while that bluster is manliness. No, sir. You may make shoes,
you may run engines, you may carry coals; you may blow the
huntsman's horn, hurl the base-ball, follow the plough, smite
the anvil; your face may be brown, your veins knotted, your
hands grimed; and yet you may be a hero. And, on the other
hand, you may write verses and be a clown. It is not necessary
to feed on ambrosia in order to become divine; nor shall one
be accursed, though he drink of the ninefold Styx. The
Israelites ate angels' food in the wilderness, and remained
stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. The white
water-lily feeds on slime, and unfolds a heavenly glory. Come
as the June morning comes. It has not picked its way daintily,
passing only among the roses. It has breathed up the whole
earth. It has blown through the fields and barnyards and all
the common places of the land. It has shrunk from nothing.
Its purity has breasted and overborne all things, and so
mingled and harmonized all that it sweeps around your forehead
and sinks into your heart as soft and sweet and pure as the
fragrancy of Paradise. So come you, rough from the world's
rough work, all out-door airs blowing around you, and all your
earth-smells clinging to you, but with a fine inward grace, so
strong, so sweet, so salubrious that it meets and masters all
things, blending every faintest or foulest odor of earthliness
into the grateful incense of a pure and lofty life.

Thus I read and mused in the soft summer fog, and the first I
knew the cars had stopped, I was standing on the platform, and
Coventry and his knight were--where? Wandering up and down
somewhere among the Berkshire hills. At some junction of roads,
I suppose, I left them on the cushion, for I have never beheld