struck the roots of the trees.

Little swarms of gossamer gnats danced in the sunlit spaces; when he
looked down there was the blue surprise of violets, and anemones
nodded dimly out of low shadows. There was a loud shrilling of birds,
and the tremulousness of the young leaves seemed to be as much from
unseen wings as wind. However, the wind blew hard in soft, frequent
gusts, and everything was tilting and bowing and waving.

Jerome looked at it all, and it had a new meaning for him. The outer
world is always tinctured more or less to the sight by one's mental
states; but who can say, when it comes to outlooks from the keenest
stresses of spirit, how impalpable the boundary-lines between
beholder and object may grow? Who knows if a rose does not really
cease to be, in its own sense, to a soul in an extremity of joy or
grief?

Whatever it might be for others, the spring wood was not to-day what
it had ever been before to Jerome. All its shining, and sweetening,
and growing were so forced into accord with himself that the whole
wood took, as it were, the motion of his own soul. Jerome looked at a
fine young poplar-tree, and saw not a tree but a maid, revealing with
innocent helplessness her white body through her skirts of
transparent green. The branches flung out towards him like a maiden's
arms, with shy intent of caresses. Every little flower upon which his
idle gaze fell was no flower, but an eye of love--a bird called to
his mate with the call of his own heart. Every sight, and sound, and
sweetness of the wood wooed and tempted him, with the reflex motion
of his own new ardor of love and passion. He had not gone to meeting
lest he see Lucina Merritt again, and wished to drive her image from
his mind, and here he was peopling his solitude with symbols of her
which were bolder than she, and made his hunger worse to bear.

A childlike wonder was over him at the whole. "Why haven't I ever
felt this way before?" he thought. He recalled all the young men he
knew who had married during the last few years, and thought how they
must have felt as he felt now, and he had no conception of it. He had
been secretly rather proud that he had not encumbered himself with a
wife and children, but had given his best strength to less selfish
loves. He remembered his scorn of the school-master and his adoring
girls, and realized that his scorn had been due, as scorn largely is,
to ignorance. Instead of contempt, a fierce pity seized h