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Chapter X
The Earliest Insights
The heaven which lies about us in our infancy, like every other heaven of which men have dreamed, lies mainly within us; it is the heaven of fresh instincts, of unworn receptivity, of expanding intelligence. It is a heaven of faith and wonder, as every heaven must be; it is a heaven of recurring miracle, of renewing freshness, of deepening interest. Into such a heaven every child is born who brings into life that leaven of the imagination which later on is to penetrate the universe and make it one in the sublime order of truth and of beauty.
As I write, the merry shouts of children come through the open window, and seem part of that universal sound in which the stir of leaves, the faint, far song of birds, and the note of insect life are blended. When I came across the field a few moments ago, a voice called me from under the apple trees, and a little figure, with a flush of joy on her face and the fadeless light of love in her eyes, came running with uneven pace to meet me. How slight and frail was that vision of childhood to the thought which saw the awful forces of nature at work, or rather at play, about her! And yet how serene was her look upon the great world dropping its fruit at her feet; how familiar and at ease her attitude in the presence of these sublime mysteries! She is at one with the hour and the scene; she has not begun to think of herself as apart from the things which surround her; that strange and sudden sense of unreality which makes me at times an alien and a stranger in the presence of Nature, "moving about in world not realised," is still far off. For her the sun shines and the winds blow, the flowers bloom and the stars glisten, the trees hold out their protecting arms and the grass waves its soft garment, and she accepts them without a thought of what is behind them or shall follow them; the painful process of thought, which is first to separate her from Nature and then to reunite her to it in a higher and more spiritual fellowship, has hardly begun. She still walks in the soft light of faith, and drinks in the immortal beauty, as the flower at her side drinks in the dew and the light. It is she, after all, who is right as she plays, joyously and at home, on the ground which the earthquake may rock, and under the sky which storms will darken and rend. The far-brought instinct of childhood accepts without a question that great truth of unity and fellowship to which knowledge comes only after long and agonising quest. Between the innocent sleep of childhood in the arms of Nature and the calm repose of the old man in the same enfolding strength there stretches the long, sleepless day of question, search, and suffering; at the end the wisest returns to the goal from which he set out.
To the little child, Nature is a succession of new and wonderful impressions. Coming he knows not whence, he opens his eyes upon a world which is as new to him as is the virgin continent to the first discoverer. It matters not that countless eyes have already opened and closed on the same magical appearances, that numberless feet have trodden the same paths; for him the morning star still shines on the first day, and the dew of the primeval night is still on the flowers. Day by day light and shadow fall in unbroken succession on the sensitive surface of his mind, and gradually an elementary order discovers itself in the regularity of these recurring impressions. Form, colour, distance, size, relativity of position are felt rather than seen, and the dim and confused mass of sensations discovers something trustworthy and stable behind. Nature is now simple appearance; thought has not begun to inquire where the lantern is hidden which throws this wonderful picture on the clouds, nor who it is that shifts the scenes. Day and night alternately spread out a changeful succession of wonders simply that the young eyes may look upon them; and grass is green and sky blue that young feet may find soft resting-places and the young head a beautiful roof over it. Every day is a new discovery, and every night receives into its dreams some new object from the world of sights and sounds.
Nature surrounds her child with invisible teachers, and makes even its play a training for the highest duties. Gradually, imperceptibly, she expands the vision and suffers here and there a hint of something deeper and more wonderful to stir and direct the young discoverer. He sees the apple tree let fall its blossoms, and, lo! the fruit grows day by day to a mellow and enticing ripeness under his eyes. Suddenly he detects a hidden sequence between flower and fruit! The rose bush is covered with buds, small, green, unsightly; a night passes, and, behold! great clusters of blossoming flowers that call him by their fragrance, and when he has come reward him with a miracle of colour. Here is another mystery; and day by day they multiply and grow yet more wonderful. These varied and marvellous appearances are no longer detached and changeless to him; they are alive, and they change moment by moment. Ah, the young feet have come now to the very threshold of the temple, and fortunate are they if there be one to guide them whose heart still speaks the language of childhood while her thought rests in the great truths which come with deep and earnest living. Childhood is defrauded of half its inheritance when no one swings wide before it the door into the fairyland of Nature; a land in which the most beautiful dreams are like visions of the distant Alps, cloud-like, apparently evanescent, yet eternally true; in which the commonest realities are more wonderful than visions. How many children live all their childhood in the very heart of this realm, and are never so much as told to look about them. The sublime miracle play is yearly performed in their sight, and they only hear it said that it is hot or cold, that the day is fair or dark!
And now there come sudden insights into still larger and more awful truths; a sense of wonder and awe makes the night solemn with mystery. Who does not recall some starlit night which suddenly, alone on a country road, perhaps, seemed to flash its splendour into his very soul and lift all life for a moment to a sublime height? The trees stood silent down the long road, no other footstep echoed far or near, one was alone with Nature and at one with her; suspecting no strange nearness of her presence, no sudden revelation of her inner self, and yet in the very mood in which these were both possible and natural. The boy of Wordsworth's imagination would stand beneath the trees "when the earliest stars began to move along the edges of the hills," and, with fingers interwoven, blow mimic hootings to the owls:
And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call—with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud,
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mock'd his skill,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
It is in such moods as this, when all things are forgotten, and heart and mind are open to every sight and sound, that Nature comes to the soul with some deep, sweet message of her inner being, and with invisible hand lifts the curtain of mystery for one hushed and fleeting moment.
