In all noble natures there is an ineradicable idealism which constantly interprets life in its higher aspects. In the dust of the road the mountains sometimes disappear from our vision, but we know that they still loom in undiminished majesty against the horizon; the gods sometimes hide themselves, but there is something within which affirms that we shall again look on their serene faces, calm amid our turbulence and unchanging amid our vicissitudes. It is this heavenly inheritance of insight and faith which makes Nature so divinely significant to us, and matches all its forms and phenomena with spiritual realities not to be taken from us by time or change or by that mysterious angel of the last great transformation which we call death. The morning is always breaking over the low horizon lines of some sea or continent; voices of birds are always "carolling against the gates of day;" and so, through unbroken light and song, our life is solemnly and sublimely moved onward to the dawn in which all the faint stars of our hope shall melt into the eternal day. Chapter XVII A Summer Noon The stir of the morning has given place to a silence broken only by the shrill whir of the locust. The distant shore lines that ran clear and white against the low background of green have become dim and indistinct; all things are touched by a soft haze which changes the sentiment of the landscape from movement to repose, from swift and multitudinous activity to the hush of sleep. The intense blue of the morning sky is dimmed and the great masses of trees are motionless. The distant harvest fields where the rhythmic lines of the mowers have moved alert and harmonious through the morning hours are deserted. On earth silence and rest, and in the great arch of the sky a sea of light so full and splendid that it seems almost to dim the fiery effluence of the sun itself. In such an hour one stretches himself under the trees, and in a moment the spell is on him, and he cares neither to think nor act; he rejoices to lose himself in the universal repose with which Nature refreshes herself. The heat of the day is at its height, but for an hour the burden slips from the shoulders of care, and the rest comes in which the gains of work are garnered.