The Hills of Hingham | Page 4

and "wilt" disease and Calasoma beetles. Nothing
will avail; nothing but a new woodlot planted with saplings that the
caterpillars do not eat. Sit still my soul, and know that when these oak
trees fall there will come up the fir tree and the pine tree and the
shagbark, distasteful to the worms; and they shall be to the Lord for a
name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
This is good forestry, and good philosophy--a sure handling of both
worms and soul.
But how hard to follow! I would so like to help the Lord. Not to do my
own share only; but to shoulder the Almighty's too, saying--
"If it were done when 't is done, then 't were well It were done quickly";

and I up and do it. But it does not stay done. I had sprayed, creosoted,
cut, trimmed, cemented, only to see the trees die, until I was forced to
rest upon the stump, when I saw what I had been blind to before: that
the pine trees were tipped with cones, and that there in the tops were
the red squirrels shucking and giving the winged seeds to the winds to
sow; and that even now up the wooded slope below me, where the first
of the old oaks had perished, was climbing a future grove of seedling
pines.
The forests of Arden are not infested with gypsy moths, nor the woods
of Heaven either, I suppose; but the trees in the hills of Hingham are.
And yet they are the trees of the Lord; the moths are his also, and the
caring for them. I am caring for a few college freshmen and my soul. I
shall go forth to my work until the evening. The Lord can take the
night-shift; for it was He who instituted the twilight, and it is He who
must needs be responsible till the morning.
So here a-top my stump in the beleaguered woodlot I sit with idle
hands, and no stars falling, and the universe turning all alone!
To wake up at forty a factory hand! a floor-walker! a banker! a college
professor! a man about town or any other respectably successful,
humdrum, square wooden peg-of-a-thing in a square tight hole! There
is an evil, says the Preacher, which I have seen under the sun--the man
of about forty who has become moderately successful and automatic,
but who has not, and now knows he cannot, set the world on fire. This
is a vanity and it is an evil disease.
From running the universe at thirty the man of forty finds himself
running with it, paced before, behind, and beside, by other runners and
by the very stars in their courses. He has struck the universal gait, a
strong steady stride that will carry him to the finish, but not among the
medals. This is an evil thing. Forty is a dangerous age. The wild race of
twenty, the staggering step of eighty, are full of peril, but not so deadly
as the even, mechanical going of forty; for youth has the dash in hand;
old age has ceased to worry and is walking in; while the man of forty is
right in the middle of the run, grinding along on his second wind with
the cheering all ahead of him.

In fact, the man of forty finds himself half-way across the street with
the baby carriage in his hands, and touring cars in front of him, and
limousines behind him, and the hand-of-the-law staying and steadying
him on his perilous course.
Life may be no busier at forty than at thirty, but it is certainly more
expensive. Work may not be so hard, but the facts of life are a great
deal harder, the hardest, barest of them being the here-and-now of all
things, the dead levelness of forty--an irrigated plain that has no hill of
vision, no valley of dream. But it may have its hill in Hingham with a
bit of meadow down below.
Mullein Hill is the least of all hills, even with the added stump; but
looking down through the trees I can see the gray road, and an
occasional touring car, like a dream, go by; and off on the Blue Hills of
Milton--higher hills than ours in Hingham--hangs a purple mist that
from our ridge seems the very robe and veil of vision.
The realities are near enough to me here crawling everywhere, indeed;
but close as I am to the flat earth I can yet look down at things--at the
road and the passing cars; and off at things--the hills and the distant
horizon; and so I can escape for a time that level stare into the face of
things which sees them as things