Recreation | Page 9

getting richer every year, and the poor man said to the millionaire, "I am a richer man than you are." "How do you make that out?" said the millionaire. "Why," he replied, "I have got as much money as I want and you haven't."
But it is not only in the small worries of life that we may be saved by a right use of recreation. We all realize how in the Great War your nation and our nation and others engaged in the war were taken out of themselves, I was going to say lost themselves, but I ought rather to say found themselves. It was a fine thing on your part to send two million soldiers across the sea in so short a time to risk their lives for an ideal. It was even more impressive to us when we heard that in this country you had adopted conscription, and that your millions of people, distributed over so vast an extent of continent, were so moved by one public spirit and one patriotism and one desire to help the Allies in the war that they were rationing themselves voluntarily with food and fuel. That voluntary action by so many millions over so great an extent of country was a tremendous example, showing what an ideal and a public spirit and a call to action can do for people in making them forget private interests and convenience and making them great.
That was an example of what could be done by not shrinking from the duty of life; but you can get greatness, too, from some of the joys of life, and from none more than from a keen sense of the beauty of the world and a love for it. I found it so during the war. Our feelings were indeed roused by the heroism of our people, but they were also depressed by the suffering. In England every village was stricken, there was grief in almost every house. The thought of the suffering, the anxiety for the future, destroyed all pleasure. It came even between one's self and the page of the book one tried to read. In those dark days I found some support in the steady progress unchanged of the beauty of the seasons. Every year, as spring came back unfailing and unfaltering, the leaves came out with the same tender green, the birds sang, the flowers came up and opened, and I felt that a great power of nature for beauty was not affected by the war. It was like a great sanctuary into which we could go and find refuge for a time from even the greatest trouble of the world, finding there not enervating ease, but something which gave optimism, confidence, and security. The progress of the seasons unchecked, the continuance of the beauty of nature, was a manifestation of something great and splendid which not all the crimes and follies and misfortunes of mankind can abolish or destroy. If, as years go on, we can feel the beauty of the world as Wordsworth felt it and get from it
"Authentic tidings of invisible things, Of ebb and flow and ever during power, And central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation,"
then we have, indeed, a recreation which will give us, not merely pleasure, but strength, refreshment, and confidence. Something of the same feeling we may get from an appreciation of great music, beautiful pictures, splendid architecture, and other things that stir us with an impression of everlasting greatness. Enjoy these and cultivate the appreciation of them, but especially, if you can, cultivate the enjoyment of the beauty of nature, because it costs nothing and is everywhere for everybody; and if we can find recreation in such things as these, then, indeed, we may make the joy of life great as well as the duty of life, and we may find that the joy of life and the duty of life are not things adverse or even to be contrasted, but may be, as Colonel Roosevelt puts them, companions and complements of each other.

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