Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/116

 our wounds, dusk and music for all our peevishness. Who taught us that we could do without her? Can you hear the skylark through a telephone or catch that husky whisper of the pines in a dictograph? Can you keep your heart young in a row of pigeonholes? Will you forego the surf of ocean rollers to be serf to a rolltop desk?

Little by little, and in haphazard ways, wisdom comes to a man. No matter how resolutely he shuts his ears, Truth keeps pricking within him. What a futility, what a meanness and paltriness of living this is that would send us hence with all Life's great secrets unlearned, her ineffable beauties unguessed, her great folio only hastily glimpsed. Here is this spinning ball for us to marvel at, turning in an ever-changing bath of color and shadow, blazed with sunshine, drenched with silver rain, leaning through green and orange veils of dusk, and we creep with blinkered eyes along narrow alleys of unseeing habit. What will it profit us to keep a balance at the bank if we can't keep a balance of youth and sanity in our souls? Of what avail to ship carloads of goods north, east, south and west, if we cannot spare time to know our own dreams, to exchange our doubts and yearnings with our friends and neighbors?

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibration of beauty. I can imagine no more fascinating privilege than to be allowed to ransack the desks of a thousand American business men, men supposed to be hard-headed, absorbed