"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.