not outward--we find ourselves hastening from land to land, gathering
mere curious resemblances which, like unassimilated property, possess no
power of fecundation. With what pathetic diligence we collect peaks and
passes in Switzerland; how we come laden from England with vain
cathedrals!

Beauty? What is it but a new way of approach? For wilderness, for
foreignness, I have no need to go a mile: I have only to come up through
my thicket or cross my field from my own roadside--and behold, a new
heaven and a new earth!

Things grow old and stale, not because they are old, but because we
cease to see them. Whole vibrant significant worlds around us disappear
within the sombre mists of familiarity. Whichever way we look the roads
are dull and barren. There is a tree at our gate we have not seen in
years: a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful than the shining
heights of the Alps!

It has seemed to me sometimes as though I could see men hardening before
my eyes, drawing in a feeler here, walling up an opening there. Naming
things! Objects fall into categories for them and wear little sure
channels in the brain. A mountain is a mountain, a tree a tree to them,
a field forever a field. Life solidifies itself in words. And finally
how everything wearies them and that is old age!

Is it not the prime struggle of life to keep the mind plastic? To see
and feel and hear things newly? To accept nothing as settled; to defend
the eternal right of the questioner? To reject every conclusion of
yesterday before the surer observations of to-day?--is not that the best
life we know?