find life. The things the nations exclusively troubled themselves about
all seemed to him so obviously vain and worthless, and, though he never
even in his highest moments felt the claims of sainthood, it puzzled and
perplexed him deeply that the conquest over Nature in all its
multifarious forms today should seem to them so infinitely more important
than the conquest over self. What the world with common consent called
Reality, seemed ever to him the most crude and obvious, the most
transient, the most blatant un-Reality. His love of Nature was more than
the mere joy of tumultuous pagan instincts. It was, in the kind of simple
life he craved, the first step toward the recovery of noble, dignified,
enfranchised living. In the denial of all this external flummery he
hated, it would leave the soul disengaged and free, able to turn her
activities within for spiritual development. Civilization now suffocated,
smothered, killed the soul. Being in the hopeless minority, he felt he
must be somewhere wrong, at fault, deceived. For all men, from a
statesman to an engine-driver, agreed that the accumulation of external
possessions had value, and that the importance of material gain was
real.... Yet, for himself, he always turned for comfort to the Earth.
The wise and wonderful Earth opened her mind and her deep heart to him
in a way few other men seemed to know. Through Nature he could move
blind-folded along, yet find his way to strength and sympathy. A noble,
gracious life stirred in him then which the pettier human world denied.
He often would compare the thin help or fellowship he gained from
ordinary social intercourse, or from what had seemed at the time quite a
successful gathering of his kind, with the power he gained from a visit
to the woods or mountains. The former, as a rule, evaporated in a single
day; the other stayed, with ever growing power, to bless whole weeks and
months.

And hence it was, whether owing to the truth or ignorance of his