Under the Trees and Elsewhere - Hamilton Wright Mabie (any book recommendations txt) 📗

with its narrow experience and its short memory, and I am entering into consciousness of a race life and dimly surveying the records of a race memory.

At last the road turns abruptly from the hillside to which it clings with the loyalty of ancient association, and, running straight across a low-lying meadow, enters a deep wood, and vanishes from sight for many a mile. It is with a deep sigh of content that I find myself once more in that dim wonderland whose mysteries I would not fathom if I could. I am at one with the genius of the place; I have escaped customs, habits, conventions of every sort; the false growths of civilisation have fallen away and left me in primitive strength and freshness once more; my own personality disappears, and I am breathing the universal life; I have gone back to the far beginning of things, and I am once more in that dim, rich moment of primeval contact with Nature out of which all mythologies and literatures have grown. How profound and all-embracing is the silence, and yet how full of inarticulate sound! The faint whisperings of the leaves touch me first with a sense of melody, and then, later, with a sense of mystery. These are the most venerable voices to which men have ever listened; and when I think of the immeasurable life that seems to be groping for utterance in them, I remember with no consciousness of scepticism that these are the voices which men once waited upon as oracles; nay, rather, wait upon still; for am I not now listening for the word which shall speak to me out of these shadowy depths and this mysterious antique life? I am ready to listen and to follow if only these vagrant sounds shall blend into one clear note and declare to me that secret which they have kept so well through the centuries. I wait expectant, as I have waited so often before; there is unbroken stillness, then a faint murmur slowly rising and spreading until I am sure that the moment of revelation has come, then a slow recession back to silence. I am not discouraged; sooner or later that multitudinous rustle of the wild woods will break into clear-voiced speech. I am sure, too, that some great movement of life is about to display itself before me. Is not this hush the sudden stillness of those whom I have surprised and who have, on the instant, sprung to their coverts and are waiting impatiently until I have gone, to resume their interrupted frolic! I have often watched and waited here before in vain, but surely to-day I shall beguile these hidden folk into revelation of that wonderful life they have suddenly suspended! So I throw myself at the foot of a great pine, and wait; the minutes move slowly across the unseen dial of the day, and I have become so still and motionless that I am part of this secluded world. The sun shines abroad, but I have forgotten it; there are clouds passing all day in their aerial journeyings, but they cast no shadow over me; even the flight of the hours is unnoticed. Eternity might come and I should be no wiser, I should see no change; for does it not already hold these vast dim aisles and solitudes within its peaceful empire? And is there not here the slow procession of birth, decay, and death, in that sublime order of growth which we call immortality?

I wait and watch, and I can wait forever if need be. Suddenly from the depths of the forest there comes a note of penetrating sweetness, wild, magical, ethereal; I slowly raise myself and wait. Surely this is the signal, and in a moment I shall see the dim spaces between the trees peopled and animate. There is a moment's pause, and then again that strange, mysterious song rings through the listening forest. It touches me like a sudden revelation; I forget that for which I have waited; I only know that the woods have found their voice, and that I have fallen upon the sacred hour when the song is a prayer. Who shall describe that wild, strange music of the hermit-thrush? Who will ever hear it in the depths of the forest without a sudden thrill of joy and a sudden sense of pathos? It is a note apart from the symphony to which the summer has moved across the fields and homes of men; it has no kinship with those flooding, liquid melodies which poured from feathered throats through the long golden days; there is a strain in it that was never caught under blue skies and in the safe nesting of the familiar fields; it is the voice of solitude suddenly breaking into sound; it is the speech of that other world so near our doors, and yet removed from us by uncounted centuries and unexplored experiences.

The spell of silence has been broken, and I venture softly toward the hidden fountain from which this unworldly song has flowed; but I am too slow and too late, and it remains to me a disembodied voice singing the "old, familiar things" of a past which becomes more and more distinct as I linger in the shadows of this ancient place. As I walk slowly on, there grows upon me the sense of a life which for the most part makes no sound, and is all the deeper and richer because it is inarticulate. The very thought of speech or companionship jars upon me; silence alone is possible for such hours and moods. The great movement of life which builds these mighty trunks and sends the vital currents to their highest branches, which alternately clothes and denudes them, makes no sound; cycle after cycle have the completed centuries made, and yet no sign of waning power here, no evidence of a finished work! Here life first dawned upon men; here, slowly, it discovered its meaning to them; here the first impressions fell upon senses keen with desire for untried sensations; here the first great thoughts, vast as the forest and as shadowy, moved slowly on toward conscious clearness in minds that were just beginning to think; here and not elsewhere are the roots of those earliest conceptions of Nature and Life, which again and again have come to such glorious blossoming in the literatures of the race. This is, in a word, the world of primal instinct and impression; and, therefore, forever the deepest, most familiar, and yet most marvellous world to which men may come in all their wanderings.

