ARBOR DAY ITS HISTORY AND OBSERVANCE. 31 



being suppressed. We need something to draw us away from the hardening condi- 

 tions of a life centered in self and absorbed in the purely material aspect of things. 

 Especially do we need something to create and stimulate in the hearts of our chil- 

 dren a genuine love for the works of nature. This can not be done by the text-book 

 study of botany no more than the treasures of literature can be appropriated and 

 made a heart possession by the study of grammar. It can not be done by studying 

 nature solely in the interest of scientific truth. 



To this, one of the world's greatest students of nature, Charles Darwin, has borne 

 conclusive testimony. Indeed, it is inexpressibly sad to hear him in his later years, 

 when the " frontlet of olive culled far and wide" was vying with the "ivy leaf, the 

 meed of learned brows" to grace the chaplet of his enduring fame, declare in the 

 undertones of lamentation that he could not endure to read a line of poetry, that 

 Shakespeare was so intolerably dull as to nauseate him, that he had almost lost his 

 taste for pictures and music, that fine scenery failed to cause him the exquisite delight 

 it formerly did, and that his mind seemed to have become a kind of machine for grind- 

 ing general laws out of large collections of facts, resulting in the atrophy of that 

 part of the brain on which the higher tastes depend. "The loss of these tastes/' 

 mark his words, "is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intel- 

 lect, and more probably to the moral 'character, by enfeebling the emotional part of 

 our nature." 



Let us take the lesson to heart. It needs to be heeded, for, in the strenuous efforts 

 that are now being put forth, with the best of motives, to make our education more 

 and more practical, the importance of cultivating the aesthetic and moral faculties 

 is only too apt to be overshadowed. It is possible to become too practical. " Rus- 

 kin speaks of. men so l practical ' that they would turn the human race into vegeta- 

 bles, make the earth a stable, and its fruit fodder. There are vine dressers and 

 husbandmen," he says, "who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush 

 better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and 

 drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew and the water they draw are 

 better than the pine forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and 

 the great rivers that move like his eternity." For all such, nature speaks in no 

 intelligible voice, Milton's grand epic has no meaning because it " proves nothing," 

 the healthy and elevating tone of the writings of a Wood and a Jefferies touches no 

 responsive chord, and these loving interpreters of nature have their books rated 

 "heavy "by the trade. "We observe the face of nature so little, that the few 

 enthusiasts who have come to know her speak to us, when they would describe her 

 beauties, in an unknown tongue." 



The planting of a tree, the tender care bestowed upon it, the eager watching for 

 new developments in its growth, the tending of a'flower bed, the training of a vine, 

 will for many a child prove the "open sesame" into the charmed circle of those 

 forces and factors of the natural world which purify, refine, and ennoble the heart 

 of man. The process itself can not be indicated. It is secret, silent, past finding 

 out. It is a growth that subtle something, which is forever escaping the clutch of 

 the keenest investigator, only to find easy access to the soul of him who hath eyes to 

 see and ears to hear what is revealed of the Infinite in the finite order of creation. 



Powers there are 



That touch each other to the quick in modes 

 Which the gross world no sense hath to perceive, 

 No soul to dream of. 



[Wordsworth. 



Though we may not analyze these mysterious powers which touch us at every 

 point of our natural environment, quickening our impulses, warming our affections, 

 exalting our thoughts, purifying our tastes, enlightening our whole being, we know 

 enough of them to prize them at their full value. Nor is this beyond the range of 

 the practical. For what is more truly, more wisely practical, than to set in operation 





