It is a sturdy conceit that wonders why Nature should spend her freshest art on treasure scenes she decrees invisible, as if the mother of mountains, tempests, deserts, toiled anxiously for the approval of a particular generation, keeping one eye on Mr. Gray and the other on Mr. Emerson in the hope that they will justify her flower blushing unseen and her excusable rhodora. Nature is far too unmoral to bother about rendering economists an account for her spendthrift loveliness. She willfully deserts the imitation Sicilian garden, though she would be well paid to stay, and rollicks in the jungle, clothing magnificently the useless snake and leopard, dressing their breakfast in paradise plumes, puzzling Victorian poets, and badly scaring the urban manicurist, who returns after her first country vacation with decided views concerning the cheerful humanity of streets compared with lodges in the wilderness. Were Nature careworn and personal, where should we turn for consolation or rest? Hers is the tonic gift of a strength that, underlying all life, does not pity or praise. As in the Cave of the Winds the most restless spirit surely might find peace, so in the eternal changefulness of the forest under the touch of forces fierce or serene we find the soul of quiet because the powers at work are beyond our control, control us utterly, hold us in an immense and soothing grasp where thought and energy are fused and contend no more. So those who live upon the ocean come to possess that which they will not barter for ease, and so the timber cruiser shortens his visit to town. They would not tell what they gain who relinquish readily the things for which others pour out their years upon the ground that commerce may grow. It is because words are not fashioned to speak what shapes the wind takes, the motion whereby mists climb after the sun out of ravines, or how the tropic orchids lift at daybreak among their fragrant shadows wings of ivory and fawn that drooped against ferny trunks. Many days must bloom and fade between you and the sound of human voices before, in the wilderness, there can be surrender to the giant arms that forever hold the body, and to the spirit, supreme and unemotional, that has sped beyond the utmost outposts the mind ever reached. But after the homecoming—when the confused echoes of a swarming, blind humanity are lost in the exalted quiet of wide spaces—the vast impersonality of woods and plains, swamps, hills, and sea, takes on a tenderness more deep than lies in human gift and a glorious hostility that calls to combat without grudge or motive, ennobling because it gives no mercy; challenges alike the craft of man and the strength of the hills.