English Prose

On Umbrella Morals

A. G. Gardiner

A sharp shower came on as I walked along the Strand, but I did not put up my umbrella. The truth is I couldn't put up my umbrella. The frame would not work for one thing, and if it had worked, I would not have put the thing up, for I would no more be seen under such a travesty of an umbrella than Falstaff would be seen marching through Coventry with his regiment of ragamuffins. The fact is, the umbrella is not my umbrella at all. It is the umbrella of some person who I hope will read these lines. He has got my silk umbrella. I have got the cotton one he left in exchange. I imagine him flaunting along the Strand under my umbrella, and throwing a scornful glance at the fellow who was carrying his abomination and getting wet into the bargain. I daresay the rascal chuckled as he eyed the said abomination. "Ah," he said gaily to himself, "I did you in that time, old boy. I know that thing. It won't open for nuts. And it folds up like a sack. Now, this umbrella...."

But I leave him to his unrighteous communings. He is one of those people who have what I may call an umbrella conscience. You know the sort of person I mean. He would never put his hand in another's pocket, or forge a cheque or rob a till--not even if he had the chance. But he will swop umbrellas, or forget to return a book, or take a rise out of the railway company. In fact he is a thoroughly honest man who allows his honesty the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he takes your umbrella at random from the barber's stand. He knows he can't get a worse one than his own. He may get a better. He doesn't look at it very closely until he is well on his way. Then, "Dear me! I've taken the wrong umbrella," he says, with an air of surprise, for he likes really to feel that he has made a mistake. "Ah, well, it's no use going back now. He'd be gone. And I've left him mine!"

It is thus that we play hide-and-seek with our own conscience. It is not enough not to be found out by others; we refuse to be found out by ourselves. Quite impeccable people, people who ordinarily seem unspotted from the world, are afflicted with umbrella morals. It was a well-known preacher who was found dead in a first-class railway carriage with a third-class ticket in his pocket.

And as for books, who has any morals where they are concerned? I remember some years ago the library of a famous divine and literary critic, who had died, being sold. It was a splendid library of rare books, chiefly concerned with seventeenth-century writers, about whom he was a distinguished authority. Multitudes of the books had the marks of libraries all over the country. He had borrowed them and never found a convenient opportunity of returning them. They clung to him like precedents to law. Yet he was a holy man and preached admirable sermons, as I can bear witness. And, if you press me on the point, I shall have to own that it is hard to part with a book you have come to love.

Indeed, the only sound rule about books is that adopted by the man who was asked by a friend to lend him a certain volume. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I can't." "Haven't you got it?" asked the other. "Yes, I've got it," he said, "but I make it a rule never to lend books. You see, nobody ever returns them. I know it is so from my own experience. Here, come with me." And he led the way to his library. "There," said he, "four thousand volumes. Every--one--of--'em--borrowed." No, never lend books. You can't trust your dearest friend there. I know. Where is that Gil Blas gone? Eh? And that Silvio Pellico? And.... But why continue the list.... He knows. HE KNOWS.

And hats. There are people who will exchange hats. Now that is unpardonable. That goes outside that dim borderland of conscience where honesty and dishonesty dissemble. No one can put a strange hat on without being aware of the fact. Yet it is done. I once hung a silk hat up in the smoking-room of the House of Commons. When I wanted it, it was gone. And there was no silk hat left in its place. I had to go out bareheaded through Palace Yard and Whitehall to buy another. I have often wondered who was the gentleman who put my hat on and carried his own in his hand. Was he a Tory? Was he a Radical? It can't have been a Labour man, for no Labour man could put a silk hat on in a moment of abstraction. The thing would scorch his brow. Fancy Will Crooks in a silk hat! One would as soon dare to play with the fancy of the Archbishop of Canterbury in a bowler--a thought which seems almost impious. It is possible, of course, that the gentleman who took my silk umbrella did really make a mistake. Perhaps if he knew the owner he would return it with his compliments. The thing has been done. Let me give an illustration. I have myself exchanged umbrellas--often. I hope I have done it honestly, but one can never be quite sure. Indeed, now I come to think of it, that silk umbrella itself was not mine. It was one of a long series of exchanges in which I had sometimes gained and sometimes lost. My most memorable exchange was at a rich man's house where I had been invited to dine with some politicians. It was summer-time, and the weather being dry I had not occasion for some days afterwards to carry an umbrella. Then one day a sensation reigned in our household. There had been discovered in the umbrella-stand an umbrella with a gold band and a gold tassle, and the name of a certain statesman engraved upon it. There had never been such a super-umbrella in our house before. Before its golden splendours we were at once humbled and terrified--humbled by its magnificence, terrified by its presence. I felt as though I had been caught in the act of stealing the British Empire. I wrote a hasty letter to the owner, told him I admired his politics, but had never hoped to steal his umbrella; then hailed a cab, and took the umbrella and the note to the nearest dispatch office.

He was very nice about it, and in returning my own umbrella took all the blame on himself. "What," he said, "between the noble-looking gentleman who thrust a hat on my head, and the second noble-looking gentleman who handed me a coat, and the third noble-looking gentleman who put an umbrella in my hand, and the fourth noble-looking gentleman who flung me into a carriage, I hadn't the least idea what I was taking. I was too bewildered by all the noble flunkeys to refuse anything that was offered me."

Be it observed, it was the name on the umbrella that saved the situation in this case. That is the way to circumvent the man with an umbrella conscience. I see him eyeing his exchange with a secret joy; then he observes the name and address and his solemn conviction that he is an honest man does the rest. After my experience to-day, I think I will engrave my name on my umbrella. But not on that baggy thing standing in the corner. I do not care who relieves me of that. It is anybody's for the taking.

On The Philosophy of Hats

A. G. Gardiner

The other day I went into a hatter's to get my hat ironed. It had been ruffled by the weather, and I had a reason for wishing it to look as new and glossy as possible. And as I waited and watched the process of polishing, the hatter talked to me on the subject that really interested him--that is, the subject of hats and heads.

"Yes," said he, in reply to some remark I had made; "there's a wonderful difference in the shape of 'eads and the size. Now your 'ead is what you may call an ord'nary 'ead. I mean to say," he added, no doubt seeing a shadow of disappointment pass across my ordinary face, "I mean to say, it ain't what you would call extry-ord'nary. But there's some 'eads--well, look at that 'at there. It belongs to a gentleman with a wonderful funny-shaped 'ead, long and narrer and full of nobbles--'stror'nary 'ead 'e 'as. And as for sizes, it's wonderful what a difference there is. I do a lot of trade with lawyers, and it's astonishing the size of their 'eads. You'd be surprised. I suppose it's the amount of thinking they have to do that makes their 'eads swell. Now that 'at there belongs to Mr. ------ (mentioning the name of a famous lawyer), wonderful big 'ead 'e 'as--7-1/2--that's what 'e takes, and there's lots of 'em takes over 7.

"It seems to me," he went on, "that the size of the 'ead is according to the occupation. Now I used to be in a seaport town, and I used to serve a lot of ships' captains. 'Stror'nary the 'eads they have. I suppose it's the anxiety and worry they get, thinking about the tides and the winds and the icebergs and things...."

I went out of the shop with my ord'nary 'ead, conscious of the fact that I had made a poor impression on the hatter. To him I was only a 6-7/8 size, and consequently a person of no consequence. I should have liked to point out to him that it is not always the big heads that have the jewel in them. Of course, it is true that great men often have big heads. Bismarck's size was 7-1/4, so was Gladstone's, so was Campbell-Bannerman's. But on the other hand, Byron had a small head, and a very small brain. And didn't Goethe say that Byron was the finest brain that Europe had produced since Shakespeare? I should not agree in ordinary circumstances, but as a person with a smallish head, I am prepared in this connection to take Goethe's word on the subject. As Holmes points out, it is not the size of the brain but its convolutions that are important (I think, by the way, that Holmes had a small head). Now I should have liked to tell the hatter that though my head was small I had strong reason to believe that the convolutions of my brain were quite top-hole.

I did not do so and I only recall the incident now because it shows how we all get in the way of looking at life through our own particular peep-hole. Here is a man who sees all the world through the size of its hats. He reverences Jones because he takes 7-1/2; he dismisses Smith as of no account because he only takes 6-3/4. In some degree, we all have this restricted professional vision. The tailor runs his eye over your clothes and reckons you up according to the cut of your garments and the degree of shininess they display. You are to him simply a clothes-peg and your merit is in exact ratio to the clothes you carry. The bootmaker looks at your boots and takes your intellectual, social and financial measurement from their quality and condition. If you are down-at-the-heel, the glossy condition of your hat will not alter his opinion about you. The hat does not come in his range of vision. It is not a part of his criteria.

It is so with the dentist. He judges all the world by its teeth. One look in your mouth and he has settled and immovable convictions about your character, your habits, your physical condition, your position, and your mental attributes. He touches a nerve and you wince. "Ah," says he to himself, "this man takes too much alcohol and tobacco and tea and coffee." He sees the teeth are irregular. "Poor fellow," he says, "how badly he was brought up!" He observes that the teeth are neglected. "A careless fellow," he says. "Spends his money on follies and neglects his family I'll be bound." And by the time he has finished with you he feels that he could write your biography simply from the evidence of your teeth. And I daresay it would be as true as most biographies--and as false.

In the same way, the business man looks at life through the keyhole of his counting-house. The world to him is an "emporium," and he judges his neighbour by the size of his plate glass. And so with the financier. When one of the Rothschilds heard that a friend of his who had died had left only a million of money he remarked: "Dear me, dear me! I thought he was quite well off." His life had been a failure, because he had only put a million by for a rainy day. Thackeray expresses the idea perfectly in Vanity Fair:--

"You see," said old Osborne to George, "what comes of merit and industry and judicious speculations and that. Look at me and my banker's account. Look at your poor grandfather Sedley and his failure. And yet he was a better man than I was, this day twenty years--a better man I should say by twenty thousand pounds."

I fancy I, too, have my professional way of looking at things, and am disposed to judge men, not by what they do but by the skill they have in the use of words. And I know that when an artist comes into my house he "sizes me up" from the pictures on the wall, just as when the upholsterer comes he "places" me according to the style of the chairs and the quality of the carpet, or as when the gourmet comes he judges by the cooking and the wine. If you give him champagne he reverences you; if hock he puts you among the commonplace.

In short, we all go through life wearing spectacles coloured by our own tastes, our own calling, and our own prejudices, measuring our neighbours by our own tape-measure, summing them up according to our own private arithmetic. We see subjectively, not objectively; what we are capable of seeing, not what there is to be seen. It is not wonderful that we make so many bad guesses at that prismatic thing, the truth.

On Taste

A. G. Gardiner

I was in a feminine company the other day when the talk turned on war economies, with the inevitable allusion to the substitution of margarine for butter. I found it was generally agreed that the substitution had been a success. "Well," said one, "I bought some butter the other day--the sort we used to use--and put it on the table with the margarine which we have learned to eat. My husband took some, thinking it was margarine, made a wry face, and said, 'It won't do. This margarine economy is beyond me. We must return to butter, even if we lose the war.' I explained to him that he was eating butter, the butter, and he said, 'Well, I'm hanged!' Now, what do you think of that?"

I said I thought it showed that taste was a matter of habit, and that imagination played a larger part in our make-up than we supposed. We say of this or that thing that it is "an acquired taste," as though the fact was unusual, whereas the fact would seem to be that we dislike most things until we have habituated ourselves to them. As a youth I abominated the taste of tobacco. It was only by an industrious apprenticeship to the herb that I overcame my natural dislike and got to be its obedient servant. And even my taste here is unstable. I needed a certain tobacco to be happy and thought there was no other tobacco like it. But I discovered that was all nonsense. When the war tax sent the price up, I determined that my expenditure should not go up with it, and I tried a cheaper sort. I found it distasteful at first, but now I prefer it to my old brand, just as the lady's husband finds that he prefers the new margarine to the old butter.

And it is not only gastronomic taste which seems so much the subject of habit. That hat that was so absolute a thing last year is as dowdy and impossible to-day as if it had been the fashion of the Babylonians. It has always been so. "We had scarce worn cloth one year at the Court," says Montaigne, "what time we mourned for our King Henrie the Second, but certainly in every man's opinion all manner of silks were already become so vile and abject that was any man seen to wear them he was presently judged to be some countrie fellow or mechanical man." And you remember that in Utopia gold was held of so small account by comparison with iron that it was used for the baser purposes of the household.

