Salt Lake City, Utah, Sunday Morning, June 9, 1935. This Land of Hills and Valleys THE land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven; a land which the Lord, thy God, careth for . . . from the beginning of the year even to the end of the year ...He will give you the rain of your land in His due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil . . . and will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full. This was the vision Moses had of the promised land, viewed from a mountain, but never entered with the tribes of Israel he had led from Egyptian bondage. There is another land of hills and valleys known as the Great West, a land which the God of Nature has cared for since the beginning of the year even to the end of the year, a land of mountains high and valleys green; a land of sunshine, snow and rain, where grass grows lush on boundless ranges and cattle feed and fatten on a thousands hillsides. Happy is he, said Virgil, who knows the divinities of the country. To the poets of ancient Rome divinities were the gods or goddesses of mythology. Yet divinities may be hallowed attributes or cherished charms. The one who knows and appreciates the joys and beauties of country life, as Wordsworth might describe him, is a lover of the meadows, and the woods and mountains, and of all that we behold of this green earth. Our own great poet, William Cullen Bryant, while yet a lad, wrote his immortal tribute to life and nature Thanatopsis. To him who, in the love of nature, holds communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language. And so he bad his fellow men, Go forth under the open sky and list to natures teachings. University of Liege, Belgium By royal decree in 1816, William of Holland reinstituted the Universities of Ghent, Louvain and Liege. Lectures the Faculty of Medicine at Liege began in 1816 to 1817. What one may learn from the open sky, the flowering vales, the towering mountains, the purling brooks, the roaring cataracts, the swaying trees, depends upon depth of feeling and size of the soul. As Robert Burns has said: Natures charms the hills and woods, the sweeping vales and foaming floods are free to all. The various language nature speaks is poetic, dramatic, eloquent as to life, convincing as to eternity, reflecting moods and yet asserting truth. According to Tennyson, Any man that walks the mead, in bud or blade or bloom, may find, according as his humors lead, a meaning suited to his mind. Whether the picturesque features of nature that people travel over the earth to behold appeared thus from the beginning of time, or have been fashioned by erratic elements in the cycles of centuries that have rolled away since the separation of mist from dust, there is no exact method to determine. Observation and investigation of natural phenomena have demonstrated to the satisfaction of thinking people that the factors of seismic convulsions, volcanic eruptions, wind and water erosion, glacial movements, cloud bursts, tidal waves, sand storms and planetary disturbances have had much to do with the creation of deserts, mountain chains, islands, lakes and canyons and the distribution and diversity of vegetation. Climate has an influence on the panoramas nature spreads before the gaze of man. It divides the earth into zones, each with its fauna and flora, each with its peculiar attractions. Some of these appeal to this one and some to that. In every canyon, every vale, every lake shore, every river bank, there is a witchery different from that found elsewhere. Some carry a stronger fascination than others. As Alexander Pope has written: All spread their charms, but charm not all alike; On different senses different objects strike. There is something of the nomad in every normal person with an imagination. Whether it came down from Eden whence man was driven out to till the ground, cut down thorns and thistles with which it was cursed, and earn bread by the sweat of labor before returning to the dust from which he was taken or courses through our veins as a heritage from more recent ancestors, we may not say. There in the restless urge to go, an inarticulate delight in open spaces, a courage found in freedom from conventions that assert themselves when men and women venture forth to see the world, or as much of it as they can within the range of their means or opportunities. The land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys. It is here and all around. Those who do not care to remain and possess it can take home its inspiration and memory of its lure and its welcome to treasure until time to come again.