THE LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL 



Warner's proposition; but, in the first place, 

 the foregoing list is not intended to be a 

 complete one; and, in the second place, I 

 am not convinced that literature is really 

 one of the conditions of life. It seems to 

 me to be rather one of its products. 



Landscape is one of the fimdamental 

 conditions. The contact with the physical 

 world is threefold — carnal, intellectual and 

 spiritual. Out of the earth we first get sub- 

 sistence for the body; second, our ideas of 

 things and phenomena; and third, our ex- 

 perience of beauty and our clue to the para- 

 dise not made with hands, eternal in the 

 heavens. In the first order of earth contact 

 we may or may not know the landscape. 

 The miner, toiling in the coal shaft, may 

 never realize to himself the existence of the 

 sky, the water and the green rolling hills. 

 But the farmer plows and sows and harvests 

 the landscape, and thus in his carnal strug- 

 gle for food comes into conscious and be- 

 nign relationship with the fields. In the 

 second order of contact with the physical 

 world, the landscape is woven into the very 

 fiber of all our mental processes. Our 

 knowledge of space and number, and all the 

 most elementary ideas psychology has ever 



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