wonder