THE BROOK IN THE WAY

Alongside every highway runs the brook whereof a man may drink often if
he will and drinking lift up his head. Its little song we scarce hear
in the rush of our businesses; its refreshing we forget even though our
throats be parched with the dust of our petty affairs. Yet it is ever
there, cool, refreshing, this world of spirits and ideals.

Nature has a prodigal way of scattering rivulets down the hillside and
along the pathways, little heeding whether men walk there or not. The
practical eye sees waste; these streams might have been made to turn
wheels; the needs of the traveller, weary with the way, might be met by
faucets at regular intervals.

It is well for us all that the power of the practical man finds its
limitations, else all poetry would have gone from the world, and great
and glorious as might have been our physical perfections our bodies
would be but the empty habitations whence souls had long since fled.
The utilitarian would have stolen from us the bliss of the deep draft
from the pebbly brook.

The man who is proud of being practical tells us we are wasting time
and nervous energy in stopping to think of ideal things; we must take
the world as we find it, he says, forgetting how fair and poetic we
once found it and how bleak and ugly we are likely to leave it. But to
him trees are always lumber, grass and flowers but hay, bird songs
spell poultry, wind and waters energy. Many are too busy making things