The Quest of the Simple Life

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ware of the pleasant music of bustling streets, greetings in the market-place, whispered converse in the doorways, gay meetings and laughter, lighted squares and crowds, the touch of kind hands, evening meals and festivals, and all the reverberation of man's soc

e side of an old earthwork on the summit of a hill; heavy rains had loosened the soil, and there lay these painful relics in the cold eye of day. Two thousand years ago, or more, spears had clashed upon this hillside, living men had gone to final rest amid their blood; and it came upon me with a sense of insult how little man and all his battles counted for in the limitless arena of the world. The brute violence of winds and tempests had swept these hills for centuries; and he whose lordship of the world is so loudly trumpeted, had lain prone beneath this violence, unremembered even by his fellows. I understood in that moment that affecting doctrine of the nothingness of man, which coloured mediaeval thought so strangely: like the monk of the cloister I also had before me my memento mori. But in truth I did not need the bo

vanity is the chief essence cannot long endure contact with Nature; Nature respects no man, and laughs in the face of the strutting egoist. But if a man will live long enough with Nature to become reconciled to her impassivity, he begins to recover self-respect, by recovering the conviction of his own identity. He has that within himself which Nature has not, the faculty of consciousness. He is but a trifling atom in the scheme of things, but he is a thinking atom. He sees also that all living creatures have an identity of their own. Each goes about the scheme of life in deliberate wisdom. Why should he complain of insignificance when the bird, the flower, the horse that drags the plough, the beaver in the stream, the spider on the wall, make no complaint; each accomplishing its task as intently as though it were the one task the world wanted done? In the life of the merest insect are toils as great, and vicissitudes as tragic, as in the most heroic human life, and to see so much is to attach a new dignity to all kinds of life. The bird building its nest is doing precisely th

e same process is necessary-we must become as little children. Thoreau has described this experience in terms which might apply equally to the religious mystic or the Nature-lover. He tells us that for a brief period after he came to live in the woods he felt lonesome, and 'doubted if the near neighbourhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain, while those thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound about my house, an infinite and unaccountab

counted public teachers were no better than persons who talked in their sleep. They knew nothing of the elemental life of man, and were unfitted to pronounce verdicts upon his destiny. Novelists particularly offended me by their gross ignorance of life. The pictures of life they drew were as untrue as a description of a street-fight would be if written by a perfumed odalisque who had never crossed the threshold of a harem. The ancient elemental life of man, spent in storm and sunshine, under wide skies, they had not so much as looked at, and their voluminous chatter about man and his doings had as little relation to life as the philosophy that is enunciated in a monkey-house. Opera-bouffe performed upon Helvellyn would be a

aesthetic pleasure became also an excitement of the intellect. An immense curiosity seized me. I desired to penetrate this lighted labyrinth of space, to climb these shining terraces, to know where these vast roads led, in whose profound seclusion God Himself seemed to hide. In a very humble way I began the study of astronomy, and although I never got beyond its elements yet my whole life was incalculably enriched by what I learned. I sometimes felt that of all my neighbours the stars were the friendliest and wisest. That sense of insignificance, begotten by the pressure of immensity upon the spirit, of which so many men have written, I never felt; my most constant feeling was a kind of gladness which had its root in the conviction of some living friendly Power behind and in the spectacle. The sense of insignificance, if it came at all, was associated with

ady half a dozen little coffins; it was a mere dust-bin of mortality, and it seemed so profane a place that no lustration of religion could give it sanctity. Dissolution met the mind there in more than its native horror; it had the superimposed horror of indecency and wilful outrage. But in the wide wholesome spaces of the world, and beneath the clean stars, death seems not undesirable. A country life gives one the pleasant sense of kinship with the earth. It is no longer an offence to know oneself of the earth earthy. I was so much engaged in the love and study of things whose life was brief that the thought of death became natural. I saw constantly in flowers and birds, and domestic creatures, the little round of life completed and relinquished without regret. I

city built by man more intricate and masterly. Here, as in all things, we are deceived by bulk, counting a thing great merely because it is big; but if it come to deducing an Invisible Mind in the universe from the things that are visible, I would as soon base my argument on what goes on in a bee's brain, as on the harmonies of law manifested in the solar system. I believe we greatly err in underrating other forms of life than our own. The Hindu, who acknowledges a mystic sacredness in all forms of life, comes nearer the truth. Life for life

e to the mere shadow of a slight, and both suspicious and resentful of patronage; but they met trust with trust, and where they gave their trust they gave their full loyalty of friendship. In my youth, as I have said elsewhere, I often passed a whole day in a forest. I would choose some solitary glade, where my intrusion was audibly resented by the unseen creatures of the wood, who fled before me; but when an hour had passed, and the signal had run through the forest that I meant no harm, those scattered and astonished creatures reassembled. The whole life of the wood then went on bef

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