Adventures in Contentment

Not long ago, coming in from my fields, I fell to thinking of the supreme wonder of a tree; and as I walked I met the Professor. "How," I asked, "does the sap get up to the top of these great maples and elms? What power is there that should draw it upward against the force of gravity?" He looked at me a moment with his peculiar slow smile. "I don't know," he said. "What!" I exclaimed, "do you mean to tell me that science has not solved this simplest of natural phenomena?" "We do not know," he said. "We explain, but we do not know." No, my Explanatory Friend, we do not know--we do not know the why of the flowers, or the trees, or the suns; we do not even know why, in our own hearts, we should be asking this curious question--and other deeper questions. No man becomes a great writer unless he possesses a highly developed sense of Mystery, of wonder. A great writer is never blasé; everything to him happened not longer ago than this forenoon. The other night the Professor and the Scotch Preacher happened in here together and we fell to discussing, I hardly know how, for we usually talk the neighbourhood chat of the Starkweathers, of Horace and of Charles Baxter, we fell to discussing old Izaak Walton--and the nonsense (as a scientific age knows it to be) which he sometimes talked with such delightful sobriety. "How superior it makes one feel, in behalf of the enlightenment and progress of his age," said the Professor, "when he reads Izaak's extraordinary natural history."