Under the Trees and Elsewhere | Page 2

people who lay claim to her
friendship; in fact, they are sentiments which I find every year
becoming more and more my own convictions. In every gallery of
paintings you will find the untrained about the pictures on which the
artist has lavished the highest colours from his palette; those whose
taste for art has had direction and culture will look for very different
effects in the works which attract them. It is among the rich and varied
low colours of this season, in wood and field, that a true lover of nature
detects some of her rarest touches of loveliness; the low western sun,
falling athwart the bare boughs and striking a kind of subdued bloom
into the brown hill-tops and across the furze and heather, sometimes
reveals a hidden charm in the landscape which one seeks in vain when
skies are softer and the green roof has been stretched over the
woodland ways. In fact, one can hardly lay claim to any intimacy with
Nature until he loves her best when she discards her royalty, and, like
Cinderella, clad only in the cast-off garments of sunnier days, she

crouches before the ashes of the faded year. The test of friendship is its
fidelity when every charm of fortune and environment has been swept
away, and the bare, undraped character alone remains; if love still holds
steadfast, and the joy of companionship survives in such an hour, the
fellowship becomes a beautiful prophecy of immortality. To all
professions of love Nature applies this infallible test with a kind of
divine impartiality. With the first note of the bluebird, under the brief
flush of an April sky, her alluring invitation goes forth to the world;
day by day she deepens the blue of her summer skies and fills them
with those buoyant clouds that float like dreams across the vision of the
waking day; night after night she touches the stars with a softer
radiance, and breathes upon her roses so that they are eager for the
dawn, that they may lay their hearts open to her gaze; the forests take
on more and more the lavish mood of the summer, until they have
buried their great trunks in perpetual shade. The splendid pageant
moves on, gathering its votaries as it passes from one marvellous
change to another; and yet the Mistress of the Revels is nowhere visible.
The crowds press from point to point, peering into the depths of the
woods and watching stealthily where the torrent breaks from its
dungeon in the hills, and leaps, mad with joy, in the new-found liberty
of light and motion; but not a flutter of her garment betrays to the
keenest eye the Presence which is the soul of all this visible, moving
scene.
And now there is a subtle change in the air; premonitions of death
begin to thrust themselves in the midst of the revelry; there is a brief
hush, a sudden glow of splendour, and lo! the pageant is seemingly at
an end. The crowd linger a little, gather a few faded leaves, and depart;
a few--a very few--wait. Now that the throngs have vanished and the
revelry is over, they are conscious of a deep, pervading quietude; these
are days when something touches them with a sense of near and sacred
fellowship; Nature has cast aside her gifts, and given herself. For there
is a something behind the glory of summer, and they only have entered
into real communion with Nature who have learned to separate her
from all her miracles of power and beauty; who have come to
understand that she lives apart from the singing of birds, the
blossoming of flowers, and the waving of branches heavy with leaves.

The Greeks saw some things clearly without seeing them deeply; they
interpreted through a beautiful mythology all the external phenomena
of Nature. The people of the farther East, on the other hand, saw more
obscurely, but far more deeply; they looked less at the visible things
which Nature held out to them, and more into the mysteries of her
hidden processes, her silent but universal mutations; the subtle
vanishings and reappearings of her presence; they seemed to hear the
mighty loom on which the seasons are woven, to feel through some
primitive but forgotten kinship the throes of the birth-hour, the vigils of
suffering, and the agonies of death. Was there not in such an attitude
toward Nature a hint of the only real fellowship with her?
Chapter II
Under the Apple Boughs
For weeks past I have been conscious of some mystery in the air; there
have been fleeting signs of secret communication between earth and
sky, as if the hidden powers were in friendly league and some great
concerted movement were on foot. There have been soft