Under the Trees and Elsewhere | Page 6

the peace of
eternity already upon them.
When I reached the end of my walk, and paused for a moment before
retracing my steps, I was conscious of the inexhaustible richness of the
world through which I had come; a thousand voices had spoken to me,
and a thousand sights of wonder moved before me; I was awake to the
universe which most of us see only in broken and unintelligent dreams.
Through all this realm of truth and poetry men have passed and
repassed these many years, I said to myself; and I began to wonder how
many of those now long asleep really saw or heard this great glad world
of sun and summer! I began slowly to retrace my steps, and as I
reached the summit of the hill and looked beyond I saw the cattle
standing knee-deep in the brook that loiters across the fields, and I
heard the faint bleating of sheep borne from a distant pasturage.
These familiar sights and sounds touched me with a sudden pathos;
there is nothing in human associations so venerable, so familiar, as the

lowing of the home-coming kine and the bleating of the flocks. They
carry one back to the first homes and the most ancient families. Older
than history, more ancient than civilisation, are these familiar tones
which unite the low-lying meadows and the upland pastures with the
fire on the hearthstone and the nightly care of the fold. When the
shadows deepen over the country-side, the oldest memories are revived
and the oldest habits recalled by the scenes about the farm-house. The
same offices fall to the husbandman, the same sights reveal themselves
to the housewife, the same sounds, mellow with the resonance of
uncounted centuries, greet the ears of the children as in the most
primitive ages.
The highway itself stands as a memorial of the most venerable customs
and the most ancient races. As I lift my eyes from its beaten road-bed,
and look out upon it through the imagination, it escapes all later
boundaries and runs back through history to the very dawn of
civilisation; it marks the earliest contact of men with a world which
was wrapped in mystery. The hour that saw a second home built by
human hands heard the first footfall on the first highway. That narrow
foot-path led to civilisation, and has broadened into the highway
because human fellowships and needs have multiplied and directed the
countless feet that have beaten it into permanency. Every new highway
has been a new bond between Nature and men, a new evidence of that
indissoluble fellowship into which they are forever united.
I have sometimes tried to recall in imagination the world of Nature
before a human voice had broken the silence or a human foot left its
impress on the soil; but when I remember that what I see in this sweep
of force and beauty is largely what I myself put into the vision, that
Nature without the human ear is soundless, and without the human eye
colourless, I understand that what lies spread before me never was until
a human soul confronted it and became its interpreter. This radiant
world upon which I look was without form and void until the earliest
man brought to the vision of it that creative power within himself
which touched it with form and colour and relations not its own. Nature
is as incomplete and helpless without man as man would be without
Nature. He brought her varied and inexhaustible beauty, and clothed

her with a garment woven on we know not what looms of divine
energy; and she fed, sheltered, and strengthened him for the life which
lay before him. Together they have wrought from the first hour, and
civilisation, with all the circle of its arts, is their joint handiwork.
In the atmosphere of our rich modern fellowship with Nature, the
unwritten poetry to which every open heart falls heir, we forget our
earliest dependence on the great mother and the lessons she taught
when men gathered about her knee in the childhood of the world. Not a
spade turned the soil, not an axe felled a tree, not a path was made
through the forest, that did not leave, in the man whose arm put forth
the toil, some moral quality. In the obstacles which she placed in their
pathway, in the difficulties with which she surrounded their life, the
wise mother taught her children all the lessons which were to make
them great. It was no easy familiarity which she offered them, no
careless bestowal of bounty upon dependents; she met them as men,
and offered them a perpetual alliance upon such terms as great and
equal sovereigns proffer and accept. She gave much, but she asked
even more than