Beautiful song and one I used to sing and play frequently, but it may be as a Czechoslovakian friend and university professor wrote me some time ago romance is only an electro/chemical biological function of the brain. I replied while that may yet prove to be the case I still believe there is a soul to be considered and there was no arguing P. G. Wodehouse "The musical-comedy lyric, an interesting survival of the days, long since departed, when poets worked,” the evidence of this being our lack of poets now worthy of the title and few people today can name the two great musicals performed with such exquisite perfection the lovers never even kissed and yet conveyed the essence of true romance.

I will never undervalue the effects of my wilderness experiences here the Sequoia National Forest as a boy in the forming of my own character, the way I perceive life and the values I maintain. But it is in living life with others that gives the voice to our character. For example, as Thoreau pointed out if you are not sharing the things that delight your own soul with others there is a missing dimension in your life; the real joy is not there, and as with Henry what is nature to me if I have no one with whom to share it?

Too many people today fail to find that sharing of mutual delights in their own lives. There has to be someone who gives the color and scent to the flowers, who will make the music meaningful, the moon and stars shine brightly, who makes life a living experience and redeems it from mere existence. The single most important thing to come from such a relationship is the learning to live for the benefit of others rather than selfishly, something that ideally comes with parenthood where the giving is never done with a sense of any self-sacrifice. The family is supposed to be the ultimate expression of this kind of love. Obviously the color and scent of the flowers is there whether you notice them or not; but it is love that causes you to notice them in all their glory and gives real meaning and value to them.

In my opinion the greatest American art form of the twentieth century was the musical play with the genius of such great artists as Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml, Victor Herbert, Rodgers and Hammerstein. But for the great Broadway musicals like Showboat and Oklahoma with their emphasis on love conquering all to survive required a national Ethos, which, with the betrayal of our nation by the evil leadership of an increasingly evil system of government fell into dark decline. There remains no more ...bright, golden haze on the meadow.

But poets and philosophers do not flourish in ideological hatreds, in systems of evil where the value of the individual is sacrificed to the vulgar, common cry for unearned bread, in systems where slavery to such evil punishes all efforts to live responsibly and cheats a man of his manhood, victimizes a woman of her womanhood, and children of their childhood. It takes a common culture to produce the great works of art, of love and romance, which the great Musicals exemplified. It requires the genius of that culture to produce hope of the ideals of commitment and fidelity being fulfilled, of a family being able to work with the hope that they are building a future for their children.

My generation of WWII antecedent to TV was not forced to read books. We were born to read, we were readers, and books were a natural and quite normal way of life to us. I was fortunate to be born to a family of avid readers, therefore from earliest memory I was surrounded by and immersed in good books and magazines, an encyclopedia and dictionary, newspapers, learning to read and write very early as a normal progression of life expected of children back then. And there was radio with a multiplicity of programming; that like good books and before the advent of TV required the constant exercising of ones imagination as well as the intellect.

Among the books of my childhood were the novels not only of those like Scott, Cooper, Grey, and so many others, but those by women as well. One of my favorite woman authors was Geneva Grace Stratton-Porter. She wrote her first novel The Song of the Cardinal in 1903. The next story, Freckles, written 1904 is about an orphan who gets a job as a timber guard in the Limberlost, a forested swamp in Indiana. Due to an accident Freckles has only one hand; however, he falls in love with a young girl, the beautiful “Swamp Angel.” The book was made into a film in 1935 followed by a remake in 1960.

A Girl of the Limberlost written in 1911 and also made into film is about a poor girl, Elnora Comstock, who grows up on the edge of the Limberlost swamp. Her father had died tragically, and when her mother is withdrawn and cold toward her she finds companionship with the Limberlost. There she discovers how Limberlost can teach her in ways no formal education could. Sharing a like love of nature, Geneva’s life at the Limberlost from which she drew so much of her writing in many ways prepared me for my life as a boy in the Sequoia National Forest, and for the later friendship and kinship I would find with Henry.

Of all her several novels and writing, Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost stand out most in my mind. There are two incidents about the young forester that remain vividly to me; the first being his coming across a footprint in the forest made by his Swamp Angel. After pressing his lips to her imprint, the young man uses a piece of bark from a tree to carefully cover and protect this precious evidence of “his angel.” The second incident occurs when the young man is abed recovering from injuries received from rescuing the angel. She declares her love for him at this time, and says he shall have her notwithstanding his seeming poverty, his noble ancestry not then known, and his being crippled.

Elnora was the girl counterpart of me as a boy. Her evident love of nature, her courage, and sense of exploration and adventure made us soul mates from the moment I started reading the book. It was not so much Sheena of the Jungle with whom I related, but Elnora of the Limberlost. Tom Sawyer had Becky Thatcher; I had Elnora Comstock to whom I wanted to be a hero just like the young forester to his angel.

Life has a cruel way at times of making cynics of people. The flaunting of perversion in the universities and Hollywood, substituting the reality of TV for good books and the exercising of ones imagination, trading the coarse and profane literature of those who obviously could never relate to Scott, Cooper, and Geneva, had they even known of them, those who never realized or cared what was being traded for the literary heritage our young people were deprived of, the very best humankind had to offer by way of civilized thought and manners, cheated and betrayed of the real progress of civilization. As a result, the Angel, Elnora, and the young forester have been cheated and betrayed as well, as have I.

Somehow, the sop to women on the part of the committee adding Austen, Cather, Elliot, and Woolf to the Great Books does not go nearly far enough. Honoring the “compatibility of differences” is not seen at the United Nations, nor is it seen in America. Perhaps it can only be seen and understood by those like Elnora, the young forester and his angel, by those who can understand them and enter into the kind of relationship that honors and dignifies the compatibility of differences.

Few today could read either Emerson or Thoreau without yawning or becoming glassy-eyed, few today could read Geneva without thinking her writing altruistic, simplistic, or at the best quaint. But we seek in vain for any marked advance of civilized good manners and morality that has supplanted these works of the past. And like the great musicals where poets last worked America has traded our heritage of great literature and romance, has sacrificed a generation devoted to reading and writing for those things of little value and do nothing to contribute to this generation’s hope for the future.