The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent along the Shore. She sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her lap—and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:
"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so good."
"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write until you begin to dream as you write—until you forget hand and paper and place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain interpret the dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."
In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will get a glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an idea, more clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy back of the work here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who come express themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these papers from the nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a ray in everything she does, at least one in a paper. What is more cheerfully disclosed than anything else, from my viewpoint, is the quickening imagination. Apparently she did not title this one:
Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build his civilisation. Of course, she is everywhere—in Germany, in Canada and California, but the Father is more to be seen with her in the wild places.
In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the Mother. Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted to, without being placed in all kinds of star and round and square shapes. Some of their leaves could be longer than others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great trees, such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve their branches without the thought of being cut down for a sidewalk, or trimmed until they were frivolous nothings. Small stones and shells could lie down on a bed of moss at the feet of these trees and ask questions that disgraced Mr. Beech. (But of course they were young.) The flower fairies could sit in the sunlight and laugh at the simple little stones.
Oh! dear, I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds like some kind of a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century instead of the Twentieth, but I am not going to tear it up. The thing I really wanted to write about this morning was the goodness of being alive here in winter.
After a long, lovely sleep at night, in a room with wide-open windows and plenty of covers, you wake up fresh and happy. From the East comes up over the frozen Lake, the sun sending streaks of orange, red, yellow, all through the sky.
Here and there are little clouds of soft greys and pinks, which look like the fluffy heads of young lettuce.
Venus in the south, big and wonderful, fades out of sight when the last shades of night pass out of the sky.