We are adaptable creatures, and easily make our tastes conform to our environment and our customs. There are certain savage tribes who wear rings through their noses. When Mrs. Brown, of Tooting, sees pictures of them she remarks to Mr. Brown on the strange habits of these barbarous people. And Mr. Brown, if he has a touch of humour in him, points to the rings hanging from Mrs. Brown's ears, and says: "But, my dear, why is it barbarous to wear a ring in the nostril and civilised to wear rings in the ears?" The dilemma is not unlike that of the savage tribe whom the Greeks induced to give up cannibalism. But when the cannibals, who had piously eaten their parents, were asked instead to adopt the Greek custom of burning the bodies they were horrified at the suggestion. They would cease to eat them; but burn them? No. I can imagine Mrs. Brown's savages agreeing to take the rings out of their noses, but refusing blankly to put them in their ears.

I have no doubt that the long-haired Cavaliers used to regard the short hair of the Puritans as the "limit" in bad taste, but the man who today dares to walk down the Strand with hair streaming down his back is looked at as a curiosity and a crank, and we all join in that delightful addition to the Litany which Moody invented: "From long-haired men and short-haired women, Good Lord, deliver us." But who shall say that our children will not reverse the prayer?

Even in my own brief span I have seen men's faces pass through every hirsute change under the Protean influence of "good taste." I remember when, to be really a student of good form, a man wore long side-whiskers of the Dundreary type. Then "mutton chops" and a moustache were the thing; then only a moustache; now we have got back to the Romans and the clean shave. But where is the absolute "good taste" in all this? Or take trousers. If you had lived a hundred years ago and had dared to go about in trousers instead of knee-breeches you would have been written down a vulgar fellow. Even the great Duke of Wellington in 1814 was refused admittance to Almack's because he presented himself in trousers. Now we relegate knee-breeches to fancy dress balls and Court functions.

But sometimes the canons of good taste are astonishingly irrational. Who was it who set Christendom wearing black, sad, hopeless black as the symbol of mourning? The Roman ladies, who had never heard of the doctrine of the Resurrection, clothed themselves in white for mourning. It is left for the Christian world, which looks beyond the grave, to wear the habiliments of despair. If I go to a funeral I am as conventional as anybody else, for I have not the courage of a distinguished statesman whom I saw at his brother's funeral wearing a blue overcoat, check trousers, and a grey waistcoat, and carrying a green umbrella. I can give you his name if you doubt me--a great name, too. And he would not deny the impeachment. I am not prepared to endorse his idea of good taste; but I hate black. "Why should I wear black for the guests of God?" asked Ruskin. And there is no answer. Perhaps among the consequences of the war there will be a repudiation of this false code of taste.

On Points Of View

A. G. Gardiner

As I sat in the garden just now, with a writing-pad on my knee and my mind ranging the heavens above and the earth beneath in search of a subject, my eye fell on a tragedy in progress at my elbow. A small greenfly had got entangled in a spider's web, and was fluttering its tiny wings violently to effect an escape. The filaments of the web were so delicate as to be hardly visible, but they were not too delicate to bear the spider whom I saw advancing upon his prey with dreadful menace. I forgot my dislike of greenflies, and was overcome with a fierce antagonism for the fat fellow who had the game so entirely in his hands. Here, said I, is the Hun encompassing the ruin of poor little Belgium. What chance has the weak and the innocent little creature against the cunning of this rascal, who hangs out his gossamer traps in the breeze and then lies in hiding until his victim is enmeshed and helpless? What justice is there in nature that allows this unequal combat?

By this time the spider had reached the fly and thrown a new filament round him. Then at frightful speed he raced to the top of his web and disappeared in the woodwork of the arbour, drawing the new filament tight round the victim, which continued its flutterings for a little time and then gave up the ghost. At this moment I was called in to lunch, and at the table I told the story of the spider and the fly with undisguised hostility to the spider. "That," said Robert, home from the front--"that is simply a sentimental point of view. My sympathies as a practical person are all with the spider. He is the friend of man, the devourer of insects, the scavenger of the gardens. He helps in the great task of keeping the equilibrium of nature. Moreover," said he, "I have seen you kill greenflies yourself. You killed them because you knew they were a nuisance. Why should you object to the spider doing the same useful work for a living?"

"Ah," said I weakly, "I suppose it is because he does it for a living. Now I ..." "Now, you," interrupted the other, "do it for a living, too, because you want your fruit trees to bear fruit, and your roses to thrive, and your cabbages to prosper. Who more merciless than you on slugs and other pests that fly or crawl? No, no, we are all out for a living, you as much as the spider, the spider as much as the fly." "We are all Huns," said I. "What a detestable world it is." "Not at all," said he. "It's a very jolly world. I drink to the health of the spider."

"And you have no pity for the fly?" I said. "Not a little bit." he replied. "I am on the side of right." "Whose side is that?" I asked. "Mine," said he. "We must all act according to our point of view. That's what the greenfly does. That's what the spider does. We shall never in this world get all the points of view in accord. We shall go on scrambling for a living to the end. Sometimes the greenfly will be on top, sometimes the spider. Look at that cherry-tree in the orchard. A month ago its branches were laden with fruit. Now there is not a cherry to be seen. The blackbirds and the starlings have stripped the tree as clean as a bone. Their point of view is that the cherries are provided for them, and they are right. They know nothing of the laws of property which man makes for his own protection. It's no use going out to them and asking them to look at your title-deeds, and reminding them of the policeman and the laws against larceny. Our moral code is for us, not for them.

"We are all creatures of our own point of view," he went on. "Before Jones next door bought a motor-car he had very bitter feelings about motorists--used to call them road-hogs, said he would tax these 'land-torpedoes' out of existence, and was full of sympathy and pity for the poor children coming from school. Now he drives a car as hard as anybody; blows the hoggiest of horns; and says it's disgraceful the way parents allow their children to play about in the streets. Nothing has changed except his point of view. He has shifted round to another position, and sees things from a new angle of vision. Samuel Butler hit the comedy of the thing off long ago:--

What makes all doctrine plain and clear?

About two hundred pounds a year.

And that which was proved true before

Prove false again? Two hundred more." (연 400 파운드면 기존의 교리도 뒤엎는다)

"Are our points of view then all dictated by our selfish motives as those of your friend the spider, who has probably by this time gobbled my friend the greenfly?" "No, I do not say that. I think that, comprehending all our private points of view, there is an absolute motive running through human society, call it the world spirit, the mind of the race, or what you will, that is something greater and better than we. The collective motion of humanity is, except in very rare cases, nobler than its individual manifestations. I respond and you respond to an abstract justice, an abstract righteousness, which is purer and better than anything we are capable of. We are all at the bottom, I think, better than our actions paint us, better than our limited points of view permit us to be, and in our illuminated moments we catch a glimpse of that Jacob's ladder that Francis Thompson saw, with ascending angels, at Charing Cross. Some one called Shelley 'an ineffectual angel.' I think most of us are ineffectual angels. Take this tragedy that is filling the world with horror to-day. We are fighting like tigers for our own points of view, but in our hearts we are ashamed of the spectacle, and know that humanity is better than its deeds. One day, perhaps, the ineffectual angel will find his wings and outsoar the spider point of view.... And, by the way, suppose we go and see how the spider is getting on."

We went out into the garden and found the web. But the little green corpse had gone, and the spider was digesting his meal somewhere out of sight.

(Note.--This article should be read in connection with that entitled "On the Downs.")

On Beer And Porcelain

A. G. Gardiner

I was reading an American journal just now when I came across the remark that "one would as soon think of drinking beer out of porcelain as of slapping Nietzsche on the back." Drinking beer out of porcelain! The phrase amused me, and set me idly wondering why you don't drink beer out of porcelain. You drink it (assuming that you drink it at all) with great enjoyment out of a thick earthenware mug or a pewter pot or a vessel of glass, but out of china, never. If you were offered a drink of beer out of a china basin or cup you would feel that the liquor had somehow lost its attraction, just as, if you were offered tea out of a pewter pot, you would feel that the drink was degraded and unpleasant. The explanation that the one drink is coarse and the other fine does not meet the case. People drink beer out of glass, and the finer the glass the better they like it. But there is something fundamentally discordant between beer and porcelain.

It is not, I imagine, that porcelain actually affects the taste or quality of the liquor. It is that some subtle sense of fitness is outraged by the association. The harmony of things is jangled. Touch and taste are no longer in sympathy, and we are conscious of a jar to some remote and inexplicable fibre of our being. It is in the realm of the palate that we get the miracle of these affinities and antipathies in their most elementary shape. Who was it who discovered that two such curiously diverse things as mutton and red-currant jelly make a perfect gastronomic chord? By what stroke of inspiration or luck did some unknown cook first see that apple sauce was just the thing to make roast pork sublime? Who was the Prometheus who brought to earth the tidings that a clove was the lover for whom the apple pudding had pined through all the ages?

Seen in the large, this world is just an inexhaustible mine of materials out of which that singular adventurer, man, is eternally bringing to light new revelations of harmony. The musician gathers together the vibrations of the air and discovers the laws of musical agreement, and out of that discovery emerges the stupendous mystery of song. The poet takes words, and out of their rhythms finds the harmonious vehicle for ideas. The scientist sees the apple fall and has the revelation of a universe moving in a symphony before which the mind stands mute and awestruck. The cook takes the pig from the stye and the apple from the tree and makes a pretty lyric for the dinner-table. The Great Adventure, in short, is just this passionate pursuit of the soul of harmony in things, great and small, spiritual and material. We are all in the quest and our captains are those who lead us to the highest peaks of revelation--Bach fashioning that immortal Concerto for Two Violins that takes us out like unsullied children into fields of asphodel; Wordsworth looking out over Tintern Abbey and capturing for us that

Sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky and in the mind of man;

Botticelli weaving the magic lines of the Madonna of the Magnificat into a harmony that, once deeply felt, seems to dwell in the heart for ever. And you and I, though we are not captains in the adventure, all have our glimpses--glorious moments when the mind sings in tune with circumstance, when the beauty of the world, or the sense of fellowship with men or the anthem of incommunicable things seems to open out the vision of something that we would fain possess and are meant to possess.

"A mirage," you say, being a cynical person--"a mirage just to keep us going through the desert--a sort of carrot held before the nose of that donkey, man." Well, looking at the world to-day, it does rather seem that, if harmony is the main concern of the adventure, humanity had better give up the enterprise. In the light of the events in which we live, man is not merely the most discordant creature on earth: he is also the most ferocious animal that exists. Dryden's famous lines read like a satire:--

From harmony, from heavenly harmony.

This universal frame began;

From harmony to harmony, through all the compass of the

notes it ran,

The diapason closing full in man.(인간이 조화의 정점에 있음을 노래함)

If Dryden could see Europe to-day(1,2차 세계대전을 치른 유럽) he might at least find one flaw in that ode of which he had so exalted(높이다, 찬양하다) an opinion.

But the story of man is a long story, and we cannot see its drift from any episode, however vast and catastrophic. We are still only in the turbulent childhood of our career, and frightful as our excesses are, there is a motive behind them that makes them profoundly different from the wars of old. That motive is the idea of human liberty, the sanctity(거룩함, 고결함) of public law, the right of every nation, small or great, to live its life free from the terrorism of force. When, in the ancient or mediaeval world, was there fought a war for a world idea like this? Despotism then had it all its own way. Even the Peace of Rome was only the peace of universal subjugation, not the peace of universal liberty based on law which the world is fighting to establish to-day. Never before has embattled democracy challenged the principle of tyranny for the possession of the world....

Ah, I know what you are thinking as you run your mind over the Allies. Liberty! Does Russia stand for liberty? Yes, in the circumstances of to-day, even Russia stands for liberty, for do not forget that this is not a war of the Russian bureaucracy,(관료) but a war sustained by the passion of the Russian people. And, Russia apart or Russia included, who can doubt that the cause of human freedom is in our hands, and the cause of ancient tyranny is in the hands of our enemy? May we not see in these baleful fires the Twilight of the Gods--of those old gods of blood and iron that have held the world in subjection through the long centuries of its travail? May we not see even in the midst of this discord and carnage, this hell of death and destruction, the new birth of humanity--the promise of a world set free?

Perhaps in that distant time when the tragedy of to-day is only an old chapter in the story of the human race it will be seen that Dryden, after all, was not guilty of a grim jest,(무서운 농담) but that this mighty discord was the announcement of that final harmony for which all that is best in us yearns. It may seem a hard vision to cherish to-day. But we must cherish it, or accept the hideous alternative that this is, after all, in very truth the madhouse of the universe. Can you live with that idea? Would it be worth while living with that idea? If not, then the other holds the field, and it is for all of us in our several ways, small or great, to work so that it may possess the field.

