I wonder whether the restless impulse that sends city folks hill-ward in the springtime is not a part of the Divine Plan that would lead us all to lift up our eyes to the hills whence our help cometh. They flock up here, the city folks, during these first spring days, to eat their luncheons by the roadside and to fill their hands with the poppies and wild hyacinth, the blue-eyed grass and pimpernel that everywhere dot the young meadows’ glowing green. I hear, at night-fall, mother’s voices calling the little ones to prepare for home-going, and I love to see the contented parties go wandering down, the tiniest tired climber usually sound asleep in his father’s arms with the sun’s last rays caressing the small face. It is good for them to be here. There is, in the dumbest of us, a faint stirring of recognition that the hope and promise of life are in the young year. This love of the childhood of things is the best thing our human nature knows: the best because there is in it the least of self. It is a different thing from the love of new beginnings. It is not new beginnings, but first principles that the soul seeks, now, and so we climb the hills, as naturally as the daisies look upward, leaving behind us the pitiful aims that end in self and belong to the dead level.
In the springtime love awakens, born anew in the green wonder of the season’s childhood. Yonder where the road climbs the hill the sunlight is sifting in long bars through the eucalyptus trees, making a brown and golden ladder all along the way. In everything is the fresh, tender suggestion of a Sunday afternoon in the springtime. The air is full of the scent of swamp-willow and laurel, and the breath of feeding cattle on the hills
By the roadside He and She walk shyly apart. They could scarcely clasp hands across the space that separates them, yet one seeing them knows their hearts are close together. The blue sky arches over them: the soft clouds pass lightly above their heads: the sunbeams bring brighter rounds for the brown and golden ladder his feet and hers tread lightly. They are palpably “of the people.” Her hands are roughened and red from toil. His shoulders are bent by the early bearings of heavy burdens. Neither He nor She is over twenty years old, and they are poor, as some count riches, but to them, together, has come the sweetness of life, and He and She are walking on the heights
Yesterday they were but a boy and a girl, but today He to her is Manhood; She, to him, is Womanhood, and in this great human wilderness they have reached out and found each other. Could anything be more wonderful than this? Could anything exceed in beauty this secret of theirs that he who runs may read in every line of their illumined faces?
Students versed in the ’ologies: sociologists, philanthropists, economists and progressionists of every sort, we know all that you would say. We have heard your arguments time and again. We have listened to your statistics and watched the shaking of your head over these unions of the poor. But the wisdom of life is wiser than men, else He and She would do well to listen to you instead of walking together here on the hill road. They do not know these things that we are seeking to reduce to what we call social science; and if they should know them, what then? Are they not of more value than many sparrows?