upward unceasingly, bring us something of hope and faith; the
sight of them cheers us. A land without trees is depressing and
gloomy. As Ruskin says, "The sea wave, with all its beneficence,
is yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave of the blue
mountain is lifted towards Heaven in a stillness of perpetual
mercy; and while the one surges unfathomable in its darkness,
the other is unshaken in its faithfulness."

And yet so strange is human nature that that which we
call civilization strives unceasingly to nullify emotion.
The almost childlike faith which made our church spires
point heavenward also gave us Gothic architecture, that
emblem of frail humanity striving towards the ideal. It is
a long leap from that childlike faith to the present day of
skyscrapers. For so is the world constituted. A great truth
too often becomes gradually a truism, then a merely tolerated
and uninteresting theory; gradually it becomes obsolete
and sometimes even degenerates into a symbol of sarcasm or a
servant of utilitarianism. This we are illustrating every day
of our lives. We speak of a person's being "silly," and yet
the word comes from "sælig," old English for "blessed"; to act
"sheepishly" once had reference to divine resignation, "even
as a sheep led to the slaughter," and so on _ad infinitum_.
We build but few great cathedrals now. Our tall buildings
generally point to utilitarianism and the almighty dollar.

But in the new art, music, we have found a new domain in which
impulses have retained their freshness and warmth, in which,
to quote Goethe, "first comes the act, then the word"; first
the expression of emotion, then the theory that classifies it;