"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting - a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."

- Emerson.

"After all, it is the divinity within that makes divinity without. . . ."

- Washington Irving.

"In all ranks of life the human heart yearns for the beautiful; and the beautiful things that God makes are his gift to all alike."

- H. B. Stowe.

We sometimes think we are living in a world where there is much that is disagreeable, much that jars upon the mind and upon the nerves. We think the things we have to encounter make us nervous. We go into the street and see things that are not always pleasant to look upon. We hear all kinds of noises and feel the spirit of rush and hurry, and lose sight of much good, because we are not looking for it.

It is possible to live in a great city, to come in contact with all the energy, with all the beauty, all the strength of it, and instead of being filled with a sense of nervousness or a disagreeable feeling, to so adjust ourselves to it that it becomes an inspiration to our lives.

We often say that the country is an inspiration to life; that it is so wearying, so trying in the city. The wearying, the trying, part is the way we adjust ourselves to life, since we are sometimes thoroughly contented and happy in the city. Regardless of all the noises, of the strenuous life people live, they are sometimes restful and happy. It is the way we are related to everything in life that gives us the beauty, the strength, and the harmony of life. The country has its advantages; the city has also. While we are living in the city we should get all that is possible from the city life, and while we are living in the country we should get all that is possible from the country life.

Someone has said that God made the country and man made the city. If we are living in a large city, then we are coming in touch with man's handiwork. We are coming in touch with the brain that thought that handiwork into existence. In reality, in a great city we are getting very near the center of human life. We find that every phase of it, every grade of it, as we are related to it, may be helpful to us or the reverse. There are the noises and the rush. We sometimes feel when we get into them we are a part of them. We rush ourselves, to keep up, as we might say, with the procession. When I first came to New York many years ago, and found the people hurrying as I had never hurried in my life, I fell into the hurry, and was so carried away by it that I hurried too. By and by I asked myself what it all meant; what was the necessity of it? I found that men who, for instance, had apparently been hurrying to do something, stopt and looked into a store window, and spent perhaps minutes of time. It came to me that they were not in a great hurry to accomplish something, but that they had fallen into the spirit of hurry, and when something came up that arrested their attention for a few minutes they forgot about their hurry.

There come times when we should think quickly and act quickly without getting into the spirit of rush, and I found after a time, that when I needed to think quickly, or to act quickly, I could do it without getting into the spirit of hurry.

Again, I found it hard to get adjusted to the noise. It had its effect upon the nervous system, and I thought I should like to be where it was quiet. Then it came to me that this rush, hurry, and noise were all expressions of human energy, and that each was good in its right place; and that if I could get above it, instead of being unrestful and discordant, it would inspire me with a greater sense of strength. That if I could get at any real understanding of the noise it would no longer affect me nor produce any degree of nervousness, but rather the reverse. I began to feel that I was part of it in a way, yet not necessarily a discordant part.

So we can come closer to the great energy that permeates a large city. Then, if we begin to see and to think about the expression, about the wonderful buildings which tower away up into the heavens, we see that not all of them are beautiful, tho conveying to the mind wonder, strength, and power. Occasionally we see that the beauty vies with the strength and power, as tho the architect had exprest himself in as beautiful a way as he knew how, tho realizing his limitations. He was able to express the strength and power, but was unable to express to the same degree the beauty. We see a more constant effort being made to express beauty in architecture in our public buildings, but the trouble with our people is that when they go abroad and see things that convey the sense of beauty and proportion, they return home and are not satisfied with a copy. They want to outdo it, and in the effort, make mistakes.

More and more, however, we are finding that it is not in trying to outdo-, or in trying to copy after people that the true expression of beauty comes. It is rather through an effort to represent our own thoughts.

On every side of city life we see evidence of a greater desire to express the beautiful. If we look back twenty-five or thirty years and consider the architecture in our country, we find we have made wonderful progress. We see changes for the better in almost every direction. Many buildings in our cities can not be called things of beauty, but they show that we are striving after beauty. There was a time when all our buildings looked very much alike. A brown-stone front was the thing to be desired, the essential thing. Now we are not satisfied with that. We want more of the beautiful, and in striving after it we go to an excess of the ornamental in architecture, and put in so much of it that it misrepresents beauty. Nevertheless these efforts give evidence of a striving for something more beautiful. Once in a while we see a really beautiful building come into existence, an effort of a master architect who has developed a love of the beautiful.