may come in all their wanderings.

As these thoughts come and go, unclothed with words and unsought by
will, I grasp again the deep truth that the truest life is unconscious
and almost voiceless; that there is no rich, true, articulate life
unless there flows under it a wide, deep current of unspoken, almost
unconscious, thought and feeling; that the best one ever says or does
is as a few drops flung into the sunlight from a swift, hidden stream,
and shining for a moment as they fall again into a current inaudible
and invisible. The intellectual life that is all expressive, that is
all conscious and self-directed, is but a shallow life at best; he only
lives deeply in the intellect whose thought begins in instinct, rises
slowly through experience, carrying with it into consciousness the
noblest, truest one has felt and been, and finds speech at last by
impulse and direction of the same law which summons the seed from the
soil and lifts it, growth by growth, to the beauty and the sweetness of
the flower. Under the same law of unconscious growth every true poem,
every great work of art, and every genuine noble character, has
fashioned itself and come at last to conscious perfectness and
recognition. Genius is nearer Nature than talent; it is only when it
strays away from Nature, and loses itself in mere dexterities, that it
degenerates into skill and becomes a tool with which to work, and not a
gift from heaven. The silence of the deep woods is pregnant with
mighty growths. Says Maurice de Guerin, true poet and lover of Nature:
"An innumerable generation actually hangs on the branches of all the
trees, on the fibres of the most insignificant grasses, like babes on
the mother's breast. All these germs, incalculable in their number and
variety, are there suspended in their cradle between heaven and earth,
and given over to the winds, whose charge it is to rock these beings.
Unseen amid the living forests swing the forests of the future. Nature
is all absorbed in the vast cares of her maternity."

But while I walk and meditate, letting the forest tell its story to my
innermost thought, and recalling here only that which is most obvious
and superficial (who is sufficient for the deeper things that lie like
pearls in the depths of his being?), the light grows dimmer, and I know
that the day has gone. I retrace my steps until through the clustered
trunks of the trees I see once more the green meadows soft in the light