Lifes Enthusiasms | Page 3

the weakest and most
cowardly form of suicide. Moreover it is never quite successful. That
"time which crawleth like a monstrous snake, wounded and slow and
very venomous" is sure to take its own revenges.
It is therefore good to look on the cheerful side of life. A touch of
humor is necessary to the salvation of the serious man. It is a gift of the
men of America to see droll things and to express them in droll fashion.
To see the funny side of one's own accomplishments is the highest
achievement of the American philosopher and there is hope for the land
in which the greatest wits have been the most earnest of moral teachers.
Who was more earnest than Oliver Wendell Holmes, who more
genuine than Mark Twain? Without the saving grace of humor our
Puritan conscience which we all possess would lead us again into all
extravagance, witch-burnings, Quaker-stoning, heresy trials, and
intolerance of politics and religion. From all these we are saved by our
feeling for the incongruous. A touch of humor recalls us to our senses.
It "makes the whole world kin."
In the love of nature is another source of saving grace. Science is power.
In the stores of human experience lies the key to action, and modern
civilization is built on Science. The love of nature is akin to Science but
different. Contact with outdoor things is direct experience. It is not

stored, not co-ordinated, not always convertible into power, but real,
nevertheless, and our own. The song of birds, the swarming of bees, the
meadow carpeted with flowers, the first pink harbingers of the early
spring, the rush of the waterfall, the piling up of the rocks, the trail
through the forest, the sweep of the surf, the darting of the fishes, the
drifting of the snow, the white crystals of the frost, the shrieking of the
ice, the boom of the bittern, the barking of the sea lions, the honk of the
wild geese, the skulking coyote who knows that each beast is his
enemy and has not even a flea to help him "forget that he is a dog," the
leap of the salmon, the ecstasy of the mocking-bird and bobolink, the
nesting of the field-mice, the chatter of the squirrel, the gray lichen of
the oak, the green moss on the log, the poppies of the field and the
Mariposa lilies of the cliff--all these and ten thousand more pictures
which could be called up equally at random and from every foot of land
on the globe--all these are objects of nature. All these represent a point
of human contact and the reaction which makes for youth, for virtue
and for enthusiasm.
To travel is merely to increase the variety of contact by giving our time
to it, and by extending the number of points at which contact is possible.
It may be that "he who wanders widest, lifts no more of beauty's
jealous veils than he who from his doorway sees the miracle of flowers
and trees." It is true, however, that the experiences of the traveler cover
a wider range and fill his mind with a larger and more varied store of
remembered delights. The very names of beloved regions call up each
one its own picture. The South Seas; to have wandered among their
green isles is to have seen a new world, a new heaven and a new earth.
The white reef with its whiter rim of plunging surf, the swaying palms,
the flashing waterfall, the joyous people, straight as Greeks and colored
like varnished leather, the bread-fruit tree and the brown orange, the
purple splendor of the vine called Bougainvillia, and above all the
volcanic mountains, green fringed with huge trees, with tree ferns and
palms, the whole tied together into an impenetrable jungle by the long
armed lianas. The Sierra Nevada, sweeping in majestic waves of stone,
alive with color and steeped in sunshine. Switzerland, Norway, Alaska,
Tyrol, Japan, Venice, the Windward Islands and the Gray Azores,
Chapultepec with its dream of white-cloaked volcanoes, Enoshima and

Gotemba with their peerless Fujiyama, Nikko with its temples, Loch
Lomond, Lake Tahoe, Windermere, Tintagel by the Cornish Sea, the
Yellowstone and the Canyon of the Colorado, the Crater Lake of
Oregon, Sorrento with its Vesuvius, Honolulu with its Pali, the
Yosemite, Banff with its Selkirks, Prince Frederick's Sound with its
green fjords, the Chamounix with its Mont Blanc, Bern with its
Oberland, Zermatt with its Matterhorn, Simla with "the, great silent
wonder of the snows."
"Even now as I write," says Whymper the master mountain climber,
"they rise before me an endless series of pictures magnificent in effect,
in form and color. I see great peaks with clouded tops, seeming to
mount upward for ever and ever.