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.