f trees do not talk, he says,
they certainly manage it "as well as most speaking, writing,
poetry, sermons--or rather they do a great deal better. I should
say indeed that those old dryad reminiscences are quite as true
as any, and profounder than most, reminiscences we get."
Farther on, speaking of evening lights and shades on foliage
grass, he says, "In the revealings of such light, such exceptional
hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables
(indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with
trees, seiz'd ecstatic with the mystic realism of the resistless
silent strength in them--strength which, after all, is perhaps the
last, completest, highest beauty." In another place, he says, "I
hold on boughs or slender trees caressingly there in the sun and
shade, wrestle with their inmost stalwartness--and _know_ the
virtue thereof passes from them into me. (Or maybe we
interchange--maybe the trees are more aware of it all than I ever
thought.)" And once again, speaking of a yellow poplar tree,
"How strong, vital, enduring! How dumbly eloquent! What
suggestions of imperturbability and _being_, as against the
human trait of _seeming_. Then the qualities, almost emotional,
palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet
so savage. It _is_, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough
and equable serenity all weathers." All this is unconventional!
So much the better! The identity of underlying sentiment comes
out the more clearly. Trees are not only alive (and yet how
much that fact alone contains!) but they have a character, an
individuality of their own; they can speak directly to the heart
and soul of man, and man can sympathise with them.

As for the animal world in the widest sense, it is plain that its
study, from the mystical point of view, forms a department to
itself. Granted that the transition from the mineral to the
organism is gradual, and that from the vegetable to the animal
still more gradual, the broad fact remains that, when we reach
the higher forms of the realm of living matter, we definitely
recognise many of the characteristics which are found in the
human soul--will, emotion, impulse, even intellectual activities.
Not only primitive man, but those also who are often far
advanced in mental development, attribute souls to animals, and
find it difficult to believe otherwise--as witness the totemistic
systems followed by theories of metempsychosis. And
Da