SOCIETY IS MAN’S PLACE
The man of the city closes his house, forgets his office and goes away. He has a suit of store clothes on him and two linen collars in his handbag, but for the rest he carries the garb of the vagabond, and getting into this as quick as he can he buries his face in the pine-needles and lets the wind and rain beat down on his uncovered head and untrimmed beard. And the weeks pass; and then happens the stranger thing. Through the music of the forest and the harmonies of the falling waters, he hears, at first, far away and hardly audible, then ever nearer and clearer, the voice of the city he deserted, and to his manhood’s spirit that voice speaks with a charm which overcomes the woodland’s spell and in another day he is back again, back in the old street, to the old work, to the ever dear old city. And once more keeping step with the vast army of toilers, he knows that not in solitude, but in society, is character made, and more, that not nature, but human nature, is God’s best handiwork.—T. C. McClelland.
(2994)
Soil—See [Fruit and Soil].
SOLACE OF THE SEA
The following paragraph is the conclusion of James G. Blaine’s eulogy of President Garfield, and forms one of the finest passages of English prose:
Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will. Within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices, with wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean’s changing wonders, on its far sails whitening in the morning light, on its restless waves rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun, on the red clouds of evening arching low to the horizon, on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning, which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that, in the silence of the receding world, he heard the great wave breaking on a farther shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.
(2995)
Solar Energy—See [Energy]; [Utilization].
SOLDIER, A TRUE