Our young art school will some day have its treasures; and there will be hung on these walls the portraits of other men whose culture and influence will be worth more than all the gold of the mountains. Let the artist set up his easel and write his silent poem upon the canvas. Welcome all influences which soften this hard and barren materialism. Before the mountains were unvexed by the miner's drill the land itself was a poem and a picture. One day the turbid streams will turn to crystal again, and the only miner will be the living glacier sitting on its white throne of judgment and grinding the very mountains to powder. Fortunate they who can catch this wealth of inspiration. These are the ministers and prophets whose larger and finer interpretation of nature are part of the treasures of the new commonwealth.
[A] As the title of this paper was adopted more than _eleven_ years ago, it has not been deemed expedient to change it because Mr. John Burroughs has recently chosen it as the title of his book.
[B] Delivered on "Assembly Day," at the University of California.
Incorrect page numbers in the Table of Contents have been corrected.
Text in italics is surrounded with underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation and spelling have been retained from the original.
Errors in punctuation have been corrected without note.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Breeze from the Woods, 2nd Ed., by William Chauncey Bartlett