re turned
in His mighty hand as surely and as certainly as it turns the
stars, and continually fall into new patterns and combinations.
But the composing elements remain the same, nor will there be
one more bit of coloured glass nor one less for ever and ever.

This being so, supposing for the sake of argument we divide ourselves
into twenty parts, nineteen savage and one civilized, we must
look to the nineteen savage portions of our nature, if we would
really understand ourselves, and not to the twentieth, which,
though so insignificant in reality, is spread all over the other
nineteen, making them appear quite different from what they really
are, as the blacking does a boot, or the veneer a table. It
is on the nineteen rough serviceable savage portions that we
fall back on emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial
twentieth. Civilization should wipe away our tears, and yet
we weep and cannot be comforted. Warfare is abhorrent to her,
and yet we strike out for hearth and home, for honour and fair
fame, and can glory in the blow. And so on, through everything.

So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the
dust, civilization fails us utterly. Back, back, we creep, and
lay us like little children on the great breast of Nature, she
that perchance may soothe us and make us forget, or at least
rid remembrance of its sting. Who has not in his great grief
felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal
Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across
the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to
let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life;
to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his
woes, and let his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly
moving energy of her of whom we are, from whom we came, and with
whom we shall again be mingled, who gave us birth, and will in
a day to come give us our burial also.

And so in my trouble, as I walked up and down the oak-panelled
vestibule of my house there in Yorkshire, I longed once more
to throw myself into the arms of Nature. Not the Nature which
you know, the Nature that waves in well-kept woods and smiles
out in corn-fields, but Nature as she was in the age when creation
was complete, undefiled as yet by any human sinks of sweltering
humanity. I would go again where the wild game was, back to
the land whereof none know the history, back to the savages,