Lie on your back in some quiet spot, and let yourself go out into the endless distances.

Or, if we note the sky, it is chiefly a midday or sunset recognition. Our literature is rich in sunsets, but relatively poor in sunrises. Civilization has led us away from the morning, and at the same time it has led us away from youthfulness. We have telescoped the day far into the night, and morning is becoming obsolete. I know that this cannot be helped; but it can be mentioned.

I have asked person after person whether he ever saw the sun rise. The large number have said no; and most of those who had seen the sun rise had seen it against their will and remembered it with a sense of weariness. Here, again, our farm boy has the advantage: he leads something like a natural life. I. doubt whether a man can be a poet if he has not known the sunrise.

The sky is the one part of the environment that is beyond our reach. We cannot change it; we cannot despoil it; we cannot paint signs on it. The sky is forever new and young; the seasons come out of it; the winds blow out of it; the weather is born from it:

"Hast thou entered the treasuries of the snow,

Or hast thou seen the treasuries of the hail ?"

I preach the mountains, and everything that is taller than

a man.

Yet it is to be feared that many persons see too many mountains and too many great landscapes, and that the "seeing" of nature becomes a business as redundant and wearisome as other affairs. One who lives on the mountains does not know how high they are. Let us have one inspiration that lifts us clear of ourselves: this is better than to see so many mountains that we remember only their names.

The best objects that you can see are those in your own realm; but your own realm becomes larger and means more for the sight of something beyond.

It is worth while to cherish the few objects and phenomena

that have impressed us greatly, and it is well to recount them often, until they become part of us. One such phenomenon is idealized in my own memory. It was the sight of sunrise on Mt. Shasta, seen from the southeastern side from a point that was then untouched by travellers. From this point only the main dome of the mountain is seen. I had left the railway train at Upton's and had ridden on a flat-car over a lumber railroad some eighteen miles to the southeast. From this destination, I drove far into the great forest, over volcano dust that floated through the woods like smoke as it was stirred up by our horses and wagon wheels. I was a guest for the night in one of those luxurious lodges which true nature lovers, wishing wholly to escape the affairs of cities, build in remote and inaccessible places. The lodge stood on a low promontory, around three sides of which a deep swift mountain stream ran in wild tumult. Giant shafts of trees, such shafts as one sees only in the stupendous forests of the far West, shot straight into the sky from the very cornices of the house. It is always a marvel to the easterner how shafts of such extraordinary height could have been nourished by the very thin and narrow crowns that they bear. One always wonders, also, at the great distance the sapwater must carry its freight of mineral from root to leaf and its heavier freight from leaf to root.

We were up before the dawn. We made a pot of coffee, and the horses were ready, - fine mounts, accustomed to woods, trails, and hard slopes. It was hardly light enough to enable us to pick our way. We were as two pygmies, so titanic was the forest. The trails led us up and up, under pitchy boughs becoming fragrant, over needle-strewn floors still heavy with darkness, disclosing glimpses now and then of gray light showing eastward between the boles. Suddenly the forest stopped, and we found ourselves on the crest of a great ridge and sheer before us stood the great cone of Shasta, cold and gray and silent, floating on a sea of darkness from which even the highest tree crowns did not emerge. Scarcely had we spoken in the course of our ascent, and now words would be sacrilege. Almost automatically we dismounted, letting the reins fall over the

horses' necks, and removed our hats. The horses stood, and dropped their heads. Uncovered, we sat ourselves on the dry leaves and waited.

It was the morning of the creation. Out of the pure stuff of nebulæ the cone had just been shaped and flung adrift until a world should be created on which it might rest. The gray light grew into white. Wrinkles and features grew into the mountain. Gradually a ruddy light appeared in the east. Then a flash of red shot out of the horizon, struck on a point of the summit, and caught from crag to crag and snow to snow until the great mass was streaked and splashed with fire. Slowly the darkness settled away from its base; a tree emerged; a bird chirped; and the morning was born!

Now a great nether world began to rise up out of Chaos. Far hills rose first through rolling billows of mist. Then came wide forests of conifer. As the panorama arose, the mountain changed from red to gold. The stars had faded out and left the great mass to itself on the bosom of the rising world, the mountain fully created now and stablished. Spriggy bushes and little leaves -- little green-brown leaves and tender tufts of herbs trembled out of the woods. The illimitable circle of the world stretched away and away, its edges still hung in the stuff from which it had just been fashioned. Then the forest awoke with calls of birds and the penetrating light, and the creation was complete.

I have now reviewed some of the elements of the sympathetic attitude toward nature, and have tried to show how this outlook means greater efficiency, hopefulness, and repose.

I have no mind to be iconoclast, to try to tear down what has been built, or to advise any man to change his occupation or his walk in life. That would be impossible to accomplish, even were it desirable to advise. But even in the midst of all our eagerness and involvedness, it is still possible to open the mind toward nature, and it will sweeten and strengthen our lives. Nature is our environment, and we cannot escape it if we would. The problem of our life is not yonder: it is here.

The seeking of truth in fresh fields and for the love of it is

akin to the enthusiasm of youth. Men keep young by knowing nature. They also keep close to the essentials. One of the New Sayings of Jesus is this: "Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood, and there am I."

AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS1

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

JUST now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labor therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savors a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness, so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted. that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, "goes for" them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome for these tumultuous barbarians who poured into the Senate-house and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.

1 From Virginibus Puerisque. Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission.

Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favor of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels on Montenegro is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond.

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school honors with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffers others to educate him. It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret;