re, and useful as a citizen-at-large; but I know
that I am chiefly and utterly dispensable at large, everywhere at
large, even in Hingham. But not here on my hilltop. Here I am
indispensable. In the short shift from my classroom, from chair to
hill, from doing to being, I pass from a means into an end, from a part
in the scheme of things to the scheme of things itself.

Here stands my hill on the highway from dawn to dusk, and just where
the bending walls of the sky center and encircle it. This is not only
a large place, with room and verge enough; it is also a chief place,
where start the north and south and east and west, and the gray crooked
road over which I travel daily.

I can trace the run of the road from my stump on the hill, off to where
it bends on the edge of night for its returning and rest here.

"Let me live in a house by the aide of the road,"

sings the poet; but as for me, after traveling all day let me come back
to a house at the end of the road--for in returning and rest shall a
man be saved, in quietness and confidence shall he find strength.
Nowhere shall he find that quietness and confidence in larger measure
than here in the hills. And where shall he return to more rest?

There are men whose souls are like these hills, simple, strong, quiet
men who can heal and restore; and there are books that help like the
hills, simple elemental, large books; music, and sleep, and prayer, and
play are healing too; but none of these cure and fill one with a
quietness and confidence as deep as that from the hills, even from the
little hills and the small fields and the vast skies of Hingham; a
confidence and joy in the earth, perhaps, rather than in heaven, and
yet in heaven too.

If it is not also a steadied thinking and a cleared seeing, it is at
least a mental and moral convalescence that one gets--out of the
landscape, out of its largeness, sweetness and reality. I am quickly
conscious on the hills of space all about me--room for myself, room for
the things that crowd and clutter me; and as these arrange and set
themselves in order, I am aware of space within me, of freedom and
wideness there, of things in order, of doors unlocked and windows
opened, through which I look out upon a new young world, new like the
morning, young like the seedling pines on the slope--young and new like
my soul!

Now I can go back to my classroom. Now I can read themes once more.
Now I can gaze into the round, mo