e cuddlesome scenery. Even if her
imagination has been somewhat cultivated and deepened, so that she
feels that a place must be wild, or at least partly wild, in order to
be beautiful, she still chooses nooks and ravines, as a rule, to be
happy in--places roofed in with gentle, quiet wonder, fenced in with
beauty on every side. She is not without her due respect and
admiration for a mountain, but she does not want it to be too large,
or too near the stars, if she has to live with it day and night; and
if the truth were told--even at its best she finds a mountain distant,
impersonal, uncompanionable. Unless she is born in it she does not see
beauty in the wide plain. There is something in her being that makes
her bashful before a whole sky; she wants a sunset she can snuggle up
to. It is essentially the bird's taste in scenery. "Give me a nest, O
Lord, under the wide heaven. Cover me from Thy glory." A bush or a
tree with two or three other bushes or trees near by, and just enough
sky to go with it--is it not enough?

The average man is like the average woman in this regard except that
he is less so. The fact seems to be that the average human being (like
the average poet), at least for everyday purposes, does not want any
more of the world around him than he can use, or than he can put
somewhere. If there is so much more of the world than one can use, or
than anyone else can use, what is the possible object of living where
one cannot help being reminded of it?

The same spiritual trait, a kind of gentle persistent grudge against
the infinite, shows itself in the not uncommon prejudice against pine
trees. There are a great many people who have a way of saying pleasant
things about pine trees and who like to drive through them or look at
them in the landscape or have them on other people's hills, but they
would not plant a pine tree near their houses or live with pines
singing over them and watching them, every day and night, for the
world. The mood of the pine is such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious
mood that there are very few persons, no matter how dull or
unsusceptible they may seem to be, who are not as much affected by a
single pine, standing in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole
skyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite--they do not want
a whole treeful of it around on the premises. And the pine comes as
near to being infinite as anything purely vegetable, in a world like
this, could expect.