192 On the Campus 



lover there are a thousand voices that come unbidden, 

 half mystic if you will, but real withal in their effect 

 upon the sentient soul, voices that touch the wander- 

 er's every mood, that kindle anew his quiet joy in living, 

 or by their gentler ministry soothe his perturbed spirit. 

 The man who treads the great aisles of the towering for- 

 ests on our western slopes passes under the spell of their 

 mighty past and revels triumphant in the privilege of 

 beholding. Giants a thousand years old rising above the 

 prostrate trunks of other giants through hundreds of 

 generations all for him, and he possesses all their 

 years and listens to the music brought pure and unal- 

 loyed from all the past. Or he stands upon the limitless 

 meadow of the uninhabited grassy plain, and sees in the 

 sunshine the wind-tossed waves chasing each other in 

 light and shadow to the far horizon, and the wealth of 

 future life is his, for shall not that flood sweep on and 

 on, as he beholds it now, so long as the sun or the moon 

 endures. Or sleepless, does he walk the desert on a star- 

 lit night amid sage brush, mesquit, covillea with its 

 golden bloom, every plant declares life 's triumph and 

 lifts him over every hardship and all the plagues and 

 difficulties that anon did pester him and seemed so in- 

 surmountable. Or in some quiet grove at home do the 

 whisperings of the leaves touch him with a sense of mel- 

 ody or of mystery ? he listens spell-bound, charmed by the 

 voice oracular that through countless generations spoke 

 to his fathers the voice of God. His musings are un- 

 conscious memories. Here is the field for the poets, and 

 no greatest man among them has failed to note it. Mil- 

 ton in Lycidas, Schiller in the Maid of Orleans, Shake- 



