Under the Trees and Elsewhere

ry of

e and repose from dawn to sunset, some of them ripe with effort and adventure, with a keen delight in the feeling of possession which comes with them; they were brief, they have gone, but they are mine forever. The beauty and freshness that touched them morning after morning as the dew touches the flower are henceforth a part of my life; they have entered into my soul as their light and heat entered into the r

o her with a sense of loss and decline after every wandering. As I take up the little, well-worn book, it opens of itself at a familiar page,

o much with us;

nding, we lay w

e in Nature

ur hearts away,

bares her boso

will be howli

ered now like s

verything, we a

ot. Great God

kled in a c

anding on this

hat would make

Proteus rising

iton blow his

hem. There is something painfully disheartening in coming back to Nature and finding one's self thus unwelcomed and uncared for, and in the first moment of disappointment an unspoken accusation of change and coldness lies in the heart. The change is not in Nature, however; it is in ourselves. "The world is too much with us." Not until its strife and tumult fade into distance and memory will those finer senses, dulled by contact with a meaner life, restore that which we have lost. After a little some such thought as this comes to us, and day after day we haunt the silent streams and the secret places of th

nce of the place, so unbroken by customary habits and thoughts, that no dial could divide into fragments a day that was one long unbroken spell of wonder and delight. So remote seemed all human life that even memory turned from it and lost herself in silent meditation; so vast and mysterious was the life of Nature that the past

e old o

r my

es in my

e wind

the proph

shake on the

s leaves of the

lay the woo

en! h

dst know the

n the spher

oad, the p

ear'st thou h

s that hinted at its kinship with the roar of the sea; but it had a different tone. Waste and trackless solitudes and death are in the roar of the sea; remoteness, untroubled centuries of silence, the strange alien memories of woodland life, are in the roar of the pines. The forgotten ages of an immemorial past seem to have become audible in it, and to speak of things which had ceased to exist before human speech was born; things which lie at the roots of instinct rather than within the recollection of thought. T

retched bene

ning star so

e lore and th

schools and t

ey all, in thei

he bush with

FOREST

if you like,

profit, and th

very faithfu

th your gold

FOR R