Rural School Leaflet. 1095 



QUOTATIONS 



"The sedges flaunt their harvest, 

 In every meadow nook. 

 And asters by the brook-side 



Make asters in the brook." — Helen Hunt Jackson 



"The vision is compact of blue and gold, 

 Of sky and water, and the drift of foam, 



And thrill of brine-washed breezes from the west : 

 Wide space is in it, and the unexpressed 

 Great heart of Nature, and the magic old 



Of legend, and the white ships coming home." 



— Richard Burton 



"In the urgent solitudes 



Lies the spur to larger moods; 

 In the friendship of the trees 



Dwell all sweet serenities." — Eihehvyn Wetherald 



"I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air, and all free poems also, 

 I think I could stop here myself and do miracles, 

 I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds 



me shall like me, 

 I think whoever I see must be happy. 

 ****** 



Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, 



It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth." 



— Walt Whitman 



"That which is first worth knowing is that which is nearest at hand. The 

 nearest at hand, in the natural environment, is the weather. Every day of our 

 lives, on land or sea, whether we will or no, the air and the clouds and the sky 

 surround us. So variable is this environment, from morning till evening and 

 from evening till morning and from season to season, that we are always con- 

 scious of it. It is to the changes in this environment that we apply the folk- 

 word "weather," — weather, that is akin to wind. No man is efficient who is 

 at cross-purposes with the main cuirents of his life; no man is content and happy 

 who is out of sympathy with the environment in which he is bom to live: so the 

 habit of grumbling at the weather is the most senseless and futile of all expendi- 

 tures of human effort. Day by day we complain and fret at the weather, and 

 when we are done with it we have — the weather." 



— L. H. Bailey in Outlook to Nature 



"It is due to every child that his mind be opened to the voices of nature. The 

 world is always quick with sounds, although our ears are closed to them. Every 

 person hears the loud songs of birds, the sweep of heavy winds and the rush of 

 rapid rivers or the sea; but the small voices v^ith which we live are known not to 

 one in ten thousand. To be able to distinguish the notes of the different birds is 

 one of the choicest resources in life, and it should be one of the first results of a 

 good education. It is but a step from this to the other small voices, — of the 

 insects, the frogs and toads, the mice, the domestic anim.Tls, the flow of quiet 

 waters, and the nouses of the little winds. It is a great thing when one learns how 

 to listen. At least once, every young person should sleep far out in the open, 

 preferably in a wood or the margin of a wood, that he may know the spirit and 

 the voices of the night and thereafter be free and unafraid." 



— L. H. Bailev m The Nature-Study Idea 



