sings the poet; but as for me, after traveling all day let me come back to a house at the end of the road—for in returning and rest shall a man be saved, in quietness and confidence shall he find strength. Nowhere shall he find that quietness and confidence in larger measure than here in the hills. And where shall he return to more rest?
There are men whose souls are like these hills, simple, strong, quiet men who can heal and restore; and there are books that help like the hills, simple elemental, large books; music, and sleep, and prayer, and play are healing too; but none of these cure and fill one with a quietness and confidence as deep as that from the hills, even from the little hills and the small fields and the vast skies of Hingham; a confidence and joy in the earth, perhaps, rather than in heaven, and yet in heaven too.
If it is not also a steadied thinking and a cleared seeing, it is at least a mental and moral convalescence that one gets—out of the landscape, out of its largeness, sweetness and reality. I am quickly conscious on the hills of space all about me—room for myself, room for the things that crowd and clutter me; and as these arrange and set themselves in order, I am aware of space within me, of freedom and wideness there, of things in order, of doors unlocked and windows opened, through which I look out upon a new young world, new like the morning, young like the seedling pines on the slope—young and new like my soul!
Now I can go back to my classroom. Now I can read themes once more. Now I can gaze into the round, moon-eyed face of youth and have faith—as if my chair were a stump, my classroom a wooded hillside covered with young pines, seedlings of the Lord, and full of sap, and proof against the worm.
Yet these are the same youth who yesterday wrote the "Autobiography of a Fountain Pen" and "The Exhilarations of the Straw-Ride" and the essays on "The Beauties of Nature." It is I who am not the same. I have been changed, renewed, having seen from my stump the face of eternal youth in the freshmen pines marching up the hillside, in the young brook playing and pursuing through the meadow, in the young winds over the trees, the young stars in the skies, the young moon riding along the horizon
"With the auld moon in her arm"--
youth immortal, and so, unburdened by its withered load of age.
I come down from the hill with a soul resurgent,—strong like the heave that overreaches the sag of the sea,—and bold in my faith—to a lot of college students as the hope of the world!
From the stump in the woodlot I see not only the face of things but the course of things, that they are moving past me, over me, and round and round me their fixed center—for the horizon to bend about, for the sky to arch over, for the highways to start from, for every influence and interest between Hingham and Heaven to focus on.
"All things journey sun and moon
Morning noon and afternoon,
Night and all her stars,"--