170 BENEDICITE 



and its hope afar off in the heavens. But here 

 beneath green leaves is quiet ; here may a man walk 

 and be at peace. For the strife is hidden, the 

 struggle is masked. Life utters itself in one long 

 revelation of beauty and delight. In tree and flower, 

 in things that fly and swim and leap and creep, in 

 sweet scents and sweeter sights and sounds, by day 

 and night life unfolds itself in such guise as only he 

 who has seen can know, and he who has not cannot 

 dream. And because a man has in him something 

 of the child, he may find solace in these fair outward 

 shows of things ; but because he is a man. and, as such, 

 kin to all life, he must needs soon learn that these fair 

 externals are the last product of a world-old strife, 

 fierce, ceaseless, universal. Then shall these peaceful 

 haunts seem to him as roaring factories of life, 

 grinding out beauty from the raw stuff of earth. And 

 weighing the strife in one hand and the beauty in the 

 other, he shall seem to see again in these upstanding 

 trees locked by living arches, in these green vaults 

 and drawn-out vistas, in this multitudinous complexity 

 of struggling forms, that old agony of stone symbolic 

 of human aspiration and endeavour. For both are 

 expressions of the one prime mystery of life. 



Advancing through the wood we came to a small 

 clump of beeches, not the massive-boled, stout-limbed 

 giants such as are found in the open, but the tall, 

 attenuated forms of trees that have fought for light and 

 shot up in eager rivalry until each spread a narrow 

 cope to become an indistinguishable part of the closely 

 woven roof. The musical ^Pr.r.r.ruT of the Moorhen 

 gave warning of our passage ; the Blackbird shot 

 across the dingle with sudden alarum; the Robin, 



