lay of a diviner purpose and
force through us. Nothing is lost, nothing really dies; all things are
conserved by an energy which transforms, reorganises, and perpetuates
in new and finer forms all visible things. The silence of winter
counterfeits the repose of death, but it is not even a pause of life;
invisibly to us the great movement goes on in the earth under our feet.
While we watch by our household fires, the unseen architects are
planning the summer, and the sublime march of the stars is noiselessly
bringing back the bloom and the perfume that seem to have vanished
forever. Every morning restores something we thought lost, recalls
some charm that seemed to have escaped.

In all noble natures there is an ineradicable idealism which constantly
interprets life in its higher aspects. In the dust of the road the
mountains sometimes disappear from our vision, but we know that they
still loom in undiminished majesty against the horizon; the gods
sometimes hide themselves, but there is something within which affirms
that we shall again look on their serene faces, calm amid our
turbulence and unchanging amid our vicissitudes. It is this heavenly
inheritance of insight and faith which makes Nature so divinely
significant to us, and matches all its forms and phenomena with
spiritual realities not to be taken from us by time or change or by
that mysterious angel of the last great transformation which we call
death. The morning is always breaking over the low horizon lines of
some sea or continent; voices of birds are always "carolling against
the gates of day;" and so, through unbroken light and song, our life is
solemnly and sublimely moved onward to the dawn in which all the faint
stars of our hope shall melt into the eternal day.

Chapter XVII

A Summer Noon

The stir of the morning has given place to a silence broken only by the
shrill whir of the locust. The distant shore lines that ran clear and
white against the low background of green have become dim and
indistinct; all things are touched by a soft haze which changes the
sentiment of the landscape from movement to repose, from swift and
multitudinous activity to the hush of sleep. The intense blue of the
morning sky is dimmed and the great masses of trees are motionless.
The distant harvest fields where the rhythmic lines of the mowers have
moved alert and harmonious through the morning hours are deserted. On
earth silence and rest, and in the gr