20 UNDER THE TREES. 



it and became its interpreter. This radiant world 

 upon which I look was without form and void until 

 the earliest man brought to the vision of it that cre 

 ative power within himself which touched it with 

 form and color and relations not its own. Nature 

 is as incomplete and helpless without man as man 

 would be without Nature. He brought her varied 

 and inexhaustible beauty, and clothed her with a 

 garment woven on we know not what looms of divine 

 energy ; and she fed, sheltered, and strengthened 

 him for the life which lay before him. Together 

 they have wrought from the first hour, and civiliza 

 tion, with all the circle of its arts, is their joint 

 handiwork. 



In the atmosphere of our rich modern fellowship 

 with Nature, the unwritten poetry to which every 

 open heart falls heir, we forget our earliest depend 

 ence on the great mother and the lessons she 

 taught when men gathered about her knee in the 

 childhood of the world. Not a spade turned the 

 soil, not an ax felled a tree, not a path was made 

 through the forest, that did not leave, in the man 

 whose arm put forth the toil, some moral quality. 

 In the obstacles which she placed in their pathway, 

 in the difficulties with which she surrounded theii 

 life, the wise mother taught her children all the 

 lessons which were to make them great. It was no 

 easy familiarity which she offered them, no careless 

 bestowal of bounty upon dependents ; she met them 

 as men, and offered them a perpetual alliance upon 



