A MEMORY OF SUMMER. m 



And the countless leaves of the pine are strings 

 Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings. 



Hearken ! hearken ! 

 If thou wouldst know the mystic song 

 Chanted when the sphere was young, 

 Aloft, abroad, the paean swells ; 

 O wise man ! hear st thou half it tells ? &quot; 



Sitting there, with the deep peace of the place 

 sinking into the soul, the solitude was full of com 

 panionship ; the very silence seemed to give Nature 

 a tone more commanding, an accent more thrilling. 

 At intervals the gusts of wind reaching the borders 

 of the wood filled the air with distant murmurs which 

 widened, deepened, approached, until they broke 

 into a great wave of sound overhead, and then, re 

 ceding, died in fainter and ever fainter sounds. 

 There was something in this sudden and unfamiliar 

 roar of the pines that hinted at its kinship with 

 the roar of the sea ; but it had a different tone. 

 Waste and trackless solitudes and death are in the 

 roar of the sea ; remoteness, untroubled centuries 

 of silence, the strange alien memories of woodland 

 life, are in the roar of the pines. The forgotten 

 ages of an immemorial past seem to have become 

 audible in it, and to speak of things which had 

 ceased to exist before human speech was born ; 

 things which lie at the roots of instinct rather than 

 within the recollection of thought. The pines 

 only murmur, but the secret which they guard so 

 well is mine as well as theirs ; I am no alien in this 

 secluded world ; my citizenship is here no less than 



