There have been many hopeful answers. The whirl has been vastly accelerated. The fly-wheel of the old horse treadmill is now geared to an electric dynamo. But it is not enough; it is not the answer. And I despair of the answer--of the perfect whirl, the perpetual, invisible, untimable. Hence the apple tree, the owls, the illusions, the lost hours--the neglect of fortune and of soul! But then you may worship nature and still find your way to church; you may be intensely interested in the life of an old apple tree and still cultivate your next-door neighbor, still earn all the fresh air and bread and books that your children need. The knoll yonder may be a kind of High Place, and its old apple tree a kind of altar for you when you had better not go to church, when your neighbor needs to be let alone, when your children are in danger of too much bread and of too many books--for the time when you are in need of that something which comes only out of the quiet of the fields at the close of day. “But what is it?” you ask. “Give me its formula.” I cannot. Yet you need it and will get it--something that cannot be had of the day, something that Matthew Arnold comes very near suggesting in his lines:-- The evening comes, the fields are still. The tinkle of the thirsty rill, Unheard all day, ascends again; Deserted is the half-mown plain, Silent the swaths! the ringing wain, The mower’s cry, the dog’s alarms All housed within the sleeping farms! The business of the day is done, The last-left haymaker is gone. And from the thyme upon the height And from the elder-blossom white And pale dog-roses in the hedge, And from the mint-plant in the sedge, In puffs of balm the night-air blows The perfume which the day foregoes. I would call it poetry, if it were poetry. And it is poetry, yet it is a great deal more. It is poetry and owls and sour apples and toads; for in this particular old apple dwells also a tree-toad. It is curious enough, as the summer dusk comes on, to see the round face of the owl in one hole, and out of another in the broken limb above, the flat weazened face of the tree-toad. Philosophic countenances they are, masked with wisdom, both of them: shrewd and penetrating that of the slit-eyed owl; contemplative and soaring in its serene composure the countenance of the transcendental toad. Both creatures love the dusk; both have come forth to their open doors in order to watch the darkening; both will make off under the cover--one for mice and frogs over the meadow, the other for slugs and insects over the crooked, tangled limbs of the tree. It is strange enough to see them together, but it is stranger still to think of them together, for it is just such prey as this little toad that the owl has gone over the meadow to catch.