ng and losing
their souls in the great social or political or business maelstrom. I
know, too, I have gone a-fishing while others have labored in the slums
and given their lives to the betterment of their fellows. But I have
been a good fisherman, and I should have made a poor missionary, or
reformer, or leader of any crusade against sin and crime. I am not a
fighter, I dislike any sort of contest, or squabble, or competition,
or storm. My strength is in my calm, my serenity, my sunshine. In
excitement I lose my head, and my heels, too. I cannot carry any citadel
by storm. I lack the audacity and spirit of the stormer. I must reduce
it slowly or steal it quietly. I lack moral courage, though I have
plenty of physical and intellectual courage. I could champion Walt
Whitman when nearly every contemporaneous critic and poet were crying
him down, but I utterly lack the moral courage to put in print what he
dared to. I have wielded the "big stick" against the nature-fakers, but
I am very uncomfortable under any sort of blame or accusation. It is so
much easier for me to say yes than no. My moral fibre is soft compared
to my intellectual. I am a poor preacher, an awkward moralizer. A moral
statement does not interest me unless it can be backed up by natural
truth; it must have intellectual value. The religious dogmas interest me
if I can find a scientific basis for them, otherwise not at all.

I shall shock you by telling you I am not much of a patriot. I have but
little national pride. If we went to war with a foreign power to-morrow,
my sympathies would be with the foreigner if I thought him in the right.
I could gladly see our navy knocked to pieces by Japan, for instance, if
we were in the wrong. I have absolutely no state pride, any more than
I have county or town pride, or neighborhood pride. But I make it up in
family or tribal affection.

I am too much preoccupied, too much at home with myself, to feel any
interest in many things that interest my fellows. I have aimed to live
a sane, normal, healthy life; or, rather, I have an instinct for such a
life. I love life, as such, and I am quickly conscious of anything that
threatens to check its even flow. I want a full measure of it, and I
want it as I do my spring water, clear and sweet and from the original
sources. Hence I have always chafed in cities, I must live in the
country. Life in the cities is like the water there--a long way from the
original sources, and more