

to the Earth 



, as in any de- 

 partment or function, "pays," we hurry 

 over the earth to find what was at our 

 elbow at home ; we go to the fields for 

 botanical study before we examine our 

 door-yards. White and Thoreau, the 

 master-watchers, kept to the confines of 

 their villages. What splendid effects are 

 never looked at ! Fog, swirling about the 

 fifteenth stories of office buildings ; sun- 

 sets ; stars ; northern lights ; we go to 

 Europe to see them ! One of the needs 

 of our restless age is content and familiarity 

 with what we have. Less general informa- 

 tion, less superficiality, some happy igno- 

 rance of integral calculus, could be endured 

 if we were stoutly grounded on a dozen 

 facts. 



Which recalls me to my position that in 

 our night-rambles we are not after the 

 material, at least not the petty. For, as 

 we mature, we rebel against littleness and 

 detail. The large, the general, the essen- 

 tial, are what we want. We demand sim- 

 plicity and order in our pictures for 

 example, in our reading, our music, our 



