beautiful is God's best gift to the human soul." So it is: and
to pass that gift on to others, in such measure as herein is
expressed, must surely have been happiness to him who wrote Green
Mansions. In form and spirit the book is unique, a simple
romantic narrative transmuted by sheer glow of beauty into a
prose poem. Without ever departing from its quality of a tale,
it symbolizes the yearning of the human soul for the attainment
of perfect love and beauty in this life--that impossible
perfection which we must all learn to see fall from its high tree
and be consumed in the flames, as was Rima the bird-girl, but
whose fine white ashes we gather that they may be mingled at last
with our own, when we too have been refined by the fire of
death's resignation. The book is soaked through and through with
a strange beauty. I will not go on singing its praises, or
trying to make it understood, because I have other words to say
of its author.

Do we realize how far our town life and culture have got away
from things that really matter; how instead of making
civilization our handmaid to freedom we have set her heel on our
necks, and under it bite dust all the time? Hudson, whether he
knows it or not, is now the chief standard-bearer of another
faith. Thus he spake in The Purple Land: "Ah, yes, we are all
vainly seeking after happiness in the wrong way. It was with us
once and ours, but we despised it, for it was only the old common
happiness which Nature gives to all her children, and we went
away from it in search of another grander kind of happiness which
some dreamer--Bacon or another--assured us we should find. We
had only to conquer Nature, find out her secrets, make her our
obedient slave, then the Earth would be Eden, and every man Adam