I have wandered somewhat far from the question of the beer and the porcelain, and yet I think you will find that the sequence is not lacking, and that the little window commands a large landscape.

On A Hawthorn Hedge

A. G. Gardiner

As I turned into the lane that climbs the hillside to the cottage under the high beech woods I was conscious of a sort of mild expectation that I could not explain. It was late evening. Venus, who looks down with such calm splendour upon this troubled earth in these summer nights, had disappeared, but the moon had not yet risen. The air was heavy with those rich odours which seem so much more pungent by night than by day--those odours of summer eves that Keats has fixed for ever in the imagination:--

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs;

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn....

Ah, that was it. I remembered now. A fortnight ago, when I last came up this lane by night, it was the flash of the white hawthorn in the starlight that burst upon me with such a sudden beauty. I knew the spot. It was just beyond here, where the tall hedgerow leans over the grass side-track and makes a green arbour by the wayside. I should come to it in a minute or two, and catch once more that ecstasy of spring.

And when I reached the spot the white hawthorn had vanished. The arbour was there, but its glory had faded. The two weeks I had spent in Fleet Street had stripped it of its crown, and the whole pageant of the year must pass before I could again experience that sudden delight of the hedgerows bursting into foam. I do not mind confessing that I continued my way up the lane with something less than my former exhilaration. Partly no doubt this was due to the fact that the hill at this point begins its job of climbing in earnest, and is a stiff pull at the end of a long day's work and a tiresome journey--especially if you are carrying a bag.

But the real reason of the slight shadow that had fallen on my spirit was the vanished hawthorn. Poor sentimentalist, you say, to cherish these idle fancies in this stern world of blood and tears. Well, perhaps it is this stern world of blood and tears that gives these idle fancies their poignancy. Perhaps it is through those fancies that one feels the transitoriness of other things. The coming and the parting in the round of nature are so wonderfully mingled that we can never be quite sure whether the joy of the one triumphs over the regret for the other. It is always "Hail" and "Farewell" in one breath. I heard the cuckoo calling across the meadows to-day, and already I noticed a faltering in his second note. Soon the second note will be silent altogether, and the single call will sound over the valley like the curfew bell of spring.

Who, I thought, would not fix these fleeting moments of beauty if he could? Who would not keep the cuckoo's twin shout floating for ever over summer fields and the blackbird for ever fluting his thanksgiving after summer showers? Who can see the daffodils nodding their heads in sprightly dance without sharing the mood of Herrick's immortal lament that that dance should be so brief:--

Fair daffodils, we weep to see

You haste away so soon;

As yet the early-rising sun

Has not attain'd its noon.

Stay, stay.

Until the hasting day

Has run

But to the evensong;

And, having prayed together, we

Will go with you along.

Yes, I think Herrick would have forgiven me for that momentary lapse into regretfulness over the white hawthorn. He would have understood. You will see that he understood if you will recall the second stanza, which, if you are the person I take you for, you will do without needing to turn to a book.

It is the same sense of the transience of beauty that inspired the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" on which pastoral beauty was fixed in eternal rapture:--

Ah, happy, happy boughs that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu.

And there we touch the paradox of this strange life. We would keep the fleeting beauty of Nature, and yet we would not keep it. The thought of those trees whose leaves are never shed, and of that eternal spring to which we never bid adieu, is pleasant to toy with, but after all we would not have it so. It is no more seriously tenable than the thought that little Johnny there should remain for ever at the age of ten. You may feel that you would like him to remain at the age of ten. Indeed you are a strange parent if you do not look back a little wistfully to the childhood of your children, and wish you could see them as you once saw them. But you would not really have Johnny stick at ten. After five years of the experience you would wish little Johnny dead. For life and its beauty are a living thing, and not a pretty fancy sculptured on a Grecian urn.

And so with the pageant of Nature. If the pageant stopped, the wonder itself would stop. I should have no sudden shock of delight at hearing the first call of the cuckoo in spring or seeing my hawthorn hedge burst into snowy blossoms. I should no longer remark the jolly clatter of the rooks in the February trees which forms the prologue of spring, nor look out for the coming of the first primrose or the arrival of the first swallow. I should cease, it is true, to have the pangs of "Farewell," but I should cease also to have the ecstasy of "Hail." I should have my Grecian urn, but I should have lost the magic of the living world.

By the time I had reached the gate I had buried my regrets for the vanished hawthorn. I knew that to-morrow I should find new miracles in the hedgerows--the wild rose and the honeysuckle, and after them the blackberries, and after these again the bright-hued hips and haws. And though the cuckoo's note should fail him, there would remain the thrush, and after the thrush that constant little fellow in the red waistcoat would keep the song going through the dark winter days.

On Living In The Country

David Grayson

"Why risk with men your hard won gold*?

Buy grain and sow your Brother Dust

Will pay you back a hundred fold--

The earth commits no breach of trust."

Hindu Proverb, Translated by Arthur Guiterman.

It is astonishing how many people there are in cities and towns who have a secret longing to get back into quiet country places, to own a bit of the soil of the earth, and to cultivate it. To some it appears as a troublesome malady only in spring and will be relieved by a whirl or two in country roads, by a glimpse of the hills, or a day by the sea; but to others the homesickness is deeper seated and will be quieted by no hasty visits. These must actually go home.

I have had, in recent years, many letters from friends asking about life in the country, but the longer I remain here, the more I know about it, the less able I am to answer them--at least briefly. It is as though one should come and ask: "Is love worth trying?" or, "How about religion?" For country life is to each human being a fresh, strange, original adventure. We enjoy it, or we do not enjoy it, or more probably, we do both. It is packed and crowded with the zest of adventure, or it is dull and miserable. We may, (if we are skilled enough,) make our whole living from the land, or only a part of it, or we may find in a few cherished acres the inspiration and power for other work, (whatever it may be.) There is many a man whose strength is renewed like that(the strength) of the wrestler of Irassa, every time (when) his feet touch the earth.

Of all places in the world where life can be lived to its fullest and freest, where it can be met in its greatest variety and beauty, I am convinced that there is none to equal the open country, or the country town. For all country people in these days may have the city--some city or town not too far away: but there are millions of men and women in America who have no country and no sense of the country. What do they not lose out of life!

I know well the disadvantages charged against country life at its worst. At its worst there are long hours and much lonely labour and an income pitifully small. Drudgery, yes, especially for the women, and loneliness. But where is there not drudgery when men are poor--where life is at its worst? I have never seen drudgery in the country comparable for a moment to the dreary and lonely drudgery of city tenements, city mills, factories, and sweat shops. And in recent years both the drudgery and loneliness of country life have been disappearing before the motor and trolley car, the telephone, the rural post, the gasoline engine. I have seen a machine plant as many potatoes in one day as a man, at hand work, could have planted in a week. While there is, indeed, real drudgery in the country, much that is looked upon as drudgery by people who long for easy ways and a soft life, is only good, honest, wholesome hard work--the kind of work that makes for fiber in a man or in a nation, the kind that most city life in no wise provides.

There are a thousand nuisances and annoyances that men must meet who come face to face with nature itself. You have set out your upper acres to peach trees: and the deer come down from the hills at night and strip the young foliage; or the field mice in winter, working under the snow, girdle and kill them. The season brings too much rain and the potatoes rot in the ground, the crows steal the corn, the bees swarm when no one is watching, the cow smothers her calf, the hens' eggs prove infertile, and a storm in a day ravages a crop that has been growing all summer. A constant warfare with insects and blights and fungi--a real, bitter warfare, which can cease neither summer nor winter!

It is something to meet, year after year, the quiet implacability of the land. While it is patient, it never waits long for you. There is a chosen time for planting, a time for cultivating, a time for harvesting. You accept the gauge thrown down--well and good, you shall have a chance to fight! You do not accept it? There is no complaint. The land cheerfully springs up to wild yellow mustard and dandelion and pig-weed--and will be productive and beautiful in spite of you.

Nor can you enter upon the full satisfaction of cultivating even a small piece of land at second hand. To be accepted as One Who Belongs, there must be sweat and weariness.

The other day I was digging with Dick in a ditch that is to run down through the orchard and connect finally with the land drain we put in four years ago. We laid the tile just in the gravel below the silt, about two feet deep, covering the openings with tar paper and then throwing in gravel. It was a bright, cool afternoon. In the field below a ploughman was at work: I could see the furrows of the dark earth glisten as he turned it over. The grass in the meadow was a full rich green, the new chickens were active in their yards, running to the cluck of the hens, already the leaves of the orchard trees showed green. And as I worked there with Dick I had the curious deep feeling of coming somehow into a new and more intimate possession of my own land. For titles do not really pass with signatures and red seals, nor with money changing from one hand to another, but for true possession one must work and serve according to the most ancient law. There is no mitigation and no haggling of price. Those who think they can win the greatest joys of country life on any easier terms are mistaken.

But if one has drained his land, and ploughed it, and fertilized it, and planted it and harvested it--even though it be only a few acres-- how he comes to know and to love every rod of it. He knows the wet spots, and the stony spots, and the warmest and most fertile spots --until his acres have all the qualities of a personality, whose every characteristic he knows. It is so also that he comes to know his horses and cattle and pigs and hens. It is a fine thing, on a warm day in early spring, to bring out the bee-hives and let the bees have their first flight in the sunshine. What cleanly folk they are! And later to see them coming in yellow all over with pollen from the willows! It is a fine thing to watch the cherries and plum trees come into blossom, with us about the first of May, while all the remainder of the orchard seems still sleeping. It is a fine thing to see the cattle turned for the first time in spring into the green meadows. It is a fine thing--one of the finest of all--to see and smell the rain in a corn-field after weeks of drought. How it comes softly out of gray skies, the first drops throwing up spatters of dust and losing themselves in the dry soil. Then the clouds sweep forward up the valley, darkening the meadows and blotting out the hills, and then there is the whispering of the rain as it first sweeps across the corn-field. At once what a stir of life! What rustling of the long green leaves. What joyful shaking and swaying of the tassels! And have you watched how eagerly the grooved leaves catch the early drops, and, lest there be too little rain after all, conduct them jealously down the stalks where they will soonest reach the thirsty roots? What a fine thing is this to see!

One who thus takes part in the whole process of the year comes soon to have an indescribable affection for his land, his garden, his animals. There are thoughts of his in every tree: memories in every fence corner. Just now, the fourth of June, I walked down past my blackberry patch, now come gorgeously into full white bloom--and heavy with fragrance. I set out these plants with my own hands, I have fed them, cultivated them, mulched them, pruned them, trellised them, and helped every year to pick the berries. How could they be otherwise than full of associations! They bear a fruit more beautiful than can be found in any catalogue: and stranger and wilder than in any learned botany book!

Why, one who comes thus to love a bit of countryside may enjoy it all the year round. When he awakens in the middle of a long winter night he may send his mind out to the snowy fields--I've done it a thousand times!--and visit each part in turn, stroll through the orchard and pay his respects to each tree--in a small orchard one comes to know familiarly every tree as he knows his friends--stop at the strawberry bed, consider the grape trellises, feel himself opening the door of the warm, dark stable and listening to the welcoming whicker of his horses, or visiting his cows, his pigs, his sheep, his hens, or so many of them as he may have.

So much of the best in the world seems to have come fragrant out of fields, gardens, and hillsides. So many truths spoken by the Master Poet come to us exhaling the odours of the open country. His stories were so often of sowers, husbandmen, herdsmen: his similes and illustrations so often dealt with the common and familiar beauty of the fields. "Consider the lilies how they grow." It was on a hillside that he preached his greatest Sermon, and when in the last agony he sought a place to meet his God, where did he go but to a garden? A carpenter you say? Yes, but of this one may be sure: there were gardens and fields all about: he knew gardens, and cattle, and the simple processes of the land: he must have worked in a garden and loved it well.

