I had into such poor words as I could
command.

What a new and wonderful world opened to me then! My takings of nature
increased tenfold, a hundredfold, and I came to a new acquaintance with
my own garden, my own hills, and all the roads and fields around
about--and even the town took on strange new meanings for me. I cannot
explain it rightly, but it was as though I had found a new earth here
within the old one, but more spacious and beautiful than any I had known
before. I have thought, often and often, that this world we live in so
dumbly, so carelessly, would be more glorious than the tinsel heaven of
the poets if only we knew how to lay hold upon it, if only we could win
that complete command of our own lives which is the end of our being.

At first, as I said, I stopped my work, or loitered as I walked, in
order to see, or hear, or smell--and do so still, for I have entered
only the antechamber of the treasure-house; but as I learned better the
modest technic of these arts I found that the practice of them went well
with the common tasks of the garden or farm, especially with those that
were more or less monotonous, like cultivating corn, hoeing potatoes,
and the like.

The air is just as full of good sights and good odours for the worker as
for the idler, and it depends only upon the awareness, the aliveness, of
our own spirits whether we toil like dumb animals or bless our labouring
hours with the beauty of life. Such enjoyment and a growing command of
our surroundings are possible, after a little practice, without taking
much of that time we call so valuable and waste so sinfully. "I haven't
time," says the farmer, the banker, the professor, with a kind of
disdain for the spirit of life, when, as a matter of fact, he has all
the time there is, all that anybody has--to wit, _this_ moment, this
great and golden moment!--but knows not how to employ it. He creeps when
he might walk, walks when he might run, runs when he might fly--and
lives like a woodchuck in the dark body of himself.

Why, there are men in this valley who scout the idea that farming,
carpentry, merchantry, are anything but drudgery, defend all the evils
known to humankind with the argument that "a man must live," and laugh
at any one who sees beauty or charm in being here, in working with the
hands, or, indeed, in just living! While they think of themselves
cannily as "practical" men, I think them the most impractical men I
know, for in a wo