and the tides of the heart have nourished these social growths and made their blossoms crimson and brilliant.  Nor could these treasures have been gained otherwise.  Nature grants no free favors.  Every wise law, institution and custom must be paid for with corresponding treasure.  Thought itself takes toll from the brain.  To be loved is good, indeed; but love must be paid for with toil, endurance, sacrifice—­fuel that feeds love’s flame.

Generous giving to-day is a great joy; but it is made possible only by years of thrift and economy.  The wine costs the clusters.  The linen costs the flax.  The furniture costs the forests.  The heat in the house costs the coal in the cellar.  Wealth costs much toil and sweat by day.  Wisdom costs much study and long vigils by night.  Leadership costs instant and untiring pains and service.  Character costs the long, fierce conflict with vice and sin.  When Keats, walking in the rose garden, saw the ground under the bushes all covered with pink petals, he exclaimed; “Next year the roses should be very red!” When Aeneas tore the bough from the myrtle tree, Virgil says the tree exuded blood.  But this is only a poet’s way of saying that civilization is a tree that is nourished, not by rain and snow, but by the tears and blood of the patriots and prophets of yesterday.

Fortunately, in manifold ways, nature and life witness to the universality of vicarious service and suffering.  Indeed, the very basis of the doctrine of evolution is the fact that the life of the higher rests upon the death of the lower.  The astronomers tell us that the sun ripens our harvests by burning itself up.  Each golden sheaf, each orange bough, each bunch of figs, costs the sun thousands of tons of carbon.  Geike, the geologist, shows us that the valleys grow rich and deep with soil through the mountains, growing bare and being denuded of their treasure.  Beholding the valleys of France and the plains of Italy all gilded with corn and fragrant with deep grass, where the violets and buttercups wave and toss in the summer wind, travelers often forget that the beauty of the plains was bought, at a great price, by the bareness of the mountains.  For these mountains are in reality vast compost heaps, nature’s stores of powerful stimulants.  Daily the heat swells the flakes of granite; daily the frost splits them; daily the rains dissolve the crushed stone into an impalpable dust; daily the floods sweep the rich mineral foods down into the starving valleys.  Thus the glory of the mountains is not alone their majesty of endurance, but also their patient, passionate beneficence as they pour forth all their treasures to feed richness to the pastures, to wreathe with beauty each distant vale and glen, to nourish all waving harvest fields.  This death of the mineral is the life of the vegetable.