removed our hats. The horses stood, and dropped their heads. Uncovered, we sat ourselves on the dry leaves and waited. It was the morning of creation. Out of the pure stuff of nebulæ the cone had just been shaped and flung adrift until a world should be created on which it might rest. The gray light grew into the mountain. Gradually a ruddy light appeared in the east. Then a flash of red shot out of the horizon, struck on a point of the summit, and caught from crag to crag and snow to snow until the great mass was streaked and splashed with fire. Slowly the darkness settled away from its base; a tree emerged, a bird chirped, and the morning was born!

Now a great nether world began to rise up out of Chaos. Far hills rose first through rolling billows of mist. Then came wide forests of spruce. As the panorama rose, the mountain changed from red to gold. The stars had faded out and left the great mass to itself on the bosom of the rising world, the mountain fully created now and established. Spriggy bushes and little leaves little green-brown leaves and tender tufts of herbs trembled out of the woods. illimitable circle of the world stretched away and away, its edges still hung in the stuff from which it had just been fashioned. Then the forest rang with calls of birds and a hundred joyous noises, and the creation was complete.

The

I have now reviewed some of the characteristics of the sympathetic attitude toward nature, and have tried to show how this outlook means greater efficiency, hopefulness, and repose. In the subsequent lectures I shall enlarge on its bearings on certain practical and very essential affairs. I have no mind to be iconoclast, to try to tear down what has been built, or to advise any man to change his occupation or profession. That would be impossible to accomplish, even were it desirable to advise. But even in the midst of all our eagerness and involvedness, it is still possible to open the mind toward nature, and it will sweeten and strengthen our

lives. Nature is our environment, and we cannot escape it if we would. The problem of our life is not yonder; it is here. The seeking of truth in fresh fields and for the love of it is akin to the enthusiasm of youth. Men keep young by knowing nature. They also should keep true. One of the New Sayings of Jesus is this: "Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood, and there am I."

1

A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU 1

PAUL ELMER MORE

Near the secluded village of Shelburne that lies along the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin, I took upon myself to live two years as a hermit after a mild Epicurean fashion of my own. Three maiden aunts wagged their heads ominously; my nearest friend inquired cautiously whether there was any taint of insanity in the family; an old gray-haired lady, a veritable saint who had not been soured by her many deeds of charity, admonished me on the utter selfishness and godlessness of such a proceeding. But I clung heroically to my resolution. Summer tourists in that pleasant valley may still see the little red house among the pines, empty now, I believe; and I dare say gaudy coaches still draw up at the door, as they used to do, when the gaudier bonnets and hats exchanged wondering remarks on the cabalistic inscription over the lintel, or spoke condescendingly to the great dog lying on the steps. As for the hermit within, having found it impossible to educe any meaning from the tangled habits of mankind while he himself was whirled about in the imbroglio, he had determined to try the efficacy of undisturbed meditation at a distance. So deficient had been his education that he was actually better acquainted with the aspirations and emotions of the old dwellers on the Ganges than with those of the modern toilers by the Hudson or the Potomac. He had been deafened by the "indistinguishable roar" of the streets, and could make no sense of the noisy jargon of the

1 Copyright. Reprinted from Shelburne Essays by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons and of the author.

market place. But shall it be confessed? - although he discovered many things during his contemplative sojourn in the wilderness, and learned that the attempt to criticise and not to create literature was to be his labor in this world, nevertheless he returned to civilization as ignorant, alas, of its meaning as when he left it.

However, it is not my intention to justify the saintly old lady's charge of egotism by telling the story of my exodus to the desert; that, perhaps, may come later and at a more suitable time. I wish now only to record the memories of one perfect day in June, when woods and mountains were as yet a new delight.

The fresh odors of morning were still swaying in the air when I set out on this particular day; and my steps turned instinctively to the great pine forest, called the Cathedral Woods, that filled the valley and climbed the hill slopes behind my house. There, many long roads that are laid down in no map wind hither and thither among the trees, whose leafless trunks tower into the sky and then meet in evergreen arches overhead. There,

The tumult of the times disconsolate

never enters, and no noise of the world is heard save now and then, in winter, the ringing strokes of the woodchopper at his cruel task. How many times I have walked those quiet cathedral aisles, while my great dog paced faithfully on before! Underfoot the dry, purple-hued moss was stretched like a royal carpet; and at intervals a glimpse of the deep sky, caught through an aperture in the groined roof, reminded me of the other world, and carried my thoughts still farther from the desolating memories of this life. Nothing but pure odors were there, sweeter than cloistral incense; and murmurous voices of the pines, more harmonious than the chanting of trained choristers; and in the heart of the wanderer nothing but tranquillity and passionless peace.

Often now the recollection of those scenes comes floating back upon his senses when, in the wakeful seasons of a summer night, he hears the wind at work among the trees; even in barren city streets some sound or spectacle can act upon him as a spell, banishing for a moment the hideous contention of commerce, and placing him beneath the restful shadows of the pines. May his understanding cease its function, and his heart forget to feel, when the memory of those days has utterly left him and he walks in the world without this consolation of remembered peace.

Nor can I recollect that my mind, in these walks, was much called away from contemplation by the petty curiosities of the herbalist or bird-lorist, for I am not one zealously addicted to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets of Nature. It never seemed to me that a flower was made sweeter by knowing the construction of its ovaries, or assumed a new importance when I learned its trivial or scientific name. The wood thrush and the veery sing as melodiously to the uninformed as to the subtly curious. Indeed, I sometimes think a little ignorance is wholesome in our communion with Nature, until we are ready to part with her altogether. She is feminine in this as in other respects, and loves to shroud herself in illusions, as the Hindus taught in their books. For they called her Mâyâ, the very person and power of deception, whose sway over the beholder must end as soon as her mystery is penetrated.

Dear as the sound of the wood thrush's note still is to my ears, something of charm and allurement has gone from it since I have become intimate with the name and habits of the bird. As a child born and reared in the city, that wild, ringing call was perfectly new and strange to me when, one early dawn, I first heard it during a visit to the Delaware Water Gap. To me, whose ears had grown familiar only with the rumble of paved streets, the sound was like a reiterated unearthly summons inviting me from my narrow prison existence