As I write, the memory of a summer afternoon long ago comes back to me. The old orchard sleeps in the dreamy air, the birds are silent, a tranquil spirit broods over the whole earth. Under the wide-spreading branches a boy is intently reading. He has fallen upon a bit of transcendental writing in a magazine, and for the first time has learned that to some men the great silent world about him, that seems so real and changeless, is immaterial and unsubstantial—a vision projected by the soul upon illimitable space. On the instant all things are smitten with unreality; the solid earth sinks beneath him, and leaves him solitary and awestruck in a universe that is a dream. He cannot understand, but he feels what Emerson meant when he said, "The Supreme Being does not build up Nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves." That which was fixed, stable, cast in permanent forms forever, was suddenly annihilated by a revelation which spoke to the heart rather than the intellect, and laid bare at a glance the unseen spiritual foundations upon which all things rest at last. From that moment the boy saw with other eyes, and lived henceforth in things not made with hands.
If we could but revive the consciousness of childhood, if we could but look out once more through its unclouded eyes, what divinity would sow the universe with light and make it radiant with fadeless visions of beauty and of truth!
Chapter XI
The Heart of the Woods
There are certain moods in which my feet turn, as by instinct, to the woods. I set out upon the winding road with a zest of anticipation whose edge no repetition of the after-experience ever dulls; I loiter at the shaded turn, watched often by the bright, quick eye of the squirrel peering over the old stone wall, and sometimes uttering a chattering protest against my invasion of his hereditary privacy. Here and there along the way of my familiar pilgrimage a great tree stands at the roadside and spreads its far-reaching shadow over the traveller; and these are the places where I always throw myself on the ground and wait for the spirit of the hour and the scene to take possession of me. One needs preparation for the sanctities and solemnities of the woods, and in the slow progress which I always make hitherward the world slips away with the village that sinks behind the hill at the first turn and reminds me no longer by sight or sound that life is fretting its channels there and everywhere with its world-old pathos and onward movement, caught on the sudden by unseen currents and swept into wild eddies, or flung over a precipice in a mist of tears. As I go on I feel a return of emotions which I am sure have their root in my earliest ancestry, a freshening of sense which tells me that I am nearing again those scenes which the unworn perceptions of primitive men first fronted. The conscious, self-directed intellectual movement within me seems somehow to cease, and something deeper, older, fuller of mystery, takes its place; the instincts assert themselves, and I am dimly conscious of an elder world through which I once walked—and yet not I, but some one whose memory lies back of my memory, as the farthest, faintest hills fade into infinity on the boundaries of the world. I am ready for the woods now, for I am escaping the limitations of my own personality, 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 as I turn from it, and the visible loveliness of its banks fades from sight, I recall that other landscape of history and legend through which it rolls, and that, for the moment, is the reality, and the other the shadow. A web of human associations spreads itself over this long valley like a richer atmosphere; the fields are ripe with action and achievement; every projecting point has its story, every gentle curve and quiet inlet its memory; for many and many a decade of years life has touched this silent stream and humanised its power and beauty until it has become part of the vast human experience wrought out between these mountain boundaries. As I think of these things and of the world of dear past things which they recall, another great river sweeps into the vision of memory, but how different! There comes with it no warmth of human emotion, but only the breath of the unbroken woods, the awful aspect of the great precipitous cliffs, the vast solitude out of which it rolls, with troubled current, to mingle its mysterious waters with the northern gulf. It is a stream which Nature still keeps for herself, and suffers no division of ownership with men; a stream as wild and solitary as the remote and unpeopled land through which it moves. This river, on the other hand, bears every hour the wealth of a great inland commerce upon its wide current; it flows past cities and villages scattered thickly along its course, past countless homes whose lights weave a shining net along its banks at night; on still Sabbath mornings the bells answer each other in almost unbroken peal along its course. Emerging from an unknown past in the earliest days of discovery, human interests have steadily multiplied along its shores, and spread over it the countless lines of human activity. To-day the Argo, multiplied a thousand times, seeks the golden fleece of commerce at every point along its shores; and of the countless Jasons who make the voyage few return empty-handed. Hour after hour the white sails fly in mysterious and changing lines, messengers of wealth and trade and pleasure, whose voyages are no sooner ended than they begin again. It is this wealth of action and achievement which make the names of great rivers sonorous as the voices of the centuries; the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, the Hudson—how weighty are these words with associations old as history and deep as the human heart!
The rivers are the great channels through which the ceaseless interchange of the elements goes on; they unite the heart of the continents and the solitary places of the mountains with the universal sea which washes all shores and beats its melancholy refrain at either pole. Into their currents the hills and uplands pour their streams; to them the little rivulets come laughing and singing down from their sources in the forest depths. A drop falling from a passing shower into the lake of Delolo may be carried eastward, through the Zambesi, to the Indian Ocean, or westward, along the transcontinental course of the Congo, to the Atlantic. The mists that rise from great streams, separated by vast stretches of territory, commingle in the upper air, and are carried by vagrant winds to the wheat-fields of the far Northwest or the rice-fields of the South. The ocean ceaselessly makes the circuit of the globe, and summons its tributaries along all shores to itself. But it gives even more lavishly than it receives; day and night there rise over its vast expanse those invisible clouds of moisture which diffuse themselves through the atmosphere, and descend at last upon the earth to pour, sooner or later, into the rivers, and be returned whence they came. This subtle commerce, universal throughout the whole domain of nature, animate and inanimate, tells us a common truth with the rose, and corrects the false report of the senses that all things are fixed and isolated. It discloses a communion of matter with matter, a fellowship of continent with continent, an interchange of forces which throws a broad light on things still deeper and more marvellous. It affirms the unity of all created things and predicts the dawn of a new thought of the kinship of races; there is in it the prophecy of new insights into the universal life of men, of fellowships that shall rise to the recognition of new duties, and of a well-being which shall bind the weakest to the strongest, the poorest to the richest, the lowest to the highest, by the golden bond of a diviner love.
