News and citizen. [volume] (Morrisville, Vt. ;) 1881-current, 1892-04-28

water! Bright water! Happy water!
While some stream, too lazy any more
torun, gathers itself into wayside pool
where the swine waIlow. and filthy in
sects hop over the surface, and reptiles
crawl among the onze, and frogs utter
their hideous croak, and by day and
night there rises from the foul mire and
green scum fever and plague and death.
There is an endless activity underfoOt
and overhead.
Not one four O'clock in the flower bed,
not one fly on the window pane, not one
squirrel gathering food from the cones
Of the white pine, not one rabbit feeding
on clover tops, not one drop falling i'll a
shower, not one minnow glancing in the
sea, not one quail whistling from the
grass, not one hawk cawing in the sky,
but is busy now and is busy always, full
filling its mission as certainly as any
monarch on earth or any angelin heaven.
NATURE NEVER IDLE.
You hear the shout of the plowboys
busy in the field and the rattle of the
whiffletrees on the harrow, but you do
not know that there is more industry in
the earth upturned and in the dumb
vegetation undertook than in all that
you see. If you put your ear to lump
of riven sod you may hear nothing in
the roots and spiculR of grass, but there
are at work spades and cleavers and pile
drivers and battering rams and inter
necine wars. | do not wonder that the
lively fancy of the ancients saw III the
inanimate creation around Floras and
Pomonas and Graces and Fauns and
Fairies and Satyrs and Nymphs. Every
thing is busy. Nothing is inanimate,
except the man who cannot see the life
and hear the music.
At the creation the morning stars sang
together, but they were only the choir
which was to lead all the stars, and all
the mountains, and all the seas in God s
worship. All natural objects seem at
one and the same time Uni iS1sE~iss yaqi.-sz
and Joy and worship. In Gods cfeatIon
there is no pause i'll either the worship,
or the work, or the joy. Amid all nat
ural objects at one and the same time it
is Halloween and Whitsunday and Ash
Wednesday and All Saints Day. All
the healthy beauty of that which we see
and hear in the natural world is depend
ent upon activity and unrest. Men
will be intellectually, morally
and physically-Only upon the condition
of an active industry. | know men die
every day Of overwork. They drop
dow in coat pits, and among the spindles
of northern factories, and on the cotton
plantations of the south.
In every city and town and village you
find men groaning under burdens, as in
the east the camels stagger under their
loads between AleppO and Damascus.
Life is crushed out every day at counters
and workbenches and anvil3. But there
are other multitudes who die from mere
inertia. Indulgences every day are con-
tracing diseases beyond the cathoicop
of allopathy and homeopathy and by
dropathy and eclecticisn. Rather than
work they rush upon lancets and seal,
pels. Nature has provided for those who
violate her laws by inactivity-what
rheum for the eyes, and what govt for
the feet, and what curvature for the
spine, and What structures for the chest,
and what tubercles for the lungs, and
what rheumatisms for the muscles, and
what neural gias for the nerves. Nature
in time arraigns every such culprit at
her bar and presents against him an
Indictment of one hundred counts, and
convicts him on each one of them.
The laws OF nature will not stop their
action because men may be ignorant of
them. Disease, when it comes to do its
work, does not ask whether you under
stand hygiene or pathology or materia
medica. If there were not so many lies
written ON tombstones and in obituaries
you would see what multitudes of the
worlds inhabitants are slain in their at
tempts to escape the necessity of toll.
Men cross oceans and continents, and
climb the Alps, and sit under the sky of
Italy or the shadow of Egyptian pyra-
mid, and go down into ancient ruins,
and battle at Baden Baden, and come
home with the same shOrtness of breath,
and the same poor digestion, and the
same twitching of the nerves, when at
home with their own spade they might
have dug health out of the ground or
with their own ak hewn health out of
log, or with their own scythe garnered
health from the grain field