overwhelm us or even utterly destroy us.  There is no defence to be offered to it; no opposition army can be set up, because in this life every man fights his own battle against every other man, and no two can be united under the same banner.  There is only one way of escape from this terrible danger which we battle against every hour.  Turn round, and instead of standing against the forces, join them; become one with Nature, and go easily upon her path.  Do not resist or resent the circumstances of life any more than the plants present the rain and the wind.  Then suddenly, to your own amazement, you find you have time and strength to spare, to use in the great battle which it is inevitable every man must fight,—­that in himself, that which leads to his own conquest.

Some might say, to his own destruction.  And why?  Because from the hour when he first tastes the splendid reality of living he forgets more and more his individual self.  No longer does he fight for it, or pit its strength against the strength of others.  No longer does he care to defend or to feed it.  Yet when he is thus indifferent to its welfare, the individual self grows more stalwart and robust, like the prairie grasses and the trees of untrodden forests.  It is a matter of indifference to him whether this is so or not.  Only, if it is so, he has a fine instrument ready to his hand; and in due proportion to the completeness of his indifference to it is the strength and beauty of his personal self.  This is readily seen; a garden flower becomes a mere degenerate copy of itself if it is simply neglected; a plant must be cultivated to the highest pitch, and benefit by the whole of the gardener’s skill, or else it must be a pure savage, wild, and fed only by the earth and sky.  Who cares for any intermediate states?  What value or strength is there in the neglected garden rose which has the canker in every bud?  For diseased or dwarfed blossoms are sure to result from an arbitrary change of condition, resulting from the neglect of the man who has hitherto been the providence of the plant in its unnatural life.  But there are wind-blown plains where the daisies grow tall, with moon faces such as no cultivation can produce in them.  Cultivate, then, to the very utmost; forget no inch of your garden ground, no smallest plant that grows in it; make no foolish pretence nor fond mistake in the fancy that you are ready to forget it, and so subject it to the frightful consequences of half-measures.  The plant that is watered to-day and forgotten to-morrow must dwindle or decay.  The plant that looks for no help but from Nature itself measures its strength at once, and either dies and is re-created or grows into a great tree whose boughs fill the sky.  But make no mistake like the religionists and some philosophers; leave no part of yourself neglected while you know it to be yourself.  While the ground is the gardener’s it is his business to tend it; but some day a call may come to him from another