eisurely,
pausing often to listen to some bird voice or to admire some rare
insect or parasitic flower shining star-like in the shade. There was a
strangely delightful sensation in me. I likened myself to a child that,
startled at something it had seen while out playing in the sun, flies
to its mother to feel her caressing hand on its cheek and forget its
tremors. And describing what I felt in that way, I was a little ashamed
and laughed at myself; nevertheless the feeling was very sweet. At that
moment Mother and Nature seemed one and the same thing. As I kept to the
more open part of the wood, on its southernmost border, the red flame
of the sinking sun was seen at intervals through the deep humid green
of the higher foliage. How every object it touched took from it a new
wonderful glory! At one spot, high up where the foliage was scanty, and
slender bush ropes and moss depended like broken cordage from a dead
limb--just there, bathing itself in that glory-giving light, I noticed
a fluttering bird, and stood still to watch its antics. Now it would
cling, head downwards, to the slender twigs, wings and tail open; then,
righting itself, it would flit from waving line to line, dropping lower
and lower; and anon soar upwards a distance of twenty feet and alight to
recommence the flitting and swaying and dropping towards the earth. It
was one of those birds that have a polished plumage, and as it moved
this way and that, flirting its feathers, they caught the beams and
shone at moments like glass or burnished metal. Suddenly another bird of
the same kind dropped down to it as if from the sky, straight and swift
as a falling stone; and the first bird sprang up to meet the comer, and
after rapidly wheeling round each other for a moment, they fled away in
company, screaming shrilly through the wood, and were instantly lost to
sight, while their jubilant cries came back fainter and fainter at each
repetition.

I envied them not their wings: at that moment earth did not seem fixed
and solid beneath me, nor I bound by gravity to it. The faint, floating
clouds, the blue infinite heaven itself, seemed not more ethereal and
free than I, or the ground I walked on. The low, stony hills on my right
hand, of which I caught occasional glimpses through the trees, looking
now blue and delicate in the level rays, were no more than the billowy
projections on the moving cloud of earth: the trees of unnumbered
kinds--great more, cecropia, and