And yet the more bent any man is upon action, the more profoundly he needs the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his equilibrium.  The radical himself needs nothing so much as fresh air.  The world is called conservative; but it is far easier to impress a plausible thought on the complaisance of others than to retain an unfaltering faith in it for ourselves.  The most dogged reformer distrusts himself every little while, and says inwardly, like Luther, “Art thou alone wise?” So he is compelled to exaggerate, in the effort to hold his own.  The community is bored by the conceit and egotism of the innovators; so it is by that of poets and artists, orators and statesmen; but if we knew how heavily ballasted all these poor fellows need to be, to keep an even keel amid so many conflicting tempests of blame and praise, we should hardly reproach them.  But the simple enjoyments of out-door life, costing next to nothing, tend to equalize all vexations.  What matter, if the Governor removes you from office? he cannot remove you from the lake; and if readers or customers will not bite, the pickerel will.  We must keep busy, of course; yet we cannot transform the world except very slowly, and we can best preserve our patience in the society of Nature, who does her work almost as imperceptibly as we.

And for literary training, especially, the influence of natural beauty is simply priceless Under the present educational systems, we need grammars and languages far less than a more thorough out-door experience.  On this flowery bank, on this ripple-marked shore, are the true literary models.  How many living authors have ever attained to writing a single page which could be for one moment compared, for the simplicity and grace of its structure, with this green spray of wild woodbine or yonder white wreath of blossoming clematis?  A finely organized sentence should throb and palpitate like the most delicate vibrations of the summer air.  We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical perfection:  but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies in the future; tried by the out-door standard, there is as yet no literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional sentence, that fresh and perfect charm.  If by the training of a lifetime one could succeed in producing one continuous page of perfect cadence, it would be a life well spent, and such a literary artist would fall short of Nature’s standard in quantity only, not in quality.