What Man has made of Man.
The rest of the stanzas she had forgotten, except the three final lines of all:
If such be Nature's Holy plan,
Have I not reason to Lament
What Man has made of Man?
Far off beyond distant Dana, rising in ice-capped majesty above the last range of mountains, hate and discord and confusion were positive qualities. Men struggled against each other, ideals clashed, faiths oppressed. Even love fought for its place and in the end surrendered. There was nothing sure, nothing positive, nothing motionless like this in its own perfection. It was all distorted, ugly and forever battling.
Sitting on the porch, after an early supper, watching the day's farewell to the granite peaks, Anne's eyes filled with tears. If only she had Rogie with her she would never leave this peace. The world beyond could fight its futile battles. If only Rogie were with her, nothing would be lacking. Undisturbed by the world's confusion, they would live out their lives, and sink, at last into the stillness of the earth.
What did it matter if they made no place for themselves among men; if no one ever heard of them; the ambitions of men were such pitiful things?
In the arrogance of his conceit, man had appropriated to himself the pinnacle of creation. In his fury of effort he rushed about over the surface of the great, still earth, erecting his little cities and civilizations, setting up his little philosophies for the guidance of others. His ideals, his religions, his pretentious systems of thought, so futilely abstruse and complicated, were like the rules and regulations for the guiding of traffic in public places: "Keep to the right"; "turn here"; "cross there"; vast in their pretension of public usefulness; needed because of the confusion created by himself. In the peace of the mountains his efforts had less cohesion, less purpose than the movements of the ants, running here and there, making long circuits about some tiny obstacle. So man made circuits through his own philosophies in a stupendous effort to reach the truth which he had lost in the involved processes of his own journey to it. Anne could almost see these myriads of tiny individuals rushing about over the surface of life, jostling, shouting, getting in each other's way, going down, being trampled, struggling to rise, each shouting his own foolish solution of the problem of life.
When Anne had been a month in the mountains she wrote to Belle asking her to find some way of sending Rogie. Belle wrote back promising to do so, even to bring him herself, if no other way opened, but the days slipped again to weeks and Rogie did not come.