e wall. Every volume there is an instrument
which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music,
as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light.
Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft
leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear.

Towards dark, having seen to the comfort of a household of kind,
faithful fellow-beings, whom man in his vanity calls the lower
animals, I went last to walk under the cedars in the front yard,
listening to that music which is at once so cheery and so sad--the
low chirping of birds at dark winter twilights as they gather in
from the frozen fields, from snow-buried shrubbery and hedge-rows,
and settle down for the night in the depths of the evergreens, the
only refuge from their enemies and shelter from the blast. But this
evening they made no ado about their home-coming. To-day perhaps
none had ventured forth. I am most uneasy when the red-bird is
forced by hunger to leave the covert of his cedars, since he, on
the naked or white landscapes of winter, offers the most far-shining
and beautiful mark for Death. I stepped across to the tree in
which a pair of these birds roost and shook it, to make sure they
were at home, and felt relieved when they fluttered into the next
with the quick startled notes they utter when aroused.

The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched
my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it
on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other.
Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times
the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side
everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through
me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across
the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go
to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal.
That way nearly everything is prose. I can feel the prose rising
in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before
any other dogs are in sights. And, indeed, the case is much that
of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at
every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever
snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought
like a common cur, is Man.

Among my neighbors who furnish me much of the plain prose of life,
the nearest hitherto has