219 *^® mystique of the desert 



moment of happiness passed, it was not because the glory 

 had faded but only because his own sight had grown dim. 



There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream. 

 The earth, and every common sight. 



To me did seem 

 Apparelled in celestial light. 

 The glory and the freshness of a dream. 



Oh joy! that in our embers 

 Is something that doth live. 

 That nature yet remembers 

 What was so fugitive! 



Something hke this is what, in clumsy prose, I am try- 

 ing to suggest. "Wilderness," "jungle," "desert," are not 

 magic words because we have been "conditioned" to find 

 them such but because they stand for things which only 

 conditioning can make seem indifferent or alien. How 

 could the part be greater than the whole? How can na- 

 trn'e's meaning come wholly from man when he is only part 

 of that meaning? "Only in ourselves does natm*e live" is 

 less true than its opposite: "Only in nature do we have a 

 being." 



The most materialistic of historians do not deny the in- 

 fluence upon a people of the land on which they live. 

 When they say, for instance, that the existence of a frontier 

 was a dominant factor in shaping the character of the 

 American people, they are not thinking only of a physical 

 fact. They mean also that the idea of a frontier, the reali- 

 zation that space to be occupied lay beyond it, took its 



