ess him; and yet, the spell was broken a little when we came to buy.
Whenever you play with the meshes of possession, a devil is near at hand
to weave you in. It is true that we took only enough Lake-frontage for
quiet, and enough depth for a permanent fruit-garden--all for the price
of a fifty-foot lot in the City; but these things call upon one for a
certain property-mindedness and desiring, in the usage of which the
human mind is common and far from admirable. There were days in the
thrall of stone-work and grading and drainage, in which I forgot the
sun-path and the cloud-shadows; nights in which I saw fireplaces and
sleeping-porches (still innocent of matter to make the dreams come
true), instead of the immortal signatures of the heavens.

But we had learned our City lessons rather well, and these disturbers
did not continue to defile. A man may build his house, if he can also
forget it. A few good things--perennials, by all means an elm-tree,
stone-work and an oaken door; the things that need not replenishing in
materials, that grow old with you, or reach their prime after you have
passed--these are enough. For a home that does not promote your
naturalness, is a place of vexation to you and to your children.

Yet it is through this breaking of the husks of illusion--through the
very artificialities that we come to love the sane and holy things. The
man of great lands, who draws his livelihood from the soil, can never
know the healing nor the tender loveliness that came up to us that first
summer. One must know the maiming of the cities to bring to the land a
surface that nature floods with ecstasies. Carlyle thundered against
artificial things all his wonderful life, exalted the splendours of
simplicity which permit a man to forget himself--just missing the fact
that a man must be artificial before he can be natural; that we learn by
suffering and come up through the hell and complication of cities only
to show us wherein our treasure lies.

The narrow non-sensitive consciousness of the peasant, with its
squirrel-dream of filled barns, its cruelty and continual
garnering--that is very far from the way. Tolstoi went against the
eternal law to try that. He wanted simplicity so tragically that he
permitted his desire to prevail, and turned back to the peasants for it.
It is against the law to turn back. The peasants are simple because they
have not met the intervening complications between their inland lake
conscio