REALIZING LIFE

SUNDAY ON THE HILL-TOP

Only ten miles from the city,
And how I am lifted away
To the peace that passeth knowing,
And the light that is not of day!

All alone on the hill-top!

Nothing but God and me,
And the springtime's resurrection,

Far shinings of the sea,

The river's laugh in the valley,
Hills dreaming of their past;
And all things silently opening,
Opening into the Vast!

Eternities past and future

Seem clinging to all I see,
And things immortal cluster
Around my bended knee.

That pebble - is older than Adam!
Secrets it hath to tell ;

These rocks they cry out history,

Could but I listen well.

That pool knows the ocean-feeling,
Of storm and moon-led tide;
The sun finds its East and West therein,
And the stars find room to glide.

When it cannot be lifted away

?

W. C. GANNETT.

- By permission of Little, Brown and Company, Boston.

REALIZING LIFE

What went ye out into the wilderness to see?
MATTHEW, xi. 7.

THIS age of steam has its dangers to the intellect as well as its strain upon the body. Too great a speed sometimes paralyzes the spirit before the muscles give out. Hurry benumbs the heart more often than it exhausts the physical vitality. Popular opinion seems to expect that the travelled young man or woman will be blasé to all the ordinary enjoyments of life. The average day and the average road, it is assumed, will be uninteresting to such. Many boast of culture to whom the world seems scarcely more than a "sucked orange," to use Emerson's phrase.

If vacation is to bring its highest good, it must correct this tendency. It must do something toward saving us from this danger. It is but

a half vacation that simply rests tired muscle or nerve; the other half must recruit mind, reinvigorate the spirit. It were better not to stop the strain of life than to find ourselves at the

end of the resting-time less ready for work, less eager for tasks, than when we stopped. An increased capacity for digestion is not much to boast of, unless there is with it a renewed relish for life, a more splendid appetite for duty. Those to whom vacation has failed to bring a fresh and overpowering sense of the opulence of nature, the wealth of life, and of their own responsibilities, have missed the reconstruction they went in search of. They have been dissipating instead of re-creating, idling instead of resting. Perhaps the highest delight that a vacation brings to busy and overworked people is the opportunity of feasting the eyes once more on the beauty of common things; of tuning the ear to detect the music there is in the life of ordinary men and women; of reading the poetry that is ever written between the lines of the dullest prose of common life. I fear there is a tendency in our mid-summer life to cultivate the "Rock-meto-sleep-in-a-hammock" disposition among the few, and a grim, sullen, almost desperate sort of a "no-rest-for-the-wicked" spirit among the many, who plod through the joyless round of duties that have become drudgeries from which no blessings are expected.