THE HEART OF THE WOODS. 63 



and moods. The great movement of life which 

 builds these mighty trunks and sends the vital cur 

 rents to their highest branches, which alternately 

 clothes and denudes them, makes no sound ; cycle 

 after cycle have the completed centuries made, and 

 yet no sign of waning power here, no evidence of a 

 finished work ! Here life first dawned upon men ; 

 here, slowly, it discovered its meaning to them ; 

 here the first impressions fell upon senses keen 

 with desire for untried sensations ; here the first 

 great thoughts, vast as the forest and as shadowy, 

 moved slowly on toward conscious clearness in 

 minds that were just beginning to think ; here and 

 not elsewhere are the roots of those earliest con 

 ceptions of Nature and Life, which again and again 

 have come to such glorious blossoming in the liter 

 atures of the race. This is, in a word, the world of 

 primal instinct and impression ; and, therefore, for 

 ever the deepest, most familiar, and yet most mar 

 velous world to which men may come in all their 

 wanderings. 



As these thoughts come and go, unclothed with 

 words and unsought by will, I grasp again the deep 

 truth that the truest life is unconscious and almost 

 voiceless ; that there is no rich, true, articulate life 

 unless there flows under it a wide, deep current of 

 unspoken, almost unconscious, thought and feeling; 

 that the best one ever says or does is as a few 

 drops flung into the sunlight from a swift, hidden 

 stream, and shining for a moment as they fall 



