isiting the trees and the grass.
I not only disbelieve utterly, but intensely dislike, the doctrine of
metempsychosis, which, if I understand it aright, seems the negation of
the creative impulse, an apotheosis of staleness--nothing quite new in
the world, never anything quite new--not even the soul of a baby; and
so I am not prepared to entertain the whim that a bird was one of his
remote incarnations; still, in sweep of wing, quickness of eye, and
natural sweet strength of song he is not unlike a super-bird--which is
a horrid image. And that reminds me: This, after all, is a foreword to
Green Mansions--the romance of the bird-girl Rima--a story actual yet
fantastic, which immortalizes, I think, as passionate a love of all
beautiful things as ever was in the heart of man. Somewhere Hudson says:
"The sense of the beautiful is God's best gift to the human soul." So
it is: and to pass that gift on to others, in such measure as herein
is expressed, must surely have been happiness to him who wrote Green
Mansions. In form and spirit the book is unique, a simple romantic
narrative transmuted by sheer glow of beauty into a prose poem. Without
ever departing from its quality of a tale, it symbolizes the yearning
of the human soul for the attainment of perfect love and beauty in this
life--that impossible perfection which we must all learn to see fall
from its high tree and be consumed in the flames, as was Rima the
bird-girl, but whose fine white ashes we gather that they may be mingled
at last with our own, when we too have been refined by the fire of
death's resignation. The book is soaked through and through with a
strange beauty. I will not go on singing its praises, or trying to make
it understood, because I have other words to say of its author.

Do we realize how far our town life and culture have got away from
things that really matter; how instead of making civilization our
handmaid to freedom we have set her heel on our necks, and under it bite
dust all the time? Hudson, whether he knows it or not, is now the chief
standard-bearer of another faith. Thus he spake in The Purple Land: "Ah,
yes, we are all vainly seeking after happiness in the wrong way. It
was with us once and ours, but we despised it, for it was only the old
common happiness which Nature gives to all her children, and we went
away from it in search of another grander kind of happiness which some
dreamer--Bacon or another--assured us we should find. We ha