that
not all men have my strong local attachments. The new countries would
never get settled. My forefathers would never have left Connecticut
for the wilderness of the Catskills.

As a rule, however, we are a drifting, cosmopolitan people. We are
easily transplanted; we do not strike our roots down into the geology
of long-gone time.

I often wonder how so many people of the Old World can pull
themselves up and migrate to America and never return. The Scots,
certainly a home-loving race, do it, and do not seem to suffer from
homesickness.

VII

DAY BY DAY

We often hear it said of a man that he was born too early, or too
late, but is it ever true? If he is behind his times, would he not
have been behind at whatever period he had been born? If he is ahead
of his times, is not the same thing true? In the vegetable world the
early flowers and fruit blossoms are often cut off by the frost, but
not so in the world of man. Babies are in order at any time. Is a
poet, or a philosopher, ever born too late? or too early? If Emerson
had been born a century earlier, his heterodoxy would have stood in
his way; but in that case he would not have been a heretic. Whitman
would have had to wait for a hearing at whatever period he was born.
He said he was willing to wait for the growth of the taste for
himself, and it finally came. Emerson's first thin volume called
"Nature" did not sell the first edition of five hundred copies in ten
years, but would it have been different at any other time? A piece of
true literature is not superseded. The fame of man may rise and fall,
but it lasts. Was Watt too early with his steam-engine, or Morse too
early with his telegraph? Or Bell too early with his telephone? Or
Edison with his phonograph or his incandescent light? Or the Wright
brothers with their flying-machine? Or Henry Ford with his motor-car?
Before gasolene was discovered they would have been too early, but
then their inventions would not have materialized.

The world moves, and great men are the springs of progress. But no man
is born too soon or too late.

* * * * *

A fadeless flower is no flower at all. How Nature ever came to produce
one is a wonder. Would not paper flowers do as well?

* * * * *

The most memorable days in our lives are the days when we meet a great
man.

* * * * *

How stealthy and silent a thing