Even my quiet old friend Burroughs had his Ford. It was her creator himself who gave her to him. The creature would climb around the slopes and over the walls about Woodchuck Lodge like a side-hill gouger, Burroughs in his long white beard driving her, as Father Time might drive a merry-go-round. He nearly lost his life in her, too. But everybody nearly loses his life so nowadays; and nearly everybody had rather lose his life in a Ford than to drag out an endless existence in a buggy or on foot or in a wooden swing at home, watching the Fords go by. What is life, anyway? The Ford is cheap; the service station is everywhere; so, pile into the little old “bug”--on the hood and running-boards! “Let’s go!” Perhaps our machines are taking us--we wish to believe so--to some new Arden, some far-off Avalon, where we shall heal us of our motor-minds, our movie-nerves, our corner-light religion; where “Safety First” shall give place to “Derring-Do” as a national motto; where we shall ascend the empty peaks, and out of the thunder and smoke of shaking Sinai bring down some daring commandment, done by the finger of God on new tables of stone. We are not lacking courage. It is imagination that we lack. We dare. But we do not think it worth while. We are shallow, skeptical, conventional, out of tune with the Infinite, and out of touch with spiritual things. If we do not try the unattempted, it is because we believe it has already been tried. It is because Homer has preëmpted Helicon that we tunnel it. Only Milton, among us moderns (and how ancient Milton seems!), only Milton in his blindness has seen that there is room and verge enough on Helicon, and deeps within the abyss of Hades where Dante would be lost. No, Milton is not the only modern to leave the plains, and, like a star, to dwell apart. Thoreau did it at Walden; Lanier did it on the marshes of Glynn; Burroughs did it at Woodchuck Lodge; and Hudson did it on the plains of Patagonia--proof enough that ponds and plains and the low-lying marsh may be as high as Helicon for poetry, if only the poet have the vision to see that “Like to the greatness of God is the greatness within The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.” But here we fail. We no longer see the greatness of God in things. We have covered God with an atom. We ask for bread, and Science gives us a stone; for God, and Science gives us an electron. It was a super-electron that created the heavens and the earth when it saw that all of the other electrons were without form and void. Atomism has taken the place of theism in our religion, if it is religion. Man is only a bunch of willful atoms, or parts of atoms, not any longer the crowning work of Creation, its center and circumference, its dominion and destiny and glory, its divine expression, interpretation, and immortal soul. Are we to be robbed of God? Inhibited forever from faith by the lensed eyes of Science?