There is one
great beauty in idealized romance: reading it can make no one worse
than he is, while it may help thousands to a cleaner life and
higher inspiration than they ever before have known."
Mrs. Porter has written ten books, and it is not out of place here
to express her attitude toward them. Each was written, she says,
from her heart's best impulses. They are as clean and helpful as
she knew how to make them, as beautiful and interesting. She has
never spared herself in the least degree, mind or body, when it
came to giving her best, and she has never considered money in
relation to what she was writing.
During the hard work and exposure of those early years, during
rainy days and many nights in the darkroom, she went straight ahead
with field work, sending around the globe for books and delving to
secure material for such books as "Birds of the Bible," "Music of
the Wild," and "Moths of the Limberlost." Every day devoted to such
work was "commercially" lost, as publishers did not fail to tell
her. But that was the work she could do, and do with exceeding joy.
She could do it better pictorially, on account of her lifelong
knowledge of living things afield, than any other woman had as yet
had the strength and nerve to do it. It was work in which she
gloried, and she persisted. "Had I been working for money,"
comments the author, "not one of these nature books ever would have
been written, or an illustration made."
When the public had discovered her and given generous approval to
"A Girl of the Limberlost," when "The Harvester" had established a
new record, that would have been the time for the author to prove
her commercialism by dropping nature work, and plunging headlong
into books it would pay to write, and for which many publishers
were offering alluring sums.
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