e
circles, if of necessity we have our being here in love, and if
thou think again what is love's nature.

"Nay, 'tis the essence of this blessed being to hold ourselves
within the divine will, whereby our own wills are themselves
made one.

"So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold,
throughout the realm, is a joy to all the realm as to the King,
who draweth our wills to what he willeth;

"And his will is our peace; it is that sea to which all moves
that it createth and that nature maketh."

DANTE, _Purgatorio_, iii. 70-87 (trans. by Rev. Philip H.
Wicksteed, in the "Temple Classics" edition).]

VI

IN THE ADIRONDACKS

For the last few days I have been living in camp on a mountain lake in
the Adirondacks. All about me are mountains and unlumbered forest. The
tree lies where it falls; the undergrowth chokes the trails; and on the
hottest day it is cool in the green, sun-chequered wilderness. Deer
start in the thickets or steal down to drink in the lake. The only
sounds are the wood-pecker's scream, the song of the hermit-thrush, the
thrumming and drumming of bull-frogs in the water. My friend is a
sportsman; I am not; and while he catches trout I have been reading
Homer and Shelley. Shelley I have always understood; but now, for the
first time, I seem to understand Homer. Our guide here, I feel, might
have been Homer, if he had had imagination; but he could never have been
Shelley. Homer, I conceive, had from the first the normal bent for
action. What his fellows did he too wanted to do. He learned to hunt, to
sail a boat, to build a house, to use a spear and bow. He had his
initiation early, in conflict, in danger, and in death. He loved the
feast, the dance, and the song. But also he had dreams. He used to sit
alone and think. And, as he grew, these moods grew, till he came to live
a second life, a kind of double of the first. The one was direct,
unreflective, and purposeful. In it he hunted wild beasts that he might
kill them, fought battles that he might win them, sailed boats that he
might arrive somewhere. So far, he was like his fellows, and like our
guide, with his quick observation, his varied experience, his practical
skill. But then, on the other hand, he had imagination. This active life
he reproduced; not by recapitulating it--that the guide can do; but by
recreating it. He detached it, as it were, from himself as c