By the time Henry completed his year on the beach, his overall picture of what life should be was coming into full focus.

Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature, he wrote in the final paragraph of The Outermost House. A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual ... Do no dishonor to the earth lest you dishonor the spirit of man.

Henrys experience on Cape Cod not only helped him find himself as a writer, but it also brought his life into perspective. Living on the Cape has brought out in me a mystic something that shows surprise of life to be quite the biggest thing, he told Boston Transcript reporter Clarissa Lorenz.

Henry was not a religious person he attended church only for aesthetic reasons, his wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth, said. Yet, harmony with the earth, sea and sky truly became a spiritual experience for the man was scarred by the events of World War I.

His lectures were filled with the sense of awe which is the essence of stirring religion, said Royal G. Davis of the Bangor Theological Seminary. He gave us just what we needed a feeling of cosmic mystery.

Through his experiences in the Great War, Henry discovered that dishonor was on a rampage when it came to life in general. He became so distressed by what he had seen, he took to writing fairy tales for the next few years.

He hated war with a vengeance, and the political world that caused such conflicts, recalled George Rongner. Brutal. Destructive. Innocent women and children being killed. He frowned severely as he uttered such descriptions.

While in France, Henry witnessed grenades detonating in soldiers hands. As he shot photographs, soldiers were dying only a short distance from him. At Verdun, the German atrocities were probably the greatest. They launched a whole laboratory of gases into the French; and gas masks saw great service. As Francis Russell would write many years later, Henry would live through the somber slaughters of the Marne and the Somme with extraordinary luck.

Henry came across the oddest sight (he had) ever seen at Bois le Pretre, as he told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy after his return from France: In walking through the wood, cut and but with a little more than the trunks standing we saw an object in the tree. We investigated and found, pinned in a branch, a human heart. Someone had been blown to bits and by a strange chance the heart had found lodgment in the tree.



Henrys fondness for the natural world around him grew while staying at a friends house in New Mexico in 1924. Along with his time spent on the shores of Cape Cod and the coast of Maine, it was here that Henry found the most peace.

"We should have a living relationship with nature," Henry told an American Legion gathering in 1933. "Some kind of relationship between man and nature is necessary to the peace of his soul, something that the Indian has. Machinery is all right as a servant, but it is poison as a master."

Mary Cabot Wheelwright, a wealthy friend from Boston, and Hastiin Klah, a Navajo medicine man, were two friends who socialized with Henry during his stay in New Mexico. Klah and Wheelwright eventually founded the Wheelwright Museum for the American Indian in Santa Fe.

During his American Legion lecture, Henry dwelt at some length of the nobility of soul and character he found in the 80-year-old medicine man, Klah. Henry and Klah became friends during this sojourn.

Not so long ago I received a unique request from this fine old fellow, Henry recalled during the American Legion lecture, which was covered by The Patriot Ledger of Quincy. Imagine my surprise when I found that he wanted sand taken from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, with which to make medicine. I was glad to fill a grocery carton with Cape Cod sand and express it to the old man. No doubt it contained the magic that he was seeking. Later I received in return a beautiful hand-woven rug, which I understand, is also full of magic.

The Indians philosophy and Henrys soon became the same, both believing that city dwellers of modern America failed to appreciate the four seasons of the year. Henry emphatically quoted an old Indian medicine man from the lower St. Lawrence: The whites have never made peace with the earth and it does not like them.

Because of that destructive nature, he reasoned that man was paying a heavy price.

People are cheating themselves with their sophistication and blase -- like the boy who steals a march on the family the night before Christmas so theres no surprise for him the next morning, he reasoned in 1926. Thats it. We are a cigarette-smoking race. We are shutting out pictures with tobacco smoke.

Henry was not a theologian, not apart; with some mystics the way to reach God / spirit is to separate from the lives of others, disconnect, wrote Nan Turner Waldron in her notes for her book Journey to Outermost House. With Henry there is a getting in touch with, learning to be more human and activating the senses. It is OK to be human, and a part of nature, and life and death are all right.

It was not aesthetic separation meditation but not remoteness. Henry was never down on the natural world, nor was he pessimistic or caustic about our modern misuse of the environment. It is an up sermon. It is a kindly lead, showing where we fit as humans and how we do benefit from the connection with the earth.