Show Intellect Grows in Large Silences Joaquin Miller Imer philosopher scholar and Poet of the Sierras yesterday esterd Y gave to The Herald the following as his estimate esti mate of the value of American scenery to mankind and of the value of communion on with nature in her various phases to the intellectual growth and development of a people In the first place the large silences and a nd the dignity of the silent trees appeal to me Everything is as silent as a king upon his throne with a sceptre This gives the soul a chance to expand Monkeys are still monkeys to the end They The only onh chatter and chatter Men and women who talk never amount to a great deal They never leave the imprint of their individuality on the world They never write or say sa anything to be per perpetuated perpetuated perpetuated in the hearts of men because they the never think The ocean is a great thing thil g The Pacific is the greatest of all on earth and it itis itis Itis is necessarily impressive Take the eternal silence and this boundless sea and the long journeys that have Isolated man from man and we have the foundations If not the building stones of the true tue poets No poet was ever born in the city No poet ever will willbe willbe willbe be They have placed a tablet showing that Byron was born in iii the city He was born in Camberwell which was twenty miles out of London London has grown to and surrounded Camberwell And so I say Sa poets are and always will w ill be from the silent places born and nursed in the silences the majesty majest of the mountains Of course man may live in cities as Emerson lived in Boston a dozen miles out of town but if he like Emerson is bigger than the city the city has no influence on him it cannot ruin cannot canno t drown him v Rosetti was In London but never was as a part of London He lived and died elsewhere el He was bigger than London though born there But the poets are not all the earth Great men like Ruskin Tyndall and such men were In London for the purpose of research and yet et were no part of the place They lived in the woods Scott and Burns and Carlyle all these men lived in the wilderness and all of these th ese were of the wilderness One was a university man whose mother could not read Carlyle At Atthe A the same time the university is not n t bad nd I say go goo through ugh the university If you Y u can but be bigger than the university I have a man working for me He is as good and sober and steady and honest a man as ever eer lived He is a graduate g of one of the greatest of the universities yet he cannot do better than tha n a work by the day This man has not seen the scenery He has not heard the thunder of the sea nor the roar of the evening wind through the pines He has ha s not looked above nor below For above the skies sk i S are arc blue And below helow is the green gr een green STeen sod I And AndOh Oh and Oh between the two Walk Valk the wonderful winds of God The rhe poet must see se and the poet must m hear The very verJ word seel means to ta see one who sees and one cannot be a poet unless he learns the lessons that Goo God would teach through the majesty majest the solemnity the grandeur and the awful silences of nature |