I The Heir of the Bluegrass
Chapter I Soul-Dreams and the Soil
Those who live near to Nature learn much: for it is only by living close to her that we learn from her. The best advice ever given on longevity was from the cheery old gentleman who said: “To live long, live naturally; eat what you want, and walk on the sunny side of the street.”
School children think that some wise man made all the hard rules of grammar that grown-up folks try to teach them. They do not know that the child-man learned to talk first and that the rules were made from his speech. It is like the simple people at the circus who think the trained horse is dancing to the music; it is the music that is dancing to him. From the facts of life we draw our rules just as the scholars made rules of grammar from the facts of language.
Nature is the One great Fact.
I was thinking of one of her facts the other day—she has so many—but one I had noticed very plainly: the man who lives close to her is an optimist.
Let the farmer fail year after year, and still he plants, hoping. Let the merchant fall behind one year and he is shaken; another year, and he quits. One season of deep water-hauling sends the fisherman home to his fields. When the wild game vanishes the pioneer hunter becomes the pioneer farmer. The merchant, the lawyer, the doctor,—there never was one who did not dream, betimes, over his books, that he would yet live to retire and till his acres.
Every failure in life goes back to the soil for a new start.
That is the fact; now for the rule. It is this: God intended that man should be, first of all, a soil-worker. And tilling the soil includes not only planting, but bringing all growing and living things thereon to strength.
Rearing things on the soil is man’s natural vocation, since neither drought, nor flood, nor failure, can shut out from his heart that instinct of hope which has come down through so many centuries of soil-loving ancestors. The hoping instinct has been housed in him so long that it is part of his heredity.
Maritime nations found empires, but not religions. Religions come from the soil. Men, living in the open, watching their flocks by night, find in the eternal wonder of the soul-questioning stars that which satisfies their own souls.
Imagine fighting Rome founding a religion! Or bookish Greece! Or the trading Saxon!
Religions come from mangers. All great soul-dreams were born amid flocks and herds.
This is my own story, and the telling of it shall be in my own way. And as I am not a writer, but a forester, doubtless my telling will be all awry. For I have seen enough of life to know that the generals who have won in the field of fiction, like the generals who have won in the field of fact, have won because they have had the drilling.
And in my case the drilling has been only trees—trees, and their children, the flowers.