on-eyed face of youth and have
faith--as if my chair were a stump, my classroom a wooded hillside
covered with young pines, seedlings of the Lord, and full of sap, and
proof against the worm.

Yet these are the same youth who yesterday wrote the "Autobiography of
a Fountain Pen" and "The Exhilarations of the Straw-Ride" and the
essays on "The Beauties of Nature." It is I who am not the same. I
have been changed, renewed, having seen from my stump the face of
eternal youth in the freshmen pines marching up the hillside, in the
young brook playing and pursuing through the meadow, in the young winds
over the trees, the young stars in the skies, the young moon riding
along the horizon

"With the auld moon in her arm"--

youth immortal, and so, unburdened by its withered load of age.

I come down from the hill with a soul resurgent,--strong like the heave
that overreaches the sag of the sea,--and bold in my faith--to a lot of
college students as the hope of the world!

From the stump in the woodlot I see not only the face of things but the
course of things, that they are moving past me, over me, and round and
round me their fixed center--for the horizon to bend about, for the sky
to arch over, for the highways to start from, for every influence and
interest between Hingham and Heaven to focus on.

"All things journey sun and moon
Morning noon and afternoon,
Night and all her stars,"--

and they all journey about me on my stump in the hilltop.

We love human nature; we love to get back to it in New York and
Boston,--for a day, for six months in the winter even,--but we need to
get back to the hills at night. We are a conventional, gregarious,
herding folk. Let an American get rich and he builds a grand house in
the city. Let an Englishman get rich and he moves straight into the
country--out to such a spot as Bradley Hill in Hingham.

There are many of the city's glories and conveniences lacking here on
Mullein Hill, but Mullein Hill has some of the necessities that are
lacking in the city--wide distances and silent places, and woods and
stumps where you can sit down and feel that you are greater than
anything in sight. In the city the buildings are too vast; the people
are too many. You might feel greater than any two or three persons
there, perhaps, but not greater than nearly a million.

No matter how centered and serene I start from Hingham, a little way
into Boston and I am lost. First I begin