nd all that the philosophers have
ever dreamed, hidden in the reservoirs of being and ready to touch
us with their breath.

Our reading of these noble writings will have been no more than a
gracious entertainment if we have not come to see that the enormous
differences of their verdicts prove conclusively that no one theory,
no one principle, can cover the tremendous field. But such reading
will have had but a poor effect if because of this radical opposition
in the voices reaching us we give up our interest in the great quest.

For it is upon our retaining our interest that the birthright of our
humanity depends.

We shall never find what we seek; that is certain enough. We should
be gods, not men, if we found it. But we should be less than men,
and beasts--if we gave up the interest of the search, the tremulous
vibrating interest, which, like little waves of ether, hovers over the
cross-roads where all the great ways part.

Something outside ourselves drives us on to seek it--this evasive
solution of a riddle that seems eternal--and when, weary with the
effort of refusing this or the other premature solution, weary with
the effort of suspending our judgment and standing erect at that
parting of the ways, we long in our hearts to drift at leisure down
one of the many soothing streams, it is only the knowledge that it is
not our intrinsic inmost self that so collapses and yields up the high
prerogative of doubt, but some lesser self in us, some tired
superficial self, which keeps us back from that betrayal.

The courage with which Emily Bronte faced life, the equanimity
with which she faced death, were in her case closely associated with
the quiet desolate landscape which surrounded her.

As my American poet says, it is only in the country that we can look
upon these fatal necessities and see them as they are. To be born and
to die fall into their place when we are living where the smell of the
earth can reach us.

There will always be a difference between those who come from the
country and those who come from the town; and if a time ever
arrives when the cities of men so cover the earth that there will be
room no longer for any country-bred persons in our midst,
something will in that hour pass away forever from art and literature,
and, I suspect, from philosophy too.

For you cannot acquire this quality by any pleasant trips through
picturesque scenery. It is either in you or it is not in you. You either
h