Society, always sensitive to generosity, is equally sensitive to selfishness.  He who treats his fellows as so many clusters to be squeezed into his cup, who spoils the world for self aggrandizement, finds at last that he has burglarized his own soul.  Here is a man who says:  “Come right, come wrong, I will get gain.”  Loving ease, he lashes himself to unceasing toil by day and night.  Needing rest on Sunday, he denies himself respite and scourges his jaded body and brain into new activities.  Every thought is a thread to be woven into a golden net.  He lifts his life to strike as miners lift their picks.  He swings his body as harvesters their scythes.  He will make himself an augur for boring, a chisel for drilling, a muck-rake for scratching, if only he may get gain.  He will sweat and swelter and burn in the tropics until malaria has made his face as yellow as gold, if thereby he can fill his purse, and for a like end he will shiver and ache in the arctics.  He will deny his ear music, he will deny his mind culture, he will deny his heart friendship that he may coin concerts and social delights into cash.  At length the shortness of breath startles him; the stoppage of blood alarms him.  Then he retires to receive—­what?  To receive from nature that which he has given to nature.  Once he denied his ear melody, and now taste in return denies him pleasure.  Once he denied his mind books, and now books refuse to give him comfort.  Once he denied himself friendship, and now men refuse him their love.  Having received nothing from him, the great world has no investment to return to him.  Such a life, entering the harbor of old age, is like unto a bestormed ship with empty coal bins, whose crew fed the furnace, first with the cargo and then with the furniture, and reached the harbor, having made the ship a burned-cut shell.  God buries the souls of many men long years before their bodies are carried to the graveyard.

This principle tells us why nature and society are so prodigal with treasures to some men and so niggardly to others.  What a different thing a forest is to different men!  He who gives the ax receives a mast.  He who gives taste receives a picture.  He who gives imagination receives a poem.  He who gives faith hears the “goings of God in the tree-tops.”  The charcoal-burner fronts an oak for finding out how many cords of wood are in it, as the Goths of old fronted peerless temples for estimating how many huts they could quarry from the stately pile.[1] But an artist curses the woodsman for making the tree food for ax and saw.  It has become to him as sacred as the cathedral within which he bares his head.  It is a temple where birds praise God.  It is a harp with endless music for the summer winds.  It fills his eye with beauty and his ear with rustling melodies.