And, drinking from the stream, we partake of the water which flows from the mountain of God—Nature’s communion cup.
The third emblem of life is the wilderness—that place to which wise men and poets and saints are driven in the last resort. “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,” wrote Byron. “There is society where none intrudes.” The wilderness tells you more, when you are attune to it. That is seldom the experience of the tramp on his first long divagation from the beaten track. The wilderness tires him, the forests blind him, the mountains wear him down, the endless plain rises under him and he smites his feet.
But there comes a point when there is a symmetry even in the wildest disarray of Nature, when man’s symmetry of parks and garden cities and roads and rides is a poor joke, a strange aberration of the human mind.
The universe is a most complicated lock with innumerable wards and windings and combination numbers. If the starry sky at night is a lock—you would say there is no key in the world to fit it. No key in the world truly—but in the human heart somewhere there is a wonderful key. “Have I not in my bosom a key called ‘Promise?’” said Pilgrim. When you find that key you can plunge it into the cunning aperture of Nature or Night. But you must know the combination numbers, and even then it will not turn if you do not first sing a verse of the Song of the Heart.
Quite a fairy tale. Even so. Life is a fairy tale, one of a series, like the Arabian Nights. And if it is a fairy tale rather than what Darwin and Herbert Spencer and Einstein have averred, how much more important to us all the fairy tale becomes.
Fairy tales are begun in the midst of woods, in strange forgotten glades, and at moments between dawn and the morning, and sunset and night.
“Fairy tales,” wrote Novalis, “are dreams of our homeland—which is everywhere and nowhere.” And to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time means to be in the wilds, and preferably quite lost. The absolute tramp, whom, I may say, I have never met, is a man with no address, no card, no reliable passport, no recognizable finger prints. But of course he is no ape man, no Tarzan, or son of Tarzan. Choice, not accident, leads him to the wilds.
The starry sky is the emblem of home, the highest roof in the universe. The sun is the mind, by whose light man seeks his way; the moon is the reflection of the mind on the heart, and is the emblem of melancholy and poetry.
However, of all these emblems, the coffeepot is apt to be the most real and vital. You will be on your knees morning and evening before your altar fire, abasing your brow and blowing the flames which are beneath it. Sun, moon, forest, river, road—these pass, but the coffeepot remains. It is so in life generally, and the tramp, however much a poet he may be, is a mortal like the rest of us. The moon may be hidden by a cloud, but that is not nearly so calamitous as having left the coffeepot at the last camping place.
