We, too, feel and
appreciate the beauty of these lakes and mountains The hill-sides and
placid waters, the forest songs, and wild scenery are pleasant to us;
but we enjoy them the more from the intellectual relaxation, the
mental quiet and repose, which we find among them. We feel that we are
resting, that the process of recuperation, intellectual as well as
physical, is going on within us. We can almost trace its progress,
and we feel that the time spent by us here is full of profit as well
as pleasure. At all events, it is so with me, and if duty to others,
whose interests it is my business to serve, did not demand my return,
I could enjoy another month here with unabated pleasure."
"You have left me little," I replied, "to add to what you have already
said, in expressing the sources of my enjoyment among these beautiful
lakes. Fishing and hunting, considered in the abstract, are things I
care but little about. They are pleasant enough in their way, but what
brings me here is the strong desire as well as necessity for the
repose of which you speak. There is a luxury in intellectual rest,
when the brain is wearied with protracted toil, which far surpasses
the mere animal enjoyment which follows relaxation from physical
labor. That rest I cannot find in society. I must seek it among wild
and primeval solitudes, where I can be alone with nature in her
unadorned simplicity, away from the barbarisms, so to speak, of
civilization, where I can act and talk and think as a natural, and not
an artificial man, where I can be off my guard, and free from the
weight of that armor which the conventionalities of life, the captions
espionage of the world compels us to wear, un-tempted by the thousand
enticements which society everywhere presents to lure us
into unrest.
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