A country life rather spoils one for the so-called luxuries. A farmer or gardener may indeed have a small cash income, but at least he eats at the first table. He may have the sweetest of the milk, there are thousands, perhaps millions, of men and women in America who have never in their lives tasted really sweet milk and the freshest of eggs, and the ripest of fruit. One does not know how good strawberries or raspberries are when picked before breakfast and eaten with the dew still on them. And while he must work and sweat for what he gets, he may have all these things in almost unmeasured abundance, and without a thought of what they cost. A man from the country is often made uncomfortable, upon visiting the city, to find two cans of sweet corn served for twenty or thirty cents, or a dish of raspberries at twenty-five or forty--and neither, even at their best, equal in quality to those he may have fresh from the garden every day. One need say this in no boastful spirit, but as a simple statement of the fact: for fruits sent to the city are nearly always picked before they are fully ripe--and lose that last perfection of flavour which the sun and the open air impart: and both fruits and vegetables, as well as milk and eggs, suffer more than most people think from handling and shipment. These things can be set down as one of the make-weights against the familiar presentation of the farmer's life as a hard one.

One of the greatest curses of mill or factory work and with much city work of all kinds, is its interminable monotony: the same process repeated hour after hour and day after day. In the country there is indeed monotonous work but rarely monotony. No task continues very long: everything changes infinitely with the seasons. Processes are not repetitive but creative. Nature hates monotony, is ever changing and restless, brings up a storm to drive the haymakers from their hurried work in the fields, sends rain to stop the ploughing, or a frost to hurry the apple harvest. Everything is full of adventure and vicissitude! A man who has been a farmer for two hours at the mowing must suddenly turn blacksmith when his machine breaks down and tinker with wrench and hammer; and later in the day he becomes dairyman, farrier, harness-maker, merchant. No kind of wheat but is grist to his mill, no knowledge that he cannot use! And who is freer to be a citizen than he: freer to take his part in town meeting and serve his state in some one of the innumerable small offices which form the solid blocks of organization beneath our commonwealth.

I thought last fall that corn-husking came as near being monotonous work, as any I had ever done in the country. I presume in the great corn-fields of the West, where the husking goes on for weeks at a time, it probably does grow really monotonous. But I soon found that there was a curious counter-reward attending even a process as repetitive as this.

I remember one afternoon in particular. It was brisk and cool with ragged clouds like flung pennants in a poverty-stricken sky, and the hills were a hazy brown, rather sad to see, and in one of the apple trees at the edge of the meadow the crows were holding their mournful autumn parliament.

At such work as this one's mind often drops asleep, or at least goes dreaming, except for the narrow margin of awareness required for the simple processes of the hands. Its orders have indeed been given: you must kneel here, pull aside the stalks one by one, rip down the husks, and twist off the ear--and there is the pile for the stripped stalks, and here the basket for the gathered corn, and these processes infinitely repeated.

While all this is going on, the mind itself wanders off to its own far sweet pastures, upon its own dear adventures--or rests, or plays. It is in these times that most of the airy flying things of this beautiful world come home to us--things that heavy-footed reason never quite overtakes, nor stodgy knowledge ever knows. I think sometimes (as Sterne says) we thus intercept thoughts never intended for us at all, or uncover strange primitive memories of older times than these--racial memories.

At any rate, the hours pass and suddenly the mind comes home again, it comes home from its wanderings refreshed, stimulated, happy. And nowhere, whether in cities, or travelling in trains, or sailing upon the sea, have I so often felt this curious enrichment as I have upon this hillside, working alone in field, or garden, or orchard, It seems to come up out of the soil, or respond to the touch of growing things.

What makes any work interesting is the fact that one can make experiments, try new things, develop specialties and grow. And where can he do this with such success as on the land and in direct contact with nature. The possibilities are here infinite new machinery, spraying, seed testing, fertilizers, experimentation with new varieties. A thousand and one methods, all creative, which may be tried out in that great essential struggle of the farmer or gardener to command all the forces of nature.

Because there are farmers, and many of them, who do not experiment and do not grow, but make their occupation a veritable black drudgery, this is no reason for painting a sombre-hued picture of country life. Any calling, the law, the ministry, the medical profession, can be blasted by fixing one's eyes only upon its ugliest aspects. And farming, at its best, has become a highly scientific, extraordinarily absorbing, and when all is said, a profitable, profession. Neighbours of mine have developed systems of overhead irrigation to make rain when there is no rain, and have covered whole fields with cloth canopies to increase the warmth and to protect the crops from wind and hail, and by the analysis of the soil and exact methods of feeding it with fertilizers, have come as near a complete command of nature as any farmers in the world. What independent, resourceful men they are! And many of them have also grown rich in money. It is not what nature does with a man that matters but what he does with nature.

Nor is it necessary in these days for the farmer or the country dweller to be uncultivated or uninterested in what are often called, with no very clear definition, the "finer things of life." Many educated men are now on the farms and have their books and magazines, and their music and lectures and dramas not too far off in the towns. A great change in this respect has come over American country life in twenty years. The real hardships of pioneering have passed away, and with good roads and machinery, and telephones, and newspapers every day by rural post, the farmer may maintain as close a touch with the best things the world has to offer as any man. And if he really have such broader interests the winter furnishes him time and leisure that no other class of people can command.

I do not know, truly, what we are here for upon this wonderful and beautiful earth, this incalculably interesting earth, unless it is to crowd into a few short years--when all is said, terribly short years!--every possible fine experience and adventure: unless it is to live our lives to the uttermost: unless it is to seize upon every fresh impression, develop every latent capacity: to grow as much as ever we have it in our power to grow. What else can there be? If there is no life beyond this one, we have lived here to the uttermost. We've had what we've had! But if there is more life, and still more life, beyond this one, and above and under this one, and around and through this one, we shall be well prepared for that, whatever it may be.

The real advantages of country life have come to be a strong lure to many people in towns and cities: but no one should attempt to "go back to the land" with the idea that it is an easy way to escape the real problems and difficulties of life. The fact is, there is no escape. The problems and the difficulties must be boldly met whether in city or country. Farming in these days is not "easy living," but a highly skilled profession, requiring much knowledge, and actual manual labour and plenty of it. So many come to the country too light-heartedly, buy too much land, attempt unfamiliar crops, expect to hire the work done--and soon find themselves facing discouragement and failure. Any city man who would venture on this new way of life should try it first for a year or so before he commits himself--try himself out against the actual problems. Or, by moving to the country, still within reach of his accustomed work, he can have a garden or even a small farm to experiment with. The shorter work-day has made this possible for a multitude of wage-workers, and I know many instances in which life because of this opportunity to get to the soil has become a very different and much finer thing for them.

It is easy also for many men who are engaged in professional work to live where they can get their hands into the soil for part of the time at least: and this may be made as real an experience as far as it goes as though they owned wider acres and devoted their whole time to the work.

A man who thus faces the problem squarely will soon see whether country life is the thing for him; if he finds it truly so, he can be as nearly assured of "living happily ever after" as any one outside of a story-book can ever be. Out of it all is likely to come some of the greatest rewards that men can know, a robust body, a healthy appetite, a serene and cheerful spirit!

And finally there is one advantage not so easy to express. Long ago I read a story of Tolstoi's called "The Candle"--how a peasant Russian forced to plough on Easter Day lighted a candle to his Lord and kept it burning on his plough as he worked through the sacred day. When I see a man ploughing in his fields I often think of Tolstoi's peasant, and wonder if this is not as true a way as any of worshipping God. I wonder if any one truly worships God who sets about it with deliberation, or knows quite why he does it.

"My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as showers upon the grass."

On The Downs

A. G. Gardiner

We spread our lunch on the crown of one of those great billows of the downs that stand along the sea. Down in the hollows tiny villages or farmsteads stood in the midst of clumps of trees, and the cultivated lands looked like squares of many-coloured carpets, brown carpets and yellow carpets and green carpets, with the cloud shadows passing over them and moving like battalions up the gracious slopes of the downs beyond. A gleam of white in the midst of one of the brown fields caught the eye. It seemed like a patch of snow that had survived the rigours of the English summer, but suddenly it rose as if blown by the wind and came towards us in tiny flakes of white that turned to seagulls. They sailed high above us uttering that querulous cry that seems to have in it all the unsatisfied hunger of the sea.

In this splendid spaciousness the familiar forms seem incredibly diminutive. That little speck moving across one of the brown carpets is a ploughman and his team. That white stream that looks like milk flowing over the green carpet is a flock of sheep running before the sheep-dog to another pasture. And the ear no less than the eye learns to translate the faint suggestions into known terms. At first it seems that, save for the larks that spring up here and there with their cascades of song, the whole of this immense vacancy is soundless. But listen. There is "the wind on the heath, brother." And below that, and only audible when you have attuned your ear to the silence, is the low murmur of the sea.

You begin to grow interested in probing the secrecies of this great stillness. That? Ah, that was the rumble of some distant railway train going to Brighton or Eastbourne. But what was that? Through the voices of the wind and the sea that we have learned to distinguish we catch another sound, curiously hollow and infinitely remote, not vaguely pervasive like the murmur of the sea, but round and precise like the beating of a drum somewhere on the confines of the earth.

"The guns!"

Yes, the guns. Across fifty miles of sea and fifty miles of land the sound is borne to us as we sit in the midst of this great peace of earth and sky. When once detached, as it were, from the vague murmurs of the breathing air it becomes curiously insistent. It throbs on the ear almost like the beating of a pulse--baleful, sepulchral, like the strokes of doom. We begin counting them, wondering whether they are the guns of the enemy or our own, speculating as to the course of the battle.

We have become spectators of the great tragedy, and the throb of the guns touches the scene with new suggestions. Those cloud shadows drifting across the valley and up the slopes of the downs on the other side take on the shapes of massed battalions. The apparent solitude does not destroy the impression. There is no solitude so complete to the outward eye as that which broods over the country when the armies face each other in the grips of death. I have looked from the mountain of Rheims across just such a valley as this. Twenty miles of battle front lay before me, and in all that great field of vision there was not a moving thing visible. There were no cattle in the fields and no ploughmen following their teams. Roads marched across the landscape, but they were empty roads. It was as though life had vanished from the earth. Yet I knew that all over that great valley the earth was crawling with life and full of immense and sinister secrecies--the galleries of the sappers, the trenches and redoubts, the hiding-places of great guns, the concealed observations of the watchers. Yes, it was just such a scene as this. The only difference was that you had not to put your ear to the ground to catch the thunder of the guns.

But the voice of war that has broken in upon our peace fades when we are once more on the move over the downs, and the visions it has brought with it seem unreal and phantasmal in their serene and sunlit world. The shadows turn to mere shadows again, and we tread the wild thyme and watch the spiral of the lark with careless rapture. We dip down into a valley to a village hidden among the trees, without fear or thought of bomb-proof shelters and masked batteries, and there in a cottage with the roses over the porch we take rest and counsel over the teacups. Then once more on to the downs. The evening shadows are stretching across the valleys, but on these spacious heights the sunshine still rests. Some one starts singing that jolly old song, "The Farmer's Boy," and soon the air resounds to the chorus:

"To plough and sow, to reap and mow,

And be a farmer's boy-o-o-o-oy,

And be a farmer's boy."

No one recalls the throbbing of the guns or stops to catch it from amidst the murmurs of the air. This--this is the reality. That was only an echo from a bad dream from which we have awakened.

And when an hour or two later we reach the little village by the sea we rush for the letters that await us with eager curiosity. There is silence in the room as each of us devours the budget of news awaiting us. I am vaguely conscious as I read that some one has left the room with a sense of haste. I go up to my bedroom, and when I return the sitting-room is empty save for one figure. I see at a glance that something has happened.

"Robert has been killed in battle," he says. How near the sound of the guns had come!

On Thoughts At Fifty

A. G. Gardiner

Stevenson, it will be remembered, once assigned his birthday to a little girl--or was it a boy?--of his acquaintance. The child was fond of birthdays, while he had reached a time of life when they had ceased to have any interest for him. Most of us, if we live long enough, experience that indifference. The birthday emotion vanishes with the toys that awaken it. I remember when life was a journey from one birthday to another, the tedium of which was only relieved by such agreeable incidents as Christmas, Easter, and the school holidays. But for many years I have stumbled up against my birthday, as it were, with a shock of surprise, have given it a nod of recognition as one might greet an ancient acquaintance with whom one has lost sympathy, and have passed on without a further thought about the occasion.

But to-day it is different. One cannot pass over one's fiftieth birthday without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those days! It was so remote as to be hardly worth thinking about. To be fifty was to be among the old fellows, to be on the shelf, to have become an antiquity.

