The Hills of Hingham | Page 5

close and real, but seldom as life, far
off and whole.
Perhaps I have never seen life whole; I may need a throne and not a hill
and a stump for that; but here in the wideness of the open skies, in the
sweet quiet, in the hush that often fills these deep woods, I sometimes
see life free, not free from men and things, but unencumbered, coming
to meet me out of the morning and passing on with me toward the
sunset until, at times, the stepping westward, the uneventful
onwardness of life has
". . . seemed to be A kind of heavenly destiny"
and, even the back-and-forth of it, a divine thing.
This knowledge is too wonderful for me; I cannot keep fast hold of it;

yet to know occasionally that you are greater than your rhetoric, or your
acres of stones, or your woods of worms, worms that may destroy your
trees though you spray, is to steady and establish your soul, and vastly
to comfort it!
To be greater than your possessions, than your accomplishments, than
your desires--greater than you know, than anybody at home knows or
will admit! So great that you can leave your plough in the turret that
you can leave the committees to meet, and the trees to fall, and the sun
to hurry on, while you take your seat upon a stump, assured from many
a dismaying observation that the trees will fall anyhow, that the sun
will hasten on its course, and that the committees, even the committees,
will meet and do business whether you attend or not!
This is bed-rock fact, the broad and solid bottom for a cheerful
philosophy. To know that they can get on without you (more
knowledge than many ever attain!) is the beginning of wisdom; and to
learn that you can get on without them--at the close of the day, and out
here on your hill in Hingham--this is the end of understanding.
If I am no more than the shoes I stitch, or the lessons I peg, and the
college can so calmly move on without me, how small I am! Let me
hope that I am useful there, and useful as a citizen-at-large; but I know
that I am chiefly and utterly dispensable at large, everywhere at large,
even in Hingham. But not here on my hilltop. Here I am indispensable.
In the short shift from my classroom, from chair to hill, from doing to
being, I pass from a means into an end, from a part in the scheme of
things to the scheme of things itself.
Here stands my hill on the highway from dawn to dusk, and just where
the bending walls of the sky center and encircle it. This is not only a
large place, with room and verge enough; it is also a chief place, where
start the north and south and east and west, and the gray crooked road
over which I travel daily.
I can trace the run of the road from my stump on the hill, off to where it
bends on the edge of night for its returning and rest here.

"Let me live in a house by the aide of the road,"
sings the poet; but as for me, after traveling all day let me come back to
a house at the end of the road--for in returning and rest shall a man be
saved, in quietness and confidence shall he find strength. Nowhere
shall he find that quietness and confidence in larger measure than here
in the hills. And where shall he return to more rest?
There are men whose souls are like these hills, simple, strong, quiet
men who can heal and restore; and there are books that help like the
hills, simple elemental, large books; music, and sleep, and prayer, and
play are healing too; but none of these cure and fill one with a quietness
and confidence as deep as that from the hills, even from the little hills
and the small fields and the vast skies of Hingham; a confidence and
joy in the earth, perhaps, rather than in heaven, and yet in heaven too.
If it is not also a steadied thinking and a cleared seeing, it is at least a
mental and moral convalescence that one gets--out of the landscape, out
of its largeness, sweetness and reality. I am quickly conscious on the
hills of space all about me--room for myself, room for the things that
crowd and clutter me; and as these arrange and set themselves in order,
I am aware of space within me, of freedom and wideness there, of
things in order, of doors unlocked and windows opened, through which
I look out upon a new young world, new like the morning, young