There is no perfect beauty in the external world
without the presence of man, and all that silent waste of prairie land
and towering mountain, which stretches away in an unbroken monotony
towards our northern limits, is to me a lifeless, useless mass, and
will be so until it has submitted every inch of its wild, untrodden
surface to the honest industry of toiling humanity. When these giant
mountain-tops look down in friendly patronage upon the gables and
towers, and curling smoke-wreaths of some struggling hamlets lying at
their feet, I shall see their grandeur and admire it, but where dumb
nature sits in lone and pensive solitude away from the hum of golden
industry, beyond the reach and influence of civilization, it has for
me only a cold surface of beauty like the sleep of death.
This thought came back to me on the following day, when we were riding
the restless waters of Lake Ontario. As far as the eye could see in
any direction nothing was visible but waves and sky. I tried to
imagine myself doomed to live alone with nature's reckless beauty,
such as I saw it then above and around me, and my heart shivered at
the mere thought of such a terrible destiny. I know "there is society
where none intrude," but I prefer to believe "it is not good for man
to be alone." All the richest and rarest charms of Nature or of Art
have never had more than a relative value for me, but give me one
short moment of sympathetic human companionship, and with its borrowed
light I see beauty above and around me everywhere.
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