car, like a dream, go by; and off on the Blue Hills
of Milton--higher hills than ours in Hingham--hangs a purple mist that
from our ridge seems the very robe and veil of vision.

The realities are near enough to me here crawling everywhere, indeed;
but close as I am to the flat earth I can yet look down at things--at
the road and the passing cars; and off at things--the hills and the
distant horizon; and so I can escape for a time that level stare into
the face of things which sees them as _things_ close and real, but
seldom as _life_, far off and whole.

Perhaps I have never seen life whole; I may need a throne and not a
hill and a stump for that; but here in the wideness of the open skies,
in the sweet quiet, in the hush that often fills these deep woods, I
sometimes see life free, not free from men and things, but
unencumbered, coming to meet me out of the morning and passing on with
me toward the sunset until, at times, the stepping westward, the
uneventful onwardness of life has

". . . seemed to be
A kind of heavenly destiny"

and, even the back-and-forth of it, a divine thing.

This knowledge is too wonderful for me; I cannot keep fast hold of it;
yet to know occasionally that you are greater than your rhetoric, or
your acres of stones, or your woods of worms, worms that may destroy
your trees though you spray, is to steady and establish your soul, and
vastly to comfort it!

To be greater than your possessions, than your accomplishments, than
your desires--greater than you know, than anybody at home knows or will
admit! So great that you can leave your plough in the turret that you
can leave the committees to meet, and the trees to fall, and the sun to
hurry on, while you take your seat upon a stump, assured from many a
dismaying observation that the trees will fall anyhow, that the sun
will hasten on its course, and that the committees, even the
committees, will meet and do business whether you attend or not!

This is bed-rock fact, the broad and solid bottom for a cheerful
philosophy. To know that they can get on without you (more knowledge
than many ever attain!) is the beginning of wisdom; and to learn that
you can get on without them--at the close of the day, and out here on
your hill in Hingham--this is the end of understanding.

If I am no more than the shoes I stitch, or the lessons I peg, and the
college can so calmly move on without me, how small I am! Let me hope
that I am useful the