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,"