Let it be remembered that he lived in a temperate, beautiful,
bountiful country; that his work was done mostly in the fields,
with the aspects of land and sky ever before him; that he was much
alone; that his thinking was nearly always of his Bible and his
Bible college. Let it be remembered that he had an eye which was
not merely an opening and closing but a seeing eye--full of health
and of enjoyment of the pageantry of things; and that behind this
eye, looking through it as through its window, stood the dim soul
of the lad, itself in a temple of perpetual worship: these are some
of the conditions which yielded him during these two years the
intense, exalted realities of his inner life.

When of morning he stepped out of the plain farm-house with its
rotting doors and leaking roof and started off joyously to his
day's work, at the sight of the great sun just rising above the low
dew-wet hills, his soul would go soaring away to heaven's gate.
Sometimes he would be abroad late at night, summoning the doctor
for his father or returning from a visit to another neighborhood.
In every farmhouse that he passed on the country road the people
were asleep--over all the shadowy land they were asleep. And
everywhere, guardian in the darkness, watched the moon, pouring its
searching beams upon every roof, around every entrance, on kennel
and fold, sty and barn--with light not enough to awaken but enough
to protect: how he worshipped toward that lamp tended by the
Sleepless! There were summer noons when he would be lying under a
solitary tree in a field--in the edge of its shade, resting; his
face turned toward the sky. This would be one over-bending vault of
serenest blue, save for a distant flight of snow-white clouds,
making him think of some earthward-wandering company of angels. He
would lie motionless, scarce breathing, in that peace of the earth,