And now here am I at fifty, and so far from feeling like an antiquity, I feel as much of a young fellow as at any time of my life. I had feared that when middle age overtook me I should feel middle-aged and full of sad longings for the old toys and the old pleasures. How would life be tolerable when cricket, for example, had ceased to play an important part in it? Never again to have the ecstasy of a drive along "the carpet" to the boundary or, with a flash of the arm, snapping an opponent in the slips.(탈주) What a dreary desolation life must be, stripped of those joys! And on the contrary I find that the spirit of youth is no more dependent on cricket than it is on the taste for lollipops.(막대사탕) It consists in the contented acceptance of the things that are possible to us. Do not suppose, young fellow, that you are any younger than I am because you can jump five feet eight and I have ceased to want to jump at all. The feeling of youth is something much deeper and more enduring than the ability to jump five feet eight. It may be as vigorous at eighty as it is at eighteen. It is only its manner of expression which is changed. Holmes never admitted that he had grown old. "I am eighty-three young to-day," he would say. And Johnson, with his old age and his infirmities, still insisted that he was "a young fellow"--as, indeed, he was, for where shall we find such freshness of spirit, such a defiance of the tooth of Time as in that grand old boy?

Youth, in fact, is not a physical affair at all, but an affair of the soul. You may be spiritually bald-headed at twenty-five or a romping(까불며 뛰노는) young blade at eighty. Byron was only thirty-four when he wrote:--

I am ashes where once I was fire.

And the soul in my bosom is dead;

What I loved I now merely admire,

And my heart is as grey as my head.

Perhaps there was some affectation in this, for Byron was always dramatising himself. But that he died an old man at thirty-six is as indisputable as that Browning died a young man at seventy-seven, with that triumphant envoi(고별사) of Asolando as his last expression of the eternal youth of the soul.

In thinking of old age, the mistake is to assume that the spirit must decay with the body. Of course, if the body is maltreated it will react on the spirit. But the natural decline of the physical powers leaves the healthy spirit untouched with age, should indeed leave it strengthened--glowing not with passion but with a steadier fire. When we are young in years our eager spirit cries for the moon.

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not.

But as we get older we learn to be satisfied with something nearer than the moon. The horizon of our hopes and ambitions narrows, but the sky above is not less deep, and we make the wonderful discovery that the things that matter are very near to us. It is the homing(귀소(歸巢) of the spirit. We have been avid of the "topless grandeurs" of life, and we return to find that the spiritual satisfactions we sought were all the time within very easy reach. And in cultivating those satisfactions intensively we make another discovery. We find that this is the true way to the "topless grandeurs" themselves, for those topless grandeurs are not without us but within.

But I am afraid I am sermonising, and I do not want to sermonise, though if ever a man may be allowed to sermonise it is when he is completing his half-century. Let me as an antidote(해독제) recall a little story which the present Bishop of Chester once told me over the dinner table, for it contains a practical recipe for keeping the heart young. He was in his earlier days associated with Archdeacon Jones of Liverpool. The Archdeacon, then over eighty, had been tutor to Gladstone, and one day the future Bishop turned the conversation into a reminiscent channel, and sought to evoke the Archdeacon's memories of the long past. Presently the Archdeacon abruptly changed the subject by asking, "What was the concert of the Philharmonic like last night?" And then, in answer to the obvious surprise which the question had aroused, he added, "Although I am an old man, I want to keep my heart young, and the best way of doing that is not to let one's thoughts live in the past, but to keep them in tune with the life around one."

The truth is that every stage of the journey has its own interests. Probably none is better than another, but my own preference has always been for that stage which I happen to be doing at the time. When I was twenty I thought there was no age like twenty, and now I am fifty I have transferred my enthusiasm to fifty. There is no age like it, I feel, for all-round enjoyment. And I have a strong conviction that if I have the good fortune to reach sixty I shall be found declaring that there is no age like sixty. And why not? It is pleasant to see the sun on the morning hills, but it is not less pleasant to walk home when the shadows are lengthening and the cool of the evening has come.

Minorities Versus Majorities

Emma Goldman

If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life--production, politics, and education--rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden.

In politics, naught but quantity counts. In proportion to its increase, however, principles, ideals, justice, and uprightness are completely swamped by the array of numbers. In the struggle for supremacy the various political parties outdo each other in trickery, deceit, cunning, and shady machinations, confident that the one who succeeds is sure to be hailed by the majority as the victor. That is the only god,--Success. As to what expense, what terrible cost to character, is of no moment. We have not far to go in search of proof to verify this sad fact.

Never before did the corruption, the complete rottenness of our government stand so thoroughly exposed; never before were the American people brought face to face with the Judas nature of that political body, which has claimed for years to be absolutely beyond reproach, as the mainstay of our institutions, the true protector of the rights and liberties of the people.

Yet when the crimes of that party became so brazen that even the blind could see them, it needed but to muster up its minions, and its supremacy was assured. Thus the very victims, duped, betrayed, outraged a hundred times, decided, not against, but in favor of the victor. Bewildered, the few asked how could the majority betray the traditions of American liberty? Where was its judgment, its reasoning capacity? That is just it, the majority cannot reason; it has no judgment. Lacking utterly in originality and moral courage, the majority has always placed its destiny in the hands of others. Incapable of standing responsibilities, it has followed its leaders even unto destruction. Dr. Stockman was right: "The most dangerous enemies of truth and justice in our midst are the compact majorities, the damned compact majority." Without ambition or initiative, the compact mass hates nothing so much as innovation. It has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth.

The oft repeated slogan of our time is, among all politicians, the Socialists included, that ours is an era of individualism, of the minority. Only those who do not probe beneath the surface might be led to entertain this view. Have not the few accumulated the wealth of the world? Are they not the masters, the absolute kings of the situation? Their success, however, is due not to individualism, but to the inertia, the cravenness, the utter submission of the mass. The latter wants but to be dominated, to be led, to be coerced. As to individualism, at no time in human history did it have less chance of expression, less opportunity to assert itself in a normal, healthy manner.

The individual educator imbued with honesty of purpose, the artist or writer of original ideas, the independent scientist or explorer, the non-compromising pioneers of social changes are daily pushed to the wall by men whose learning and creative ability have become decrepit with age.

Educators of Ferrer's type are nowhere tolerated, while the dietitians of predigested food, a la Professors Eliot and Butler, are the successful perpetuators of an age of nonentities, of automatons. In the literary and dramatic world, the Humphrey Wards and Clyde Fitches are the idols of the mass, while but few know or appreciate the beauty and genius of an Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman; an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Butler Yeats, or a Stephen Phillips. They are like solitary stars, far beyond the horizon of the multitude.

Publishers, theatrical managers, and critics ask not for the quality inherent in creative art, but will it meet with a good sale, will it suit the palate of the people? Alas, this palate is like a dumping ground; it relishes anything that needs no mental mastication. As a result, the mediocre, the ordinary, the commonplace represents the chief literary output.

Need I say that in art we are confronted with the same sad facts? One has but to inspect our parks and thoroughfares to realize the hideousness and vulgarity of the art manufacture. Certainly, none but a majority taste would tolerate such an outrage on art. False in conception and barbarous in execution, the statuary that infests American cities has as much relation to true art, as a totem to a Michael Angelo. Yet that is the only art that succeeds. The true artistic genius, who will not cater to accepted notions, who exercises originality, and strives to be true to life, leads an obscure and wretched existence. His work may some day become the fad of the mob, but not until his heart's blood had been exhausted; not until the pathfinder has ceased to be, and a throng of an idealless and visionless mob has done to death the heritage of the master.

It is said that the artist of today cannot create because Prometheus-like he is bound to the rock of economic necessity. This, however, is true of art in all ages. Michael Angelo was dependent on his patron saint, no less than the sculptor or painter of today, except that the art connoisseurs of those days were far away from the madding crowd. They felt honored to be permitted to worship at the shrine of the master.

The art protector of our time knows but one criterion, one value,--the dollar. He is not concerned about the quality of any great work, but in the quantity of dollars his purchase implies. Thus the financier in Mirbeau's LES AFFAIRES SONT LES AFFAIRES points to some blurred arrangement in colors, saying "See how great it is; it cost 50,000 francs." Just like our own parvenues. The fabulous figures paid for their great art discoveries must make up for the poverty of their taste.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought. That this should be so terribly apparent in a country whose symbol is democracy, is very significant of the tremendous power of the majority.

Wendell Phillips said fifty years ago: "In our country of absolute democratic equality, public opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omnipresent. There is no refuge from its tyranny, there is no hiding from its reach, and the result is that if you take the old Greek lantern and go about to seek among a hundred, you will not find a single American who has not, or who does not fancy at least he has, something to gain or lose in his ambition, his social life, or business, from the good opinion and the votes of those around him. And the consequence is that instead of being a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly blurting out his own conviction, as a nation compared to other nations we are a mass of cowards. More than any other people we are afraid of each other." Evidently we have not advanced very far from the condition that confronted Wendell Phillips.

Today, as then, public opinion is the omnipresent tyrant; today, as then, the majority represents a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirrors its own soul and mind poverty. That accounts for the unprecedented rise of a man like Roosevelt. He embodies the very worst element of mob psychology. A politician, he knows that the majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display. It matters not whether that be a dog show, a prize fight, the lynching of a "nigger," the rounding up of some petty offender, the marriage exposition of an heiress, or the acrobatic stunts of an ex-president. The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass. Thus, poor in ideals and vulgar of soul, Roosevelt continues to be the man of the hour.

On the other hand, men towering high above such political pygmies, men of refinement, of culture, of ability, are jeered into silence as mollycoddles. It is absurd to claim that ours is the era of individualism. Ours is merely a more poignant repetition of the phenomenon of all history: every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

The principle of brotherhood expounded by the agitator of Nazareth preserved the germ of life, of truth and justice, so long as it was the beacon light of the few. The moment the majority seized upon it, that great principle became a shibboleth and harbinger of blood and fire, spreading suffering and disaster. The attack on the omnipotence of Rome was like a sunrise amid the darkness of the night, only so long as it was made by the colossal figures of a Huss, a Calvin, or a Luther. Yet when the mass joined in the procession against the Catholic monster, it was no less cruel, no less bloodthirsty than its enemy. Woe to the heretics, to the minority, who would not bow to its dicta. After infinite zeal, endurance, and sacrifice, the human mind is at last free from the religious phantom; the minority has gone on in pursuit of new conquests, and the majority is lagging behind, handicapped by truth grown false with age.

Politically the human race would still be in the most absolute slavery, were it not for the John Balls, the Wat Tylers, the Tells, the innumerable individual giants who fought inch by inch against the power of kings and tyrants. But for individual pioneers the world would have never been shaken to its very roots by that tremendous wave, the French Revolution. Great events are usually preceded by apparently small things. Thus the eloquence and fire of Camille Desmoulins was like the trumpet before Jericho, razing to the ground that emblem of torture, of abuse, of horror, the Bastille.

Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move. The truth of this is borne out in Russia with greater force than elsewhere. Thousands of lives have already been consumed by that bloody regime, yet the monster on the throne is not appeased. How is such a thing possible when ideas, culture, literature, when the deepest and finest emotions groan under the iron yoke? The majority, that compact, immobile, drowsy mass, the Russian peasant, after a century of struggle, of sacrifice, of untold misery, still believes that the rope which strangles "the man with the white hands"[1] brings luck.

In the American struggle for liberty, the majority was no less of a stumbling block. Until this very day the ideas of Jefferson, of Patrick Henry, of Thomas Paine, are denied and sold by their posterity. The mass wants none of them. The greatness and courage worshipped in Lincoln have been forgotten in the men who created the background for the panorama of that time. The true patron saints of the black men were represented in that handful of fighters in Boston, Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, whose great courage and sturdiness culminated in that somber giant, John Brown. Their untiring zeal, their eloquence and perseverance undermined the stronghold of the Southern lords. Lincoln and his minions followed only when abolition had become a practical issue, recognized as such by all.

About fifty years ago, a meteor-like idea made its appearance on the social horizon of the world, an idea so far-reaching, so revolutionary, so all-embracing as to spread terror in the hearts of tyrants everywhere. On the other hand, that idea was a harbinger of joy, of cheer, of hope to the millions. The pioneers knew the difficulties in their way, they knew the opposition, the persecution, the hardships that would meet them, but proud and unafraid they started on their march onward, ever onward. Now that idea has become a popular slogan. Almost everyone is a Socialist today: the rich man, as well as his poor victim; the upholders of law and authority, as well as their unfortunate culprits; the freethinker, as well as the perpetuator of religious falsehoods; the fashionable lady, as well as the shirtwaist girl. Why not? Now that the truth of fifty years ago has become a lie, now that it has been clipped of all its youthful imagination, and been robbed of its vigor, its strength, its revolutionary ideal--why not? Now that it is no longer a beautiful vision, but a "practical, workable scheme," resting on the will of the majority, why not? With the same political cunning and shrewdness the mass is petted, pampered, cheated daily. Its praise is being sung in many keys: the poor majority, the outraged, the abused, the giant majority, if only it would follow us.

