We thought there must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come to it. There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order begins. Order should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of surfaces and deeps in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has come far, and one does well to be alone for a time in a golden afternoon in a wheat-field just before cutting. One loves the Old Mother better for that adventure. She must give high for wheat. She must be virgin and strong and come naked and unashamed to the sun to bring forth wheat. She must bring down the spirit of the sun and blend it with her own—for wheat partakes of the alkahest. Wheat is a master, an aristocrat.
The Dakotan said that once when he was on the Open Road through the northwest, he slept for two days in a car of wheat, and that it was a bath of power.... We thought we would make our beds in wheat, thereafter—but that would be sacrilege.
Then we talked of that mysterious harmony from the beehives, and we saw at once that it has to do with Order, that Inertia was mastered there—that the spirit of wheat has mastered Inertia—so that there is a nobility, even about the golden husk. It occurred to us, of course, then, that all the aristocrats of Nature—rose and wheat and olives and bees and alabaster and grapes—must all have their part of the harmony, for Order has come to their chaos. Their spirit has come forth, as in the face of a far-come child—the brute earth-bound lines of self gone—the theme of life, Service.
I am at the end of Capitals now.
One afternoon we talked about corn—from the fields where the passionate mystic Ruth gleaned, to our own tasseled garden plot. And another day we found the ants enlarging the doors of their tunnels, to let out for the nuptial flight certain winged mistresses. There is something in everything.
Each of us sees it differently. Each of us can take what he sees, after all the rest have told their stories, and make a poem of that. The first wonder of man cannot be conceived until this is realised.
There is an inner correspondence in the awakened human soul for every movement and mystery of Nature. When the last resistance of Inertia is mastered, we shall see that there is no separateness anywhere, no detachment; that the infinite analogies all tell the same story—that the plan is one.