Yet, in fact, nothing so dismisses the host of little nervousnesses with which house-caged women suffer as this free life.  Cares, frets, worries, and social annoyances disappear, and in the woods and by the waters we lose, as if they were charmed away, our dislikes or jealousies, all the base, little results of the struggle for bread or place.  At home, in cities, they seem so large; here, in the gentle company of constant sky and lake and stream, they seem trivial, and we cast them away as easily as we throw aside some piece of worn-out and useless raiment.

The man who lives out of doors awhile acquires better sense of moral proportions, and thinks patiently and not under stress, making tranquil companions of his worthy thoughts.  This is a great thing, not to be hurried.  There seems to me always more time out of doors than in houses, and if you have intellectual problems to settle, the cool quiet of the woods or the lounging comfort of the canoe, or to be out under “the huge and thoughtful night,” has many times seemed to me helpful.  One gets near realities out of doors.  Thought is more sober; one becomes a better friend to one’s self.

As to the effect of out-door life on the imaginative side of us, much may be said.  Certainly some books get fresh flavors out of doors, and you see men or women greedily turn to reading and talking over verse who never dream of it when at home.  I am tempted to mention the poets, and even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the gentle company of lake and wood and stream.  I should frankly name Walt Whitman and Thoreau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration.  A good many of them—­read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump in the woods—­shrink to well-bred, comfortable parlor bards, who seem to you to have gotten their nature-lessons through plate-glass windows.  The test is a sharp one, and will leave out some great names and let in some hardly known, or almost forgotten.  Books to be read out of doors would make a curious catalogue, and would vary, as such lists must, with every thoughtful reader, while some would smile, perhaps with reason, at the idea of any such classification.  Certainly all would name Wordsworth, and a few would add Clough, whilst the out-door plays of Shakespeare would come in, and we should soon be called on to feel that for this sort of congenial open-air poetic company we have still to fall back on the vast resources of English verse.  Somehow, as yet, our own poets have not gotten fully into imaginative relation with what is peculiar in our own flowers, trees, and skies.  This does not lessen our joy in the masters of English verse, because, of course, much of what they have sung has liberal application in all lands; yet is there something which we lose in them for lack of familiar knowledge of English lanes and woods, of English flowers and