f giving. We test it out
like a wine, and decide there is something in it.

There is something in everything.

The Dakotan said (in his clipped way and so low-voiced that you have to
bend to hear him) that the birds hear something in the morning that we
don't get. He says there is a big harmony over the earth at sunrise, and
that the birds catch the music of it, and that songs are their efforts
to imitate it. An afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We
recall the fact that it isn't the human ear-drum exactly which will get
this--if it ever comes to us--and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he
_heard_ his last symphonies, the great pastoral and dance and choral
pieces, and that he wrote them from his inner listening. Parts of them
seem to us strains from that great harmony that the birds are trying to
bring out.

We thought there must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat
is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come
to it. There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order
begins. Order should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of
surfaces and deeps in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has
come far, and one does well to be alone for a time in a golden afternoon
in a wheat-field just before cutting. One loves the Old Mother better
for that adventure. She must give high for wheat. She must be virgin and
strong and come naked and unashamed to the sun to bring forth wheat. She
must bring down the spirit of the sun and blend it with her own--for
wheat partakes of the _alkahest_. Wheat is a master, an aristocrat.

The Dakotan said that once when he was on the Open Road through the
northwest, he slept for two days in a car of wheat, and that it was a
bath of power.... We thought we would make our beds in wheat,
thereafter--but that would be sacrilege.

Then we talked of that mysterious harmony from the beehives, and we saw
at once that it has to do with Order, that Inertia was mastered
there--that the spirit of wheat has mastered Inertia--so that there is a
nobility, even about the golden husk. It occurred to us, of course,
then, that all the aristocrats of Nature--rose and wheat and olives and
bees and alabaster and grapes--must all have their part of the harmony,
for Order has come to their chaos. Their spirit has come forth, as in
the face of a far-come child--the brute earth-bound lines of self
gone--the theme of life, Service.

I a