It is a proverb that pilgrims to foreign lands find only what they take
with them. Riding over the New England hills near Boston, Lowell spake not
to his companion, for now he was looking out upon the pageantry of a
glorious October day, and now he remembered that this was the road forever
associated with Paul Revere's ride. Reaching the outskirts of Cambridge, he
roused from his reverie to discover that his silent companion had been
brooding over bales and barrels, not knowing that this had been one of
those rare days when October holds an art exhibit, and also oblivious to
the fact that he had been passing through scenes historic through the valor
of the brave boy.
Of the four artists copying the same landscape near Chamouni, all saw a
different scene. To an idler a river means a fish pole, to a heated
schoolboy a bath; to the man of affairs the stream suggests a turbine
wheel; while the same stream leads the philosopher to reflect upon the
influence of great rivers upon cities and civilizations. Coleridge thought
the bank of his favorite stream was made to lie down upon, but Bunyan,
beholding the stream through the iron bars of a prison cell, felt the
breezes of the "Delectable Mountains" cool his fevered cheek, and stooping
down he wet his parched lips with the river of the waters of life. Nature
has no message for heedless, inattentive hearers. It is possible for a
youth to go through life deaf to the sweetest sounds that ever fell over
Heaven's battlements, and blind to the beauty of landscape and mountain and
sea and sky. There is no music in the autumn wind until the listener comes.
There is no order and beauty in the rolling spheres until some Herschel
stands beneath the stars. There is no fragrance in the violet until the
lover of flowers bends down above the blossoms.
Listening to stars, Laplace heard the story how fire mists are changed to
habitable earths, and so became wise toward iron and wood, steel and stone.
Listening to birds, Cuvier heard the song within the shell and found out
the life history of all things that creep or swim or fly. Listening to
babes that have, as Froebel thought, been so recently playmates with
angels, the philosopher discovered in the teachableness, trust and purity
of childhood, the secret of individual happiness and progress. Listening to
sages, the youth of to-day garners into the storehouse of his mind all the
intellectual treasures of the good and great of past ages. That youth may
have culture without college who gives heed to Channing's injunction "to
listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages."