34 BIRDS AND MAN 



will into the mind of another ; let us further imagine 

 that some one in the audience who had wondered 

 at that saying, finding it both dark and hard, had 

 asked me to explain it ; and that in response I 

 had shown him, as by a swift succession of lightning 

 flashes a scare or a hundred images of birds at their 

 best — the unimaginable loveliness, the sunlit colour, 

 the grace of form and of motion, and the melody — 

 how great the effect of even that brief glance into 

 a new unknown world would have been ! And if I 

 had then said : All that you have seen — the pictures 

 in one small room in a house of many rooms — is not 

 after all the main thing ; that it would be idle to 

 speak of, since you cannot know what you do not 

 feel, though it should be told you many times ; 

 this only can be told — the enduring images are but 

 an incidental result of a feeling which existed already ; 

 they were never looked for, and are a free gift from 

 nature to her worshipper ; — if I had said this to him, 

 the words of the speech which has seemed almost sheer 

 insanity a little while before would have acquired 

 a meaning and an appearance of truth. 



It has curiously happened that while writing 

 these concluding sentences some old long-forgotten 

 lines which I read in my youth came suddenly into 



