wilderness. I wish, she says, that mankind might sit at a sumptuous
table, but I shall not scoff at the wooden spoon that feeds its
hunger. She hangs one picture upon her wall: it is Christ sitting at
meat with publicans and sinners. And so season after season, year
after year, she carries her sympathy, her hope, her steady faith to
all the pioneers. She is not a poet, but the world is to her
enchanted. Under the sharp voice of the reformer she hears the music
of the harmony which he discordantly foretells. With the distorted
eyes of the ill-disciplined, ignorant enthusiast she beholds the
symmetry of the future towards which he looks. In turn, the reformer
and the enthusiast behold in her and vaguely comprehend the outward
charm of beauty and grace and high condition which they blindly
announce. It is as if Daniel Boone, shaggy and savage, suddenly saw
his cabin and his rude clearing glorified: a stately, hospitable
mansion, overlooking a placid landscape of rounded groves and blooming
gardens and distant parks, murmuring with the song of birds and all
domestic sounds. Her service to a good cause is more than eloquence,
more than devotion--it is the perpetual presence of its ideal.

There were plenty of Lords and Ladies Cavaliere who were tired to
death of that solemn enthusiast and bore, Columbus. But when he saw
the shore of San Salvador he must have recalled that he had long ago
seen it in the patient faith of any unknown friend who had always
hoped for him and believed with him. The Lady Cavaliere who thinks
Daniel Boone in early Kentucky, or Christopher Columbus pacing the
shore and ceaselessly looking westward, the most romantic of figures,
does not know that she sneered at both when she whispered, "I am tired
to death of reformers."