Who has not heard this litany before? Who does not know this never-varying refrain of all politicians? That the mass bleeds, that it is being robbed and exploited, I know as well as our vote-baiters. But I insist that not the handful of parasites, but the mass itself is responsible for this horrible state of affairs. It clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify! the moment a protesting voice is raised against the sacredness of capitalistic authority or any other decayed institution. Yet how long would authority and private property exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen. The Socialist demagogues know that as well as I, but they maintain the myth of the virtues of the majority, because their very scheme of life means the perpetuation of power. And how could the latter be acquired without numbers? Yes, power, authority, coercion, and dependence rest on the mass, but never freedom, never the free unfoldment of the individual, never the birth of a free society.

Not because I do not feel with the oppressed, the disinherited of the earth; not because I do not know the shame, the horror, the indignity of the lives the people lead, do I repudiate the majority as a creative force for good. Oh, no, no! But because I know so well that as a compact mass it has never stood for justice or equality. It has suppressed the human voice, subdued the human spirit, chained the human body. As a mass its aim has always been to make life uniform, gray, and monotonous as the desert. As a mass it will always be the annihilator of individuality, of free initiative, of originality. I therefore believe with Emerson that "the masses are crude, lame, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. Masses! The calamity are the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only."

In other words, the living, vital truth of social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass.

On A Bit Of Seaweed

A. G. Gardiner

The postman came just now, and among the letters he brought was one from North Wales. It was fat and soft and bulgy, and when it was opened we found it contained a bit of seaweed. The thought that prompted the sender was friendly, but the momentary effect was to arouse wild longings for the sea, and to add one more count to the indictment of the Kaiser, who had sent us for the holidays into the country, where we could obey the duty to economise, rather than to the seaside, where the temptations to extravagance could not be dodged. "Oh, how it smells of Sheringham," said one whose vote is always for the East Coast. "No, there is the smack of Sidmouth, and Dawlish, and Torquay in its perfume," said another, whose passion is for the red cliffs of South Devon. And so on, each finding, as he or she sniffed at the seaweed, the windows of memory opening out on to the foam of summer seas. And soon the table was enveloped in a rushing tide of recollection--memories of bathing and boating, of barefooted races on the sands, of jolly fishermen who always seemed to be looking out seaward for something that never came, of hunting for shells, and of all the careless raptures of dawn and noon and sunset by the seashore. All awakened by the smell of a bit of seaweed.

It is this magic of reminiscence that makes the world such a storehouse of intimacies and confidences. There is hardly a bird that sings, or a flower that blows, or a cloud that sails in the blue that does not bring us some hint from the past, and set us tingling with remembrance. We open a drawer by chance, and the smell of lavender issues forth, and with that lingering perfume the past is unrolled like a scroll, and places long unseen leap to the inward eye and voices long unheard are speaking to us:--

We tread the path their feet have worn.

We sit beneath their orchard trees,

We hear, like them, the hum of bees,

And rustle of the bladed corn.

Who can see the first daffodils of spring without feeling a sort of spiritual festival that the beauty of the flower alone cannot explain? The memory of all the springs of the past is in their dancing plumes, and the assurance of all the springs to come. They link us up with the pageant of nature, and with the immortals of our kind--with Wordsworth watching them in "sprightly dance" by Ullswater, with Herrick finding in them the sweet image of the beauty and transience of life, with Shakespeare greeting them "in the sweet o' the year" by Avon's banks long centuries ago.

And in this sensitiveness of memory to external suggestion there is infinite variety. It is not a collective memory that is awakened, but a personal memory. That bit of seaweed opened many windows in us, but they all looked out on different scenes and reminded us of something individual and inexplicable, of something which is a part of that ultimate loneliness that belongs to all of us. Everything speaks a private language to each of us that we can never translate to others. I do not know what the lilac says to you; but to me it talks of a garden-gate over which it grew long ago. I am a child again, standing within the gate, and I see the red-coated soldiers marching along with jolly jests and snatching the lilac sprays from the tree as they pass. The emotion of pride that these heroes should honour our lilac tree by ravishing its blossoms all comes back to me, together with a flood of memories of the old garden and the old home and the vanished faces. Why that momentary picture should have fixed itself in the mind I cannot say; but there it is, as fresh and clear at the end of nearly fifty years as if it were painted yesterday, and the lilac tree bursting into blossom always unveils it again.

It is these multitudinous associations that give life its colour and its poetry. They are the garnerings of the journey, and unlike material gains they are no burden to our backs and no anxiety to our mind. "The true harvest of my life," said Thoreau, "is something as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was the summary, the essence, of all his experience. We are like bees foraging in the garden of the world, and hoarding the honey in the hive of memory. And no hoard is like any other hoard that ever was or ever will be. The cuckoo calling over the valley, the blackbird fluting in the low boughs in the evening, the solemn majesty of the Abbey, the life of the streets, the ebb and flow of Father Thames--everything whispers to us some secret that it has for no other ear, and touches a chord of memory that echoes in no other brain. Those deeps within us find only a crude expression in the vehicle of words and actions, and our intercourse with men touches but the surface of ourselves. The rest is "as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was one of the most companionable of men, William Morris, who said:

That God has made each one of us as lone

As He Himself sits.

That is why, in moments of exaltation, our only refuge is silence, and the world of memory within answers the world of suggestion without.

"And what does the seaweed remind you of?" said one, as I looked up after smelling it. "It reminds me," I said, "of all the seas that wash our shores, and of all the brave sailors who are guarding these seas day and night, while we sit here secure. It reminds me also that I have an article to write, and that its title is 'A Bit of Seaweed.'"

In Praise of Walking

A. G. Gardiner

I started out the other day from Keswick with a rucksack on my back, a Baddeley in my pocket, and a companion by my side. I like a companion when I go a-walking. "Give me a companion by the way," said Sterne, "if it be only to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." That is about enough. You do not want a talkative person. Walking is an occupation in itself. You may give yourself up to chatter at the beginning, but when you are warmed to the job you are disposed to silence, drop perhaps one behind the other, and reserve your talk for the inn table and the after-supper pipe. An occasional joke, an occasional stave of song, a necessary consultation over the map--that is enough for the way.

At the head of the Lake we got in a boat and rowed across Derwentwater to the tiny bay at the foot of Catbells. There we landed, shouldered our burdens, and set out over the mountains and the passes, and for a week we enjoyed the richest solitude this country can offer. We followed no cut-and-dried programme. I love to draw up programmes for a walking tour, but I love still better to break them. For one of the joys of walking is the sense of freedom it gives you. You are tied to no time-table, the slave of no road, the tributary of no man. If you like the road you follow it; if you choose the pass that is yours also; if your fancy (and your wind) is for the mountain tops, then over Great Gable and Scawfell, Robinson and Helvellyn be your way. Every short cut is for you, and every track is the path of adventure. The stream that tumbles down the mountain side is your wine cup. You kneel on the boulders, bend your head, and take such draughts as only the healthy thirst of the mountains can give. And then, on your way again singing:--

Bed in the bush with the stars to see.

Bread I dip in the river--

There's the life for a man like me.

There's the life for ever.

What liberty is there like this? You have cut your moorings from the world, you are far from telegraphs and newspapers and all the frenzies of the life you have left behind you, you are alone with the lonely hills and the wide sky and the elemental things that have been from the beginning and will outlast all the tortured drama of men. The very sounds of life--the whistle of the curlew, the bleating of the mountain sheep--add to the sense of primeval solitude. To these sounds the crags have echoed for a thousand and ten thousand years; to these sounds and to the rushing of the winds and the waters they will echo ten thousand years hence. It is as though you have passed out of time into eternity, where a thousand years are as one day. There is no calendar for this dateless world. The buzzard that you have startled from its pool in the gully and that circles round with wide-flapping wings has a lineage as ancient as the hills, and the vision of the pikes of Langdale that bursts on you as you reach the summit of Esk hause is the same vision that burst on the first savage who adventured into these wild fastnesses of the mountains.

And then as the sun begins to slope to the west you remember that, if you are among immortal things, you are only a mortal yourself, that you are getting footsore, and that you need a night's lodging and the comforts of an inn. Whither shall we turn? The valleys call us on every side. Newlands wide vale we can reach, or cheerful Borrowdale, or lonely Ennerdale, or--yes, to-night we will sup at Wastdale, at the jolly old inn that Auld Will Ritson used to keep, that inn sacred to the cragsman, where on New Year's Eve the gay company of climbers foregather from their brave deeds on the mountains and talk of hand-holds and foot-holds and sing the song of "The rope, the rope," and join in the chorus as the landlord trolls out:

I'm not a climber, not a climber,

Not a climber now,

My weight is going fourteen stone--

I'm not a climber now.

We shall not find Gaspard there to-night--Gaspard, the gay and intrepid guide from the Dauphine, beloved of all who know the lonely inn at Wastdale. He is away on the battle-field fighting a sterner foe than the rocks and precipices of Great Gable and Scawfell. But Old Joe, the shepherd, will be there--Old Joe, who has never been in a train or seen a town and whose special glory is that he can pull uglier faces than any man in Cumberland. He will not pull them for anybody--only when he is in a good humour and for his cronies in the back parlour. To-night, perchance, we shall see his eyes roll as he roars out the chorus of "D'ye ken John Peel?" Yes, Wastdale shall be to-night's halt. And so over Black Sail, and down the rough mountain side to the inn whose white-washed walls hail us from afar out of the gathering shadows of the valley.

To-morrow? Well, to-morrow shall be as to-day. We will shoulder our rucksacks early, and be early on the mountains, for the first maxim in going a journey is the early start. Have the whip-hand of the day, and then you may loiter as you choose. If it is hot, you may bathe in the chill waters of those tarns that lie bare to the eye of heaven in the hollows of the hills--tarns with names of beauty and waters of such crystal purity as Killarney knows not. And at night we will come through the clouds down the wild course of Rosset Ghyll and sup and sleep in the hotel hard by Dungeon Ghyll, or, perchance, having the day well in hand, we will push on by Blea Tarn and Yewdale to Coniston, or by Easedale Tarn to Grasmere, and so to the Swan at the foot of Dunmail Raise. For we must call at the Swan. Was it not the Swan that Wordsworth's "Waggoner" so triumphantly passed? Was it not the Swan to which Sir Walter Scott used to go for his beer when he was staying with Wordsworth at Rydal Water? And behind the Swan is there not that fold in the hills where Wordsworth's "Michael" built, or tried to build, his sheepfold? Yes, we will stay at the Swan whatever befalls.

And so the jolly days go by, some wet, some fine, some a mixture of both, but all delightful, and we forget the day of the week, know no news except the changes in the weather and the track over the mountains, meet none of our kind except a rare vagabond like ourselves--with rope across his shoulder if he is a rock-man, with rucksack on back if he is a tourist--and with no goal save some far-off valley inn where we shall renew our strength and where the morrow's uprising to deeds shall be sweet.

I started to write in praise of walking, and I find I have written in praise of Lakeland. But indeed the two chants of praise are a single harmony, for I have written in vain if I have not shown that the way to see the most exquisite cabinet of beauties in this land is by the humble path of the pedestrian. He who rides through Lakeland knows nothing of its secrets, has tasted of none of its magic.

A Good Apple

David Grayson

"I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods."

I have just had one of the pleasant experiences of life. From time to time, these brisk winter days, I like to walk across the fields to Horace's farm. I take a new way each time and make nothing of the snow in the fields or the drifts along the fences....

"Why," asks Harriet, "do you insist on struggling through the snow when there's a good beaten road around?"

"Harriet," I said, "why should any one take a beaten road when there are new and adventurous ways to travel?"

When I cross the fields I never know at what moment I may come upon some strange or surprising experience, what new sights I may see, what new sounds I may hear, and I have the further great advantage of appearing unexpectedly at Horace's farm. Sometimes I enter by the cow lane, sometimes by way of the old road through the wood-lot, or I appear casually, like a gust of wind, around the corner of the barn, or I let Horace discover me leaning with folded arms upon his cattle fence. I have come to love doing this, for unexpectedness in visitors, as in religion and politics, is disturbing to Horace and, as sand-grits in oysters produce pearls, my unexpected appearances have more than once astonished new thoughts in Horace, or yielded pearly bits of native humour.

