42 THE BOOK OF THE OPEN AIR 



To observe what is going on around Familiar Letters, the Pyrenees were 



and beneath us is to touch the illimit- " huge and monstrous excrescences of 



able past. Nature," although " not so high or 



To see a world in a grain of sand, hideous as the Alps." The poet Gray 



A heaven in a wild flower, 



Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, describes the horrors of Mont Cems, 



And Eternity in an hour, an( i Goldsmith talks of " the dismal 



sang William Blake. And to know landscape of the hills," while, less 



the history of a piece of chalk or sand- unexpected from him, Horace Walpole 



stone or granite or pumicestone, is to writes of " the uncouth rocks and un- 



have the story of rock-formation, fire- comely inhabitants of the Alps." 



fused or water-laid, at our fingers' Here, by this treacherous coast of 



ends. In the rolled pebble ; in the shoal and surf, where 



glistening sandgrain ; in the cham- 



. . . Tamarisks bow their heads, compelled 



bered shell or the striated boulder ; By no ungent , e force> 



from the rain puddle to the great sea While the air a sunny sweetness held 



Mingled of sea and gorse, 

 itself which " no man can tame, there 



is the story of energies which have and in scattered villages inland, the 

 known no pause, which were potential elements have fed superstition, and 

 in the nebulous stuff of which all things, many a barbaric belief and custom, 

 both living and the dead, are spun; carefully hidden from parson and school- 

 energies which, Proteus-like, are ever master, sways, and long will sway, the 

 changing their modes, and passing, the life of the unlettered. That sublime 

 one into the other, but are extinguished saying, " Ye shall know the truth, and 

 never. the truth shall make you free," has 

 With the key supplied by that story, intellectual as well as spiritual applica- 

 what once was dreaded becomes dear tion. And to this they can best bear 

 and desired, because knowledge, like witness who have escaped vacuity of 

 " perfect love, casteth out fear." Herein life in search after wisdom. 

 we of these latter days have a coign of " For happy is the man that findeth 

 vantage, not only over the ancients, wisdom, and the man that getteth un- 

 to whom mountains were haunts of derstanding. . . . She is more pre- 

 demons, and of terrible beasts, but over cious than rubies, and all the things 

 men of recent time. To the delightful, thou canst desire are not to be com- 

 if romancing author of Ho-Elianae, or pared unto her." 



