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Let me give another illustration of the way natural objects 
lead us on to an ideal beyond nature. This is a very common 
theme. The eye seeks ever the horizon. The near landscape 
may be very beautiful, but the point of interest is ever in the 
distance. We wish to go there, for we think that there we shall 
be nearer to that perfect beauty we seek. But we go there and 
still the beauty we seek flies on before, and is still on the horizon. 
There are the delectable mountains which we can never climb. 
It is an illusion, we say, but it is also a law of the mind—it is a 
law of things—for “all experience is an arch where-through 
gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades, forever and 
forever, as we move.’ Everybody has felt the power of this spell, 
from which we cannot escape by thinking, for, as Hamlet says, 
‘‘ thinking makes it so.” 
EDEN. 
Among the distant mountains, 
Beneath the setting sun 
There is a lonely Eden 
Where peace may yet be won. 
Unseen in yonder forest 
There bloom enchanted bowers, 
Beyond the gleaming vistas, 
Where joy may yet be ours. 
And by the winding river, 
Far-shining in the west, 
There is a land of Beulah 
Where wandering hearts may rest. 
Oh, if we could but find it, 
By forest or by stream, 
This land, this lonely Eden 
And find it—not a dream! 
May I give an illustration of a different kind? I have spoken 
of the music of streams. For nature enters not only through 
the eye, but through the ear, into the soul. And here also there 
is selection and an ideal. We know that music is not always 
heard when it is heard. The ear hears it, and often that is all. 
But sometimes the soul hears it, too. It greatly depends upon 
the mood. ‘‘The world is too much with us.” We are seldom 
unpreoccupied. At the crowded and fashionable watering place 
we may never hear the sea. Ona lonely shore, when no other 
sound is nigh, we may hear that mighty voice and say, with 
Klizabeth Browning, ‘sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!’ So I 
believe few people ever hear the voice of streams. Once I heard 
it, on the occasion commemorated in the lines I have read, ‘“ By 
the River,” and again recently in two places, one in the country 
and one in the town. There is a place of meeting streams a 
little behind Habergham Hall, and there one day last summer I 
