I swing on as one in a dream—I swing
Down the airy hollows, I shout, I sing!
The world is gone like an empty word!
My body's a bough in the wind, my heart a bird!
Never in a thousand years can one get such pure, sweet, pulsing, living and stay-long-with-you delights as these, in a city. Granted there are pleasures in the ballroom, and they are doubtless great, but can they begin to compare with the delights of out-of-doors? Languor next day, ennui, jealousies, heart-burnings, gossiping, cruel slandering, ruination of health, too often come with these city pleasures. Then, too, the ballroom in its desirable form is only for the rich, while the poor may enjoy everything good of the great out-of-doors. The city has its theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, and the like, but they are generally at night, compelling people to be out when they should be in bed, turning day into night, and reversing the natural order of things. And the artificial is never equal to the real, the unnatural to the natural.
Then, too, the out-of-doors is such a teacher; and not a teacher of the arid, formal, dry, embalmed knowledge, but the real living facts. As Robert Louis, the well-beloved, says:
There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science, but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.
Book knowledge can never equal living knowledge. He whose mind is stored with what he has read too often only thinks he knows, while the one whose facts are gained at first hand from the real objects themselves knows that he knows. A man in a factory as a rule, in these days of specialization, is only a cog in a wheel, a part of a great machine. Be he a woodworker, he does not make any complete piece of furniture. He saws on one part; another on another; a third on still another; a fourth, who knows nothing of shaping the parts, assembles the whole, and a fifth puts them together; a sixth sandpapers; a seventh stains or varnishes; and an eighth polishes and finishes. So with watchmaking and everything used by human hands. Nobody, nowadays, has the joy of "doing it all."
But in the country a man plows, harrows, sows the seed and cultivates, and during it all he is in the open, seeing all the wonderful phenomena of Nature pass before him in everchanging panorama each hour. That is, of course, providing he has not been ground down by too many hours of hard physical labor until he has become a mere "brother to the ox," and the stolid and stunned creature so powerfully described by Edwin Markham in his Man with the Hoe.