. As I lift my eyes from its beaten
road-bed, and look out upon it through the imagination, it escapes all
later boundaries and runs back through history to the very dawn of
civilisation; it marks the earliest contact of men with a world which
was wrapped in mystery. The hour that saw a second home built by human
hands heard the first footfall on the first highway. That narrow
foot-path led to civilisation, and has broadened into the highway
because human fellowships and needs have multiplied and directed the
countless feet that have beaten it into permanency. Every new highway
has been a new bond between Nature and men, a new evidence of that
indissoluble fellowship into which they are forever united.

I have sometimes tried to recall in imagination the world of Nature
before a human voice had broken the silence or a human foot left its
impress on the soil; but when I remember that what I see in this sweep
of force and beauty is largely what I myself put into the vision, that
Nature without the human ear is soundless, and without the human eye
colourless, I understand that what lies spread before me never was
until a human soul confronted it and became its interpreter. This
radiant world upon which I look was without form and void until the
earliest man brought to the vision of it that creative power within
himself which touched it with form and colour and relations not its
own. Nature is as incomplete and helpless without man as man would be
without Nature. He brought her varied and inexhaustible beauty, and
clothed her with a garment woven on we know not what looms of divine
energy; and she fed, sheltered, and strengthened him for the life which
lay before him. Together they have wrought from the first hour, and
civilisation, with all the circle of its arts, is their joint handiwork.

In the atmosphere of our rich modern fellowship with Nature, the
unwritten poetry to which every open heart falls heir, we forget our
earliest dependence on the great mother and the lessons she taught when
men gathered about her knee in the childhood of the world. Not a spade
turned the soil, not an axe felled a tree, not a path was made through
the forest, that did not leave, in the man whose arm put forth the
toil, some moral quality. In the obstacles which she placed in their
pathway, in the difficulties with which she surrounded their life, the
wise mother taught her children all the lessons which were to make them
great.