CRUSADE FOR THE COUNTRY SCHOOL 



Often as I walk the streets of a great city 

 do I recall Matthew Arnold's verse: 



"Who can see the green earth any more 

 As she was by the sources of time ? 

 Who imagines her fields as they lay 

 In the sunshine, unworn by the plow ? 

 Who thinks as they thought, 

 The tribes who then roamed on her breast, 

 Her vigorous, primitive sons? 

 This tract which the river of Time 

 Now flows through with us, is the plain. 

 Gone is the calm of its earlier shore. 

 Bordered by cities and hoarse 

 With a thousand cries is its stream. 

 And we on its breast, our minds 

 Are confused as the cries which we hear, 

 Changing and short as the sights which we see." 



There must be in our land multitudes of 

 children, if not of men and women, who 

 have never in all their lives seen a natural 

 forest, meadow, grass-plat, mountain, or 

 waterfall; never heard "the wild sough of 

 the sea," or even the Great Lakes' feeble 

 imitation thereof; never listened to one of 

 those bird oratorios which each summer 

 morning turn every country side in the 

 world into a portico of heaven. To most 

 denizens of cities these precious, unique, 



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