“As for me, when I turn these leaves I hear the rustle of wild foliage and wilder wings, the songs of many birds, the babbling of innumerable brooks. Can the reader hear these by these same means? If so, my writing has not been in vain.”

Success measured by whether the page still carries the woods · Preface, Sylvan Secrets

• Nature
• Readers
• Writing

“I have been forced to conclude that a good part of bird-song is the mechanical response to what may be called hereditary memory.”

Melody treated as inheritance as much as invention · Essay, The Motif of Bird-Song, in Sylvan Secrets

• Animals
• Instinct
• Memory

“The poet who does not truly sing himself is like Eutychus, the painter in the epigram, who begat twenty sons and never got a single likeness, even among his children.”

Impersonal verse dismissed as a family without faces · Essay, The Personal Note

• Individuality
• Poetry
• Poets