Tuesday, January 27, 2015

From Henry Beston

“I am glad that the country world thus retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of early common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.” 

Henry Beston, Northern Farm.


Beston is a northern Wendell Berry and disciple of Thoreau. He and his wife, writer Elizabeth Coatsworth,  lived a life devoted to naturalist writing and wrote from a farm in Maine most of their years together.