Lifes Enthusiasms | Page 6

is hung by clouds or sown with stars,
wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets
into celestial spaces, wherever is danger and awe and love--there's
Beauty, plenteous as rain shed for thee and though thou shouldst walk
the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or
ignoble."
"I took a walk the other day," so Thoreau tells us, "on Spaulding's farm.
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
family had settled there in that part of Concord, unknown to me--to
whom the sun was servant. I saw their path, their pleasuring ground
through the woods 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. 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 the
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 their house. Nothing
can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a
lichen. It is painted on the pines and the oaks. 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 say their work, for their
industry was not in knots and excrescences embayed. Yet I find it
difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably even while I speak.
It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect that I became again

aware of their cohabitance. If it were not for such families as this I
think I should move out of Concord."
In the arts of music and painting and sculpture, one may find not only
professional satisfaction, but the strength that comes from higher living
and more lofty feeling. In the study of history as biography, the
acquaintance with the men and women of other times, those who have
felt and thought and acted and suffered to make a freer world for you
and me, like inspiration may be found. History is more than its
incidents. It is the movement of man. It is the movement of individual
men, and it is in giving illumination to personal and racial characters
that the succession of incidents has its value. The picturesque
individual, the man who could not be counted with the mass, the David,
the Christ, the Brutus, the Caesar, the Plato, the Alfred, the
Charlemagne, the Cromwell, the Mirabeau, the Luther, the Darwin, the
Helmholtz, the Goethe, the Franklin, the Hampden, the Lincoln, all
these give inspiration to history. It is well that we should know them,
should know them all, should know them well--an education is
incomplete that is not built about a Pantheon, dedicated to the worship
of great men.
With all this comes that feeling of dedication to the highest purposes
which is the essential feature of religion. Religion should be known by
its tolerance, its broadmindedness, its faith in God and humanity, its
recognition of the duty of action.
And action should be understood in a large way, the taking of one's part
in affairs worth doing, not mere activity, nor fussiness, nor movement
for movement's sake, like that of "ants on whom pepper is sprinkled."
As the lesser enthusiasms fade and fail, one should take a stronger hold
on the higher ones. "Grizzling hair the brain doth clear" and one sees in
better perspective the things that need doing. It is thus possible to grow
old as a "grand old man," a phrase invented for Gladstone, but which
fits just as well our own Mark Twain. Grand old men are those who
have been grand young men, and carry still a young heart beneath old
shoulders. There are plenty of such in our country to-day, though the
average man begins to give up the struggle for the higher life at forty.

President White, President Eliot, President Angell,--few men have left
so deep an impression on the Twentieth Century. Edward Everett Hale,
the teacher who has shown us what it is to have a country. Senator Hoar,
Professor Agassiz, Professor Le Conte, Professor Shaler,--all these,
whatever the