I wish I could radiate to every human soul what I mean by having one's mind, one's soul, live in the open. Words fail to convey what I mean. The sense of largeness, of expansion, of breadth, depth, width, and height are as tangible in soul-results as in those of body. None can live in the open all the time and become sordid money-grubbers. If they are to become rich they do it in a large, expansive, virile way that commands respect. It is only the shut-in man that can add to his millions by cheese-paring methods, by grinding the face of the poor, by counting up cents and nickels and dimes wrung from the labor of the children of the poor.
Read these lines from a wonderful poem of the out-of-doors by Edwin Markham, and see how much you can make it mean to yourself:
I ride on the mountain tops, I ride; I have found my life and am satisfied.
I ride on the hills, I forgive, I forget Life's hoard of regret-- All the terror and pain Of the chafing chain. Grind on, O cities, grind; I leave you a blur behind. I am lifted elate--the skies expand; Here the world's heaped gold is a pile of sand. Let them weary and work in their narrow walls; I ride with the voices of waterfalls!
I swing on as one in a dream--I swing Down the airy hollows, I shout, I sing! The world is gone like an empty word! My body's a bough in the wind, my heart a bird!
Never in a thousand years can one get such pure, sweet, pulsing, living and stay-long-with-you delights as these, in a city. Granted there are pleasures in the ballroom, and they are doubtless great, but can they begin to compare with the delights of out-of-doors? Languor next day, ennui, jealousies, heart-burnings, gossiping, cruel slandering, ruination of health, too often come with these city pleasures. Then, too, the ballroom in its desirable form is only for the rich, while the poor may enjoy everything good of the great out-of-doors. The city has its theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, and the like, but they are generally at night, compelling people to be out when they should be in bed, turning day into night, and reversing the natural order of things. And the artificial is never equal to the real, the unnatural to the natural.
Then, too, the out-of-doors is such a teacher; and not a teacher of the arid, formal, dry, embalmed knowledge, but the real living facts. As Robert Louis, the well-beloved, says: