It was no easy familiarity which she offered them, no careless
bestowal of bounty upon dependents; she met them as men, and offered
them a perpetual alliance upon such terms as great and equal sovereigns
proffer and accept. She gave much, but she asked even more than she
offered, and in the first moment of intercourse she struck in men that
lofty note of sovereignty which has never ceased to thrill the race
with mysterious tones of power and prophecy. Men have stood erect and
fearless in the presence of the most awful revelations of the forces of
Nature, affirming by their very attitude a supremacy of spirit which no
preponderance of power can overshadow. Face to face through all his
history man has stood with Nature, and to each generation she has
opened some new page of her inexhaustible story. Beginning in the
hardest toil for the most material rewards, this fellowship has
steadily added one province of knowledge and intimacy after another,
until it has become inclusive of the most delicate and hidden recesses
of character as well as those which are obvious and primary. In
response to spirits which have continually come into a closer contact
with her life, Nature has added to her gifts of food and wine, poetry
and art, far-reaching sciences, occult wisdoms and skills; she has
invited the greatest to become her ministers, and has rewarded their
unselfish service by sharing with them the mighty forces that sleep and
awake at her bidding; one after another the poets of truest gift have
forsaken the beaten paths of cities and men, and found along her
untrodden ways the vision that never fades; her voice, now that men
begin to understand it again as their forefathers understood it, is a
voice of worship. So, from their first work for food and shelter, men
have steadily won from Nature gifts of insight and knowledge and
prophecy, until now the mightiest secrets are whispered by the trees to
him who listens, and the winds sometimes take up the burden of prophecy
and sing of a fellowship in which all truth shall be a common
possession.

As I walk along the old highway, the deepening shadows touch the
familiar landscape with mystery; one landmark after another vanishes
until the lights in the scattered farm-houses gleam like reflected
constellations. A deep silence fills the great heavens and broods over
the wide earth; all things have become dim and strange; and yet I feel
no loneliness in the midst of this star-lit