Ever since I have known him, Horace has been rather high-and-mighty with me; but I know he enjoys my visits, for I give him always, I think, a pleasantly renewed sense of his own superiority. When he sees me his eye lights up with the comfortable knowledge that he can plough so much better than I can, that his corn grows taller than mine, and his hens lay more eggs. He is a wonderfully practical man, is Horace; hard-headed, they call it here. And he never feels so superior, I think, as when he finds me sometimes of a Sunday or an evening walking across the fields where my land joins his, or sitting on a stone fence, or lying on my back in the pasture under a certain friendly thorn-apple tree. This he finds it difficult to understand, and thinks it highly undisciplined, impractical, no doubt reprehensible.

One incident of the sort I shall never forget. It was on a June day only a year or so after I came here, and before Horace knew me as well as he does now. I had climbed the hill to look off across his own high-field pasture, where the white daisies, the purple fleabane, and the buttercups made a wild tangle of beauty among the tall herd's grass. Light airs moved billowing across the field, bobolinks and meadow larks were singing, and all about were the old fences, each with its wild hedgerow of choke cherry, young elms, and black raspberry bushes, and beyond, across miles and miles of sunny green countryside, the mysterious blue of the ever-changing hills. It was a spot I loved then, and have loved more deeply every year since.

Horace found me sitting on the stone fence which there divides our possessions; I think he had been observing me with amusement for some time before I saw him, for when I looked around his face wore a comfortably superior, half-disdainful smile.

"David," said he, "what ye doin' here?"

"Harvesting my crops," I said.

He looked at me sharply to see if I was joking, but I was perfectly sober.

"Harvestin' yer crops?"

"Yes," I said, the fancy growing suddenly upon me, "and just now I've been taking a crop from the field you think you own."

I waved my hand to indicate his high-field pasture.

"Don't I own it?"

"No, Horace, I'm sorry to say, not all of it. To be frank with you, since I came here, I've quietly acquired an undivided interest in that land. I may as well tell you first as last. I'm like you, Horace, I'm reaching out in all directions."

I spoke in as serious a voice as I could command: the tone I use when I sell potatoes. Horace's smile wholly disappeared. A city feller like me was capable of anything!

"How's that?" he exclaimed sharply. "What do you mean? That field came down to me from my grandfather Jamieson."

I continued to look at Horace with great calmness and gravity.

"Judging from what I now know of your title, Horace," said I, "neither your grandfather Jamieson nor your father ever owned all of that field. And I've now acquired that part of it, in fee simple, that neither they nor you ever really had."

At this Horace began to look seriously worried. The idea that any one could get away from him anything that he possessed, especially without his knowledge, was terrible to him.

"What do you mean, Mr. Grayson?"

He had been calling me "David," but he now returned sharply to "Mister." In our country when we "Mister" a friend something serious is about to happen. It's the signal for general mobilization.

I continued to look Horace rather coldly and severely in the eye.

"Yes," said I, "I've acquired a share in that field which I shall not soon surrender."

An unmistakable dogged look came into Horace's face, the look inherited from generations of land-owning, home-defending, fighting ancestors. Horace is New England of New England.

"Yes," I said, "I have already had two or three crops from that field."

"Huh!" said Horace. "I've cut the grass and I've cut the rowen every year since you bin here. What's more, I've got the money fer it in the bank."

He tapped his fingers on the top of the wall.

"Nevertheless, Horace," said I, "I've got my crops, also, from that field, and a steady income, too."

"What crops?"

"Well, Even just now been gathering in one of them. What do you think of the value of the fleabane, and the daisies, and the yellow five-finger in that field?"

"Huh!" said Horace.

"Well, I've just been cropping them. And have you observed the wind in the grass--and those shadows along the southern wall? Aren't they valuable?"

"Huh!" said Horace.

"I've rarely seen anything more beautiful," I said, "than this field and the view across it--I'm taking that crop now, and later I shall gather in the rowen of goldenrod and aster, and the red and yellow of the maple trees--and store it all away in my bank--to live on next winter."

It was some time before either of us spoke again, but I could see from the corner of my eye that mighty things were going on inside of Horace; and suddenly he broke out into a big laugh and clapped his knee with his hand in a way he has.

"Is that all!" said Horace.

I think it only confirmed him in the light esteem in which he held me. Though I showed him unmeasured wealth in his own fields, ungathered crops of new enjoyment, he was unwilling to take them, but was content with hay. It is a strange thing to me, and a sad one, how many of our farmers (and be it said in a whisper, other people, too) own their lands without ever really possessing them: and let the most precious crops of the good earth go to waste.

After that, for a long time, Horace loved to joke me about my crops and his. A joke with Horace is a durable possession.

"S'pose you think that's your field," he'd say.

"The best part of it," I'd return, "but you can have all I've taken, and there'll still be enough for both of us."

"You're a queer one!" he'd say, and then add sometimes, dryly, "but there's one crop ye don't git, David," and he'd tap his pocket where he carries his fat, worn, leather pocket-book. "And as fer feelin's, it can't be beat."

So many people have the curious idea that the only thing the world desires enough to pay its hard money for is that which can be seen or eaten or worn. But there never was a greater mistake. While men will haggle to the penny over the price of hay, or fight for a cent more to the bushel of oats, they will turn out their very pockets for strange, intangible joys, hopes, thoughts, or for a moment of peace in a feverish world the unknown great possessions.

So it was that one day, some months afterward, when we had been thus bantering each other with great good humour, I said to him:

"Horace, how much did you get for your hay this year?"

"Off that one little piece," he replied, "I figger fifty-two dollars."

"Well, Horace," said I, "I have beaten you. I got more out of it this year than you did."

"Oh, I know what you mean----"

"No, Horace, you don't. This time I mean just what you do: money, cash, dollars."

"How's that, now?"

"Well, I wrote a little piece about your field, and the wind in the grass, and the hedges along the fences, and the weeds among the timothy, and the fragrance of it all in June and sold it last week----" I leaned over toward Horace and whispered behind my hand--in just the way he tells me the price he gets for his pigs.

"What!" he exclaimed.

Horace had long known that I was "a kind of literary feller," but his face was now a study in astonishment.

"What? "

Horace scratched his head, as he is accustomed to do when puzzled, with one finger just under the rim of his hat.

"Well, I vum!" said he.

Here I have been wandering all around Horace's barn--in the snow--getting at the story I really started to tell, which probably supports Horace's conviction that I am an impractical and unsubstantial person. If I had the true business spirit I should have gone by the beaten road from my house to Horace's, borrowed the singletree I went for, and hurried straight home. Life is so short when one is after dollars! I should not have wallowed through the snow, nor stopped at the top of the hill to look for a moment across the beautiful wintry earth--gray sky and bare wild trees and frosted farmsteads with homely smoke rising from the chimneys--I should merely have brought home a singletree--and missed the glory of life! As I reflect upon it now, I believe it took me no longer to go by the fields than by the road; and I've got the singletree as securely with me as though I had not looked upon the beauty of the eternal hills, nor reflected, as I tramped, upon the strange ways of man.

Oh, my friend, is it the settled rule of life that we are to accept nothing not expensive? It is not so settled for me; that which is freest, cheapest, seems somehow more valuable than anything I pay for; that which is given better than that which is bought; that which passes between you and me in the glance of an eye, a touch of the hand, is better than minted money!

I found Horace upon the March day I speak of just coming out of his new fruit cellar. Horace is a progressive and energetic man, a leader in this community, and the first to have a modern fruit cellar. By this means he ministers profitably to that appetite of men which craves most sharply that which is hardest to obtain: he supplies the world with apples in March.

It being a mild and sunny day, the door of the fruit cellar was open, and as I came around the corner I had such of whiff of fragrance as I cannot describe. It seemed as though the vials of the earth's most precious odours had been broken there in Horace's yard! The smell of ripe apples!

In the dusky depths of the cellar, down three steps, I could see Horace's ruddy face.

"How are ye, David," said he. "Will ye have a Good Apple?"

So he gave me a good apple. It was a yellow Bellflower without a blemish, and very large and smooth. The body of it was waxy yellow, but on the side where the sun had touched it, it blushed a delicious deep red. Since October it had been in the dark, cool storage-room, and Horace, like some old monkish connoisseur of wines who knows just when to bring up the bottles of a certain vintage, had chosen the exact moment in all the year when the vintage of the Bellflower was at its best. As he passed it to me I caught, a scent as of old crushed apple blossoms, or fancied I did or it may have been the still finer aroma of friendship which passed at the touching of our fingers.

It was a hand-filling apple and likewise good for tired eyes, an antidote for winter, a remedy for sick souls.

"A wonderful apple!" I said to Horace, holding it off at arm's length.

"No better grown anywhere," said he, with scarcely restrained pride.

I took my delight of it more nearly; and the odour was like new-cut clover in an old orchard, or strawberry leaves freshly trod upon, or the smell of peach wood at the summer pruning--how shall one describe it? at least a compound or essence of all the good odours of summer.

"Shall I eat it?" I asked myself, for I thought such a perfection of nature should be preserved for the blessing of mankind. As I hesitated, Horace remarked:

"It was grown to be eaten."

So I bit into it, a big liberal mouthful, which came away with a rending sound such as one hears sometimes in a winter's ice-pond. The flesh within, all dewy with moisture, was like new cream, except a rim near the surface where the skin had been broken; here it was of a clear, deep yellow.

New odours came forth and I knew for the first time how perfect in deliciousness such an apple could be. A mild, serene, ripe, rich bouquet, compounded essence of the sunshine from these old Massachusetts hills, of moisture drawn from our grudging soil, of all the peculiar virtues of a land where the summers make up in the passion of growth for the long violence of winter; the compensatory aroma of a life triumphant, though hedged about by severity, was in the bouquet of this perfect Bellflower.

Like some of the finest of wines and the warmest of friends it was of two flavours, and was not to be eaten for mere nourishment, but was to be tasted and enjoyed. The first of the flavours came readily in a sweetness, richness, a slight acidity, that it might not cloy; but the deeper, more delicate flavour came later--if one were not crudely impatient--and was, indeed, the very soul of the fruit. One does not quickly arrive at souls either in apples or in friends. And I said to Horace with solemnity, for this was an occasion not to be lightly treated:

"I have never in my life tasted a fine apple."

"There is no finer apple," said Horace with conviction.

With that we fell to discussing the kinds and qualities of all the apples grown this side China, and gave our more or less slighting opinions of Ben Davises and Greenings and Russets, and especially of trivial summer apples of all sorts, and came to the conclusion at last that it must have been just after God created this particular "tree yielding fruit" that he desisted from his day's work and remarked that what he saw was good. The record is silent upon the point, and Moses is not given to adjectives, but I have often wondered what He would have said if He had not only seen the product of His creation, but tasted it.

I forgot to say that when I would have slurred the excellence of the Baldwin in comparison with the Bellflower, Horace began at once to interpose objections, and defended the excellence and perfection of that variety.

...He has fifty barrels of Baldwins in his cellar.

While we talked with much enjoyment of the lore of apples and apple-growing, I finished the Bellflower to the very core, and said to Horace as I reluctantly tossed aside the stem and three seeds:

"Surely this has been one of the rare moments of life."

Drinking Is Fellowship

Jo Ji-hoon

It's only with alcohol that the host, furnishing spirits at his expense, gets angry when his guests don't drink, and it's always been to alcohol's credit that people aren't hateful however much they exaggerate and lie. When drink is offered and accepted with kindly feelings, both the giver and the receiver are given over to warm-heartedness. Neither the speaker nor the listener cares if what they say or hear is true because they are happy to be saying and hearing it. I am proud that I understand that "it is not alcohol that we drink, but the fellowship, and we are not drunk on alcohol but inebriated by the convivial mood." I have two unforgettable experiences of touching kindness related to drinking.

It was about 17 or 18 years ago. One of my friends living in Gwanchul-dong would occasionally put me up for the night even when there was no longer a curfew. One winter day back then, a few of us got together and began drinking, starting at the pub opposite "Dongah Ladies' Goods", sweeping through the bars "White Water" and "Midori" bars on the lane in front of Woomikwan Theater, and on our way dropping in to such cafes as "White Horse" and "Diamond" until the night grew quite late. However, for some unknown reason, we then dispersed in all directions. Dead drunk, I naturally headed for Gwanchul-dong. I shook open the gate to my friend's and went straight into the room beside it where he lived and fell asleep without waiting for him to come back. Early next morning, I woke up and saw what a preposterous thing I had done: the man sleeping beside me was not my friend, but a gray-haired old man. Looking around the room, I found it was not my friend's where I would sleep. Embarrassed and frightened. I made ready to sneak out. But being an early riser, the old man was awake. He stubbornly detained me, saying, "Hey, old boy. Don't you think we should introduce ourselves with a little hair of the dog?"

