one, and the winds and the tempests and my passions are one. I
feel the 'strangeness' only with regard to my fellow men,
especially in towns, where they exist in conditions unnatural to
me, but congenial to them.... In such moments we sometimes feel
a kinship with, and are strangely drawn to, the dead, who were
not as these; the long, long dead, the men who knew not life in
towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and wind and rain." This
unspoiled unity with Nature pervades all his writings; they are
remote from the fret and dust and pettiness of town life; they
are large, direct, free. It is not quite simplicity, for the
mind of this writer is subtle and fastidious, sensitive to each
motion of natural and human life; but his sensitiveness is
somehow different from, almost inimical to, that of us others,
who sit indoors and dip our pens in shades of feeling. Hudson's
fancy is akin to the flight of the birds that are his special
loves--it never seems to have entered a house, but since birth to
have been roaming the air, in rain and sun, or visiting the trees
and the grass. I not only disbelieve utterly, but intensely
dislike, the doctrine of metempsychosis, which, if I understand
it aright, seems the negation of the creative impulse, an
apotheosis of staleness--nothing quite new in the world, never
anything quite new--not even the soul of a baby; and so I am not
prepared to entertain the whim that a bird was one of his remote
incarnations; still, in sweep of wing, quickness of eye, and
natural sweet strength of song he is not unlike a
super-bird--which is a horrid image. And that reminds me: This,
after all, is a foreword to Green Mansions--the romance of the
bird-girl Rima--a story actual yet fantastic, which immortalizes,
I think, as passionate a love of all beautiful things as ever was
in the heart of man. Somewhere Hudson says: "The sense of the