As these thoughts come and go, unclothed with words and unsought by will, I grasp again the deep truth that the truest life is unconscious and almost voiceless; that there is no rich, true, articulate life unless there flows under it a wide, deep current of unspoken, almost unconscious, thought and feeling; that the best one ever says or does is as a few drops flung into the sunlight from a swift, hidden stream, and shining for a moment as they fall again into a current inaudible and invisible. The intellectual life that is all expressive, that is all conscious and self-directed, is but a shallow life at best; he only lives deeply in the intellect whose thought begins in instinct, rises slowly through experience, carrying with it into consciousness the noblest, truest one has felt and been, and finds speech at last by impulse and direction of the same law which summons the seed from the soil and lifts it, growth by growth, to the beauty and the sweetness of the flower. Under the same law of unconscious growth every true poem, every great work of art, and every genuine noble character, has fashioned itself and come at last to conscious perfectness and recognition. Genius is nearer Nature than talent; it is only when it strays away from Nature, and loses itself in mere dexterities, that it degenerates into skill and becomes a tool with which to work, and not a gift from heaven. The silence of the deep woods is pregnant with mighty growths. Says Maurice de Guérin, true poet and lover of Nature: "An innumerable generation actually hangs on the branches of all the trees, on the fibres of the most insignificant grasses, like babes on the mother's breast. All these germs, incalculable in their number and variety, are there suspended in their cradle between heaven and earth, and given over to the winds, whose charge it is to rock these beings. Unseen amid the living forests swing the forests of the future. Nature is all absorbed in the vast cares of her maternity."

But while I walk and meditate, letting the forest tell its story to my innermost thought, and recalling here only that which is most obvious and superficial (who is sufficient for the deeper things that lie like pearls in the depths of his being?), the light grows dimmer, and I know that the day has gone. I retrace my steps until through the clustered trunks of the trees I see once more the green meadows soft in the light of sunset. As I pass over the boundary line of the forest once more, faint and far the song of the thrush searches the wood, and, finding me, leaves its ethereal note in my memory-a note wild as the forest, and thrilling into momentary consciousness I know not what forgotten ages of awe and wonder and worship.


Chapter XII

Beside the River

All day long the river has moved through my thought as it rolls through the landscape spread out at my feet. There it lies, winding for many a mile within the boundaries of this noble outlook; by day flecked with sails approaching and receding, and at night shining under the full moon like a girdle of silver, clasping mountains and broad meadow lands in a varied but harmonious landscape. From the point at which I look out upon its long course, the stream has a setting worthy of its volume and its history. In the distant background a mountain range, of noble altitude and outline, has today an ethereal strength and splendour; a slight haze has obliterated all details, and left the great hills soft and dream-like in the September sunshine; at first sight one waits to see them vanish, but they remain, wrought upon by sunlight and atmosphere, until the twilight touches them with purple and night turns them into mighty shadows. On either hand, in the middle ground of the picture, long lines of hills shut the river within a world of its own, and shelter the green meadows, the fallow fields, and the stretches of woodland that cover the broad sweep from the river's edge to their own bases. Below me the quiet current enters the heart of another group of mountains, flowing silently between the precipitous and rocky heights that lift themselves on either hand, indifferent alike to the frowning summits when the sun warms them with smiles, and to the black and portentous shadows which they often cast across the channel at their feet. The solitude and awe which belong to mountain passes through which great rivers flow clothe this place with solemnity and majesty as with a visible garment, and fill one with a sense of indescribable awe.

The river which lies before me moves through a mist of legend and tradition as well as through a landscape of substantial history. It has been called an epical river because of the varied and sustained beauty through which it sweeps from its mountain sources to the sea; but