s me like a sudden revelation; I forget that for which I have
waited; I only know that the woods have found their voice, and that I
have fallen upon the sacred hour when the song is a prayer. Who shall
describe that wild, strange music of the hermit-thrush? Who will ever
hear it in the depths of the forest without a sudden thrill of joy and
a sudden sense of pathos? It is a note apart from the symphony to
which the summer has moved across the fields and homes of men; it has
no kinship with those flooding, liquid melodies which poured from
feathered throats through the long golden days; there is a strain in it
that was never caught under blue skies and in the safe nesting of the
familiar fields; it is the voice of solitude suddenly breaking into
sound; it is the speech of that other world so near our doors, and yet
removed from us by uncounted centuries and unexplored experiences.

The spell of silence has been broken, and I venture softly toward the
hidden fountain from which this unworldly song has flowed; but I am too
slow and too late, and it remains to me a disembodied voice singing the
"old, familiar things" of a past which becomes more and more distinct
as I linger in the shadows of this ancient place. As I walk slowly on,
there grows upon me the sense of a life which for the most part makes
no sound, and is all the deeper and richer because it is inarticulate.
The very thought of speech or companionship jars upon me; silence alone
is possible for such hours and moods. The great movement of life which
builds these mighty trunks and sends the vital currents to their
highest branches, which alternately clothes and denudes them, makes no
sound; cycle after cycle have the completed centuries made, and yet no
sign of waning power here, no evidence of a finished work! Here life
first dawned upon men; here, slowly, it discovered its meaning to them;
here the first impressions fell upon senses keen with desire for
untried sensations; here the first great thoughts, vast as the forest
and as shadowy, moved slowly on toward conscious clearness in minds
that were just beginning to think; here and not elsewhere are the roots
of those earliest conceptions of Nature and Life, which again and again
have come to such glorious blossoming in the literatures of the race.
This is, in a word, the world of primal instinct and impression; and,
therefore, forever the deepest, most familiar, and yet most marvellous
world to which men