great strands of Indian corn, acres within acres, and hardly a human dwelling anywhere; the loneliness, the majesty, the untouched primitiveness of it, were the elements I remember; and the wind, and the unclouded great expanse of the blue upper sky, like a separate element lifted in deep color over the gold of harvest, the green of earth, and the touches of brown road and soil.  So, with pauses for common sights and things, and some word of comment and fuller statement and personal touches that do not matter now, I read my brief notes of life in its most sacred part.

“The gift of life at birth is only a little breath on a baby’s lips; the air asks no consent to fill the lungs, the heart beats, the senses awaken, the mind begins, and the first handwriting of life is a child’s smile; but as boyhood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives a more intimate sweetness, and manhood expands in richer values, life is not less entirely a gift.  As well say a self-born as a self-made man.  Nature does not intrust to us her bodily processes and functions, and the fountains of feeling within well up, and the forms of thought define, without obligation to man’s wisdom; body and soul alike are above his will—­our garment of sense comes from no human loom, nor were the bones of the spirit fashioned by any mortal hands; in our progress and growth, too, bloom of health and charm of soul owe their loveliness to that law of grace that went forth with the creative word.  Slow as men are to realize the fact and the magnitude of this great grant, and the supreme value of it as life itself in all its abundance of blessings, there comes a time to every generous and open heart when the youth is made aware of the stream of beneficence flowing in upon him from the forms and forces of nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour; he knows, too, the cherishing of human service all about him in familiar love and the large brothering of man’s general toil; he begins to see, shaping itself in him, the vast tradition of the past,—­its mighty sheltering of mankind in institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its fostering agencies, its driving energies.  What a breaking out there is then in him of the emotions that are fountain-heads of permanent life,—­filial love, patriotic duty, man’s passion for humanity!  It is then that he becomes a man.  Strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments, the youth should not, in pure thankfulness, find out the Giver of all good!

“As soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has established a direct relation with the Creator, did he but realize it,—­not in mere thought of some temporal creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning, but in immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps the universe in being,

    ’Which wields the world with never wearied love,
    Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,’—­