ness and the
heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. Everything done in the world
that is loved and remembered--every life lived with beauty and
productiveness to the many--has come from the Solitaries. _Quest_, that
is the greatest word in English. One must have imagination to set out on
the quest.... In reality we only search for our real selves--that which
we yearn toward is the arousing of the half-gods within. When they are
fully awake, we return to tell the many. Perhaps we do meet a more
poignant suffering--but that is an honour----"

The teacher was smiling at me again. "Do you not see," she asked, "that
all that you do and say and teach is for those who have the essential
imagination?"

"But children have it," I said.

5

WILD GEESE

I could not stay away entirely that winter. After a week or ten days of
hard work, night-classes and furnace air--imagination would work to the
extent that a day by the open fire was required. It seemed to me some
days that I wanted a century of silence.... There was one bright cold
mid-March day, the northern shore still frozen a mile out. I had come
forth from the city to smell wood-smoke, a spring symptom. It was now
sunset. In the noble stillness, which for many moments had been broken
only by the sagging of the dead ice, there came now a great cackling of
geese, so that I looked up the lane a quarter of a mile to the nearest
farmyard, wondering who had turned loose the collie pups. It hadn't
occurred to me to look up; and that, when you come to think of it, is
one of the tragedies of being city-bred.

Presently I had to. Voices of wild geese carry with astonishing force
and accuracy. A hundred yards ahead was the long-necked gander, with
the lines of a destroyer, his wings sweeping more slowly because of
their strength and gear, yet he was making the pace. Then came his
second in command, also alone, and as far back again, the point of the
V. In this case, the formation was uneven, the left oblique being twice
as extended as the right.... They were all cackling, as I imagined,
because of the open water ahead, for geese either honk or are silent in
passage. They began to break just above, the formation shattering piece
by piece as they swept on with wild ardour toward the ice-openings.
Coming up from the thrall of the thing, I found my hat in hand.

It would shake any one. Indeed, there's a fine thrill in the flight of
ducks--darting dwarfs compared to thes