Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/38

10 farther up in the rocky hills, where the burning breasts of the mountains are lifted from their headless shoulders. There, too, like Victory’s, is seen the stride of their sheer descents, throwing back the clouds for draperies. This is summer, summer of ripening grain fields, summer of odorous, melodious South winds, balsam-scented and hemlock-tuned.

Autumn’s brilliant moment of splendor passes and the traveler flees before the sere and drear November, gray, brown, and sodden with fog and freezing tears. The mountaineer stays and cuts his logs. Now the great nature painting of all the seasons is preparing. The frost has bitten, the snow has fallen, and once more the sun shines forth. Behold the blue peaks, lifted above the green of the hemlock and the pine, and the dazzling sweep of virgin snow. The air is stimulating and purifying. Over this land bends a sky which gathers its true sons to her heart, whose stars are eloquent, whose storms are majestic, whose day-dawns are passionately tender.

The farmer and the mountaineer of to-day feel the divine salute of Nature as did the early settlers of the state. They are sustained in their life of toil by the same enchantment. But one circumstance of life, one sacred influence they have lost, homely but potent. That is the fireplace of their ancestors. In the living room of the early farmhouses huge logs were burned, and this resinous fire, like a pure spiritual force subduing nature to the will of man, yielded a glory to the homely walls, lighted up the faces of the family circle, drawing each member