The pleasure of nature is to store her raw material in seemingly inaccessible strongholds. She does not willingly yield them to men lacking vision and great conceptions. If they were of easy access, common men would crush them to make roads for donkeys to tramp over. Nature’s treasures are too valuable for ignorance to destroy, so she locks them in secret depths or inaccessible heights, awaiting the coming of the man of genius. If only a man yields himself to the divine leadings, and catches a vision of a statue like Moses, or a façade for the Church of San Lorenzo, or for a mausoleum for the Medici, no mountainside is too steep to chisel a roadway through the jagged rocks, no morass so yielding but that a solid highway may be erected, no water so troubled but that boats may safely transport the precious marble. He will not depend upon hirelings nor lean upon borrowed strength. The dream of beauty must be wrought in marble, the unquarried statue must be lifted from obscurity and made to live in some public place, therefore he will personally attend to the breaking of the blocks. It is not an easy matter to live out a divine idea and make it a thing tangible and real for a critical world to examine and criticize and afterwards love and venerate. Sluggards and lovers of ease cannot do it. To them an unquarried statue is only a stone. For centuries no one has given it any attention; why should they? They would rather have something to eat and drink. A cushioned chair is far more comfortable to sit on, and a potato is much more substantial food. What they want is something to eat, and a place in which to lounge, and because they do not see the value of great ideas they can never be forgotten when dead, for they were never known while living. He lives who forgets to live and concentrates all his powers in bringing to light the vision of his beauty-loving soul. It may be the beauty of art or the beauty of worthy living; it may be the beauty of perfect workmanship in shop or factory, or the beauty of a wholesome influence flowing from noble character; it may be loveliness of sympathetic serving, or the beauty of aggressive battle for righteousness; it may take any one of many forms of exalted thinking and endeavor, yet its realization comes only when one eats, and drinks, and bends every energy, not for the sake of living, but for the realization of that which is more than living.