bursting through each
chink and cranny."

Phillips Brooks, Thoreau, Garrison, Emerson, Beecher, Agassiz, were
rich without money. They saw the splendor in the flower, the glory in
the grass, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in
everything. They knew that the man who owns the landscape is seldom
the one who pays the taxes on it. They sucked in power and wealth at
first hands from the meadows, fields, and flowers, birds, brooks,
mountains, and forest, as the bee sucks honey from the flowers. Every
natural object seemed to bring them a special message from the great
Author of the beautiful. To these rare souls every natural object was
touched with power and beauty; and their thirsty souls drank it in as a
traveler on a desert drinks in the god-sent water of the oasis. To
extract power and real wealth from men and things seemed to be their
mission, and to pour it out again in refreshing showers upon a thirsty
humanity. They believed that man's most important food does not enter
by the mouth. They knew that man could not live by estates, dollars,
and bread alone, and that if he could he would only be an animal. They
believed that the higher life demands a higher food. They believed in
man's unlimited power of expansion, and that this growth demands a more
highly organized food product than that which merely sustains animal
life. They saw a finer nutriment in the landscape, in the meadows,
than could be ground into flour, and which escaped the loaf. They felt
a sentiment in natural objects which pointed upward, ever upward to the
Author, and which was capable of feeding and expanding the higher life
until it should grow into a finer sympathy and fellowship with the
Author of the beautiful. They believed that the Creation thunders the
ten commandments, and that all Nature is tugging at the terms of every
contract to make it just. They could feel this finer sentiment, this
soul lifter, this man inspirer, in the growing grain, in the waving
corn, in the golden harvest. They saw it reflected in every brook, in
every star, in every flower, in every dewdrop. They believed that
Nature together with human nature were man's great schoolmasters, that
if rightly used they would carve his rough life into beauty and touch
his rude manner with grace.

"More servants wait on man than he'll take notice of." But if he would
enjoy Nature he must come to it from a higher level than the yardstick.
He mu