Back in those days, I was a timid and shy young man so I sank down after standing there awhile stupefied by his words, losing all the wildness of my earlier drunken self. The old man, seeing me sit down, went out into the alley carrying a kettle and a pot. After a while, a wind of conversation between the two generations blew over a table of warmed alcohol and hot soup. After I became drunk again, I realized that it was the old man who had opened the gate for me when I shook it, mistaking it for my friend's. He said he couldn't turn away some young drunken stranger--the night had been very cold and it had been late. He had a good time seeing me open the door and come into the room without any hesitation and fall asleep. The old man, with the dignity of gray hair and unblunted grace, gave me a warm-hearted look and said that he too had had such an experience when he was young. I heard too that he had lost a grown-up son. A smitten drinker himself, he smiled delightedly and listened to my story. On top of his fatherly worries that I might have encountered some unforeseen disaster if I had fallen asleep in the street, he said he had put me for the night because he wanted to share a morning drink with me. I don't remember his name. Perhaps he has passed away. This incident woke me to the warm sympathy only real drinkers feel for each other.

The other episode was during the Retreat from Seoul. I crossed the Han River at Mapo at 8 p.m. on January 3rd and slept in Suwon that night. I then took the train and arrived in Daegu on the morning of January 7th. I had to sleep on the train for three nights; this story happened when the train arrived at a small station early one morning. The train was filled to the roof with refugees, and as soon as it stopped at the platform, nimble ones got off quickly and bustled about making fires to boil rice for breakfast. I hopped off rubbing myself in order to straighten my twisted body and inhaled some fresh air for my heavy lungs. In front of me was a rare and delightful sight. In a remote corner of the platform, beside a bonfire, a woman was selling alcohol and already a middle-aged gentleman was drinking. I quickly ran to her and ordered a bowl and drank it in one gulp without asking any questions(I won't forget the pleasantness of its flavor for as long as I live.). As a side dish, I took two or so spoonfuls of stew too. Unsatisfied in all respects, I ordered another bowl. But the lady selling it neither gave me the drink nor a response, but just smiled. At that moment, the middle-aged gentleman, who was drinking his second bowl, put down his drink and gazed at me intently.

"Mister, it seems you like to drink very much. Because you looked thirsty, I offered a bowl, but this is not for sale. I have brought this with me to have one or two drinks, morning and evening, until I arrive in Busan."

He then stood up wiping his lips with a handkerchief, not explaining why he couldn't offer me another bowl.

"My husband said that he needed nothing to flee the war with, and just packed 6 bottles of alcohol. Ha, ha, ha."

The lady who was laughing quietly, her hand covering her mouth. This woman who was selling alcohol without taking any money was of course the gentleman's wife.

I envied him for the comfortable abandonment and retirement he had reached through the awakening of alcohol. He had risen above the chaos with dignity and style. With the train running so slow, he worried about his drink running out before arriving in Busan. Exchanging looks, we laughed together. Isn't it fellowship that silently offered me that cherished drink, a mind that knows alcohol and one that knows life? I still can't suppress a wry smile when I recall stretching out my hand for the drink, mistaking it to be for sale. The lady who willingly filled a bowl for a stranger seemed to have experienced the real taste of life. It may not be exactly true to say that all this originates from drink, but the conviction of those who violently reproach drinking for no other reason than being a mere vice definitely comes from their not knowing alcohol.

1956

THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FOLLAME BEETLE

A Fable for the Third Millennium

Barry Daniels

In the spring of 1927 an entomological expedition to the Amazon

River Basin brought back samples of a previously unknown insect,

which they found in large numbers along the river banks close to

the river’'s source. Experts were at a loss to explain how an insect

present in such large quantities had not previously

been reported or identified. The large, multicolored

beetle, named for the team’'s leader, entomologist Sir

Edmund Follame, was a beautiful creature, having a

carapace which resembled mother-of-pearl in its

subtle shades and in its luminescence. Sunlight

falling on the shell was reflected as though from some precious

stone.

The beetles were of particular interest to entomologists of the era

due to their unique foraging process. One insect, normally the

largest and strongest of the group, would take the lead and

become responsible for locating food. In order to be able to eat

while traveling the insects had evolved a singular physiology; the

antennae of each beetle were constructed so as to connect with

and lock onto the rear legs of the beetle in front. In this way

individual insects did not even have to look where they were going,

and could concentrate on eating. Long lines of foraging insects

would march through the jungle in a way which inspired one

explorer to remark: “"It was as though a diamond necklace were

moving through the forest, catching those rays of sunlight which

found their way through the canopy in a most amazing and

delightful display.”" Lines of several hundred meters in length were

common, and chains of up to half a kilometer were not unknown.

And then, suddenly, they were gone. While expeditions in ’'29 and

’'30 reported large colonies of Follame Beetles wandering in lengthy

procession along the banks of the Amazon, the 1931 party was

stunned to discover that the insects were nowhere to be found.

The discovery of exoskeletal remains later that year explained what

had happened to the beetles but not why. The shells formed a

huge circle, over a kilometer in diameter, along jungle trails several

kilometers west of the river.

The scientific community was baffled, and while various theories

were examined and discarded, it fell to the noted entomologist Ivor

Bindair-Dundat to produce the now generally accepted theory to

account for the unfortunate demise of the Follame. Dundat had

noticed from his observations of the beetle in previous years that

the foraging lines were becoming fewer in number but were much

longer. This was the result of the leading beetle of one line coming

upon the end unit of another line and joining onto it. Ultimately

this had resulted in the entire population of Follame beetles

becoming joined together in a single line of immense length. This

situation could probably have continued for some time except that,

purely by chance, the leading beetle came into contact with the tail

end of its own line and instinctively joined it. Bindair-Dundat

speculated that after two or three circuits of the same area all

available food had been taken, and the circle of beetles probably

moved faster and faster in its search for food until the weaker

members of the line perished from starvation. The dead insects

unfortunately maintained their linkage, fore and aft, and the chain

remained unbroken. While dead beetles could be carried by the

line up to a certain point, it could not continue indefinitely. Move6

ment of the line finally ground to a halt, and the remaining beetles

starved to death while locked into place in the motionless chain.

Bindair-Dundat was widely quoted as saying: “"It saddens me

greatly to think that if only one beetle had managed to break away

from the circle the entire population could have been saved from

extinction.”"

Don’'t be a Follame Beetle! Never mistake Activity for

Accomplishment.

‘' Moving’' is not necessarily ‘'Going Somewhere’'.

And if you’'re going nowhere, running will not get you there any

faster.

WALKING

BY

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Henry David Thoreau was born at Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and died there May 6, 1862. He was one of the most markedly individual of that group of philosophers and men of letters which has made the name of the little Massachusetts town so notable in the intellectual history of America.

Thoreau came of a family of French descent, and was educated at Harvard. "He was bred," says his friend Emerson, "to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun." The individualism which is implied in these facts was the most prominent characteristic of this remarkable person. Holding that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone," he found that a small part of his time, devoted to making lead-pencils, carpentering, and surveying, gave him enough for his simple needs, and left him free for the rest of the year to observe nature, to think, and to write.

In 1845 Thoreau built himself a hut on the edge of Walden Pond, and for over two years lived there in solitude, composing his "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers." During these years he kept a journal, from which he later drew the volume called "Walden," and these are his only two books published during his lifetime. From articles in magazines and manuscripts, some eight more volumes have been compiled since his death.

Interesting as is the philosophy which permeates the work of this solitary, his books have found readers rather on account of their minute and sympathetic observation of nature and the beauty of their style. The following essay on "Walking" represents all three elements; and in its charming discursiveness, in the absence of any structure to hinder the writer's pen from wandering at will, and in the responsiveness which it exhibits to the moods and suggestions of nature, it is a characteristic expression of its author's spirit.

WALKING

[1862]

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from "idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprizes. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honourable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,—not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.

"When he came to grene wode,

In a mery mornynge,

There he herde the notes small

Of byrdes mery syngynge.

"It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,

That I was last here;

Me lyste a lytell for to shot

At the donne dere."

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour or four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,—I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbours who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of—sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o'clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one's self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and housebred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing—and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours—as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, "Here is his library, but his study is out of doors."

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "They planted groves and walks of Platanes," where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works—for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilisation and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all,—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road—follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs—a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD

Where they once dug for money,

Where sometimes Martial Miles

But never found any;

Singly files,

And Elijah Wood,

I fear for no good:

No other man,

Save Elisha Dugan,—

O man of wild habits,

Partridges and rabbits,

Who hast no cares

Only to set snares,

Who liv'st all alone,

Close to the bone,

And where life is sweetest

Constantly eatest.

When the spring stirs my blood

With the instinct to travel

I can get enough gravel

On the Old Marlborough Road.

Nobody repairs it,

For nobody wears it;

It is a living way,

As the Christians say.

Not many there be

Who enter therein,

Only the guests of the

Irishman Quin.

What is it, what is it,

But a direction out there,

And the bare possibility

Of going somewhere?

Great guide-boards of stone,

But travellers none;

Cenotaphs of the towns

Named on their crowns.

It is worth going to see

Where you might be.

What king

Did the thing,

I am still wondering;

Set up how or when,

By what selectmen,

Gourgas or Lee,

Clark or Darby?

They're a great endeavor

To be something forever;

Blank tablets of stone,

Where a traveller might groan,

And in one sentence

Grave all that is known;

Which another might read,

In his extreme need.

I know one or two

Lines that would do,

Literature that might stand

All over the land,

Which a man could remember

Till next December,

And read again in the Spring,

After the thawing.

If with fancy unfurled

You leave your abode,

You may go round the world

By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle,—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a south-eastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. "The world ends there," say they; "beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea." It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realise history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,—which, in some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead,—that something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails,—affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and if I were a broker I should probably take that disturbance into account.

"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempts us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.

"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,

And now was dropped into the western bay;

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;

To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that "the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size." Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther—farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says: "As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.… The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant." When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages." So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802," says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From what part of the world have you come?' As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe."

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of Canada, tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.… The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader." This statement will do at least to set against Buffon's account of this part of the world and its productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants;" and I think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, Africanae bestiae, African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the centre of the East Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man—as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveller something, he knows not what, of laeta and glabra, of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say—

"Westward the star of empire takes its way."

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favourably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of to-day.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the light of to-day and saw the steam-boats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's Cliff,—still thinking more of the future than of the past or present,—I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course.

Some of our Northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure—as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to which I would migrate,—wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of Nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odour of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants' exchanges and libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man—a denizen of the woods. "The pale white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields."

Ben Jonson exclaims,—

"How near to good is what is fair!"

So I would say—

How near to good is what is wild!

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog—a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender places on the earth's surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there—the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora—all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks—to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlour, behind this plot, instead of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front-yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it—"Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.… In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence." They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say: "On reëntering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia." When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place,—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. The wild-wood covers the virgin mould,—and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness; and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilised nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin soil," and that "agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else." I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions,—"Leave all hope, ye that enter,"—that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian's corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plough and spade.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in "Hamlet" and the "Iliad," in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,—Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included—breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green wood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,—aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Platte, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent—others merely sensible, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice,—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights,—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes—already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried, "Whoa!" to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says—"The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned." But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.

When looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours them. It is as if they had been named by the child's rigmarole—Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray, the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called "Buster" by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame: and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman, discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe." But he observed that "those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it has been inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom." Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge—Gramática parda, tawny grammar—a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers,—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,—Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man's ignorance some times is not only useful, but beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: Hos ti noôn, ou cheinon noeseis,—"You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing," say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist,—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. "That is active duty," says the Vishnu Purana, "which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist."

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well, if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to live for, aye, and to die for, than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.

"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,

And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,

Traveller of the windy glens,

Why hast thou left my ear so soon?"

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Kosmos, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners' deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me,—to whom the sun was servant,—who had not gone into society in the village,—who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,—sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!

We hug the earth,—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for three-score years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me,—it was near the end of June,—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets,—for it was court-week,—and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature's red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,—the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate,"—and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.