A Memory of Summer
In the pine woods, or floating under overhanging branches on the silent
and almost motionless river, I have had visions of my study fire during
the summer months, and, now that I find myself once more within the
cheerful circle of its glow, the time that has passed since it was
lighted for the last time in the spring seems like a long, delightful
dream. I recall those charming days, some of them full of silence and
repose from dawn to sunset, some of them ripe with effort and
adventure, with a keen delight in the feeling of possession which comes
with them; they were brief, they have gone, but they are mine forever.
The beauty and freshness that touched them morning after morning as the
dew touches the flower are henceforth a part of my life; they have
entered into my soul as their light and heat entered into the ripening
fruits and grains. I have come back to my friendly fire richer and
wiser for my absence from its cheer and warmth; my life has been
renewed at those ancient sources whence all our knowledge has come; I
have felt again the solitude and sanctity of those venerable shades
where the voices of the oracles were once heard, and fleeting glimpses
of shy divinities made a momentary splendour in the dusky depths.
Wordsworth's sonnets are always within reach of those who never get
beyond the compelling voice of nature, and who are continually
returning to her with a sense of loss and decline after every
wandering. As I take up the little, well-worn book, it opens of itself
at a familiar page, and I read once more that sonnet which comes to one
at times with an unspeakable pathos in its lines--a sense of permanent
alienation and loss:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like springing flowers--
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Almost unconsciously I repeat these lines aloud, and straightway the
fire, breaking into flame where it has been only glowing before,
answers them with a sudden outburst of heat and light that make a brief
summer in my study. When one goes back to the woods and streams after
long separation and absorption in books and affairs, he misses
something which once thrilled and inspired him. The meadows are
unchanged, but the light that touched them illusively, but with a
lasting and incommunicable beauty, is gone; the woodlands are dim and
shadowy as of old, but they are vacant of the presence that once filled
them. There is something painfully disheartening in coming back to
Nature and finding one's self thus unwelcomed and uncared for, and in
the first moment of disappointment an unspoken accusation of change and
coldness lies in the heart. The change is not in Nature, however; it
is in ourselves. "The world is too much with us." Not until its
strife and tumult fade into distance and memory will those finer
senses, dulled by contact with a meaner life, restore that which we
have lost. After a little some such thought as this comes to us, and
day after day we haunt the silent streams and the secret places of the
forest; waiting, watching, unconsciously bringing ourselves once more
into harmony with the great, rich world around us, we forget the tumult
out of which we have come, a deep peace possesses us, and in its
unbroken quietness the old sights and sounds return again. Youth,
faith, hope, and love spring again out of a soil which had begun to
deny them sustenance; old dreams mingle with our waking hours; the
old-time channels of joy, long silent and bare, overflow with streams
that restore a lost world of beauty in our souls. We have come back to
Nature, and she has not denied us, in spite of our disloyalty.
I know of nothing more full of deep delight than this return of the old
companionship, this restoration of the old intimacy. How much there is
to recall, how many confidences there are to be exchanged! The days
are not long enough for all we would say and hear. Such hours come in
the pine woods; hours so full of the strange silence of the place, so
unbroken by customary habits and thoughts, that no dial could divide
into fragments a day that was one long unbroken spell of wonder and
delight. So remote seemed all human life that even memory turned from
it and lost herself in silent meditation; so vast and mysterious was
the life of Nature that the past and the future seemed part of the
changeless present. The light fell soft and dim through the thickly
woven branches and among the densely clustered trunks; underneath, the
deep masses of pine needles and the rich moss spread a carpet on which
the heaviest footfall left the silence unbroken. It was a place of
dreams and mysteries.
Heed the old oracles,
Ponder my spells;
Song wakes in my pinnacles
When the wind swells.
Soundeth the prophetic wind,
The shadows shake on the rock behind,
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings.
Hearken! hearken!
If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young,
Aloft, abroad, the paean swells;
O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells?
Sitting there, with the deep peace of the place sinking into the soul,
the solitude was full of companionship; the very silence seemed to give
Nature a tone more commanding, an accent more thrilling. At intervals
the gusts of wind reaching the borders of the wood filled the air with
distant murmurs which widened, deepened, approached, until they broke
into a great wave of sound overhead, and then, receding, died in
fainter and ever fainter sounds. There was something in this sudden
and unfamiliar roar of the pines that hinted at its kinship with the
roar of the sea; but it had a different tone. Waste and trackless
solitudes and death are in the roar of the sea; remoteness, untroubled
centuries of silence, the strange alien memories of woodland life, are
in the roar of the pines. The forgotten ages of an immemorial past
seem to have become audible in it, and to speak of things which had
ceased to exist before human speech was born; things which lie at the
roots of instinct rather than within the recollection of thought. The
pines only murmur, but the secret which they guard so well is mine as
well as theirs; I am no alien in this secluded world; my citizenship is
here no less than in that other world to which I shall return, but to
which I shall never wholly belong. The most solitary moods of Nature
are not incommunicable; they may be shared by those who can forget
themselves and hold their minds open to the elusive but potent
influences of the forest. He who can escape the prison of habit and
work and routine can say with Emerson:
When I am stretched beneath the pines,
When the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?
IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN
Go with me: if you like, upon report,
The soil, the profit, and this kind of life,
I will your very faithful factor be,
And buy it with your gold right suddenly.
"AND I FOR ROSALIND"