Education and the Higher Life | Page 9

in the many-tinted glory; when the miracle of the
changing year is the soul's fair seed-time; when lying in the grass, the
head resting in clasped hands, while soft white clouds float lazily
through azure skies, and the birds warble, and the waters murmur, and
the flowers breathe fragrance, we feel a kind of unconscious
consciousness of a universal life in Nature. The very rocks seem to be
listening to what the leaves whisper; and through the silent eternities
we almost see the dead becoming the living, the living the dead, until
both grow to be one, and whatever is, is life.
He who has never had these visions; has never heard these airy voices;
has never seemed about to catch a glimpse of the inner heart of being,
pulsing beneath the veil of visible things; has never felt that he himself
is a spirit looking blindly on a universe, which if his eyes could but see
and his ears hear, would be revealed as the very heaven of the infinite
God,--must forever lack something of the freshness, of the eager
delight, with which a poetic mind contemplates the world and follows
whither the divine intimations point. This early intercourse with Nature
nourishes the soul, deepens the intellect, exalts the imagination, and
fills the memory with fair and noble forms and images which abide
with us, and as years pass on, gain in softness and purity what they may
lose in distinctness of outline and color. This is the source of
intellectual wealth, of tranquil moods, of patience in the midst of
opposition, of confidence in the fruitfulness of labor and the
transforming power of time. Here is given the material which must be
molded into form; the rude blocks which must be cut and dressed and
fitted together until they become a spiritual temple wherein the soul
may rest at one with God and Nature, and with its own thought and
love. To run, to jump, to ride, to swim, to skate, to sit in the shade of
trees by flowing water, to watch reapers at their work, to look on
orchards blossoming, to dream in the silence that lies amid the hills, to

feel the solemn loneliness of deep woods, to follow cattle as they crop
the sweet-scented clover,--to learn to know, as one knows a mother's
face, every change that comes over the heavens from the dewy
freshness of early dawn to the restful calm of evening, from the
overpowering mystery of the starlit sky to the tender human look with
which the moon smiles upon the earth,--all this is education of a higher
and altogether more real kind than it is possible to receive within the
walls of a school; and lacking this, nothing shall have power to develop
the faculties of the soul in symmetry and completeness. Hence a
philosopher has said there are ten thousand chances to one that genius,
talent, and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.
The daily intercourse with Nature in childhood and youth intertwines
with noble and enduring objects the passions which form the mind and
heart of man, whereas those who are shut out from such communion
are necessarily thrown into contact with what is mean and vulgar; and
since our early years, whatever our surroundings may have been, seem
to us sweet and fair because life itself is then a clear-flowing fountain,
they cannot help blending the memory of that innocent and happy time
with thoughts of base and mechanical objects, or, it may be, of low and
ignoble associates.
He is fortunate who, during the first ten years of his life, escapes the
confinement and repression of school, and lives at home in the country
amid the fields and the woods, day by day growing familiar with the
look on Nature's face, with all her moods, with every common object,
with living things in the air and the water and on the earth; who sees
the corn sprout, and watches it grow week after week until the yellow
harvest waves in the sunlight; who looks with unawed eye on rising
thunder-clouds and shouts with glee amid the lightning's play; who
learns to know that whatever he looks upon is thereby humanized, and
to feel that he is part of all he sees and loves. He will carry with him to
the study of the intellectual and spiritual world of men's thoughts shut
up in books, a strength of mind, a depth and freshness of heart which
only those can own who have drunk at Nature's deep flowing fountain,
and come up to life's training-course wet with her dews and with the
fragrance of her flowers on their breath. In the eyes of the old Greeks,
who first made education a science, the scholar