This of Menu addresses our
privacy more than most.
It is a more private and familiar, and,
at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is
spoken in parlor or pulpit now-a-days. As our domestic fowls are
said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our
domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her
philosophers. We are dabbling in the very elements of our
present conventional and actual life; as if it were the primeval
conventicle where how to eat, and to drink, and to sleep, and
maintain life with adequate dignity and sincerity, were the
questions to be decided. It is later and more intimate with us
even than the advice of our nearest friends. And yet it is true
for the widest horizon, and read out of doors has relation to the
dim mountain line, and is native and aboriginal there. Most
books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields
their leaves feel very thin. They are bare and obvious, and have
no halo nor haze about them. Nature lies far and fair behind
them all. But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what
is deepest and most abiding in man. It belongs to the noontide
of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have
melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth
speaks freshly to our experience.
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