A few days at Lake Tahoe, when not a hundred white men had visited its
shores, inspired a sermon long remembered by those who heard it, and
today, after numerous nature-sermons by the world's most gifted
preachers, this discourse remains an almost perfect example of what such
a sermon should be. The following single excerpt must suffice to suggest
its beauty:

"I must speak of another lesson, connected with religion, that was
suggested to me on the borders of Lake Tahoe. It is bordered by groves
of noble pines. Two of the days which I was permitted to enjoy there
were Sundays. On one of them I passed several hours of the afternoon in
listening, alone, to the murmur of the pines, while the waves were
gently beating the shore with their restlessness. If the beauty and
purity of the lake were in harmony with the deepest religion of the
Bible, certainly the voice of the pines was also in chord with it.

"The oracles of Greece are connected with the oak. And the lightness,
the gaiety, the wit, the suppleness, of the Greek mind find in the voice
of the oak their fit representatives; for the oak, though so stubborn
and sinewy in its substances, is cheery and gay in its tone when the
wind strikes it. But the evergreen trees, though so much softer in their
stock, are far deeper and more serious in their music; and the evergreen
is the Hebrew tree. The Cedar of Lebanon is the tree most prominent when
we think of Palestine and the clothing of its hills. As I lay and
listened to the deep, serious, yet soft and welcome sound of those pines
by the lake shore, I thought of the inspiration of old which had wakened
such lasting and wonderful music from the great souls of Israel. When we
want knowledge or the quickening of intellect, we enter the groves of
Greece; when we would find quickening, when we would feel the deeps of