A BOOK FOR QUIET PEOPLE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LIV, Issue LIV, 4 December 1920, Page 7

A BOOK FOR QUIET PEOPLE

BY A RESTFUL-MINDED MAN “Once a man and a woman, who had taken! toll ot the years, were busy casting up accounts, as people will when they wake from their dreams and would lain lind what good things their love lias brought them. “The man, who was grey-haired and weather-worn, said in the bitterness of his spirit, T have given you nothing but sorrow.' The woman, who was still young and beautiful, thought for a while before she answered, Aon have taught me to love the country. Anu the answer contented him. 1 ' E. M. MARTIN, in “Wayside Wisdom. ABOUT A BOOK “A Book For Quiet People is the sub-title to'a book called “Wajside Wisdom,” by E. M. Martin. | It consists of seventeen very | charming essays such as one rarely, reads to-day, because to-day theyare rarely written. , They are full of mellow wisdom, of insight, of love of the best things. v They are serene in vision,' and they make for peace of mind. One’s homage gocs_ our, lo the writer, and it is right, to cn\y him nis thoughts. \ou ask, who is this restful-' minaed man! But you only got: one personal glimpse: “My trade is the selling of books, and it has brought 'me "into touch that is al-j most friendship with many people come from many lands and speaking many tongues. • • • I “The books are printed at the back of a house nearly four eem I turies old, and are _ sold m the front of it, so following as nearl,\ j as possible the counsel of .perfection that the makers of the wares and the buyers shall be nrotignt. into close and intimate rclationSll “The low, oak-beamed workshop looks out upon a garden that is now filled with ole -fashioned flowers. . • • The garden is ‘tn« poetry of this nmeo, the solid, square chimney, the hanging timbered gable-end ; so, too, are the books that, with meir wide margins and eightecnth-ccntuij. type are not all unworthy of the dead masters who wrote them. ; xierc is a small handful ol gleanings from the golden sheaves withia this book, and readers should possess th(? full harvest; The hook glorifies country life, and simple things and great commonplace of life which we are too

apt to forget. “There are, I think, two clas.-.e.> of people who are happy in the oountrv; those who were born there and have never left it, and those who though born there, have spent the best part of their years in a town, but creep back to their birthplace to ‘entertain the lag-end of life with quiet hours,’ and it is bard to tell which, of these two love the country best. “Those who have never left it love it as men of a contented turn of mind love the familiar surroundings they have learned to call home, without passion, yet iMth inmate altection; but those who come back to it love it with an

ever whelming regret. “The test of the true country lover is the winter, the long winter of English woods and fields in the dead of the year; the winter a man knows who has never ridden to hounds or trumped with therms. . . . “Of the four seasons, winter is the mystic and the seer, and it is then the silver birch, that is the moon’s tree and the tree ot the night, and for this was loved by Leonardo da t Vinci, is in Dio (very fulness of its beauty • • • • “Yet there are people who can find no beauty in the dead month, that, not without reason, stands first in the processional order ot. tHe year, because the beginning! of being, like its ending, is one! of the myst.eries. „ “It is well to see the great cities | of me world, and to live for a while in one or other of them, it i only we make no mistake as to the exact hour when we sho’i.cl leave it. And the time to eavei is on the morning when we wake up to find the town has ail ot a sudden grown hateful to us ; we feel we have given to a best, and taken from it ot its ib-H.. and the hour of parting hasi come. . ! "‘The voices in , the streets seem now to be merely a vulgar hubbub, the crowds only hustle us, ana we wonder why men ever consent live in these great dreary prisonhouses when outside theru are still to be found green,fields quiet waters, and a silent world. “ T begin through the grass once again to be bound to the Lord so sings a poet who is still with us, and this one line seems to me ;to hold all the truth of the great

mystery. i “When the most beautilul wp-j maji of our time lay a-dying, she j often asked to have this poem read to her, finding in it more oU comfort than in the words oi. greater masters, | “She was facing back the, earth in the fulness a! youth. AmU it must have been hard to part v.ith so great a ’oveliuess as was hers; but she learned that this was J the* only possible gate of. knowledge and if she would be. wise she nt*u»t pass through it;) and thfiy say, she died with a glad heart, having heard the earth call to her.” “The reason Corot painted a tree as perhaps no other man has painted it was because he understood in a special sense the value of atmosphere, and this value is too often lost in the beauty spots of the world Where our eyes arc so held that we miss, as it were, ihe soul of the picture. “But it is not possible to miss the soul in the level country where there being nothing to break tho line <vf vision, the earth takes unto itself some of the- characteristics of water by acting as a reflection of our moods. “In these low-lymg lands we arc cn near to the bare soil that we remember we are of kin to it and rtut of this remembering comes a 1 feeling of goodwill from man to j the earth and from the earth to man; the greatest writers and

thinkers have been bom in the level lands.” “In one of the best passages to be found in all her ordered prose, George Eliot laments the death ot leisure, a. death that has affected the world more deeply than any other since the sun was darkened over the hill of Calvary. . . .Le> , sure is dead, and men do not understand how rare and precious a thing has been taken from i them. . . For though the world may not have been a better place when it moved more slowly, men felt kindlier each to other in those i quiet times before leisure died. , . “When all the world is winged, will it be as far removed from the world that went on wheels as the wheeled world was from the world that went afoot? Even' though we ho near enough to the stars to have lost the measure of their mystery and far enough from the earth to have forgotten our .kinship with it? j "A philosophic writer has said : ‘The greatest curse of poverty is The lack of solitude.’ Now the ■poor in a city are never alone, {and though the absence of solitude may sharpen wits, it has of necessity an ill effect on character. 1 “This is why we have learned *io look to the. land for our strength ; and though we may waste it in Our cities, we know jin the sleepy hamlets and quiet fields there is waiting more lusty ; life to spend and be spent. 1 Out of their nearness to tho earth country people have learnjed certain virtues —a wholesomcness of mind and a clear outlook that no number of unfortunate j‘exceptions’ will ever explain away. ! “What publisher to-day would be man enough to accept, such a j work as ‘The Doctor’ (Sout hey’s), ■even if anyone could he found with the wit to write it? For the ; readers of to-day are not as the readers of yesterday; the short j paragraph, sensational serial, the informing article, if only - it he not too long or too dry, is ! what is asked for and given. >1 “The old writers, with their I tender recollections, their broad : jokes, their funds of knowledge - scattered with generous hand along ► tho pages, have gone, and it seems unlikely that any heirs to their ‘ wit will arise. j “We who love them can ordy Told our hands and be humbly ■•thankful for what, they have left L to us ; for those backward glances' those wise smiles, and the sunset 1 atmosphere of a shadowy past ' that they have preserved to us for 1 ever.

WHO WAS SHE? “Outside a secondhand bookshop 1 once saw a bright-eyed old woman in \\ orkhouse bonnet and shawl looking wistfully at the trays full of books, until, unable to resist the temptation, she took one up and began to read, lost to the noise of the street or the mud that splashed upon the pavement. “I came closer and saw that it was a volume of Pascal f s ‘Pensees,’ but before I could speak she placed it back on the tray and disappeared down a side' alley as a man came out of the shop. , ~ , “If she had the money she’d be one of my best customers, ’ he said, beginning to re-arrange his wares. “She comes as often as she can vet away, and I never disturb her but let her read as long as she likes. She must have spent many an hour here.”—Public Opinion,