The Holy Earth

by L. H. Bailey

The background spaces.—The forest

"This is the forest primeval." These are the significant words of the poet in Evangeline. Perhaps more than any single utterance they have set the American youth against the background of the forest.

The backgrounds are important. The life of every one of us is relative. We miss our destiny when we miss or forget our backgrounds. We lose ourselves. Men go off in vague heresies when they forget the conditions against which they live. Judgments become too refined and men tend to become merely disputatious and subtle.

The backgrounds are the great unoccupied spaces. They are the large environments in which we live but which we do not make. The backgrounds are the sky with its limitless reaches; the silences of the sea; the tundra in pallid arctic nights; the deserts with their prismatic colors; the shores that gird the planet; the vast mountains that are beyond reach; the winds, which are the universal voice in nature; the sacredness of the night; the elemental simplicity of the open fields; and the solitude of the forest. These are the facts and situations that stand at our backs, to which we adjust our civilization, and by which we measure ourselves.

The great conquest of mankind is the conquest of his natural conditions. We admire the man who overcomes: the sailor or navigator in hostile and unknown seas; the engineer who projects himself hard against the obstacles; the miner and the explorer; the builder; the farmer who ameliorates the earth to man's use.

But even though we conquer or modify the physical conditions against which we are set, nevertheless the backgrounds will remain. I hope that we may always say "The forest primeval." I hope that some reaches of the sea may never be sailed, that some swamps may never be drained, that some mountain peaks may never be scaled, that some forests may never be harvested. I hope that some knowledge may never be revealed.

Look at your map of the globe. Note how few are the areas of great congestion of population and of much human activity as compared with the vast and apparently empty spaces. How small are the spots that represent the cities and what a little part of the earth are the political divisions that are most in the minds of men! We are likely to think that all these outlying and thinly peopled places are the wastes. I suspect that they contribute more to the race than we think. I am glad that there are still some places of mystery, some reaches of hope, some things far beyond us, some spaces to conjure up dreams. I am glad that the earth is not all Iowa or Belgium or the Channel Islands. I am glad that some of it is the hard hills of New England, some the heathered heights of Scotland, some the cold distances of Quebec, some of it the islands far off in little-traversed seas, and some of it also the unexplored domains that lie within eyesight of our own homes. It is well to know that these spaces exist, that there are places of escape. They add much to the ambition of the race; they make for strength, for courage, and for renewal.

In the cities I am always interested in the variety of the contents of the store windows. Variously fabricated and disguised, these materials come from the ends of the earth. They come from the shores of the seas, from the mines, from the land, from the forests, from the arctic, and from the tropic. They are from the backgrounds. The cities are great, but how much greater are the forests and the sea!

No people should be forbidden the influence of the forest. No child should grow up without a knowledge of the forest; and I mean a real forest and not a grove or village trees or a park. There are no forests in cities, however many trees there may be. As a city is much more than a collection of houses, so is a forest much more than a collection of trees. The forest has its own round of life, its characteristic attributes, its climate, and its inhabitants. When you enter a real forest you enter the solitudes, you are in the unexpressed distances. You walk on the mould of years and perhaps of ages. There is no other wind like the wind of the forest; there is no odor like the odor of the forest; there is no solitude more complete; there is no song of a brook like the song of a forest brook; there is no call of a bird like that of a forest bird; there are no mysteries so deep and which seem yet to be within one's realization.